The insane story of how an Alabama prison inmate helped rob a former Soviet Republic blind

Every prisoner has a story, but very few of them have one quite as wild as Eugene Gourevitch.

Currently serving a five-year prison sentence in a federal facility in Montgomery, the UC Berkeley-educated financier was convicted of wire fraud related to insider trading. Now working as a prison library aide Andy Dufresne style, the inmate has a tale almost as shocking as the Shawshank Redemption.

In a phone interview with Bloomberg News, Gourevitch told his convoluted story that included witnessing widespread looting and corporate bribery in the obscure former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan, working as an criminal underground “bag man”, and being kidnapped and caught up in the Italian mob.

Gourevitch was born in Moscow and came to the United States in 1990. After receiving his degree from Berkeley, he became a U.S. citizen in 1999. He took his business degree to New York City, where he and a few partners established a Kyrgyz investment bank.

One of his partners, Maksim Bakiyev, was the son of the then-president of Kyrgyzstan. The entire Bakiyev family had been implicated in numerous corruption schemes, and both Maksim and his father were convicted in absentia when their government was overthrown in 2010. Bakiyev himself was convicted of embezzling more than $130 million in state funds.

After the founding of their bank in 2008, Gourevitch began to catch on to his partner’s schemes and started to warn investigators.

It would not be the first time Gourevitch was apparently playing both sides — benefitting from the river of money flowing through his possession while simultaneously tipping off the authorities to his partner’s indiscretions.

In the recent Bloomberg interview, Gourevitch said that Bakiyev asked him to pick up as much as $2 million in bribes per trip to a local company seeking to curry favor with the ruling family. “I would go there to work on something unrelated,” Gourevitch said. “He would say, ‘As long as you’re going down there, they have a package for me.’”

But everything changed when the Bakiyev family was overthrown in 2010. While Maksim and his father — the deposed president — escaped to neighboring Belarus, Gourevitch was left behind, now an enemy of the state. Maksim ultimately sneaked Gourevitch out of the country on a private plane, but for a hefty price: Gourevitch would from that point forward be Maksim’s prisoner and would be forced to manage his finances.

After then helping his captors perpetrate a massive insider-trading scheme, Gourevitch became desperate to escape. He had authorities bearing down on him from Kyrgyzstan, as well as from Italy, where he was accused of taking part in a tax avoidance scheme that somehow involved the Italian mob.

With seemingly nowhere else to go, he turned to the U.S. government to become an informant against his captors, even though he knew he would be implicated as well.

But deep into the investigation, Gourevitch suddenly reverted to his criminal ways. He stole $6 million from Bakiyev’s bank account and tried to undermine the authorities’ investigation. He ended up getting busted and turned over the cash to the U.S. government.

Gourevitch told Bloomberg he helped his former captor because he was grateful for the man’s help in escaping to Belarus.

He hopes one day to turn his wild story into a book. The working title right now is Shadow Advisor, and it could be coming to a bookstore near you if and when the Alabama inmate is released from Federal Prison.

For now, the only books he’s allowed to handle are in the prison bookstore in Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery.

(Read the full story at BLOOMBERG NEWS)