MOSCOW -- Two months have passed since Anthony Riccio died here, yet today no one is any closer to knowing exactly what happened to the enthusiastic 21-year-old American exchange student from Brown University.
The official investigation into his death is all but dormant. Results of the autopsy have yet to be compiled. Police opened a murder probe, but they have no suspects. They say the case might still be declared a suicide, which would be convenient for them but difficult to believe for people here who knew Mr. Riccio.
Students and other residents of the dormitory where he lived are unwilling to talk in any detail about what happened. They will say, though, that they are sure that he was murdered.
Mr. Riccio came to Moscow with a burning desire to learn all he could of Russian life. But, in ways he hadn't counted on, the Brown University junior was entering a different world from any he had known back home in America.
Dormitory life here is not for the timid. One university official said residents must live by "the law of the jungle." One high-level police official calls dorms "nests of crime," where young gangsters get their start while corrupt local police look the other way.
On Sept. 15, Mr. Riccio moved into a concrete-slab, 16-story dormitory in the far southern reaches of Moscow, at No. 25 Kirovogradskaya St. Five days later he was dead.
It was late in the afternoon of Sept. 20. Mr. Riccio was standing on a balcony at the end of a corridor, overlooking a vast landscape of mud, smoke and concrete high-rises. Nearby, construction of a new subway line had gouged a deep trench in the earth. Closer still, a pick-up soccer game was in progress.
The balcony is about 8 feet across and 3 feet deep, surrounded by a chest-high concrete railing. Mr. Riccio was accustomed to coming out here for a smoke, a roommate said. Room No. 145, which he shared with three Russian students from the Far Eastern city of Nakhodka, was down a long dim hallway.
What happened next that afternoon may never be known. The only thing that's clear is that Mr. Riccio fell more than 13 stories to the ground. He may have been dead before he left the balcony. A preliminary medical examination suggested that he died from strangulation. It implied that he was throttled where he stood, then tossed to the ground below.
Anthony Riccio was so focused on Russia as an idea that he may in fact have been blind to the very real dangers around him.
Russians themselves believe that no foreigner can truly understand them. Mr. Riccio was determined to try.
School not like others
He was to have been a student at a 3-year-old school under the iron thumb of its director, the historian Yuri Afanasyev.
This is a school where faculty are not allowed to make outside appearances without the administration's permission -- even within Russia. It's a place where teachers say they are forced to pay kickbacks to administrators. Dormitory rooms are rented out to the most nominal of students, and even legitimate students devote as much time to jobs and trading in consumer goods as they do to their studies.
Mr. Riccio was afraid he would stand out in this world because of his American accent. In fact, his Russian was so good that it didn't betray him as a foreigner -- his attitude did.
One of his Russian roommates, an 18-year-old first-year student who agreed to be identified only as Yevgeny, described him: "Anton" was one of those strange Americans who studies hard and is not too deeply in touch with real life.
He stayed up late into the night, querying his roommates about Russia. He complained about having to wait four days for classes to start. He wanted to get right to it.
Mr. Riccio and four other American students had come to Moscow under the auspices of a Vermont organization generally known as the Collegiate Consortium. They had all asked to be placed in the Kirovogradskaya dormitory, an hour's subway ride from the university complex, rather than in a special dormitory where most foreign students stay. But after only a few days, four of the students had already asked to transfer out of the dorm, apparently because they had become extremely uneasy living there.
Only one wanted to stay: Mr. Riccio.
On the day that he died, sources said, panicky university officials pressured Moscow police into declaring the case a suicide. Local police said there was a thin piece of broken rope around Mr. Riccio's neck -- although another roommate, who identified himself only as Maxim, said he had been the first one to reach the body and had seen no rope.
The suicide ruling held up for a few days, until it became known that the medical examiner had made a preliminary finding of homicide. Under pressure from the U.S. Embassy, police opened a murder investigation more than a week after the death.
Residents of Mr. Riccio's dorm assume "the mafia" had a hand in his death.
But who is "the mafia"? Some suspect a connection to the group of 40 students who came together all the way from Nakhodka, a Pacific Ocean port that has a reputation even in Russia for the audacity of its criminals.
At least some of them, though, including Mr. Riccio's roommates, are clearly legitimate students. But even legitimate students can have guests with criminal intentions, and this, according to one Interior Ministry official, is how gangs make use of university dorms.
Did Mr. Riccio fall afoul of a Nakhodka gang? Was he too curious? Or did he see something he shouldn't have?
"No, we can rule that out completely," said Alexander Shlykov, the chief investigator, while declining to be interviewed further. "Who started this rumor, I wonder? It's stupidity."
What happened to Anthony Riccio is not, of course, typical in any way. Thousands of American students pass through here every year, almost all without incident. More Japanese exchange students have been murdered in the United States than Americans in Russia.
Collegiate Consortium officials say they want their exchange students to be as fully integrated as possible. Other programs take a more careful approach, placing students in special dorms for foreigners or with families in private apartments.
Moscow, in their view, can pose its own challenges.
Linda Bruce, who runs a Middlebury College program here, said her students have had to contend with fires, drunks wandering around, and once, an armed intruder.
"These dormitories are nests of crime," said Viktor Bulgakov, a high-ranking officer in a special organized-crime unit of the Moscow police. "The university administration never cares what's going on there."
The young gangsters who move in, he said, are hard to root out because they quickly buy off local police.
"The police won't work there," he said. "You have to understand: The police are part of this society, and this society is sick. We see cases of local police corruption every day."
The parents speak
In Glastonbury, Conn., where Anthony Riccio grew up, his father, John Riccio, said he hasn't heard much from either American or Russian officials about his son's death. The family had a second medical examination performed in Connecticut, but without toxicologic information that they need from Moscow it, too, is incomplete, he said.
Mr. Riccio seems torn between wanting to know what happened to Anthony -- and not wanting to know.
"If in fact he committed suicide, there must have been a tremendous amount of deterioration since we last talked to him," which was eight days before he died, he said. "It just doesn't seem to fit."
He and his wife, Lenore, have talked to a psychologist who agrees that, from what they have told him, Anthony seemed to be showing no signs of suicidal depression.
Mr. Riccio said he did not believe that people should be deterred from going to Russia for fear of crime. "Otherwise, we might just as well be telling our kids not to go to New York City."