Aristocratic Thieves — Richard Dorrance

Little Jinny Blistov is a second tier gangster who arrives in the US in the unheated hold of an Aeroflot cargo plane. He meets, make enemies of, then friends with, the aristocratic Gwenny and Roger June of Charleston, South Carolina, America's most beautiful town. It isn't long before he convinces them to steal artifacts from warehouses of the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. They get huge shipping containers of the stuff back home, at which point Stirg, a Russian billionaire and old adversary of theirs, objects. The two parties meet one evening out on the waters of Charleston harbor, and it isn't pretty.