Latest news with #Calvey
Daily Mirror
3 days ago
- Daily Mirror
'I was locked up with Rose West - she flew into a rage at another crime'
WARNING: DISTRESSING CONTENT Linda Calvey, once dubbed the Black Widow, has rubbed shoulders with some of the most evil women in British history – including child murderers Myra Hindley and Rose West Ever wondered what it's like to be incarcerated in prison alongside some of Britain's most notorious criminals? Few can imagine the chilling experience of sharing a prison wing with sadistic child murderers. However, one woman who knows all too well is Linda Calvey, also known as the Black Widow. The infamous East End gangster, now 76, made a name for herself as a bank robber but ended up behind bars for gunning down her lover Ronnie Cook. Her crimes put her behind bars for more than 20 years, and at one point she held the title of Britain's longest-serving living female prisoner. In a book published back in 2019 after her release, she unveiled the reality of being locked up with two of Britain's most wicked women – Myra Hindley and Rose West. West, now 71, was handed a life sentence in 1995 for her role in assisting her husband Fred to rape and murder at least 12 women and girls at their Cromwell Street home in Gloucester. She's locked up in HMP New Hall where 'she can barely walk and has no friends'. And Hindley was sentenced to life imprisonment for the torture and murder of five children with her partner Ian Brady during the 1960s. Fred and Rose West are currently the subjects of a Netflix documentary, Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story. It includes never-before-seen footage from the depraved dungeon where the evil duo carried out some of their heinous murders. Looking back on her time inside, Calvey recalled, "I was in Durham prison. Myra and Rose were both there too. They used to sit together and became very pally but then suddenly they stopped talking. I think Rose's solicitor told her it doesn't look good." Calvey went on to describe West's unpredictable temper, often triggered by the most peculiar things. "I saw her go into a rant once and it looked like toothpaste coming out of her mouth," she said. "She was foaming like a mad person. She was upset about a drink driver who ran over a cyclist. "We were in a debating class where they look through the papers and get us to discuss something. She kept screaming, 'It's disgusting, his poor family.'" Calvey added, "She also got upset when her cell was set on fire and it nearly killed her budgie. She went to pieces. She was sobbing over this little bird, begging them not to let it die." Calvey further revealed: "She was so angry at Fred for hanging himself. We all heard the boys chanting next door 'Fred is dead' and she was the only one who didn't know what it meant at the time." During her time inside, Calvey started a grim collection of trinkets made or given to her by the killers. She purchased a cushion crafted by West. Hindley gifted her a nightie, a cardigan, some Christmas cards and an empty heart-shaped box. Despite her heinous crimes, Calvey describes Moors murderer Hindley – whom she once slapped in prison – as appearing more like a "suburban housewife" than a monster, complete with pink nail varnish and a flowing kaftan. Hindley had a fear of spiders, once pleading with Calvey to kill one in her cell. "She screamed and hid behind me and told me to kill it, saying, 'You're the Black Widow,'" Calvey recalls. "I was astounded that the woman who had murdered children could be frightened of ending a spider's life." She added: "That's when I noticed she had a locked briefcase under her bed. "She told me it was her personal papers. But we weren't allowed to keep private documents on the wing. I've always wanted to know what was in that case." Calvey became acquainted with Hindley when she was appointed as her hairdresser at Highpoint prison in Suffolk. "She was fussy about her hair as that was the only control she had left," Calvey revealed. "She liked it dyed a dark shade of red once a month. And twice a week I had to wash it. She would sit there chain smoking roll-ups." Hindley introduced Calvey as her friend to her mother, even asking her fellow inmate to converse with the elderly woman over the phone. Calvey recalled: "She phoned her mum to say she had a lovely friend. "I would think, 'I'm not your friend'. I was only there as I was forced to do her hair. She asked me to speak to her on the phone and I did every Sunday. I felt sorry for her having a daughter like that." According to Calvey, Hindley spent her final days harbouring resentment towards the mothers of her victims. "She was very bitter about being in prison and believed she shouldn't be. She was especially bitter towards Lesley Anne Downey 's mum and called her 'that b****y woman'. "She didn't speak about her crimes except once, when she said Brady forced her to do it. Calvey first encountered the child murderer at Cookham Wood prison in Kent when she was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for armed said: 'I worked in the library and she would take out violent and gory books that were banned to her under other people's names.' Hindley died in prison in November 2002, aged 60. Calvey revealed that she received marriage proposals from gang boss Reggie Kray and notorious armed robber Charles Bronson, who recently made a fresh bid to be released from prison, aged 81. She shared: "Reggie asked me to marry him over the phone. He phoned me twice a week and I used to get bouquets of flowers from him. He sent me trainers once. I said it wasn't good for either of us, really thinking it wouldn't be good for me as I'd still be sitting there now if I was Mrs Kray.' On Bronson, Calvey remarked: "He proposed to me so many times but he's a serial proposer."
Irish Times
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Bravery, common decency and reflections on investing from a Russian prison cell
The arrest of top US fund manager Michael Calvey in Moscow, on what proved to be trumped up charges, made international headlines in 2019 . Diplomatic efforts, including a direct intervention by then president Donald Trump with Vladimir Putin , failed to secure his freedom , as the Russian president maintained that he could not interfere with the country's independent judicial system. 'Going to prison is never easy, but Matrosskaya Tishina is synonymous with misery and despair,' Calvey tells The Irish Times. 'I spent the first few days being interrogated in solitary confinement by FSB [secret police] specialists who told me the only way out was to admit my guilt to a crime that never happened – which I refused to do. 'I imagined they would put me in a cell with hardened criminals. I was asked to gather up my belonging at 10.30pm at night, just before lights out. I was led to a cell with seven prisoners, and I expected the worst, but I was greeted cheerfully by my name, and I had the good fortune to share my cell with a bunch of really brave and decent men ." Calvey's prison experience and the circumstances that led him there are the subject of his new book, Moscow Odyssey, where he writes eloquently about the humanity and stoicism of the men he met in prison who shared their food parcels and kept him going during his darkest days. The book charts the path of Russia over the past three decades and how his optimism for the country fades as he falls victim to the corruption that lies at the heart of the state. READ MORE Growing up in an Irish Catholic American family in Oklahoma in the US, Calvey developed an early fascination with Russia as a teenager, inspired by reading New York Times Moscow correspondent Hedrick Smith's The Russians, which related first-hand experiences of the Soviet era in the 1970s. 'You could almost smell the Soviet cigarettes, samovars and communal apartments,' he says. After college, Calvey briefly pursued a Wall Street career with investment bank Salomon Brothers, where he specialised in energy, and this led to an opportunity to join the European Bank for Reconstruction & Development (EBRD). He arrived in Moscow in early 1992, weeks after Mikhail Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union – and found it the capital city a grim place. 'It seemed a strangely colourless place – everything seemed to be grey or brown. People seemed unwelcoming, scowling if I accidentally made eye contact. There was no sense of excitement of a new nation getting onto the front foot, full of opportunity or promise,' he recalls. Working in the oil and gas sector, he visited lesser-known regions, where he encountered conditions at times so cold that his contact lenses ended up frozen. He married a Russian citizen in the 1990s and started a family, splitting time between London and Moscow. In Russia, this of course was an era of oligarchs and criminal gangs running protection rackets. The country's economic fortunes swung wildly, and a market collapse in 1998 led to an IMF bailout. Russia changed over time as Putin seized more and more control. Prosperity followed, and Calvey moved to the private sector as a fund manager, where he pivoted from energy to focus on opportunities presented by the emergence of a wealthy middle class. The firm he led, Baring Vostok, eventually became one of the top funds in the country. While there were some early failures, there were also blockbuster successes, such as Russian search engine Yandex, where a $5 million investment led to a 450-fold return on the fund's investment, when it was cashed out after a Nasdaq IPO valuing the firm at $8 billion. An ill-fated decision to invest in the banking sector proved Calvey's undoing. His apartment was raided by secret police in 2019, and he was arrested on corruption charges relating to investments made by the bank. He was detained along with other executives on charges of embezzlement linked to mid-sized lender Vostochny in a 2.5-billion-rouble (circa €30 million at the time) case. Calvey knew the accusations were bogus, but his life was turned upside down. A later cancer scare compounded his worries, but it was caught in time. Jail was followed by release to house arrest, curfew and then freedom to leave Russia, but it was 2024 before the conviction was vacated, following a tortuous legal process, that eventually gave him the legal status of someone not convicted of the related charges. 'Any postwar investment will be pretty small, while people test to see how thick the ice is under their feet on the frozen lake they are standing on' — Michael Calvey on investing in Russia after the Ukraine war When Putin invaded Ukraine , Calvey pulled all of his firm's investments out of Russia. Regarding Ukraine's situation, he foresees a resolution that involves Ukraine securing EU rather than Nato membership and ceding part of its territory to Russia as part of its settlement. The ending of sanctions on Russia, meanwhile, could be tied to Russia paying at least a substantial part of the reconstruction costs of Ukraine, which he can't see western taxpayers wanting to stomach fully. While he has concerns about the rhetoric of the Trump administration and damage the US president is causing to EU-US relations, he applauds moves to make Europe more responsible for funding its own defence and pushing for a more urgent end to the conflict in Ukraine, moves which he says are long overdue. Calvey (57), believes it will take a long time for Russian-western trade to be restored to former levels, but does feel it is worthwhile for the West to hold out for this prospect. 'While I think it is premature to talk about a return of investment while the war is going on and before any peace agreement can be tested for its stability, I think it is right and wise for the Trump administration to put it on the table because it does create a further incentive for Russia to end the war. If they feel like they are going to be in the penalty box forever, there's less reason for them to stop fighting,' he says. 'However, even though it is in US and western interests to propose a conditional resumption of trade and investment based on peace being maintained, I don't think that big investors are going to be putting a lot of money in for some time. They are going to have to consider how fragile that peace agreement might be when there are people who hate each other so much on that border now. Any postwar investment will be pretty small, while people test to see how thick the ice is under their feet on the frozen lake they are standing on.' Today, as chairman of Baring Ventures, he focuses on other international markets, including some promising ventures backed by Russians now based in the West. He splits his time between Switzerland and the UK. Reflecting on his time in prison, Calvey says: 'It's a cliche, but the experience did make me extremely grateful for what I have. I don't take things for granted, and it's made me more philosophical. One thing it didn't do is to shatter my great sympathy and affection for ordinary Russian people.' Michael Calvey's book, Odyssey Moscow, One American's Journey from Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State, is published by The History Press
New York Times
23-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
An American Helped Build Russia's Economy. He Was Jailed on Bogus Charges.
A foul cell in a Moscow detention center was about the last place an American businessman named Michael Calvey expected to find himself after spending 25 years building a flourishing venture capital firm in Russia that transformed some tech startups into global brands. First, beefy agents from the F.S.B., the federal security service, ransacked his apartment before dawn. Hours later he was confined to a holding cell with two other inmates and a filthy hole in the floor for a toilet. 'The cell is stuffy and hot, an oppressive stench hanging in the air as if from accumulated decades of human sweat mixed with the indescribable horrors emanating from the toilet hole area,' Mr. Calvey wrote in a new book out this week called 'Odyssey Moscow.' It details his extended ordeal through the Russian court system in a fabricated fraud case initiated in 2019: 'In the course of a few surreal, terrifying hours I have morphed from one of the most successful Western businessmen in Russia into a prisoner of the state.' With President Trump lauding the possibility of 'major economic development transactions' between the United States and Russia as he seeks improved relations with Moscow, Mr. Calvey's fate stands as a cautionary tale about the significant personal and professional risks involved in doing business in Russia, particularly given the arbitrary nature of its courts. Perhaps no Western businessman promoted foreign investment in Russia more than Mr. Calvey, 57, who helped to forge internet titans from tech startups like Yandex — a version of Google, Amazon and Uber rolled into one — or Tinkoff Credit Systems, one of the world's biggest digital banks. The firm he founded, Baring Vostok Capital Partners, earned colossal returns. Then Baring Vostok got mired in a nasty commercial dispute with two dubious Russian partners who were stripping assets out of a bank in a troubled merger. Once, Mr. Calvey's empty Moscow apartment mysteriously caught fire hours before a dinner involving tense negotiations. After his firm filed a case with a London arbitration court, the partners convinced Department K of the F.S.B., responsible for internal financial crimes, that the American and several partners had perpetuated a massive fraud as part of a dastardly foreign plot to undermine Russia's financial sector. The agents pounced in February 2019, and although no evidence of wrongdoing ever emerged in court, Mr. Calvey and several partners spent years in jail or under house arrest. 'Once the F.S.B. gets involved in a case, they're like a car with six gears going forward and none in reverse,' Mr. Calvey said in an interview in Switzerland, his home since finally being allowed to leave Russia in 2022. Lanky and trim, he retains a boyish air despite his gray hair. 'They will never back up or lose face.' His arrest stunned Western investors. 'Everyone I knew was incredulous, angry and shocked,' said Bernie Sucher, an American banker with extended experience in Russia. 'It was viewed as a direct assault on the very idea of long-term investment in the Russian economy.' Unusually, dozens of influential Russians defended Mr. Calvey. They included Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund and now a key negotiator for ending the Ukraine war; German Gref, the chief executive of Russia's largest bank; and Alexei Kudrin, a previous finance minister. The U.S. Embassy in Moscow also objected strenuously to his arrest. Mr. Calvey thought such interventions, combined with the blow to investor confidence, would get the case dropped. But nothing outweighed the F.S.B. President Vladimir V. Putin did summon top Kremlin officials, ordering them to get the American businessman out of prison, but also to find something illegal that Mr. Calvey had done, he said he later learned. At a tense time in U.S.-Russia relations, the Kremlin could not admit to arresting a prominent American businessman on false pretenses, he said. Released from prison after two months, Mr. Calvey was confined to his apartment with an electronic monitoring device strapped around his ankle for two years, and spent a third under court-ordered supervision with an 8 p.m. curfew. When he developed a cancerous tumor in one leg, the court refused to allow him to remove the device, so doctors operated without benefit of an M.R.I. The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment about Mr. Calvey's account. At the time of his conviction, Dmitry Peskov, the presidential spokesman, quoted Mr. Putin as saying that the government could not interfere in the courts. When first arrested, Mr. Calvey was jailed in Matrosskaya Tishina prison, near downtown Moscow. It is sometimes called 'Kremlin Central' because so many inmates face charges in high-profile corruption cases pushed by the Kremlin. There were no violent criminals, but nobody is ever acquitted, either, Mr. Calvey wrote His cellmates greeted him with a nonalcoholic toast: 'Novoselye,' or welcome. One was a former deputy minister of culture. Another was an army general. A younger one was a computer hacker, and three were construction moguls. Trust nobody, one of them confided. Their cell, 13 feet by 16 feet, was tidy and somewhat comfortable, with a television and a separate toilet. The men shared everything equally from cleaning chores to food supplies from outside. He dedicated his book to the men of Cell 604, and tears up when he talks about them. The book will be released Thursday in Britain and in early April in the United States. Throughout his detention, Mr. Calvey endeavored to avoid his jailers seeing him disturbed. His reading list included Kafka as an apt reflection of his fate. When one prosecutor summarized the case, for example, she admitted that not a single witness testified to a crime being committed, then added, 'That just proves what a well-organized criminal group we are dealing with.' The entire courtroom laughed aloud, Mr. Calvey said. The trial underscored F.S.B. control over the courts, with the closing statements repeating the opening accusations almost exactly, Mr. Calvey said. All the witness testimony might never have happened. 'Russian people are of course the main victims of its courts,' he wrote. In August 2021, Mr. Calvey was convicted of the misappropriation of funds and given a five-year suspended sentence. The conviction on false charges grated, he said, a stain on all his work for Russia. His Russia saga started in 1991, when just two years out of the University of Oklahoma, Mr. Calvey went to work for his former Wall Street boss at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. It was established to help the former Soviet bloc transition to a market economy. He worked on financing energy sector projects. Considered young for the magnitude of the deals, he tried to camouflage his age by adopting a serious demeanor at work, said Charlie Ryan, his first Moscow roommate. 'Life for an expat in 1990s Moscow was equal parts bizarre and marvelous,' Mr. Calvey wrote. Pizza Hut was considered a high-end restaurant to impress a date. Kilos of inexpensive caviar proved a substitute for breakfast cereal. Mr. Calvey established Baring Vostok to build businesses catering to the new middle class. He married a Russian woman named Julia, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, now all young adults. He existed within an elite business bubble, surrounded by people eager to integrate Russia into the global economy. At the time of his trial, Baring Vostok said that overall, it had invested more than $2.8 billion in 80 companies across the region, making it the biggest such Western player. He learned Russian through countless hours he spent with young, ambitious entrepreneurs. 'It was hard to spend time with them and not feel like Russia was a much, much better place than at the time of their grandparent's generation,' he said. When prominent businessmen got arrested, Mr. Calvey attributed it to their meddling in politics. He considered his Russian associates overly gloomy about the direction of their country. He ignored repeated red flags that Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent, had handed control over every major institution to the siloviki, a Russian term incorporating all security agencies. Not even the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 deterred Mr. Calvey. 'What I didn't really appreciate, and only realized with my arrest, was the depth of the control and influence of the ruling caste of Russia, which is F.S.B. and the other siloviki,' he said. Mr. Calvey's businesses thrived even while he was imprisoned, and he pulled the plug only after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The hasty disinvestment cost his company billions of dollars, he said. He is done with Russia. Although under Russian law his conviction was nullified after his five-year probation period ended a year ago, last week a Moscow court changed the probationary sentence given to a French defendant in the case to a prison term in absentia. Mr. Calvey expects some American businesses to return, although he considers Russia too risky for long-term investments. A peace deal might prompt him to invest in Ukraine, however. He is fostering internet startups elsewhere, employing young tech talent that fled Russia. The simmering geopolitical differences between Moscow and Washington mean that any businessman can become a chessboard pawn, he said, adding: 'You may hope that you're not going to get stepped on the head, but ultimately it could happen at any time.'
