To Live, Love and Die Hard in Moscow

The red brick walls and fir-shaded alleys of Novodevichy Cemetery embrace Russia’s pantheon of writers, poets, cosmonauts and Communist leaders.

Those who knew Paul Tatum, a brash young businessman from Middle America, believe that he too deserves a place among the departed elite.

Like Communist revolutionary John Reed, another American who died trying to build a better Russia, Tatum had traded the security of his homeland to march in this country’s tumultuous vanguard.

While Reed was drawn to the red glow of communism, Tatum was lured by the green promise of its defeat.

Both men died before their time in the chaotic aftermath of revolution.

Reed, who succumbed to typhus in 1920 at the age of 33, lies buried at Russia’s most prestigious cemetery--the Kremlin wall.

Tatum, 41, was gunned down at dusk on a gray November day in Moscow. His ashes are stored in the basement morgue of Moscow’s Botkin Hospital, awaiting judgment.

The decision on his final resting place lies with the Moscow city government--his nemesis and the ruthless political machine from which many believe came the order to kill him.

While friends press on with the fight for a dignified interment, his enemies probably see the effort to bury him at Novodevichy as one last display of the impudence that proved his downfall.

*

The ghost of Paul Edward Tatum haunts every Westerner in Russia who has ever silently wondered: Could the worst really happen?

Was there some explanation why it happened to him? Was he so blinded by ambition that he failed to see the warnings? Was there some misstep along the way that marked him for coldblooded murder, some reason that would let those still here rest a bit more assured?

Tatum was born in 1955, sandwiched between two sisters in a devout Baptist family in the comfortable Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond. His father, Edward, had an insurance business that did well in the postwar quest for security. Like most mothers in those days, Millie Tatum stayed at home.

Young Tatum was a good student, a Boy Scout who once sang in the church choir. When the Tatums designed and built a new home in the early 1960s, he was set up in his own third-floor quarters where he would be unable to taunt his sisters.

More interested in books and TV than sports, Tatum broke his hip at the age of 12 and suffered a hernia when he tried to recover too quickly. The resulting yearlong absence from school precipitated a weight problem that nagged him through his life.

Persuasion Skills

At Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, where he studied business, Tatum proved his knack for persuasion.

“Paul was the kind of person who would put up fliers in dorms and organize ski trips so that he could go for free,” recalls Matt Seward, a friend from college and later his business partner.

During a “semester at sea” program that took Tatum around the world by ship, he paid his way by bending customs rules and selling cigarettes from duty-free port calls to consumers on land at a 300% markup.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, Tatum, only 25, borrowed $10,000 to become a Republican “eagle,” winning entrance to the party’s most vaunted circles. At quarterly meetings of the big donors, he rubbed elbows with high rollers at Newport, Hilton Head, Palm Springs.

So charismatic was the young fund-raiser that he was named the Oklahoma GOP financial director and recruited more than a third of the 450 “eagles” signed up in Oklahoma in 1980. National party leaders rewarded him with an invitation to the 1981 inaugural ball.

At the time, Tatum was dating Mary Copeland, a state government clerical worker from Tecumseh, Okla., population 6,000, who was awed by his charm and ambition.

“He could be flamboyant at times,” she recalls. “He bought me a beautiful ball gown and whisked me off to the inauguration.”

That self-styled “small-town girl,” now Mary Fallin with a husband and two children, is lieutenant governor of Oklahoma.

Flaunting his money when he had it was, for Tatum, an irresistible indulgence; he once owned both a Porsche and a Ferrari. When he and Seward were putting together lucrative oil and land deals in Oklahoma City, he would splurge for family vacations to show his parents and sisters he had made it.

But his high rolling ended with the Penn Square Bank failure in 1982. Coinciding with the economic disaster that dried up Oklahoma oil money, the savings and loan crisis stripped Tatum of financing for his trade deals and left him broke and entangled in litigation.

He moved to Arizona, then to Orange County, returning on occasion to see what business life stirred in Oklahoma. In August 1985, old acquaintances in the Republican Party talked him into joining a Chamber of Commerce agricultural delegation to Moscow.

He arrived a mere five months into the heady leadership of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, but Tatum recognized at first glance that Russia would be his destiny.

“It was like standing on top of a mountain from where I could see everything--my past, present and future,” Tatum was to recall later. “I immediately felt that here, all my life’s hopes would be realized and that I would be able to affect the future in a greater way than I ever could in stable America.”

Appalled by the conditions on offer for visiting businessmen, he came up with the idea of creating a hotel and business center that would meet Western expectations. He embarked on the fund-raiser of a lifetime, forming Americom Business Centers in Irvine and approaching friends, fellow gamblers and anyone who owed him a favor. He canvassed his extensive contacts, drafting the likes of Watergate figure H.R. Haldeman to talk to the Radisson hotel chain and muscle together the money for the American half of a joint venture.

What was to become his obsession was in 1989 an unfinished hotel being built by Yugoslav contractors on the banks of the Moscow River. It was a time of tumult and dislocation in the Soviet Union, with the Communist economy crumbling but no capitalist foundation yet built in its place.

The Russian government was more than happy to let Western management and know-how move in. RadAmer--the partnership between Tatum and the Radisson chain--cinched a 20-year lease on the new hotel with the Soviet travel agency, Intourist, giving the Russians 50% of the profits, Tatum 40% and Radisson 10%.

Working with a single-mindedness born of the certainty that he had finally hit pay dirt, Tatum used his state connections to acquire rare international phone lines for the hotel and won permission to import quality furniture and equipment. The British Broadcasting Corp., Reuters news agency and an array of Western businesses abandoned their musty offices to set up in the swank new Radisson-Slavyanskaya.

During the first years after the June 1991 opening, “times were good, and everyone played well together,” says Margaret McLaren, an American who worked for Tatum.

Occupancy was phenomenal. The business center was packed. President Clinton stayed at the hotel during his January 1994 visit, the start of a year that saw a 50% operating profit and yet another transfer of ownership for the Russian side of the joint venture. After the Soviet Union collapsed and its Intourist agency with it, the hotel was inherited by the Moscow City Property Committee.

A Celebrity in Moscow

Tatum soon began exploring other hotel ventures in the Czech Republic, Yugoslavia and across Russia. The picture he painted for those back home was one of boundless opportunity, a canvas spanning 12 time zones between the Austrian border and Alaska where his was still the only hotel up to international standards.

With his Armani suits and Burberry trench coat and the hotel’s fleet of chauffeured luxury cars at his service, the pudgy Oklahoman with flyaway blond hair became a celebrity in Moscow.

He reveled in the role of eligible bachelor, cruising the party circuit with other well-heeled pioneers in the Wild East atmosphere of the new Russia. Spandex- and leather-clad trophy girls of the clubs and casinos hung on both arms.

“He always went around with girls, but he wasn’t really with them,” says Herb Van Dyke, a frequent Tatum companion on the club crawls. “He would always tell girls he was looking for a woman who would bear him seven children,” Van Dyke recalls, mimicking the horrified reactions of the young women.

While riding high, Tatum brought his whole family to Russia for a fortnight in 1993, treating his parents, sisters, nephews and nieces to helicopter tours of this city--his city--and forays into the countryside he had yet to conquer. His sister Robin and her husband, Rick Furmanek, stayed on for a year to work for Tatum.

By 1994, Tatum was anxious to expand. Big on ideas but only a minority partner, he criticized Radisson for being too complaisant, content to milk its one cash cow when it could be acquiring whole new farms. The Russian partners sided with Radisson, preferring to rake in what they could today rather than invest in an uncertain tomorrow.

The fight over the direction of the company soon became a fight for control. Temperamentally unsuited for compromise, Tatum went on the offensive.

He sued for breach of contract. He cut off the phone lines to the office of Vladimir Draitser, the joint venture director. Draitser retaliated by posting security guards at the hotel entrance to bar Tatum. That worked for a few days. Then Tatum pushed back in with his own bodyguards, who would accompany him day and night until the day he died.

Tatum’s most crucial error was misunderstanding the culture of business in Russia, says his lawyer and friend, Ray Markovich.

“Although he only controlled 40%, he really treated it like his baby, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way,” says the attorney still fighting Tatum’s battles in court.

“He made the fundamental error of applying U.S. concepts--the rags-to-riches idea, Horatio Alger, David and Goliath--as if it was a movie,” Markovich says. “Maybe it happens that way 20% of the time in America, but it almost never happens that way here.”

The rules are different in Russia, and Tatum thought he knew them. He relished the unconstricted environment reminiscent of America in the 1950s, when smoking, joking and carousing were expressions of success. But a fellow businessman says Tatum erred in “acting like a Russian, then thinking he could still call in the U.S. Cavalry when he got in too deep.”

In the spring of 1994, Radisson sued to dissolve its partnership with Tatum. It was an act that could have led to Tatum’s ruin, and he knew it. Dissolution of the U.S. partnership would abrogate its 20-year lease and leave the lucrative hotel complex in the sole hands of Moscow. (Despite their dispute, Radisson officials would, after Tatum’s death, praise him as “a courageous entrepreneur who was a pioneer in bringing American business into Russia.”)

While the American partners squabbled, Umar Dzhabrailov arrived on the scene to head the Russian half of the joint venture. Like Tatum, Dzhabrailov was a dapper, ambitious man, and the two hit it off for a while.

When they fell out, suddenly and bitterly and for reasons neither side’s allies seem to understand, Dzhabrailov tried to pack the joint venture’s board with figures loyal to the city. Tatum deemed the moves illegal and said they were an attempt to dilute his power so as to allow “Mafia rule.”

Tatum began wearing a bulletproof vest and beefed up his bodyguard contingent, although friends say those moves were mainly theatrics. He called news conferences and issued statements so often that journalists began to avoid him.

“Paul believed very much in the fourth branch of government--the press,” Markovich says. “He way overdid the publicity thing and offended a lot of people.”

Defying Warnings

The tension eventually turned violent. One bodyguard was stabbed in the chest outside Tatum’s hotel room one night and was told to warn his boss it was “high time for Paul to leave.”

Unflinchingly defiant, Tatum announced: “I’m here until they carry me out.”

He turned up the heat and adopted his enemies’ tactics. When Dzhabrailov accused him of embezzling, he countered that the Chechen businessman was using the hotel to launder money and house criminal gangs. Burly men in leather jackets had indeed been plying the glitzy foyer, and a casino and currency-exchange office had moved in. Moscow’s only international press center, originally founded on the ground floor, was forced out by a staggering rent increase.

As hostility escalated into soap-operatic confrontation, Tatum demanded an outside audit and a ruling from the International Court for Arbitration in Stockholm. His angry partners cut off his access to all bank accounts and halted payment of his share of the monthly profit. For the last 18 months of his life, Tatum bummed money, cigarettes and sympathy from friends.

Through it all, Tatum maintained his posture of mover and shaker, champion of democracy, doer of good deeds. He and Natalya Bokadorova, a kindred spirit in his love of Russian culture, worked tirelessly to form a board of sponsors for the cash-strapped Bolshoi Theater. Devoted to children although he never married or had one of his own, he cobbled together a “Toys for Tots” program for Moscow’s army of poor and once promised to buy an English dictionary for every child in a 400-student schoolhouse.

Even when cut out of the hotel business, Tatum was constantly in motion. “He was a meeting maniac,” Van Dyke says. “Sometimes he would have 15, 20 meetings a day.”

But it was often only keeping up appearances. “People thought he could do more for them than he actually could,” Van Dyke says.

Generous beyond his means, Tatum often disappointed people, like the children at the school who never got their dictionaries. But the role of would-be philanthropist soothed an ego dented by his disintegrating business.

The ritual and ceremony of the Russian Orthodox religion gave him some solace. During his salad days, he had made a donation to the city campaign to rebuild Christ the Savior Cathedral, and that had earned him an engraved place on its marble tribute to key sponsors. Spiritually bereft in a strange and hostile country, he was studying Orthodoxy and contemplating conversion.

“He told me several times that this country was his fate,” says Igor Kharichev, a friend and political advisor on the staff of President Boris N. Yeltsin.

In a moment of candor, Tatum told Kharichev that he felt such a forceful familiarity with Russia it made him believe in the possibility of reincarnation.

Links to Leaders

Certainly, Tatum loved the way his status put him in touch with those in power.

He had supported Yeltsin during his 1991 standoff with Communist hard-liners, offering the defenders of democracy use of what was then rare--a cell phone. He felt he had helped good triumph over evil.

The hotel played host to every notable U.S. delegation that hung its hat in Moscow, affording grip-and-grin shots with world leaders and entertainers. Friends rolled their eyes at the umpteenth telling of how he had squired actress Sharon Stone around Moscow during her visit.

But the hotel dispute was beginning to taint his social standing. When Clinton came to Moscow for last April’s nuclear security summit, White House handlers decided a presidential photo op with Tatum would be too controversial. McLaren had a picture of her own meeting with the president but, attuned to her boss’ feelings, she never hung it in her office.

“Paul said to me more than once that he was too visible for anything to happen to him. He started believing himself,” she remembers. “No matter what anyone told him, he started pushing things too far.”

As his cash dwindled and fair-weather friends began to avoid him, Tatum’s devotion to saving his business bordered on obsession.

“It was his baby. It was his life, his breath and his passion,” McLaren says. “It was all that he had, and he felt like they were trying to take it away from him.”

McLaren describes the bodyguards and girlfriends as “window dressing” that covered a truly lonely existence. “I’d like to think it was otherwise, but Paul didn’t really have anyone close to him. He’d do anything for anyone, but he really didn’t have a best friend.”

The war between Tatum and Umar--as Dzhabrailov is universally known--became bitter. They communicated by memo when contact was essential. Mostly their points were made with lawsuits and court orders.

Some U.S. officials have suggested that it was Umar who killed Tatum, and although his contempt for his former partner is palpable, he is seen by those with a closer view of Moscow as more likely the city’s fall guy.

From behind his polished desk and a plate of handmade chocolates, Umar fidgets with his cellular phone as he describes how he felt toward Tatum.

“This guy behaved badly toward me--toward my friends, toward my family,” says the slight executive with a nervous habit of shaking out his 1960s Beatles-style hair. “He told lies about me. He talked about Chechen gangsters, just because I’m a Chechen.”

He casts Tatum as the villain--the one in the partnership who wanted to cut legal corners. With hand over his heart in a gesture of sincerity, Umar says he couldn’t abide stealing. Neither could he have killed his onetime friend, the city’s steward insists with equal emotion. “I could not raise my hand against one to whom I had once extended it as a friend,” he says. When Tatum was locked out during his clash with Draitser, Umar took the American in.

“Paul used to always say, ‘What goes around comes around,’ ” says Umar--a fitting epitaph for the man who he feels betrayed him.

Public Accusations

What destroyed the relationship between Tatum and him remains a mystery. But the American was notorious for publicly accusing the Moscow power structure of rot, violence and corruption.

At a March 1995 dinner party in the suburb of Zelenograd, attended by Moscow dignitaries, Tatum launched into a diatribe about Moscow Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov and the “capital mob,” saying that no one wanted to do business with city officials because of the corruption.

“You could have heard a pin drop--it got so quiet at the table,” recalls Steve Gray, a Tulsa, Okla., attorney and old Tatum acquaintance who was at the dinner.

By the time his appeal was taken up by the arbitration court in Stockholm, Tatum was broke. Already in debt to friends, he had no prayer of borrowing the $600,000 needed to make his case.

He hit upon a rescue mission for himself: freedom bonds.

The idea was classic Tatum. Gambling that he would win the court case, he offered a 100% return on all investments by April 2, 1997, his 42nd birthday. He cast the bond issue as the ante that would win security and investor rights, the imposition of a little order on the wild frontier. He hawked his bonds in full-page ads in the daily Moscow Times.

As he prepared to give testimony to the Stockholm court last October, Tatum had reason for optimism. He had located the original registration of his company and thought it supported his position that the city had violated the agreement.

It was time, his friend and business advisor Robert Brown believed, for Tatum to keep his mouth shut and be patient. But the strident Tatum wouldn’t listen.

“He had this one bad habit. When he got a hold of something, he would tell everyone about it,” Brown says with regret. “He went around waving the evidence under their noses and calling the press.”

Then, Tatum got a warning. On Saturday, Oct. 26, as he sat alone watching Demi Moore in “Striptease” at the Americom movie theater in the hotel, two armed Moscow policemen burst in and removed him. He was accused of entering without a ticket.

There was an argument and a brief scuffle, as the police refused to heed his claims of being the theater’s owner. Americom colleagues were summoned and tempers cooled.

Three days later, Tatum waited for his friend Kharichev, the political advisor, at Moscow’s funky Starlight Diner, a neon and aluminum eatery that dishes up burgers and meatloaf, comfort food for homesick Americans.

“I saw him sitting in the bar, having a Coke and waiting for someone,” recalls an American businesswoman. “I didn’t know him all that well, but I went up to him and told him how much I admired what he was doing. I told him I thought he had real courage standing up to these people. He just said, ‘Someone has to do it.’ ”

That was a sentiment harbored by many foreign entrepreneurs, that the battle for fairness should be fought but that someone other than themselves should wage it.

“Paul was a flag bearer for those who do business here, and all of us, openly or secretly, hoped he would win,” businessman Thomas DeShazo was to tell mourners at Tatum’s memorial two weeks later.

Kharichev showed up at the diner with a banker friend interested in helping democratic candidates in the provinces. Although Tatum was distracted by his worries over the hotel, the political action committee seemed to be coming together, and the trio agreed to meet again Sunday at the same place.

Tatum spent much of his last days alone, holed up in his hotel room while bodyguards played cards by the door. He told an interviewer that he was reading the latest Frederick Forsyth espionage novel and that it had fascinating parallels to his own plight. In the novel, “Icon,” Moscow in 1999 is in the death grip of corruption, and the American hero conspires with a Chechen hotelier and warlord named Umar to rescue Russia from ruin.

“I asked him how the story ended,” journalist Sergei Mitrofanov says of the discussion he had with Tatum in late October. “He said he hadn’t finished it, that he would tell me later.”

In the novel, the American and Chechen hang together and succeed in thwarting a bloody nationalist coup.

On Nov. 1, two days before his death, Tatum underwent another mood swing, bursting into McLaren’s office to announce that he had been inducted into a Russian fraternity of descendants of Scottish knights.

His friend Bokadorova smiles as she recalls his childlike pleasure: “It made him feel like he belonged.”

“On Friday, it was like he had been given the keys to the city,” McLaren says, smiling over the last memory of her colleague. “Those were the fun things with Paul. He thought that was the height of cool--to hell with business.”

Mother’s Dream

The night before his Sunday meeting, Tatum’s mother called. She had dreamed the night before that her son had come home to surprise them. He had not visited for several years, and his phone calls had become less frequent as he sank deeper into financial despair. The dream “was so real, I had actually started down the stairs,” his mother says. When she talked with him that Saturday, “he still sounded upbeat.”

Like all who were close to him, Tatum’s mother concedes that “he wasn’t perfect. We realize he could be very obstinate and overconfident. It was just that he had this dream.”

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Moscow, the owner of a battered Zhiguli sedan had a windfall. A man approached him at the automotive flea market, offering $5,000 in cash, no questions asked.

As dusk grew to darkness about 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3, the Zhiguli idled outside the hotel as Tatum exited and descended into the nearby Kievskaya subway entrance, headed for the diner to meet Kharichev. As he reached the foot of the bleak stone steps, a single gunman opened fire from the parapet around the stairway. Twenty shots rang out, and 11 ripped through Tatum. He died 30 minutes later, just as the confusion had subsided enough so that an emergency medical crew was summoned. The murder weapon, a Kalashnikov free of fingerprints, was left at the scene in a plastic bag. The abandoned Zhiguli was found two hours later, just across the river, stripped of any contents or clues save an empty soda can on a back floor mat.

*

What little property Tatum had left consisted mostly of paintings. They had been loaded onto a truck in mid-October, when he was forced to give up a Boulevard Ring apartment he never lived in because he couldn’t afford furniture or another year’s $40,000 rent. The truck has since gone missing.

His business files, keepsakes, clothes and impressive video collection remain under police seal in his offices and in Suites 850 and 852 at the Radisson-Slavyanskaya, the space that was his home for half a decade. The Moscow prosecutor’s office ordered the premises off limits for the investigation.

As with most of the 500 or so other contract murders in Russia last year, no one has been arrested for killing Tatum. City officials refuse to talk about the case, but detectives say privately that the trail has gone cold.

The same might be said about the effort to bury Tatum.

Although the city government promised an answer by late December, the appeal is still pending.

Bokadorova, now back at her job teaching Russian at the University of Grenoble in France, still occasionally inquires about the interment request among indifferent city officials. The U.S. Embassy, formally the Tatum family’s representative in the burial effort, has relegated the case to the list of unsettled issues to be raised at each diplomatic meeting.

Tatum’s friends say they will press on with the campaign to inter him in Novodevichy, not just to give him a proper burial but to let their outspoken friend have the last word.

“Being buried in Moscow would probably please him,” Seward says. “He would really like that idea--that even when they killed him, they couldn’t get rid of him.”