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.