On the agenda: an assessment Eringer had commissioned from a special source within Department Six (anti-organized crime) of the Russian Interior Ministry Police (MVD).
Eringer's source reported Russia's perspective on the principality: 1) Monaco is luxurious and easily susceptible to bribe money. 2) Monaco's police have a sleepy attitude. 3) Due to tourism and casinos, the conditions in Monaco for money laundering are ideal.
This source identified the Chernoy brothers (Mikhail and Lev) as responsible for leading New Russians into Monaco. Due to the one hundred percent confidentiality of Monaco's banking system, the principality was highly appealing to New Russians for opening bank accounts and purchasing real estate.
The source also reported that Monaco was now frequented by Umar Jabrailov, a Chechen hotelier thought to be responsible for the murder of Paul Tatum, his American partner in Moscow's Radisson Slavanskaya Hotel.
Next, an investigation into the illegal movement of Iraqi and Libyan oil that linked a Frenchman named Patric Maugein to two Monaco residents and several Monaco-based companies. Maugein, reputed to be French President Jacques Chirac's bagman--collecting money from Iraq's Saddam Hussein, among others--was known to be a violent thug who'd contracted the shooting on a Paris street of a doctor he believed was having an affair with his wife. The relationship between Chirac and Maugein was said to be so close that when the French president's mentally unstable daughter suffered a breakdown in the 1980s it was Maugein who checked her into a Swiss asylum in Lausanne and covered the ten thousand dollar per week medical bills.
Good intelligence suggested that Maugein and his two Monaco-based associates were allegedly engaged in "super-loading" oil tankers. That is, buying oil from Iraq at seven dollars a barrel, disguising it as Iranian oil, and selling it for fourteen dollars a barrel, with transfers taking place at sea in the Strait of Hormuz.
Eringer and Piers apprised Prince Albert of potential embarrassment to the principality if such criminal activities were exposed in the media.
The Prince reported that one of Maugein's Monaco-based associates (a Lebanese national represented by Albert's personal lawyer) had been urging him to meet Maugein on the basis that "he has good ideas for Monaco."
Due to his spymaster's intelligence, Prince Albert declined, and no such introduction to Maugein ever took place.
Finally, Eringer chided the Prince on his rather risqué cell phone greeting messages, which Albert changed monthly. The latest included the word boner.
"Hey," the Prince replied, "I needed a rhyme for October."
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