attempted assassination unhurt. Falcone's death nurtured Del Ponte's resolve to fight organised crime. Her enemies in the Cosa Nostra call her "La Puttana" ("the whore"). She therefore became the first public figure in Switzerland to require round-the-clock protection and armour-plated car. In the late 1990s, Del Ponte and Yuri Skuratov with Filipe Turover providing evidence investigated Russian corruption involving high ranking Russian officials. Earlier, both Italian and German Tax officials had started investigations. In early 2000, Filipe Turover sent messages from his residence in Switzerland to Moscow prosecutors "I'm ready to talk about Putin. Always your Turover." () Although the initial investigations were headed by Skuratov and Georgy Timofeyevich Chuglazov (), Chuglazov was promoted to adviser to the Prosecutor General of Russia by Vladimir Ustinov, who replaced Skuratov as Prosecutor General of Russia after Boris Yeltsin fired Skuratov on 2 April 1999; Chuglazov was taken of the case just days before he was to travel to Switzerland in August to depose witnesses and to receive bank and other documents. The Russian prosecutor Ruslan Tamaev headed the Russian investigations which ended when his half brothers Hasan and Hussein were charged with illegal possession of drugs and weapons and he was subsequently removed from investigations. A few months later the charges against his half brothers were dropped. Vladimir Putin appointed Pavel Borodin to the diplomatic post of Secretary of the State of the Russia—Belarus Union () which gave Borodin diplomatic immunity from prosecution and ended further investigations into Borodin's criminal activities. In 1999, Del Ponte suffered a setback when Switzerland's highest court overturned the confiscation by her office of $90 million from Swiss accounts belonging to Raúl Salinas de Gortari, the brother of a former President of Mexico. The court ruled that Del Ponte had no authority to seize the $90 million only on the suspicion that it included money from drug-trafficking. But the ruling did not absolve Salinas of the charges. Career at the ICTY and ICTR After serving for five years as Switzerland's attorney general, in 1999 Del Ponte joined the ICTY and ICTR to deal with war crimes as prosecutor. Del Ponte was the first experienced prosecutor to hold the job on the war crimes tribunals; her predecessors, Louise Arbour and Richard Goldstone, were both judges. At the time, Switzerland was not a member of the United Nations, which was considered an advantage for Del Ponte. In an interview