The Man Who Knew Too Much

48 Hours Mystery Reports On Murder Of U.S. Journalist In Moscow

(CBS)  "It's quite easy to offend a person like that. And just the title itself, you don't know, he may find it pretty offensive," says Franchetti. "They can be pretty dangerous people to write about. ... It can be deadly dangerous to make enemies. Deadly dangerous."

In recent years, Chechen rebels, fighting for freedom from Russia, have shot hostages inside a Russian theater, blown up an airplane, and killed 170 schoolchildren at Beslan. Murdering a journalist who had displeased their leaders would not be out of the question.

But, after taking a look at all the possible motives for this murder, Franchetti comes back to the simplest - money: "For someone to make the decision to kill someone like Paul Klebnikov, which is a very high profile killing, he had to have had something which really was damaging to the business interests."

All roads seem to lead back to business, to the unmasking of corruption -- Klebnikov's trademark. And in the weeks before he was killed, he'd found a new target, Moscow's building boom, and its systematic destruction of historic landmarks.

Musa says that Klebnikov sometimes wished Russia could be a little more like the United States: "He was very motivated to bring a lot of our best American things to Russia, to really insist that we need laws. We need people to respect rules, and we can't have this kind of attitude where you can tear down a city block if you feel like it."

As the old buildings come down, the fortunes being made go up, including those of many politicians. One example is Elena Baturina, wife of the mayor of Moscow. She runs a huge construction empire. And an American official in Moscow told CBS News that, when it comes to building, little happens in the city without her approval.

Baturina claims her husband's job actually hurts her business. But it's hard to see how. She was No. 35 on Klebnikov's richest Russians list, and Forbes had put her at $1.3 billion, a fact not previously known to most ordinary Russians. She reportedly was furious with Klebnikov for telling them.

Baturina did not respond to 48 Hours' requests for an interview, and there is no evidence linking her to this murder.

But colleagues say that Klebnikov seemed about to tread on some powerful toes. "That is a very dangerous area to be looking into if you're going to start doing real investigative journalism because it's a dirty business," says Franchetti.

"We spent the whole last taxi ride I had with him in Russia talking about the articles he wanted to write about preservation," says Musa.

And these are articles that someone may have wanted to stop. "He felt no fear," says Michael Klebnikov. "He had a very strong sense of good and evil, or right and wrong. There was no gray. There was no gray."