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Customers can also pay to have flowers, candy or perfume delivered to a woman by one of Angelika's local affiliates in Russia. If such items were sent by mail from the US, Lewis says, they would likely be stolen and sold by corrupt postal workers. He even makes travel and lodging arrangements for men looking to visit Russia.
"As long as American women keep acting the way they do, this business will be OK," he says, laughing.
A Way Out
At age 61, Art Steckel is tall, probably 6 feet 2 inches, and somewhat gaunt, but has energy to burn when talking about his niche industry. Wearing oversized, tinted glasses indoors, he dresses casually at the office, in jeans and a T-shirt. His conversation is studded with flat declarations that have the ring of a sales pitch.
"No matter who you are and what your drawbacks, your expectations can be much higher with Russian women," he exclaims.
Steckel's joviality seems somewhat at odds with his purported background. An Atlanta native, he says he learned Russian while working in Europe for the National Security Agency, the ultra-secret intelligence agency whose operatives are forbidden to discuss their duties.
In 1989, after entering civilian life and having sold a successful business in California, Steckel was traveling in the Soviet Union when he came across the office of a state-run, local dating agency.
Looking at the photos posted on the wall, he says, "I was amazed by the number of beautiful women. I thought, American guys would really go for this."
Asking if these women might also be interested in foreign men, he was told, Da, da. He bought 1,000 of the women's files for $1 apiece from the delighted agency bureaucrats.
Two years later, when the Soviet Union fell apart, European Connections was born.
"It started big and has only grown," Steckel boasts. After a year of building up his client base, he launched his proudest creation, the romance tour. Before tourism fell off on account of 9-11 and the deflating economy, he estimates his company took 1,000 men a year on trips to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Odessa and Kiev.
The idea is simple: Three days of receptions are followed by a week of sightseeing and organized events during which the men have the chance to get to know the women they've met at the socials.
Steckel allows that seeing 400 women in one afternoon can be a bit overwhelming, but when it's a life partner you're looking for, better to have too many choices than too few.
Often his biggest challenge, he confides, is persuading the men not to limit their opportunities.
"It's a constant battle to protect the client from himself," Steckel says, shaking his head. "I tell guys all the time: Don't fall in love with a photograph, don't pick an interpreter you're attracted to, don't go off with the first pretty girl you meet, leave the engagement rings at home -- but they sometimes just ignore us."
Then there are the women who are simply looking for a ticket out of Russia and plan to dump their husbands after two years of marriage, when they become eligible for permanent resident status.
"Many of these women are looking to get into the country any way they can," says Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Garrison Courtney, who added that some immigrant women accuse their new husbands of domestic abuse, which can automatically entitle them to a provisional green card. But he admits that the bureau has no statistics to determine how common this is.
There's no doubt, however, that the biggest risks in these relationships are faced by the women, who are leaving behind their families and their support network to come to a place where they don't know the language and often don't know their husbands.
"The profile of the average guy who's using this service is someone who's not able to relate to local women," says Donna Hughes, professor of Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island and one of the few academics who has spent any time investigating the mail-order bride industry.
"Many of these guys are control freaks and some are abusive," she says. One of the main reasons that men are drawn to much-younger, less-sophisticated women is the Pygmalion impulse, the desire to tell the woman what she needs to know and teach her how to act, she says.
Also, because the woman is in the US under the man's sponsorship, he can hold her immigration status over her head to make her do what he wants, Hughes adds.
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