Constantin Nikolaj Vladimir Rakeovich III
No one is quite sure where, or exactly when Constantin Nikolaj Vladimir Rakeovich was born. There are no records in the state of Illinois for his birth and some say there are none in the entirety of the United States. His grandfather came to this country at the end of World War II as part of a Top Secret program, the details of which are still sealed. No one is quite sure that the name that Constantin bears is even the real name of his grandfather. No records exist of a man with such a name in the Ukraine or in Russia, the two places that the family was supposedly from. In fact, the first mention of the name at all was in the employment records of the Argonne National Laboratory in 1948.
Secrets seem to surround every aspect of the Rakeovich family. Property records for them often have different names on them, all tracing back to one of the two surviving Constantin Rakeovichs. Out of deference to his father, the younger is referred to as Nikolaj by his family, however anyone not related to him that were to call him that would find themselves dispatched quickly. Few even know his middle names, more layers of secrecy on a family that officially seems not to exist.
While his grandfather appears to have been in some kind of research at Argonne, there are few records on what exactly his father did, but it was clear he was amassing great wealth. There are no less than five homes in the greater Chicago area that can be traced to the elder Constantin. There are rumors that he is the sole founder and owner of NVR Enterprises, a secretive company that is steeped in government contracts and foreign relations. Records on the company are hard to come by and those that look into its business dealings find themselves quickly warned off.
There are no school records readily available for the younger Constantin until he is found at the Houghton Academy in New York as a Freshman. He graduated with a straight A average and those who attended with him found him to be cold, aloof, and intimidating. While he was never physically violent, his classmates said that few were ever brave enough to outright challenge him. From Houghton, he moved on to Harvard where he got his Bachelor’s and then Master’s Degrees in Business and Finance. When he moved back to Chicago after graduation, he was brought in as CEO of NVR. To those around the Rakeovich family, this solidified the belief that the family owned the company. What exactly they do still remains shrouded in mystery.
Constantin proved himself to be shrewd and cutthroat in business, negotiating hostile takeovers of small, independent labs and then bringing them under NVR’s umbrella and tying them to Argonne. As soon as this would happen, all public releases of information became significantly more vague and the dealings of the company more clandestine. There are those who believe that the businesses and the family are in black ops, while others believe that they are all a front for a powerful Eastern European Crime family. With the secretive nature of the entire Rakeovich family and their associates, the odds seem evenly split between the two.
While Constantin continues to run NVR, he is known to deal in underworld matters as well. He first came onto the DEA and US Marshals radar a decade ago when it was found that at least one of his subsidiaries was being used to traffic in cocaine and other high end, designer drugs. Later ties to very high end escorts, extortion, loan sharking, and a protection racket would be uncovered, but Constantin has managed to stay one step ahead of law enforcement at every turn. Some say he is just that cunning, others say it is that he has bought off the Chicago offices of the DEA, FBI, and the US Marshals, then there are those who believe it is a combination of both.
Those who have crossed Constantin through the years have paid a high price, normally their lives. Anyone that he feels has betrayed him in any way has been eliminated. Many of these were very elaborately staged assassinations that were made to look like accidents. He has paid top dollar for the best in the business, including Sasha Vasiliev, to ensure that none of the deaths can ever be traced back to him. In recent years he has become a bit more hesitant to use Sasha, fearing that crossing the assassin would prove more fatal that if someone were to cross he himself. He has seen the assassin put a bullet through the skull of a man completely undetected to anyone around the target till he fell dead at their feet. Had he not been the one that hired Sasha, he never would have known who or how. That he does means that the assassin is one of the very few that Constantin would never double cross.
When the Federal, State, and Chicago law enforcement agencies began to close in on him, Constantin blamed one man: Colin Masterson. They have become bitter adversaries and while Colin would do whatever it took legally to bring down Constantin’s empire; Constantin does not relegate himself to legal means to try and take down Colin. The feud is escalating, each man pushing the other closer and closer to an explosive confrontation.
In kidnapping Colin’s intern, Constantin had hoped to force the man’s hand into dropping all investigations into his dealings. However the intern proved more stubborn and resistant to cooperation than Constantin had anticipated, bringing forth his anger in explosive bursts that even his longest known associates find hard to believe. Has Colin pushed him finally into the pit of madness from which there is no redemption, or is there still some vestige of humanity left in Constantin’s dark and murky soul? The man isn’t even sure himself.
