Russia's rich and shameless

"I make up games. Sometimes I dress up my clients like bums and take them to the rail station. They have to beg. Whoever has the most coins in the morning wins," he says. "The wives of these businessmen wanted their own games. So we had some of them work as waitresses in a diner. Whoever gets the most tips wins. Sometimes they'll go as striptease dancers and see who comes away with the most cash."

He looks down, scratches his thin goatee, reflects: "Some very rich women want to play the part of a prostitute. I organize that. Of course, they don't go all the way. We stop it before that.... But, yes, some would go all the way."

He pauses, adding, in his best Sigmund Freud: "Why do they want to do these things? Deep down they're driven by a fear that one day they might end up a beggar, a prostitute, because for many of them, their businesses aren't that clean."

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THE guy is wonderful, a wily bit of flash, a symbol of the new Russia. Knyazev came of age, economically speaking, in the late 1980s, when then-Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev called for reforms known as perestroika. It was a time of cigar smoke and dreams. He opened a student cafe, a private school and an advertising agency in Siberia. He later ventured to Moscow, founding the Empire of Passion strip club and hiring a former Bolshoi ballerina to teach dance steps.

The thing about Knyazev, 44, is that you wonder where he draws the border between fantasy and reality. He runs with the rich, but there are no chandeliers, no Botticelli knockoffs floating in his chamber, which resembles a dentist's office -- long hallway, closing doors, muffled voices. His pinstriped suit is subtle, but it is not Armani. You get the sense of being lured into a web of meticulously constructed origami.

"I know Sergei Knyazev and I've heard his stories about some bizarre games he invents for rich businessmen. What can I tell you?" says Konstantin N. Borovoi, a founder of Moscow's commodities exchange and chairman of the Party of Economic Freedom. "There is no way to verify that because he won't disclose the names of his clients. But really, some of his tales are hard to believe. All I can say is that Knyazev is surely not lacking in imagination."

Confidentiality breeds mystique. Finding out who's who, or, more important, who's doing what, is tough anyway. This is a nation where credit cards were decades late in arriving, where money was smuggled out or funneled to foreign banks. Financial searches today often lead into mazes, and many firms rely on criminal background checks and the website Kompromat.ru (Compromising Material), a thicket of rumors and gossip about the rich and powerful.