Russian Five: Slava Kozlov goes from life support to life with Red Wings

In “The Russian Five: A story of espionage, defection, bribery and courage,” Keith Gave, the spy-turned-Detroit Free Press newsman whose clandestine mission to Helsinki, Finland, put the Red Wings’ acquisition of the iconic quintet in motion, shares the pulse-pounding and unforgettable tale of how Sergei Fedorov, Slava Fetisov, Vladimir Konstantinov, Slava Kozlov and Igor Larionov slipped past the Iron Curtain, wound up in crumbling 1990s Detroit, helped build a championship empire and changed the landscape of American hockey forever. This excerpt of the new book, released March 20, is the fourth installment in a five-part series leading up to the Freep Film Festival, which opens with the world premiere of the "Russian Five" documentary on April 11 at Fillmore Detroit.

Slava Kozlov lay critically injured in a Soviet hospital, somehow clinging to life. Anyone who had seen the twisted wreck that remained of the car he was driving understood that for the Detroit Red Wings’ most prized young prospect to still be drawing a breath after surviving the crash was nothing short of a miracle.

Kozlov, then 19, had suffered massive head and facial injuries that were so severe it was difficult to even look at him.

“It was impossible to find his eyes, his nose or his mouth on his face. It looked like the moon,” said Valery Matveev, who visited Kozlov a few days after the mid-November 1991 accident. Kozlov was Matveev’s latest project, hoping to find a way to help deliver another young hockey star to the Red Wings as he had with Sergei Fedorov and Vladimir Konstantinov. Suddenly, all bets about Kozlov’s once-certain future of NHL stardom were off.

He was in a coma for four hours. He would spend nearly three months in the hospital. But he was alive. His passenger and teammate, Kirill Tarasov, did not survive. The two were in a rush to return from Voskresensk to their Central Red Army hockey club.

Their trip covered just 50 miles or so, but along poor roads around Voskresensk funneling into snarling Moscow traffic; it could easily take up to two hours from the Kozlov home to the CSKA rink. Kozlov, an aggressive driver who learned the basics by driving rental cars when Wings executive Nick Polano came to court him, knew the shortcuts on the way back to the rink.

That morning, though, his route took him into the path of a bus that had just turned a corner. Both young men were ejected through the windshield. Tarasov, a defenseman with NHL potential, was pronounced dead at the scene with a broken neck. Kozlov somehow survived.

Investigators surmised that his strong hands on the steering wheel helped to catapult him out of his seat before the wheel could crush his chest. The little Lada 2106, which cost Kozlov the equivalent of $500 when new about five months earlier, was beyond recognition. “You could not even tell what kind of car it was before,” Matveev said.

One of the most talented young players the Wings had ever scouted, Kozlov became part of NHL history in June 1990, when the Wings selected him with their third-round pick (45th overall) in the NHL entry draft. At that time, it was the highest a Soviet-born player had been drafted, breaking the record set the previous year when Detroit took Fedorov in the fourth round.

The Wings were eager to get Kozlov in a uniform as soon as they could. But Kozlov stubbornly resisted Detroit’s overtures. He had a pretty good thing going in Russia, and he knew it. At age 15, he was starting to play some games with his hometown’s professional club, Khimik Voskresensk. He was that league’s rookie of the year in 1990. And cocky, too, he admitted.

“I was a big star in Russia,” he said years later. “But I did some stupid mistakes.”

He acknowledged not getting along with his Khimik coach, which prompted his decision to play for the Red Army club, where discipline was the cornerstone of the program. It was what he knew he needed. But he also was influenced by the $120,000 CSKA promised to pay him, a factor in his reluctance to leave for the NHL.

Emboldened by the success in getting their other two Soviet draftees out of Russia and into the Detroit lineup, and recognizing Kozlov’s enormous potential, the Wings put a full-court press on him even though their scouts were telling him he wasn’t quite ready for the NHL. So six months after they drafted Kozlov, the Wings put together a contingent that, aboard owner Mike Ilitch’s private plane, traveled to Regina, Saskatchewan, for the World Junior Championships. Their group included executive vice president Jim Lites, assistant general manager Nick Polano and a rather boastful “agent” the Wings hired when Matveev was unable to attend.

“He was going to be my interpreter and introduce me to Kozlov,” Lites said. “But this agent guy is all talk. He keeps saying, ‘I’m like Don King!’ He’s crazy. Says he’ll negotiate for Kozzie right away and he (Kozlov) will leave Regina right from there. So, I’m rarin’ to go. I lined up a rental car in case he doesn’t have the right papers, so we could drive him across the border if we had to. You’ve got to make sure you do that correctly.”

Except for one important thing: Slava Kozlov had no intention of leaving. In fact, at one point he felt like he was being kidnapped. Like all prominent young Soviet players coveted by NHL teams, Kozlov was worried about two kinds of people constantly around their teams: “spies” and “agents.”

The spies were the KGB types assigned to all Russian teams that traveled outside the Soviet Union. They collected all the passports on arrival at their destination, and they were responsible for making sure all those players who made the trip returned home again.

“There were always spies traveling with us, and on the other side were the agents,” Kozlov said.

The agents were like talent bounty hunters, always with designs on delivering players to their NHL teams and signing them to big contracts that would allow them to collect staggering commissions.

They would always be around the hotel, whispering to players in the elevators, Kozlov said. If they could get a player alone, they would give him gifts, including expensive skates. It was all very pleasant and flattering, though Kozlov knew the limitations.

“It was still the Iron Curtain,” he said, “so you didn’t know if you were going to leave or you were not going to leave.”

The guy who was boastfully certain he could deliver Kozlov to the Wings was Vitali Shevchenko, a brash young entrepreneur. A Ukrainian introduced to the Wings by Matveev, Shevchenko was with Lites and Polano on that trip to Saskatchewan. But Kozlov was wary of how Shevchenko tried to represent him. In the agent’s defense, however, Kozlov conceded he led him on a bit.

The two had met in the fall of 1990, when Shevchenko turned up in Voskresensk, telling Kozlov that Detroit wanted him to defect as soon as possible, that the team representatives would be at the world junior tournament and that he could leave from there to the NHL.

“I should have said ‘no’ right away,” Kozlov told a reporter for thehockeywriters.com. “But I just mumbled something pretty vaguely. I kind of let him imagine that it was OK to me.”

When the two met again in Saskatchewan, Shevchenko approached Kozlov and told him, “A man from Detroit is waiting for you in the car.”

Kozlov panicked. He rushed out of the dressing room, without a wallet, without any documents and, not knowing what else to do, he got into the car.

“Sit down,” Shevchenko said, trying to get the young man to relax. “The plane is ready to go.”

Now the Wings were nervous.

“We’re all prepared to go. We’ve got everything arranged,” Lites recalled. “And all the kid wants to do is drive the rental car. It’s literally 30 degrees below zero in Regina. We’re there for two days just before Christmas, and it’s clear the kid has no intention of leaving right away. He just won’t come. He wants to go home to Mom.

“By circumstance, a lot of guys who come through the Russian system are 19 going on 25. Slava was 19 going on 16 when I first met him. He was still a boy, and he wasn’t ready to go, emotionally. I always kind of appreciated that about him.”

Recalling that moment in the car with the Wings officials in Regina, Kozlov doesn’t dispute that perception.

“I wasn’t ready to be in such a rush,” he confessed. “I said, ‘I won’t go anywhere. I can’t let the team down. I don’t even have my passport!”

Kozlov told the Wings he would defect after the tournament perhaps, or during the summer. The Wings had no choice. As badly as they wanted the player, they weren’t about to kidnap him.

“They drove me back to the hotel,” Kozlov said, admitting his relief. “I was really afraid for my parents. Russia was still Communist at the time. I thought my father would get fired from his job, and my parents would be persecuted. So I decided I still have time, that I’m not going to defect.”

More Russian Five excerpts:

How Konstantinov faked cancer to join Detroit Red Wings

Covert mission brought iconic Red Wings to Detroit

How Sergei Fedorov escaped USSR for Red Wings

The uncertainty about what the Soviet regime might do to his family, Kozlov said, was the single most important reason he did not leave immediately. It’s also why he kept secret what had transpired in Saskatchewan.

When the world junior tournament ended, with the Soviets winning silver, Kozlov returned home with his teammates. The Wings didn’t press the issue, despite what Kozlov had told them earlier. But neither would Polano give up. He met with Kozlov three other times over the next year or so, trying to woo him to Detroit.

“It was always, ‘No, no ready yet. No ready. We drive your car now?’ ” Polano recalled, chuckling. That’s how Kozlov’s recruitment went. They would hop in Nick’s rental car and Slava would drive around and around the block while Polano talked to him about how good life was for a player in the National Hockey League, and how he could drive any kind of car he could imagine with what the Red Wings were willing to pay him.

Instead, Kozlov signed a rather lucrative contract with the Red Army club and bought himself a cheap Lada, which he wrecked after playing just 11 games with CSKA in the fall of 1991. Suddenly, he was on life support in an intensive care unit.

As soon as the Wings heard about the accident, Polano packed his bags and headed to Russia again, intent on offering any support the Red Wings might be able to provide.

On his arrival, he spent some of the club’s money in the duty-free shops on gifts for Kozlov’s family.

“I know I was very nervous about my career after it happened," Kozlov said. "What kept me going and helped me to recover the most was the fear of never playing hockey again, because that is the meaning of my life. And the situation with my parents, putting all their hopes on me, that helped me to come out of the situation and recover from the accident and keep moving.”

The kindness Polano showed in representing the Red Wings went a long way as well, Kozlov added.

“I remember Nick came and he offered medical help — offered to take me under medical observation in Detroit,” he said. “Detroit was really hoping and willing to help me in every way. They weren’t going to throw me aside."

It wasn’t just talk or moral support, either. Matveev immediately began working on doctors in much the same way he did to secure Vladimir Konstantinov’s release from the military. Rather than fake cancer, however, which worked for Konstantinov, the Wings spread around enough cash so that doctors concluded that Kozlov had suffered permanent brain damage and a loss of peripheral vision stemming from head injuries sustained in the crash.

Over the strenuous objections of military officials, Kozlov ultimately was released from his Red Army enlistment, despite showing clear signs of recovery. Within two weeks of the crash, he could walk around for 15 minutes or so and could eat solid food again. Meanwhile, Matveev had hatched a plan to bring Kozlov to Detroit — for purely medical purposes, of course. The Wings arranged for Kozlov to seek the help of medical specialists at Henry Ford Hospital.

“Of course,” Polano said with a wry smile, “if we got him to Detroit, he was never going back.”

That’s about the time Red Army general manager Valery Gushin was beginning to smell a rat. He reacted by transferring Kozlov to a secure Red Army hospital in Moscow for a second opinion that, likely, would dispute the earlier prognosis of a serious brain injury.

“That made real problems for me,” Matveev said. “For a couple of days, I couldn’t find the way into this hospital.” Finally, a connection in the Soviet military provided Matveev a pass — for a fee, of course — and soon he was visiting Kozlov every day. Matveev even managed to get a very nervous Polano to Kozlov’s military bedside by bribing an armed guard with 25 rubles (about $2 at the time) and two packs of American cigarettes. “It was so easy,” Matveev said.

By then, Kozlov’s sizable paychecks from the Red Army hockey club had stopped coming. No longer was he one of the highest-paid players in Russian hockey history. His inability to play because of the accident was just part of it. The club had fallen on hard economic times. It was essentially bankrupt, and it couldn’t pay big salaries anymore.

“At that time, for the first time, Slava started thinking of the NHL,” Matveev said. “He figured that the Red Army team was just jerking him around.”

Eventually, Kozlov turned to Polano and said, “I am ready now.” Polano immediately began arranging the necessary travel documents. Though it was still unclear whether Kozlov would ever be able to play again at the elite level required to succeed in the NHL, the Wings were still all in. It was also uncertain whether military doctors could be persuaded to agree with the diagnoses of brain damage by the previous doctors. Matveev found himself in a test of wills with Red Army officials.

“Mr. Gushin believed it would be impossible for me to get the necessary findings that would get Slava his release,” Matveev said. “He had promised these doctors they could travel to Western Europe, to Germany and Switzerland with the team at hockey tournaments. But I — well, the Red Wings — gave them lots of money, around $25,000. And I paid cash immediately.

“Gushin couldn’t match that. After that, he just gave up. He told everybody it was impossible to compete.”

With his release from the military, Kozlov was free to travel to Detroit to see more medical specialists and continue his rehabilitation.

“I am very grateful for Detroit, the leadership of the team, to Mr. Ilitch, that even under the circumstances they invited me to Detroit,” Kozlov said. “They still believed in me. They were not afraid, and they still signed me.”

Kozlov still faced legal ramifications stemming from the accident. Criminal charges could have been filed, but the Red Army intervened and pulled some strings on his behalf, Matveev explained. The hockey club could have been culpable, too, because it had allowed a young soldier to have a car and live away from his barracks. And a civil suit against him disappeared when the Red Wings paid an unspecified sum of cash to the Tarasov family.

So Kozlov was released from the hospital in January, and by mid-February he was on his way to Detroit with his new agent, Paul Theofanous.

Keith Gave spent six years in the United States Army as a Russian linguist during the Cold War, then transitioned into a career as a sports writer covering hockey for the Detroit Free Press. His 15 years with the newspaper were the highlight of his 40-year career in the news industry, which included stops at The Associated Press and Dallas Morning News. Gave resides in Roscommon, where he continues to write. Follow him on Twitter @KeithGave.

How to buy the book

What: "The Russian Five: A story of espionage, defection, bribery and courage"

Publisher: Gold Star Publishing, Ann Arbor.

Release date: March 20.

How to order: Visit Amazon.com, Indiebound.org or other online book outlets, including Barnes & Noble, Walmart, Target and eBay.