The following May the service started analyzing at its forensic laboratory in Ashland, Oregon the caviar coming into JFK airport and detaining the shipments that according to its method were mislabeled. That December the Times ran article  on the “caviar cops,” Special Agent 248 of the Fish and Wildlife Service Richard Rothe and Special Agent 523 Edward Grace, who had seized two tons of Caspian Sea beluga caviar, “some of which flunked DNA testing and will be destroyed.” Agent Grace called himself “the voice of the sturgeon who has no other voice.” The agents “who are enforcing the regulations can easily test the DNA of a single egg, revealing whether the caviar is, in fact, the grade, provenance, and variety promised on its label.” A companion article reported that a Stamford, Connecticut- based company, GINO International, had been busted for smuggling thousands of pounds of sturgeon roe through Poland.  Zachary W. Carter, the United Attorney for the eastern district of New York, (who months later would  successfully prosecute the cops who sexually assaulted Abner Louima) was quoted as saying that the United States was “the world’s leading importer of caviar. [Most knowledgeable sources say that Europe and Asia import roughly an equal amount.] More than 80 tons with a wholesale value of $1,889,911 legally enters the country, and who knows how much more enters undetected in suitcases, shipping containers, and through the mail. Nine tons come in to New York alone between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve.” 

         This really pressed Vadim’s buttons. He felt that the small, family-run caviar dealerships were being unfairly victimized. “There is no verification at the country of origin, so they have no way of knowing what they are getting. They have to take the distributors’ word. Bad guys should be caught, but government has no right to use lousy science for this purpose.” He compared Fish and Wildlife’s “so-called method” to the “politically motivated pseudoscience” that marred the DNA evidence in the O.J. Simpson trial.

         We walked east on 59th Street until we got to Park Avenue, where there is a small restaurant called Caviarteria, and met with its owner, Eric Sobel, a second-generation New York caviar dealer. 38 and full of moxy, Sobel is making the most of caviar’s new trendiness.  
He has other restaurants in the Soho Grand Hotel, Grand Central Station, Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, and South Miami Beach. On November 9, l998, he told us, “Special Agent Sam Labrandi came into my warehouse and seized portions of two shipments of caviar. He said they failed our DNA test. He released the beluga but claimed there’s some beluga in your ossetra and said your sevruga is ship sturgeon, and he seized 1500 pounds of my caviar, worth almost a million dollars retail. We said what DNA test ? We never heard of this. Show us your samples. He said we didn’t mark the jars, but we’re making an example of you and taking the whole shipment. So we slapped restraining order against the federal government and forty-eight hours later brought a hundred-million dollar action, and then everything began. Our lawyers, Drobenko and Piddubny, said who’s the world’s leading expert on the DNA of sturgeon and got hold of Dr. Birstein. He told them that Fish and Wildlife’s method is an unproven test that hasn’t passed the Daubert Principal [review and validation by other scientists]. Without going through the Daubert Principal, anyone can say anything . 160,000 pounds of caviar came into the U.S. in l998. Fish and Wildlife’s lab bank consists of 2.2 pounds of samples and they never went to the source-- Astrakhan and the government-controlled caviar-producing plantin Sheilat, Iran.. The whole thing is a scam.

        “On January 7 and 29 we brought in two more shipments and Fish and Wildlife seized the ossetra portions of both,” Sobel went on, “alleging they were not Russian but Siberian sturgeon.  We had undisputable papers from the government  of Russia proving this caviar was caught in the Lower Volga basin and there are no Siberian sturgeons in Astrakan. They require a different water temperature. We brought in real Siberian sturgeon from a French farm  and asked Fish and Wildlife to test it and they refused.  Out of 32 samples of ossetra the museum disagrees all 32 of  Fish and Wildlife’s test results.In a preliminary hearing, the director of their lab, Steven Fain, said he didn’t have to have  an exact DNA match. The government had given him the right, if the computer couldn’t come up with an exact match, to make his own subjective call. On top of this someone in Oregon or the U.S. Attorney’s Offfice changed the names of the January seizures from Gueldenstaedtii (Russian sturgeon) to Baeri (Siberian) and manually altered the sequences.  [Later Vadim showed me the pages of their report where this had been done. He insists that Fain doesn’t have the information or the expertise to be able to distinguish between Russian and Siberian.] This is Keystone Cop stuff. I feel like I’m dealing with a bunch of petty criminals from high school. How can you release the results of a test that took a million taxpayer dollars to develop that say ‘most similar to’ and change the names to whatever you feel like ? It’s ludicrous.  Three days ago we submitted papers to federal court demanding an immediate hearing on the basis of newly-found evidence that the government has manipulated evidence. We’ve caught them in the middle of a lie, that’s what happened. I said to the head of the U.S. Attorney’s forfeiture division, Mr. Hui, I’m giving you one chance pay us $800,000 plus our legal fees, bringing it to $1.1 million, and we won’t embarrass you before the world.”

       At Vadim’s request, Robert de Salle  had tested the confiscated January shipments at the museum’s lab, and his results were completely different from Fain’s, so now the museum was involved. It was the government’s word versus the museum’s. . When the museum, which had just got $30 million from the federal government for its new plantarium—  realized that it had been placed in an adversarial position in  a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against the government , it wasn’t at all happy. Vadim, who was already on shakey ground because of the patent dispute, was really in its bad books. “I’m a trouble-maker,” Vadim said with a helpless, dejected shrug. The latest Kafkaesque twist is that, Vadim claims, the museum’s lawyers have repudiated De Salle’s results.

      I had been looking forward to visiting the museum, one of my favorite places, and watching Vadim and de Salle test some caviar in the lab— maybe some of Hansen’s, and seeing if Sturm-Hansen was still conning his customers. My family has a three-generation association with the museum : my great uncle was a trustee, the type specimens of a small, irridescent-blue butterfly called Shoumatoff’s hairstreak after my father, who caught them on Jamaica in the thirties, are kept in a glass case in the Entomology Department. I wrote about the insect for its magazine, Natural History, have read from my nature writing in its auditorium, and am in frequent touch with its scientists on natural-history and ethnological matters. Vadim suggested that with my connections, I could set up a meeting with the two of us and the museum’s director, Helen Futter, and straighten everything out. So I called her office and asked if we could come in and talk to her and get permission for the test to be performed on caviar having nothing to do with the ongoing suit. A few days later a second vice-president in charge of communications, who knew nothing about the situation and had never heard of Vadim, got back to me. As for my request, he said that Mrs. Futter was not available, but he saw no problem with doing a test, but when I called a few days later to schedule the visit, he said that actually it wasn’t such a good idea. Could I just pop into the lab and see where it’s done then ? I asked. You know how it is with journalists : we need scenes to make our subject come to life. He said that shouldn’t be a problem, but a few days later he told me, “Dr. Birstein didn’t do the wet work. He was never in the lab and he was never on staff. He was an unpaid research associate. I don’t see what the museum has to do with your profile of him.”

     I reported this to Vadim, who said, “That is true.  I am really a thinking tank. I can discuss every step of the method and I know how to do it, but I don’t do the actual testing myself.” I called Robert de Salle to see if he would be willing to test some caviar, and he said, “I don’t want to do any more diagnostic work in the lab. I have science that I’m doing and that’s forensics. I was sucked into the last round.” Beyond that, he refused to say anything without permission from the museum, so I called the flak back and asked if it would be okay to talk to Dr. de Salle not about the method or the lawsuit, but about Vadim and sturgeons in general, but that was out, too. “There is no need to talk to Dr. de Salle about sturgeons. You can just read his articles.”

       “You can do the test in any DNA lab,” the flak reminded me. But Vadim was reluctant to do that because he had signed over the American patent to the museum..

***

        Stymied, Vadim and I decided to cruise the caviar dens of Brighton Beach and eat smuggled caviar with the Russian Mafia. Two years ago, Vadim had told me lurid tales of caviar smuggling by the Brighton Beach Mafia. A hundred and fifty tons were coming in to the U.S. without the custom duties of up to 50% being paid on them. A lot of it was from sturgeon poached on the Caspian and from rivers in Siberia by former KGB with Kalashnikovs, in collusion with the  Ministry of Fisheries, “an old Mafia structure created 30 years ago that in Soviet days was the owner of everything in the sea, a many billion-dollar business. [This is from my notes.] It imposed legal quotas and had its own nets and controlled all plants which produce caviar, which is now disappearing to Brighton Beach, where Mafia has small packaging plant that repackages it and distributes it to shops in metropolitan area.” 

      But now “situation is quite different since  CITES treaty went into effect last year,” Vadim told  me.  Yelstin had dissolved the Ministry of Fisheries, calling it the most corrupt structure in Russia, and Vadim had no evidence of criminal activity by its successor, the Russian Department of Fisheries.  The smuggling to Brighton Beach, moreover, was “small issue compared to whole issue of implementation.” As far as he was aware,  it  was only small-time, artesanal smuggling, individuals bringing in a dozen tins in suitcases, “just tip of iceberg.” The black market in New York was insignificant because one could buy caviar legally and it was plentiful. “Now I don’t believe any number. Some caviar is smuggled, and Fish and Wildlife  putting out of business all these legitimate small dealers will have no impact because if the Russian producers cannot send their caviar here, they will send it to Europe or Asia. This crackdown is anti-productive. They did not give the industry time to prepare, and it will not help the fish. ”

       From my perspective— that of a third-generation American of Russian descent who had grown up in a verdant, opulent exurb of Westchester County, Brighton Beach Avenue, with its deafening el  blotting out the sky; marginal, wasted Latinos lurking on the corners; squalid little businesses like Tarot, Psychic, Magic Corsets, immigration help in Cyrillic; dingy, rundown apartments with names like the Zamora— was depressingly grim and tacky. You didn’t need the eye of a Diane Arbus to capture the scene; all you had to do was point and shoot. But Vadim saw it completely differently. “This is  communist dream of how capitalist society should be,” he explained.. “Even in Moscow there are no shops with such variety of goods. First thing you notice in Russia is how  oppressed the people look. Here the people are much more relaxed. But it is still a ghetto, a small place with a high concentration of criminal activity.. Most only speak Russian and they are afraid to go to the police because in Russia the worst thing you can do is be in the hands of the police because they can do absolutely anything they want to you, for their fun. That is why it is so easy to control these people, because they are still with that mentality.”

      We first went to Rasputin, a flamboyantly restaurant and cabaret popular with the Russian Mafia, but it only comes to life on Friday and Saturday nights; nothing was happening on Wednesday at lunchtime. About the only action was at a place on the boardwalk called Volna (Wave.) We took one of the outdoor, umbrella-shaded tables. A light, warm, clammy rain was sifting down. Several tables away a portly man of Eastern European provenance who looked like a colleague of Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre— vain but seedy, with slicked-down hair, a carefully groomed moustache, and a suit that was a la mode in l964— stole furtive looks at us. Immediately to our right  three small-time businessmeni sat talking about sleazy deals and draining a caraffe of vodka. One of the deals was about caviar. “I need to meet Grigory. He has a delivery coming in this afternoon,” one of them said. Their Russian was spiced with occasional 
 words of English like “root canal.”  One of them noticed that I was taking notes in my little Red Chinese notebook (Vadim was holding forth on the history of caviar), and he and one of his cronies got up and walked out to the railing of the boardwalk where they could talk out of earshot. When he returned he said to me in Russian, menacingly, “Your business was disbanded.”  A disheveled lowlife who looked to be  in his early twenties and had fresh bruises on his face and arms came up to them and opened a cheap black briefcase so they could see what was inside. They shooed him away.  A few hours later we passed him several blocks away, staggering and weaving, without the briefcase. His face had been beaten to a bloody pulp.

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