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.”