The Louisville Courier-Journal is chasing a story that further illustrates what a wonderful environment for coincidence the current political moment happens to be.

Kentucky might be going into business with the Russian mafia. Not the rough-and-tumble “Godfather” crowd with the bent noses and such names like Tessio, Barzini and Luca Brasi. If all goes according to plan, by the middle of the year, we’ll be in business with Oleg Deripaska, a buddy of Vladimir Putin.

He could be sending $200 million — if you believe media reports — in what could very well be mobbed-up money to northeastern Kentucky to build a $1.7 billion aluminum plant on an old strip mine there. The 51-year-old billionaire emerged as a powerful businessman following the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union after a bloody fight for control of Russia's aluminum industry. Last November, the New York Times quoted Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Russian billionaire, saying he stayed out of that battle and urged those he worked with to do the same because of the ruthlessness of the fight. “There were so many murders, I refused to go into this business,” Khodorkovsky said. According to the Times, many have claimed that Deripaska “engaged in theft, intimidation, bribery and even murder, notably of a Russian banker in 1995,” but that none of those claims has been substantiated.

It seems that Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin was hot to build a new aluminum milling plant, but that the proposed location was not suitable for such a large operation. The cost of finding a new location drained the project's funds. And along came the Volga Bagmen to the rescue.

Enter Rusal, a Russian aluminum company that until just three months ago was barred from doing business in the United States in part because of its ties to Deripaska. The Trump administration lifted the sanctions in January after Deripaska agreed to reduce his ownership stake in the Moscow-based company, the world’s second-largest aluminum manufacturer, from 70% to less than 45%.

Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin is a character indeed. Tasos Katopodis Getty Images

But there was Kentucky-specific help needed, too.

And that came only after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed that decision despite large numbers of Republicans and Democrats who objected to allowing Rusal and its parent company En+ Group into the United States. The House voted to keep the sanctions 362-53, but the Senate fell three votes short of the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. McConnell, along with Sen. Rand Paul, voted against the resolution.

Two of the three votes needed to maintain the sanctions against goons like Deripaska came from senators representing a state into which his company was pumping money he'd obtained god knows where or how, and one of whom is the Majority Leader of the U.S. Senate into whose PAC Deripaska's partner dumped $3.5 million between 2015 and 2017. Oddly, one of the stories that has sunk like a stone over the past few years is the story of how much Russian ratfcking money went into Republican campaigns generally over the past few cycles.

Again, nobody knows what the ultimate sources of this money may be, but since Russia is a thoroughgoing thieves' paradise, anybody's guess is as good as anybody else's. But only a fool believes in accidents any more.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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