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Also this issue: Segway or the Highway Back in Style Liberation The Bell Curve |
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July 25-31, 2002
city beat
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In what must be the most bizarre story about the local Russian underworld in recent history comes the tale of the Russian undertaker with a top-secret -- and much-coveted -- Soviet recipe for preserving the dead.
The story of the Russian undertaker was told to a mob girlfriend from Northeast Philadelphia who told City Paper.
The boyfriend is a midlevel gangster originally from the Ukraine who spent his high school years in Northeast Philly and now works with several gangs from Brooklyn to Miami. He is in his early 30s and married, but not so married that he doesn't have a mistress who went to high school with him. She then went on to Temple University and now works in the legal profession, but she can't quite break it off from this bad-news-but-good-in-bed lover.
We'll call him Nicoli, because if City Paper used his real name his gal would end up floating face down in the Delaware River.
According to Nicoli's gal pal, Nicoli attended a party two weeks ago in a Bucks County restaurant where various midlevel Russian gangsters from New York and Philadelphia gathered to celebrate that they were still alive and not in prison and that one of their own was soon to be married.
Also at the party was a mortician from Russia with heavy-duty mob ties. The Moscow undertaker told the gathering that he had a business venture to propose. Because everyone at Nicoli's level in the mob is always looking for new ways to make money -- legal and illegal -- they were intrigued enough to stop drinking and socializing long enough to listen to a macabre proposal.
The undertaker explained that he had been in business in Moscow in the early and mid-1990s, when gangsters in Russia were killing one another in record numbers and making the former Soviet Union look more like Prohibition-era Chicago with its machine-gun drive-bys and mobster massacres than the staid capital of the Cold War.
The corpses of the dead had horrific wounds, said the undertaker. There were bullet holes, knife slashes and severe burn marks. The families of the dead were desperate to pretty up the cadavers for funerals -- so other family members wouldn't freak out when they saw daddy, little brother or boyfriend after they had been on the losing end of a Russian mob fight.
Eventually one funeral company in Moscow called Ritual Services began to monopolize the funeral market. It turned out that Ritual Services had gone into business with a super-secret group of scientists who worked for the Russian government but hadn't received any government funds since 1991.
The scientists -- morticians, anatomists, biochemists -- worked for an entity called The Scientific Research and Methodological Center of Biomedical Technology, headquartered inside a modern Soviet-style office building not far from Moscow's Red Square.
The scientists included some of the finest medical minds of Russia, and their job was to mummify dead dictators -- North Korea's Kim Il Sung, North Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and the Soviet Union's most infamous leaders, Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.
For years the scientists worked in a laboratory hidden beneath Lenin's Tomb in Red Square. The lab was always kept at 62 degrees Fahrenheit, and there was always the smell of formaldehyde from the vats of chemicals -- the exact ingredients still a state secret -- that Lenin's body was bathed in several times a month to preserve his lifelike appearance and to fight biological deterioration.
When the Soviet empire crumbled, the new Russian government just stopped paying the scientists, so they went into business with the Ritual Services funeral company. There were many instances where the scientists' know-how was used to enhance the appearance and preserve the cadavers of Russian gang leaders.
But the scientists soon wearied of working on gangsters and broke off their relationship with the funeral company.
The Russian undertaker visiting Bucks County claimed that he had been able to steal some of the mortuary secrets from the scientists. The undertaker told the Russian mobsters that he wanted their financial backing to open the finest funeral company in the U.S. -- a company that would mummify the corpses of rich Americans and preserve them in mausoleums where their descendants could view them forever.
As an added incentive to invest, the undertaker told them, he would preserve the bodies of his backers in a giant mausoleum where family members could visit their deceased gangster kin to their heart's content.
To clinch the deal the undertaker promised that if any of his backers were horribly mutilated in death, he would, using the secret vat of chemicals and other techniques, return their corpses to a handsome state for viewing and burial purposes and so that they could be displayed inside the mausoleum.
Nicoli's girlfriend told City Paper that Nicoli found the whole proposal ghoulish but was considering investing some money anyway.
"Nobody wants to die," Nicoli allegedly told his girlfriend, "but in America everybody wants to stay young forever. So look at it from another way -- Americans could be willing to pay a lot of money to look good forever, even after they're dead!"
