The Old Banknote Story

Excerpt from The Rare Earth Series, Volume One: On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok


     By Spring of 1986, I had collected some 1000 old banknotes in my new hobby of frequenting the Polish jarmarks, gieldy, flea markets, and gieldy starych pieniedzy of Warsaw, Krakow, Poznan, and Gdansk. Eighteen months of buying, selling and bartering brought my collection to a size that I began to wonder how I was going to get my little make believe treasure of Old Russian, Polish, German, and Ukrainian notes out of the country. These banknotes, old stock certificates, and bonds varied in size all the way up to 8" by 14" and were mostly in very good condition. These notes were dated from 1796 to 1944.

      ...Not seeing very many interesting or new potential notes that day I was starting to lose interest when suddenly a very old woman pulled my shoulder bag lightly and turned me toward her. She was quite well dressed and had a heavy looking antique sewing bag in her hand. She said she had something that I might be interested in and opened the bag up slowly, making sure that others were not peering over our shoulders or watching us too closely.

     What was in her bag was, to me, absolutely exquisite. Several unopened packages of one ruble notes from 1898 in mint condition...including the the Russian style seals on the packages and the crisp red tissue paper that it had originally been packed in at the mint. Each little package had fifty one ruble notes and, not being exposed to the sun or to sweaty-dirty hands, were just like new with colors I had never seen in this common banknote in the flea markets in Poland. She wanted $10 per package and told me she would only sell me four packages. As we talked, she said she had noticed me all year long coming to the gielda spending money on junk and I hoped I would be pleased with her offer. I told her I was and appreciated that I had been given an exclusive chance to buy from her.

     ...In parting, I asked the woman how she had come across these banknotes in such good condition. She told me that she had worked in a bank and found them hidden away in a vault in a bin labelled "For Destruction". She took them in her purse and had held them in her attic for 30 years in Warsaw.

The Osmium Deal

Excerpt from The Rare Earth Series, Volume One: On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok


     This story begins as one of my closer colleagues in Krakow mentioned to me that he had some contacts in Warsaw that had pulled an Osmium deal together between a Dutch/American buyer and the Polish Government representing the seller who happened to be Russian – no surprise there. The group in Warsaw was a larger trading company that was quite legitimate doing consumer goods in Poland bringing them in from Western Europe…all quite legally. The owners of the business were all former Solidarity leaders that had contacts directly with President Walesa. The reason that this deal was suddenly causing a stir was because the buyers’ representatives had suddenly appeared in Warsaw with documents from a US Congressman saying that he represented a strategic interest in the US wanting to buy as much Osmium as could be arranged. The buyer wanted it to come only through official government channels and there had to be original documentation for the material. The buyer would inspect and make arrangements to pick up the Osmium in Warsaw. The Poles in Warsaw that had met the buyers’ reps were a little intimidated by the situation and I had been signaled to them as a person that might be able to represent our group better…both by virtue of language and by my reputation as the former FEDEX Chief.

This deal was reportedly going to to be worth $2.6M to the whole daisy chain of agents in the transaction. We were representing both the buyers and the sellers and had been told that we would be offered 25% of the seller’s fee and 25% of the buyer’s fee. A payday of $650,000 for Jacek and me for lending credibility and speaking English well enough to get these two parties to “YES”.

It seemed fair enough to me. (I actually knew at the time that this could involve months of dealings and did not view it as easy money. The fact that this nearly had me 1) Shot by Russians trying to eliminate what they thought were ‘deal breakers’ and 2) picked up by INTERPOL for ‘fraudulent representation of foreign governments in the transaction of strategic materials sales’ was something that I could never have had any idea about…other than what Dennis at Teledyne had told me in Krakow just a few weeks before about the nature of these deals.) For me, if there was a US Congressman in this transaction representing the US, and the staff of the President of Poland on the other side, I did not see the kind of risk that Dennis had warned about.

Convinced that this was the big deal I had been waiting for, I got up that Monday morning early to catch the 6:10 am train to Warsaw, met Jacek in the dining car for breakfast, and arrived in Warsaw for our first meetings.

An Introduction to Risky Business

  Excerpt from The Rare Earth Series, Volume One: On the Job Training - Berlin to Vladivostok  

     An unfamiliar look of concern overtook Dennis as he was looking at my papers. “You have any idea how many of these offers and requests for offers are bogus? There is a good chance that they are all fake. Let me go through them again.” He said somewhat gruffly. Dennis took the papers and looked more closely at the offers and requests for titanium and aluminum. He seemed focus on the stamps, signatures, and seals that were all over the Russian documents. “This is a joke…this one here. These two are real but the dates seem to be altered. Hard to tell if it was done at the factory or by some intermediary. How long have you been here in Poland?” “It’s coming up on 10 years”, I told him, “Minus some time in San Francisco.” “You know much about what you’re getting yourself into here with these offers? This is not something to be doing on your own unless you know this business and can defend yourself.” I think I tried to defend “Fresh Aire” as a company legally registered in Poland and approved for international trade. Dennis took a few deep breaths and told some stories:

     “I was on the Polish-Lithuanian border a couple of weeks ago to do an inspection of some zirc tubes and other materials for which we had submitted a conditional letter of credit to a Russian metals factory in Samarra. The material arrived and we were in the middle of inspection, doing some purity testing with our mobile labs. At some point four guys come up to us in suits, identify themselves as US Dept of Justice inspectors, and ask us in American English, who we are and what we plan on doing with the shipment if we finalize the deal. Now I’ve seen a lot of guys running around looking for strategic metals coming out of Russia and the Ukraine (not to mention bombs and other radioactive material) but I had never seen them so openly aggressive in a place where they are not only acting without host country authorization, but they are also playing Marshall Dillon where the Russian and Eastern European Mafias, the CIA and the Israeli Mossad rule. It was a signal that these deals are being tracked much more closely than we thought. In any case, we weren’t happy with what we saw on the truck and walked away from the deal.”


     ...Dennis stopped talking and smiled. He seemed only halfway pleased to have told me what he did. I asked him if he expected to hire more people in this business or did he hope to simply survive through to the end of another contract like at the URSUS factory in the 80’s. He said he wasn’t hiring and there was some chance that someone might come in to really sell Water Piks.

     “If that happens,” he surmised, “I’ll either be dead or long gone on another assignment.”

The Kennedy Family in Poland

     Excerpt from On the Job Training:  Berlin to Vladivostok

     Events in the world at the time of my week with the Kennedy’s included the demise of Colorado, US senator Gary Hart's campaign for President of the United States in 1987. After Hart challenged the press to provide evidence of his infidelities, reporters for the Miami Herald, in a controversial move, staked out Hart's townhouse around the clock, and finally spotted the Senator with Miami model Donna Rice. The ensuing report sent the media into frenzy, and within days photos of Hart and Rice on the opulent yacht, Monkey Business, were flooding international media. Consequently, his shot at the presidency had sunk. Teddy was going through Time and Newsweek articles on the train and among them included those famous photos of Gary Hart on the yacht "Monkey Business".

     “This really pisses me off!” he suddenly blurts out in the compartment. “See what the press is doing to him! This is going to destroy Hart. And why…for no other reason than they are challenged and now they go in for the kill. This really drives me insane!”

     “Please don’t go down this path again, Teddy. Please don’t. We argue about it every time. And besides, Billy is with us and this dirty laundry of ours needn’t come out right now.” Counters Kerry sitting next to the window.

     Teddy goes on in the same direction, “Look at this. Regardless of what it may look like, what he is doing isn’t any different than what most elected officials are doing and he will go down since the media have somehow targeted him for the kill.”

     Kerry takes a deep breath and hits the sour note that causes the rest of the group to cringe, “You always say these things and you forget that this family is still functioning despite common knowledge that both Bobby and John were fucking Marilyn Monroe and probably all three together in bed many times! Don’t go attacking the press too viciously with all they have on us. You need to be thankful, in fact, that things are the way they are in the wake of our legacy and recent history.”

“GEEEEZ!  Sorry Billy. Subject dropped” Teddy conceded.


     ...Teddy didn’t sleep very long and nudged William, “You ready for another hit? Billy! Let’s do another round!”

     William took a long shot and asked Teddy if he was up for messing around in Warsaw when the train arrived. He looked at me and said, “Surely there are few good night clubs or jazz bars in Warsaw we could hit?!” I assured him that there were and I would be happy to arrange things.

     Cousin Kerry spoke up after a long silence following the Marilyn Monroe comment and seemed pretty upset, again,

     “Let’s just get to the hotel and decide from there what we are going to do. There are people there waiting for us and they will be worried if we come traipsing in late. Worse yet will be if we wind up having the Marines scouring the city. Remember, we are in a communist country that is unfriendly to our being here, at all. They’d love the negative press.”


     With the group re-invigorated from another three of four shots of vodka, the train pulled into Warsaw around 8 pm. The Akwarium Jazz Club was a short couple of blocks from the train station. Teddy seemed “jazzed” for going out and wanted to walk. It had been raining for some time and was wet, slick, muddy, but the night air was fresh and we strolled over to the Akwarium that was in full tilt for the evening and very loud.

Teaching English for the British Council - Ramon & Bill

Excerpt from the unedited version of On the Job Training: Berlin to Vladivostok

     Bill was quite a storyteller and, together with Ramon, could fill a day, a night, and part of the next morning with colorful stories of their experiences in Poland. Ramon, about 5’11” in his clogs and quite thin except for a small potbelly, had long black hair streaked with some gray in his early thirties. He had a constant large smile that stretched from ear to ear and he always looked like he was ready to tell you a story or a joke. He often did.

     His nose was proportionately large to accommodate the big smile and his eyes were chronically tired screaming for sleep showing signs of late nights, innumerable female encounters or “events”, that often lasted for days according to his stories. These usually started as sad stories he had to listen to and lead to the bedroom sooner or later. His usual inability to say “no” to female propositions drove Ramon to near exhaustion from what we could tell. Residential courses putting students and teachers together for days on end were no exception.

(One story about Ramon that occurred in the early 90's involved meeting the actor, Ben Kingsley, at a local hotel in the sauna. As Ramon tells it, "Ben was sitting on a low bench enjoying the steam room when I walked in. As I found myself next to him, it was impossible not to notice how well endowed he was and that "it" nearly reached the floor from the bench that he was sitting on. After quite a few exchanges about how things were going during the filming of Schindler's List, I told him that my name, by coincidence, was Schindler. With the ice broken and pleasantries exchanged between us, I asked him while pointing to "it", 'So that must be why you are called Big Ben around here'.

Ben seemed amuzed.)

     Bill had equally raucous, profusely promiscuous, and side-splitting stories alongside Ramon’s. His massive body, 6’3” and around 280 pounds, and physical presence sometimes made Bill the real center of attention when the alcohol was flowing as it could. Ramon was clearly the greater prize in terms of the sexual “hunt” that always occurred during the off-site residential courses. 30-50 students, three to four teachers, and the Boss, Ramon, made up the typical course. All of us, together with the secret police "plant" that usually joined us, hidden in a medieval castle or old Polish estate for 2-3 weeks, made for an intensive English course that was not only tiring, but also made for interesting human chemistry.

Courses that had Ramon and Bill together were sure to be fun and the amount of alcohol that was consumed by all increased by at least a factor of 2-3 times compared to a non-Bill/Ramon course. 

When the official end of the day came and Polish was allowed to be spoken,  the women that were clearly single, unattached, without boyfriends at the course, would begin to signal their interest.  Ramon and Bill were very good at parrying the advances that were constant while selectively signaling their own real interests and intentions. Ramon, the director of the program, was able to orchestrate multiple encounters. Despite this incredible "itinerary" he maintained what seemed to me to be the proper teacher – student distance. I would usually hear about what had really gone on within a month after we had returned from a course.

I was often amazed at how little I knew of what was going on and wondered usually, “Where the hell was I when that was happening?!”

Arranging a Life in Poland

Excerpt from

On the Job Training:  Berlin to Vladivostok    

     Events, places, people, and circumstances in Poland that make up a collective memory of my twenty years in the country are especially vivid as I recall the post Berlin Wall black market and grey market activity that grew throughout Central Europe. Getting caught up and sucked into this tsunami-like wave of anarchic and crazed trading became an obsession that had long lasting repercussions for the rest of my years in Poland.

My family and friends still laugh at the memory of phone calls from me in Poland that may have seemed out of character or almost surreal.

     "Jay! Do you have any takers for three Russian tanks? They'd be great collectors' pieces."

     "John, do you know anything about Osmium? I can get three grams of it out of Russia and they say it's worth a couple million dollars. Don't know what it does though. I am meeting with President Lech Walesa's staff about it tomorrow. Can you help? How about Red Mercury? Got that, too. Two guys were killed on the train in Russia trying to smuggle it out last week. The US Department of Justice sits at the Polish - Lithuanian border waiting for strategic materials that might be leaving the former Soviet Union. Zirc tubes, high grade titanium, you name it...it's all out there for the taking."

     The story of how I got involved in the "trading" and what occurred over the years could itself occupy a generous portion of my story. As I look back at some of these events and my behavior, I am amazed that I am still alive.