However, Ferguson’s last spell in Glasgow ended with him receiving a jail sentence for his behaviour on and off the pitch and it is debatable whether he would want to return.South of the border, David Busst, the Coventry defender whose career was ended a year ago by injury, has been assured of a good benefit match by Manchester United.Busst suffered horrific leg injuries playing for Coventry at Old Trafford last Easter, and Alex Ferguson, the United manager, has agreed to send a United side to play a Coventry City XI in a benefit at Highfield Road on 16 May.Rangers’ Ally McCoist and Paul Gascoigne have agreed to play and the England manager, Glenn Hoddle, will also take part.Busst, who has undergone 15 operations on his leg, had to announce his retirement from the game on medical grounds. He expects a full-house 23,500 at Highfield Road for the game.Busst’s agent, Murdo Mackay, said: “We have had so many offers from top players that we could almost field 50-a-side. A lot of people were affected by David’s injury, but they all respect the way he has handled it We want to make it a night for him to remember.”. On Manhattan’s Upper East Side there is an upmarket food store that caters to the Park Avenue crowd.

The swanky delicatessen charges the earth and supplies every conceivable delicacy on the planet. It was here, between the racks of extra virgin olive oil and dried mango, that Natalia Lomakina met her nemesis. “I was working a part-time job filling shelves that barely paid my subway fare,” says the 23-year-old blonde from Pitsunda, a resort on the Black Sea “I’d come here with my father but he died in 1995. I had to move in with a cousin from Moscow who insisted I pay rent.”
Lomakina’s cousin has an apartment in Gravesend, a grim part of Brooklyn that borders the Atlantic Ocean. This section of New York City is home to more than 20,000 emigres from the former Soviet Union. Lomakina felt she had left the ruins of Communism only to be exiled in a Russian-American ghetto. She wanted more and that made her vulnerable to corruption.”I was at work on a Saturday in August,” she says, smoking nervously.

Although her name has been changed for this story she still fears retribution for what she has agreed to say. “I was stacking packets of fresh ravioli and I heard this man speaking in Russian. On an impulse I stood and made a joke to him in Russian about the weather, which was terribly hot.”The man she had engaged in chance conversation complimented Lomakina on her appearance. He switched from Russian to English and soon began praising Lomakina’s grasp of both languages “He told me he was a partner in a restaurant.

He gave me his telephone number and told me to call.” Lomakina winces slightly at the memory. “He said he might have a ‘good job’ for me paying much better money than a grocery store.”Lomakina wasted no time. She called and within a week she was working in a stylish French brasserie less than half a mile from her old job She saw the same faces she had seen at the deli. Wealthy, complacent and self-assured, none seemed to have any idea that their patronage was helping to launder money for the Russian Mafiya, now acknowledged by the FBI, CIA and MI5 as the most serious threat to global law and order.”I’d been there a week when the guy I’d met in the deli came by and took me to one side,” she says, stretching the long legs which helped get her hired at the restaurant. “He explained that I might get calls from outside the brasserie, to make up bills for customers who weren’t actually there. I was told I’d be given credit card numbers and I had to process them through the system as if it were a regular table.”Within days Lomakina was getting calls from women – prostitutes serving clients in nearby hotels – who would give her credit card numbers and tell her to get approval from the card company for hundreds of dollars.

“The smallest were $250 but many were $750 and $1,000,” she says “I would process a fortune every week this way. I soon realised the restaurant was fronting a multi-million-dollar sex business.”Lomakina would also get calls from a man who called himself Rafik. “He would tell me to make up false bills for any empty tables, big ones. I would collect these and tally them at the end of the evening. Rafik would then call and ask for the totals.”Within days the young Russian had become a vital cog in a money-laundering machine that may include as many as 100 New York restaurants “Rafik” was using the brasserie to clean drug money. The dirty cash his dealers took from the street could be made to represent legitimate commerce in the form of expensive meals.