Leo Tolstoy traveling from Zurich to Stuttgart, looked out the train window and saw the moon: a good omen, he thought.  The French banker sitting next to him was on his way to the gaming tables in Baden-Baden, and Tolstoy decided to join him.  “Roulette from morning to night,” he writes in his diary.  “Lost, but made it up toward the end of the day.” The next day he lost everything.  The banker bailed him out and left town.   Tolstoy kept losing until Turgenev arrived to clean up matters and get him out of town.

The Russians have always loved Baden-Baden.  In 1793, Czar Alexander took Lousie Princess of Baden as his wife.  A Russian orthodox church was built for a Czar and is the place of worship today for the Russians who have taken over Baden-Baden.

Russian laundered money is very much in the news, but not in Germany.  Cyprus is in the headlights and German Chancellor Angela Merkel is leading the charge.  “He that among you who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”

The US seems to take laundered money more seriously.  Authorities shuttered a presumed outlet for dirty Russian money in the Carlyle hotel.   Article