by Matt Potter
Mickey says it’s an open secret there are outfits—he knows the men, though he’s never flown with them—for whom quick-fix magnetic decals and even (should circumstances demand) matt emulsion are the product of choice. Emulsion because of the ease with which it can be washed off with water and a mop at the end of the day by man-with-van operators—while some networked airline groups interchange planes so frequently that anything more than a magnetic strip is an unnecessary encumbrance.
Needless to say, the application and removal of both can be haphazard, leading to bizarre games of mix and match on occasion, with planes appearing to sport the rear section of one operator’s Antonov with the fuselage or wings of another. Today, other expat pilots openly trade mobile-phone snapshots on Internet chat rooms of Soviet-era cargo planes sporting game, but sometimes comically inept, attempts to replicate larger airlines’ livery—even the famous United Nations logo and lettering on the wings and fuselage—in their attempt to escape detection.
“If they could misspell UN,” one indignant expat British pilot tells me, his voice wavering between a shout and a laugh, “they would. And you know what? The authorities either don’t give a shit, or they make money off them. Or they haven’t got a fucking clue. Or all of the above.”
Andrei Lovtsev, a respected former military and civil cargo pilot who now runs his own highly legitimate business and stable of planes from his headquarters in Moscow’s Star City cosmonaut training camp, points out that checking, for those who want to check, is—theoretically, at least—easy. “If the plane has records done by bandits, I won’t deal with them. You can always check [with the aviation authorities] when it was repaired. On the paper itself, the bandits put fake stamps. But there won’t be any record [of those registrations, lifespan extensions, or repairs] in the factory. You can find it all out.
“It’s not the pilots but those behind the business—those are the people who act without a conscience. Many are shot down in Somalia or Congo, but many crash through mechanical failure, and those pilots are betrayed!”
Indeed, as the 1990s wore on, it seemed more and more to Mickey that the pilots and crewmen were the fall guys; that they’d left one futile and badly run war in Afghanistan only to be catapulted back into one even worse. While the freedom to fly their own personal cargoes was welcome, the men making the real money behind the scenes, Lovtsev’s “bandits,” preferred the air-conditioned malls of Dubai, their luxury mansions in Sandhurst and Johannesburg, or their European retreats on the Med or in Switzerland or Ostend. And as for the rest of the world, it was just like Gary Busch said: Nobody cared. That was just the way it was.
But then, in 2000, quite by chance, the Italian authorities stumbled across a private party in a tiny hotel near Milan, and all that was about to change.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Men of Wealth and Taste
Milan, 2000
IN THE HOT BLACK-AND-BLUE NIGHT of August 5, 2000, outside the open window of room 341 at the Europa Hotel, everything seemed to have stopped. The Saturday-night traffic was quiet, even for August; and in the long, lazy summer the outskirts of Milan, like the modest three-star, seemed almost empty. Here in the suite, though, things were definitely livening up for the occupant and his four hookers. While the utterly beautiful—and stark naked—Kenyan prostitute passed the freebasing pipe, the Italian girl held the heated rock of coke steady. The man inhaled, letting the rush of electric confidence spread through his body. Another whore, an Albanian, beautiful and wired, was distractedly watching the porno flick on the wall TV.
He looked down at his naked belly. At fifty-three, he couldn’t deny he was carrying a few extra kilos, and, well, he probably shouldn’t be doing this. But what the fuck—with a forty-gram-a-day habit, one more wouldn’t hurt, and as a bona fide multimillionaire he could certainly afford it. He glanced over at the desk—he’d divided his two-room suite into “business” and “pleasure”—where the Russian hooker was frowning with concentration as she cut and diluted a few of the fifty-eight grams of cocaine for later disposal. Gritting his teeth on one more blast of euphoria, Leonid Efemevich Minin lay back on the bed. Life was good.
What happened next changed everything—for Leonid, for the three-star hotel of which he was part owner, and for international authorities baffled by the way their embargoes against war-torn regimes in countries as far away as Sierra Leone and Liberia seemed to make not one jot of difference to the number of weapons that found their way there.
The local police, having been alerted by a complaint—some later claimed it was a tip-off from another hooker who’d not been paid—knocked on the door, gained entry, and arrested the girls. They also arrested the man they initially assumed was just another hardworking business traveler indulging a few specialist peccadilloes courtesy of the local vice trade.
It took five weeks before they realized they’d stumbled across the prominent international gun smuggler, money launderer, and big wheel in the so-called Odessa mafia, a man wanted by the authorities in Switzerland, France, and Monaco for trafficking crimes, in Belgium in connection with the assassination of a Russian mafia boss—though nothing was ever proven—and in Italy itself. In fact, Minin, who produced an Israeli passport on his arrest, also had passports issued by the Soviet Union, Germany, Bolivia, Greece, and Russia under a variety of aliases including (to name but a few) Vladimir Abramovich Popela, Vladimir Abramovich Popiloveski, Leon Minin, Wulf Breslav, Leonid Bluvshtein, Leonid Bluvstein, Igor Osols, Vladimir Abramovich Kerler, and Igor Limar. He had been under surveillance by the Milanese customs and police authorities since 1992 for his involvement in laundering money earned from narcotics trafficking through the accounts of several prominent Italian businessmen.
But the real dazzle shots came from the party-loving businessman’s suitcase. Despite being listed as the owner of a company called Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises, investigators found a treasure trove of paraphernalia suggesting their portly prisoner was more than a businessman, more than even a common trafficker or a party-happy mafia kingpin. This was the paperwork of a serious international kingmaker: Alongside receipts for oil and timber exports were an inquiry by Minin about becoming the provider of Nigeria’s mobile-phone network; a letter following up on his offer of a Ukrainian aircraft carrier for sale to Turkey; a letter from his Beijing office asking whether Liberian president Charles Taylor—then fighting off an insurrection and still two years away from his war-crimes arrest warrant—fancied establishing diplomatic relations with China; and correspondence between Minin and President Taylor’s son Chuckie Junior.
Then, at the bottom, they stumbled across the arms deals.
Here was an end-user certificate for one consignment of thousands of small weapons, signed by ousted Ivory Coast dictator General Robert Guéï. An EUC is supposed to function like a fingerprint: Every shipment of weapons has one, unique copy, specifically about that deal. It’s effectively a testimony statement guaranteeing that the shipment will only go to the people, and for the purpose, described at purchase. So far so good—except Minin’s case was stuffed with copies of the certificate for later use elsewhere. (It gets even dodgier—Guéï later testified not only that he had signed just the one EUC—suggesting Minin had faked the rest—but that he’d been bribed to do so by Liberian president Taylor’s offer of a share of the weapons.)
The prosecutors were on to him now—alert to the possibility that, while living right under their noses in a suburb of Milan, this apparently small-time operator was in fact indirectly responsible for horrifying militia uprisings and brutal regime crackdowns halfway around the world. The devil had, it seemed, been real all along, and he ran a cozy hotel on the outskirts of town.
Now feverishly looking for a smoking gun—something to tie Minin incontrovertibly to payment on one hand and trafficking on the other—they began sifting through his other possessions, where they found $500,000 in uncut diamonds; maps of the rebel-controlled Liberia–Sierra Leone border; a ledger filled with
entries for small arms, including five million 7.62mm bullets; a fax to Minin requesting sign-off on a flight of 113 tons of bullets from Ukraine to the Ivory Coast; and the all-important money trail, via—you guessed it—a small Russian-owned aviation outfit.
It showed that Minin had paid $1 million to the outfit, an Azerbaijan-based operation called Aviatrend reportedly headed by a man named Valery Cherny, which not only brokered the arms purchase but chartered the plane and crew for delivery. A payment of $850,000 went to an Aviatrend account in that notorious mafia launderette that is Turkish Cyprus; the rest, rather more surprisingly, to Aviatrend’s account at Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.
Investigative journalist Matthew Brunwasser, who followed the progress of the bust alongside controversial Belgian UN arms-trade investigator Johan Peleman, says Minin is far from the uniquely gifted criminal mastermind he’s often painted as—not least in the Nicolas Cage Hollywood action flick Lord of War, rumored to be based on (and fictionalized from) the lives of Minin and Bout. “The timing of Minin’s rise, and that of others like Viktor Bout, is not a coincidence,” says the softly spoken San Franciscan at his office in Istanbul. “Their power and success just would not have been possible without the chaos, poverty, and disintegrating state apparatus that hit the former Soviet republics.”
Still, Minin’s prosecution immediately hit trouble. Sure, they had the vice rap sewn up, but as for the transnational trafficking stuff … who the hell had jurisdiction over that? The evidence was top-drawer: faxes, end-user certificates, all as close to conclusive as it seemed you could get. The problem went deeper.
Like Viktor Bout’s exploits, it appeared that many of the things Minin was doing actually failed to qualify as illegal. Sanctions-busting is reprehensible and draws censure. Transporting illicit shipments of arms may or may not break laws in the individual countries concerned, but all too often those countries either benefit from the trade, have bigger fish to fry, or have pretty weak, corrupt, and chaotic legal and enforcement frameworks themselves.
Like the Muslim hawala system of money transference, or the peer-to-peer downloading networks antipiracy groups find so tough to crack, these arms deals benefit from their lack of central command—there’s no one bank that processes or approves payments, no central server, no accounts department in any one particular building in any one country. And because they involve many parties in many territories, all working within a framework of trust and loose allegiance, each country only sees a small piece of the jigsaw.
It’s the perfect camouflage: The picture is broken up, scattered, and hard to detect. Only this went one step further: Even when the Italian police put the picture together, not enough of it was within their jurisdiction.
Fighting seemingly chaotic trafficking networks like Minin’s, in which much of the evidence is scattered and loosely connected, through the courts is always going to be hard, says Mark Galeotti: “We tend to think of organized crime as a Godfather movie or whatever, disciplined, hierarchical, pyramidal, where orders go out from the Godfather, through the ranks, and the foot soldiers at the bottom obey. In practice, it’s actually nothing of the sort. Most of the time, your main men are out there hustling on their own account. The role of the gang is to set the turf rules, don’t interfere, to mediate disputes, because shoot-outs are bad for business—it’s to maintain security, to maintain a brand name that is valuable so that when people come along they know to fear you rather than say, ‘Who the hell are you?’ And in a way when there is some kind of systemic threat to the group as a whole, it represents the rallying cry.”
I tell Galeotti he could be describing some of the affiliations that exist in the “gray” cargo world. He points out that a key strength of this network of loose affiliations is its adaptability, making it perfect for new environments. “In some ways a Russian or Ukrainian mafiya gang is more like a kind of freemasonry. If all of a sudden you’ve got some new opportunity, and it’s not something you can do yourself, you get in touch. Someone will say, Look, I can get hold of a truckload of stolen sportswear. You think, Well, what the hell would I do with stolen sportswear? So the gang provides you with a network of contacts. The individual elements in this gang are often going to be a pretty stupid bunch of people. They might well be wily and have street smarts, but they’re not thinkers, they’re not intellectuals. They don’t have business plans or mission statements. However, the organism as a whole and the economy that it represents is often surprisingly sophisticated. It reacts very rapidly.”
After a trial in which his testimony was called poco verosimile (“scarcely credible”) by the judge—Minin claimed he’d never known Cherny despite faxes and orders passing between them, saying he’d only ever bumped into him once in an Italian hotel bar—and despite a paper trail leading from Ukraine, Minin, and Aviatrend to the Ivory Coast and Liberia, Leonid Minin went to prison for just two years.
But while the Italian prosecutors were frustrated in their attempts to pursue the arms-running case, in other ways the bust was a success. Not only was the mother lode of documents and testimony something of a Rosetta stone—an unusually complete crash course in how to trace the movements of arms conducted across the globe by men like Minin and his network of cargo agents, pilots, quartermasters, and end users; as it happened, its coverage provided something of a wake-up call, too.
The bust’s snowballing, high-profile nature—and make no mistake, cocaine, hookers, and diamond-rich rogue Liberian presidents were an irresistible combination for the media—called attention to the nature of these masonry-like networks and underlined the inadequacy of traditional law enforcement in stopping them.
From this point on, governments would at least try to work together, to keep tabs on what was coming and going, if not through their skies or their ports then at least through their banks. And if they were still no better at picking up or detaining these traffickers, at least they figured they’d found a new way to shut them down. As an associate of Charles Taylor, Minin had his assets seized, his accounts frozen.
For men whose sole focus is on making money, this approach promised much. But if anybody thought the tide was turning, they were wrong. At the turn of the decade, it wasn’t just runways in out-of-the-way and unstable countries like Liberia or Angola that shook with the thunder of Soviet-era steel.
Genteel and decidedly developed, Ostend in Belgium became a traffickers’ hub and the focus of a “Clean Up Ostend Airport” campaign, even as Viktor Bout himself acquired a place there; meanwhile, Europe’s fringes from the Balkans to the Mediterranean remained open for business from utterly respectable and “rogue” cargo operations alike. But the cleanup campaigns had their work cut out, even with the invaluable help of the armies of dedicated, camera-toting plane spotters and cargo teams they recruited for the cause. Because stopping a loose trafficking network like this is a job that’s difficult, if not impossible, even if you’ve got witnesses on the ground.
GENIAL, QUIETLY SPOKEN, and slight, Peter Danssaert is one of the men tasked with tracking this flow of so-called destabilizing commodities across the globe. As a leading light at the Antwerp-based International Peace Information Service and member of several UN Panel of Experts on trafficking, he specializes in the arms trade, providing expert services to the UN Security Council, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and the UK parliament.
It’s his job to monitor, and ultimately to stop, dodgy cargoes transported by men like Mickey in planes chartered by the likes of Bout and Minin. It’s a tough task. But today, as he recalls one up-close encounter a few years ago on the smuggling front line of East Africa that proves firsthand exactly how swift these trafficking “organisms” are to adapt, even he can’t help but laugh.
“I was checking into the hotel, up-country in Uganda, on some United Nations business,” he says, “when I heard a Slavic-accented male voice talking on the phone behind me.” Not Russian this time, he thought as he listened to the disembodied voice. Slowly he tune
d in. His dealings with the arms-smuggling pipeline through Bulgaria in the past two decades had left him with enough experience to recognize a native.
“I turned round and saw a man wearing a pilot’s uniform, complete with official United Nations insignia on the breast pocket,” he says. “So, I waited, then I went over to him, exchanged a few politenesses, and then just came out and asked, as a UN pilot—as a colleague, really—whether he’d heard any rumors about the other side, you know, about illicit arms trafficking in the area. You could tell he spoke a very little English, and he clearly misunderstood my question, because he just nodded, smiled, and said to me in a low voice, ‘No problem: You just tell me when, where, and how much.’ ”
Danssaert was surprised, and, without realizing quite what he’d heard, sought to clarify his question. “I said, ‘No, no, I’m asking whether you know anything—whether you’ve seen any activity of that nature, smuggling arms, weapons, around here?’
“But he still didn’t get it. He held up his hands like we had a deal, and repeated, ‘Yes, yes, I tell you, we can do it. You just tell me: where, when, and how much. I will do it, no problem!’
“He scribbled a number on a piece of paper and told me to arrange the deal with his colleague, whose English was better. I looked up the number when I got home. It was a Bulgarian cargo outfit, sure enough—and sure enough, they’ve since been closed down for arms trafficking.”