by Matt Potter
The sheikh hired a delicately spoken, fine-boned Syrian-American named Richard Chichakli as commercial manager of Sharjah Airport International Free Trade Zone. Chichakli is a talented alumnus of Riyadh University in Saudi Arabia, where he and one wealthy young student named Osama bin Laden had been friends. (He’s reported to have recalled how the preradical bin Laden “was a lot of fun in those days.”) A certified public accountant, real estate guy, and car dealer with an office in Texas, who served in the U.S. military in the early 1990s and prides himself on “a strange hobby that involves creating highly decorative fruit plates,” Chichakli seems an unlikely candidate for the title of international aviation player. Yet this likable amateur chef is also, by his own admission, “one of the world’s top experts in managing [air]fleets … setting up airlines and managing and administering all financial operations.” And after leaving the army, Chichakli put all the aviation knowledge he’d gained there to spectacular private use.
The Free Trade Zone boom Chichakli oversaw became Sharjah’s gold rush. Soon, newspaper reports in the region were gasping at the speed and success of the enterprise. Indeed, Chichakli would later protest that those who accused him of a full-time role helping Bout have “no idea” of the workload involved in running an airport. The figures certainly make impressive reading. The airport’s special zone opened in 1995 with fifty-five aviation outfits based there, and doubled that figure within a year. By 2003, a staggering 2,300 aviation outfits were based there. One of the aviation specialists who turned up early and became “a brother and a friend” to Chichakli, he says today, was Viktor Bout.
It’s quite possible that even Chichakli himself never guessed quite what was brewing out there on the tarmac and in the shade of the hangars as the sleepy emirate began to change. But as more and more former Soviet aircraft circled and landed and left again, the twentieth century’s black-market boom took hold.
These were dusty, sun-baked, lawless Sharjah’s Wild West days, when anyone who arrived at the frontier with guts and cunning and a fistful of dollars could grab himself fifty acres and a mule—or at least a huge tax break, a landing berth, and a no-questions-asked policy on what went on, and came off, his plane. Strangers blew into town with shady connections and out again with fortunes, and everybody was, effectively, the Man with No Name.
The sands around Sharjah airport still bear mute, grisly witness to the wing-and-a-prayer flying of many former Soviet crews, with plane fuselages sticking up from dunes, and tailplanes visible under the drifting sand. “They just leave them where they crash,” says Sharjah veteran John MacDonald. “The end of the runway’s littered with them, just stuck there where they came down or blew up in the sand.”
By 1996, bookish, bearded, and rather humorless young men in Afghan salwar kameez were stalking the hangars at dusk, sauntering from cooling plane to cooling plane and desk to desk asking pretty much anyone still in the area about doing some “don’t-ask–don’t-tell” cargo runs in and out of Kandahar, as cash jobs of course. One fiery-eyed twentysomething cleric named Farid Ahmed briefly became a local figure of fun, sneaking round the secure areas and introducing himself to anyone he (literally) bumped into as the buyer for a then-still-obscure organization called the Taliban, a nascent Islamic movement with an extreme interpretation of Koranic imperatives borne out of Afghanistan’s religious madrassas who saw themselves not just as the rightful successors to the anti-Soviet mujahideen as the saviors of their country, but also as the solution to Afghanistan’s problems with corruption, opium, petty crime, and foreign interference. Their agenda—strict observance of a particularly austere view of Islam—we now know. But at that time, they were just another rebel group with pockets full of secretly donated Saudi and Pakistani cash. And it wasn’t long before Ahmed found a man with a plane ready to talk money, in the shape of Viktor Bout.
While most operators were on the level—or at least as close as you could stay to level in an environment like Sharjah—they found themselves lined up alongside other ground staff, crews, and owners some of whom routinely changed their planes’ registration numbers overnight, under cover of darkness, to avoid being fingered for any particularly cheeky arms-running jobs. Airlines and cargo operations that appeared on the paperwork may or may not be the ones who owned the planes, and the signatories on the registration, tax, customs, and ownership papers may or may not be real names, or pseudonyms for a real person, or made-up names for entirely fictitious owners of fictitious companies running unlogged flights. Taliban gold was now being flown into Sharjah and Dubai alike by Il-76 or Antonov, bound for Pakistan and the Sudan; blood diamonds, guns, ammunition, explosives, caviar, fur, drugs, and currency all made their way in and out, and nobody there, it seemed, knew a thing.
Today, one seasoned cargo aviator still has trouble believing the no-questions-asked regime around the airport at the time—and well into the 2000s. “There wasn’t any security at all—not around customs, or the hangars. Nowhere. Practically anyone could just walk into the airport from the street and up to, around, and into the planes. It was really incredible. Even tourists could buy tickets entitling them the freedom of all areas of the airport, going up around the planes, everything. And you could see cargo coming into the airport straight from boats and the road, without being logged in or out or checked or anything, put on planes and flown off to wherever. My airline did it, and though there’s no suggestion we were carrying anything improper, we easily could have, so easily. Nobody kept track. Anything was possible.”
The murk, whether the result of a calculated obfuscation or naïveté on the part of the local authorities, made any attempt to chase the trail of illicit cargoes quite scattershot, with conscientious operators soon being caught up in the same wide dragnet of suspicion and investigation as the gunrunners. Indeed, so arcane and complex was the web of bought, sold, part-owned, leased, chartered, borrowed, loaned, verbally transferred, and informally operated planes, logos, and businesses in which Bout was involved at the height of his influence that the authorities were reduced to “linking” planes to him in a desperate attempt to keep tabs on him—or even simply to get some idea of where he’d been.
“It’s just got ridiculous,” says one UK-based charter agent. “We’re a highly legitimate company, and our reputation is important, but some people out there make so many spurious connections that all the big leasing agents like us are totally paranoid. We’ve got to be careful now that we don’t even lease a chassis that he once had anything to do with—even one he previously owned, several owners ago—because people start coming after you. A relative of mine was claimed to be somehow ‘linked’ to his ‘network’ on some bloke’s Viktor Bout–monitoring Web site, though he’d never had anything to do with him or his aircraft. It’s that confused.”
The airport, its hangars and loading bays, rapidly became a sanction-breakers’, black marketeers’, and traffickers’ playground, and a natural honeypot for Mickey’s connections and, quickly, Mickey himself. Soon, air-conditioned restaurants with Russian-only menus, discreet vodka bars, and handling-agent types from Odessa and Vitebsk were part of the crew’s monthly, if not daily, routine. Bank accounts were opened, apparently without ID or with the same people using different passports every day, in names nobody knew; paper companies were born, registered, and then immediately seemed to disappear. Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, investigative journalists and the coauthors of Merchant of Death, wrote that by the end of the 1990s, when HSBC Sharjah did a housekeeping audit, it found that some 1,186 bank accounts had been opened by hundreds of different Russians in one branch alone. The speed at which the accounts opened, were used to transfer huge sums, then closed again, was, they concluded, proof of “money laundering on a huge scale.”
Across Sharjah and neighboring Dubai, the hawala system of Islamically correct banking, in which large sums could be given, loaned, invested, and repaid without the need for interest—or, crucially, transfer records or receipts—was an open door for smuggler
s, launderers, and mafia from all countries looking to “clean” the suspiciously large profits from their illicit ventures. Airline employees taking home less than two thousand dollars a month would receive transfers of millions in and out of their accounts. In one incident, bemused investigators challenged one such aviation worker, whose indignant response was that he’d just been amazingly lucky with a few flutters on the stock exchange. (As scrutiny grew in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the world’s eyes turned to the Emirates as potential havens for terrorist funds, Dubai at least set up an investigation team—though many view it as lip service. Later that year, a Sharjah national on the Dubai Central Bank’s money-laundering investigation team had his house attacked by a group of suspected Russian money launderers. With uncanny timing, another promptly began receiving death threats.)
But through the mid-1990s as free-and-easy Sharjah grew, such scrutiny seemed unthinkable. First more planes and crews, then more menus, prostitutes, and businesses were from the former Soviet Union. There was no doubt who was running things now. Mickey began first visiting, then staying. Seemingly without anybody noticing, the Man with No Name who blew into town with a battered old Il-76 or a couple of fuel-guzzling An-12s to his name had become the Man with a Dozen Different Names and Bank Accounts. The only difference was that in this spaghetti western, when he disappeared off into the sunset nobody even asked who that enigmatic stranger was.
But Sharjah wasn’t the only one of these wild frontiers rapidly becoming a honeypot for screaming super planes, local mafia, contraband, and hell-raising former Soviet aviators. There were many others, from Ostend in Belgium to Maribor in Slovenia, which locals call “Mafiabor,” though Mickey and Sergei affectionately call it “Marlboro” in honor of the huge mob-run cigarette-smuggling pipeline from Serbia and Montenegro to the EU that its airport served through the 1990s. And yet more from Freetown in Sierra Leone to the former Soviet states in the Caucasus, who were close enough to political fault lines, rogue regimes, and war- and disaster-prone areas to know a good business opportunity when they saw it and jump on the open-market bandwagon.
Like Bavarian beer or Savile Row suits, says Mickey, every airstrip had its own “thing”—its own specialism. For Afghanistan’s Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, it was humanitarian aid, illicit booze, consumer goods, arms, and cash in; heroin, siphoned-off aid money, raw materials, artifacts, people (both willing clients and unwilling marks) out. Across the Balkans, it was humanitarian assistance, luxury items, black-market cigarettes, guns, heroin, and cash. For Rwanda, Congo, and the rest, humanitarian aid, guns, and helicopters crossed paths with raw materials, foodstuffs, and natural resources—including blood diamonds.
The transportation business model was perfect in its evenhandedness, in the way it spread the money around: the operator, the owner, the crew who fill up whatever extra space they can find with their own cash jobs. But the best part was the way the dynamics of catastrophe meant they got paid by both sides, on their way in and out of each destination. The crews will never fly empty if they can help it, so on the way out they make sure they fill up with whatever it takes. And on runs in and out of “fucked” countries, that could be anything—chickens, fruit, fish, wood, rugs, bricks, sand, coffee, whatever.
In his 2004 film, Darwin’s Nightmare, about the effect of globalization on Central Africa, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper recorded the sudden coming together of aid, business, and smuggling in the holds of the now-ubiquitous Il-76s flocking to Africa on fat aid contracts and even fatter gunrunning jobs, and the birth of a new kind of chaos wherever Mickey’s hordes went. He issued a statement explaining what he called the film’s “trigger”:
In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, I witnessed for the first time the bizarre juxtaposition of two gigantic airplanes, both bursting with food. The first cargo jet brought forty-five tons of yellow peas from America to feed the refugees in the nearby UN camps. The second plane took off for the European Union, weighed down with fifty tons of fresh fish. I met the Russian pilots and we became kamarads. But soon it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations, so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights. In the mornings, my trembling camera saw in this stinking jungle destroyed camps and bodies. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world’s biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World Bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes, and Russian pilots.
The picture Sauper paints is like a scene from a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch. But as with Sharjah, the sense of chaos and confusion may not be quite as accidental as it seems. Indeed, the appearance of disorganization is a positive boon to crews and their charter masters keen to traffic in illicit goods.
“The illicit stuff is how your crew makes its real money,” says Johnson-Thomas, who’s flight-managed former Soviet crews on Il-76s and An-12s all over the world. “Most of these particular pilots are freelance—they don’t work for anybody, just whoever needs them. And because they’re freelance, they’re not in any union, or on any payroll, so they’re very, very difficult to keep tabs on, and they can carry whatever they like.”
He can’t help beaming with admiration as he recalls how one Il-76 crew hit on the brilliantly counterintuitive idea of making more money by offering to do all their aid flights for charities for free. “The pilot made his fortune on the fifteen secret tons of belly cargo he’d carry in addition to the official payload. Depending on the destination, he’d fly something for free for you—he’d fly all the official cargo for no charge whatsoever—providing you let him carry what he wanted in the belly cargo space. The aid organizations, bless them in their innocence, all just thought he was being enormously public spirited!”
The thing is, most people didn’t know that it was there. But even if they did know, money talks, so it was no problem just the same. The organizations were getting their main cargo to the destination for free, so they kept taking him up on it. On a typical trip, remembers the veteran flight manager, he’d take his official cargo of aid or pineapples between Mogadishu and Ostend, but in the belly cargo he’d have fifteen tons of whatever else. It might be ammo in or coffee sacks out.
“That’s what eventually got him his lovely house,” says Johnson-Thomas, “and his-and-hers sports cars. And not one penny of that money showed up on any cargo manifests, let alone the tax returns! It wasn’t on any declarations, and as far as the world was concerned, the plane was full to capacity with the official cargo.”
Like that anonymous master of commerce, Mickey and Sergei make it their personal business to know the perennial hot tickets in most cities, too—devouring local news, sweeping for rumors everywhere they go, and even checking in with distant contacts by telephone constantly. “Sometimes you hear things when you’re out or talking even to airport and customs officials,” shrugs Sergei. “Someone will maybe say, we really have trouble getting toothpaste, or we can always use more mineral water, or whiskey. Maybe you will know if a new business is coming to your city, and you tell us. And then we know what to do next time we are in town. It is quite easy.”
“These crews are the epitome of globalization,” says Moisés Naím, former executive director of the World Bank, Venezuelan minister for trade, and author of Illicit, an award-winning report on “how smugglers, copycats and traffickers are hijacking the global economy.” “The common theory is that this was chaos. But there’s nothing chaotic about it at all! What we’ve been witnessing here is not disorganization—it’s markets at work.
“There were superpowers, and now they’ve gone. But that doesn’t make it chaos—anything but. This is like saying that before, you had an organized oil and energy market because you had the Seven Sisters—the seven big oil companies—and that was an organized market, and that now you have a disorganized market be
cause you have thousands of independent oil companies. Wrong: What happened is that the barriers to entry in that market have lowered. So now you have new people—you’re right, they are not foot soldiers, they are SME businesses—operating in this market. Before, they were dominated by big organizations that had first-mover advantages and were able to capture a large chunk of the market. Then as a result of competition, government intervention, disruptive technologies, changes in consumer behavior, changes in supply, demand, financing, logistics, and everything else, that same market is no longer dominated by the equivalent of the Seven Sisters—the Mr. Big types, the Viktor Bouts and Pablo Escobars—but it’s an open market where you have hundreds or thousands of independent players. Some are very big, some are very small, some are medium, and it’s all just a market.”
Like any SME, the key advantages they had from the start were things like agility, their flexibility, their low overheads, and their speed. But there’s an added dimension, too: They’re importing tax-free and pay not a penny in transport costs.
Whoever Mickey, Sergei, Lev, and Dmitry are flying for, they are a business within a business: The client gets what they get, they overload with whatever will make them quick cash, and everybody wins. Once they know their next stop, says Sergei, they can make swift decisions about what to buy in Belgrade, Bangkok, Minsk, Frankfurt, Istanbul, or Shanghai; essentially, what will be most profitable and easiest and safest to sell, leverage, or drop off at their destination. Dealing with customs isn’t their problem for the main loads—they just drop the shit off and the client will have to get it released. But for whatever they want to keep for themselves, keeping customs sweet is a must.