by Matt Potter
Low avgas prices, even by Russian crews’ standards, make it the cheap-as-chips place to refuel a twenty-five-year-old superplane—especially when you’re on a European aid run from Germany, the UK, or Scandinavia down into Afghanistan, Iraq, Dubai, Sharjah, Pakistan, or China. Receipts are plentiful and generously prepared. But one thing Mickey is far more circumspect about, and what puts the chills on just about everyone here you mention it to, is the illegal market in the other black stuff.
Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, an inland sea covering more than 1.4 million square miles, is part of a watery trade crossroads linking Iran, Russia, Caucasian Azerbaijan, and the first of the Central Asian ’stans—Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Fed by Russia’s Volga and Ural rivers, and home to the world’s largest concentration of sturgeon—the fish whose caviar commands prices of up to sixteen thousand dollars for a single kilo—it is also a smugglers’ playground with a long and dark history.
The city’s organized-crime cartels were legendary even in pre-Soviet export-boom times, when one of its most feared enforcers was a young upwardly mobile biznesman, bank robber, kidnapper, trafficker, counterfeiter, and killer by the name of one Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili—later known to the world as Josef Stalin. Today its growth as a freewheeling buffer zone between Iranian, Russian, and Turkish spheres of influence has, according to Russian diplomats, turned it into a thrilling, terrifying arms traffickers’ paradise. But it is also home to one of the most powerful former-Soviet mafiyas on the planet: the caviar mafia. Though supposedly protected, the gourmet black eggs are increasingly in demand among the new rich of China, the Arab world, and Europe. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), more than $25 million worth of illegal caviar is airlifted from these shores into the Arab Emirates every year, where it is bought and sold by Dubai’s all-powerful organized-crime networks, with whom Baku’s own institutionalized mob can do good, good business. The caviar, says CITES, is then shipped onward to hubs in Asia, North America, and Europe, where it is sold as being of lawful origin. From dirty to clean, as laundered as a Sharjah sheet.
Normally, of course, airport security would notice. But airport security just might not be Baku’s high point. On one journey back out of Kabul, the guards’ state-of-the-art bleeper detects some old ammo I picked up in Bamiyan, northern Afghanistan, and have hidden about my person as a souvenir. I’m stopped. We talk. They take one of the bullets away, wave me on through to the plane with the rest.
So the caviar heads somehow, and very quickly, to the UAE, global hub for planes, businesses, and Mickey. From where I’m crouching in the glass belly as we take off again and climb over the Caspian, the aerial view is spectacular: oil tankers and glittering blue water, and all the business connections laid out before us. We circle round, above the city center, and over Baku’s upscale shopping district, where row upon row of empty upscale boutiques provide the perfect wash for all that money coming back; then past the swankiest hotels in town, the Baku and Absheron, where Chechen warlords were flown by Soviet-made cargo planes via Turkish Cyprus for rest and recuperation during the wars with Russia. There, says Russia’s NATO representative Dmitry Rogozin, they received “Azerbaijani passports on which they could travel to Turkey or Russia on criminal business, while those who did not fancy long-distance trips could stay and earn money on the side through racketeering and drug trade, as Azerbaijan became a transit point for weapons supplies from Turkey.”
Then up, into cloud, and toward the Gulf.
Rogozin talks of an illicit “air corridor” that was opened up between Cyprus and Chechnya via Azerbaijan and Georgia in 1995, a wormhole through which guns, troops, and cash could be teleported. But if the route and destination sounds familiar, then so do the men: rootless, international business types haunting the air-conditioned, high-class-escort-lined, luxury-branded malls and corridors of Dubai’s hotels and palaces, rubbing shoulders with old armed forces, GRU, and JAJ pals; crews and captains of Sharjah-based planes, and captains of import-export industry from the former Soviet Union, Serbia, Britain, the USA, Europe, China, Japan, Australia. Indeed, stories of Il-76 and Antonov-operating cargo businessmen with checkered pasts in this “caviar mafia” are legion.
CITES says that these Dubai-based mafia groups coordinate the caviar smuggling by “forging documents and making false declarations to customs officials to obtain re-export certificates from local authorities.” With a huge, speedy pipeline in hidden cargo capacity using Baku as a staging post on its way to and from whiter-than-white aid drop-offs and Sharjah, Dubai, and Western Europe, not to mention Central Asian forgers selling diplomatic IDs and Russian driving licenses at roadside markets, the risks are phenomenally low. But the rewards—a kilo that costs twenty dollars to buy from a Caspian poacher retails for four thousand dollars in New York—are sky-high.
So it’s no surprise that feuds, murders, and double-crossings are common. Since the 1990s, guards and policemen who’ve attempted to stop the trade have been assassinated, with the most deadly attack killing sixty-seven people—twenty-one of them children—when a nine-story apartment building for border guards in Kaspiysk was bombed. A few years ago, a hundred-man mob raided a coast guard station on the Caspian and liberated confiscated caviar boats in what officials described as part of “an ongoing war with the caviar mafia.”
Unsurprisingly, some claim the link between the caviar mafiya and the planes goes deeper than client-courier. One clearly bitter man claiming to be an avialegioner wrote a letter to an African newspaper recently denouncing a Russian business associate as having very strong links with the “black caviar mafia” at home in the former USSR. The mafia had, claimed the man, lent him money to purchase the cargo aircraft he started out with. “But because they have been in jail for some years [the operator] has never repaid his investors’ money. The problem is, now they are out of jail and searching for him in order to get it back.” But again, there were some strange points in the letter that cast doubt not only on its credibility but its origin. For one thing, the writer claimed in his letter that his former associate had relocated to Africa as a way to remain out of reach of his creditors in the mafia and “keep a low profile”—although if that’s true, then his base, the most GRU-haunted, Russian-speaking enclave in sub-Saharan Africa would seem an odd choice of bolt-hole. The African telephone numbers supplied by the correspondent are disconnected (mobile) or ring until they cut off (landline), while the e-mail seems to be dormant. No wonder the newspaper to which it was apparently sent refused to publish.
Indeed, one pilot on a Russian forum calls the writer “a very-informed person with a good imagination and a bad upbringing.” Of course, embittered former employees and business associates will say much, and even if the letter did originate from the name given at the foot of the page, there’s no evidence that this is more than an attempt to smear a former business partner—perhaps even to tar him with the same brush, fairly or otherwise, as Viktor Bout. I asked the subject of these accusations for comment, but though he said he would respond, and though I chased him, I never did hear back either way. And I can’t honestly say I blame him.
In any case, a low profile is always good even for those on the legitimate side of the cargo business too—which is the vast majority of hardworking airmen and businessmen from ex-Soviet backgrounds.
Still, sometimes, unavoidably, Mickey’s profile sinks lower than even he would like. Downtime is the part he and the crew all dread, with a Soviet-bred fear of famine. Nevertheless, it’s a reality nobody, whatever their connections, prices, or networking skills, can avoid completely. It lasts as long as it lasts, too—for unlucky crewmen, there can be months of trying to exist on the last paycheck, eking out an existence in some far-flung corner of the developing world or a flat in Ulyanovsk until another job comes up. Little wonder the pressure to take on jobs that look dodgy or downright dangerous starts to tell.
Which is where Mickey and Sergei’s entrepreneur
ial touch—their shuttle traders’ instinct for business within a business—pays off. When something breaks, when a deal falls through, when there’s simply no work on and we’re kicking our heels, their time is filled with “shopping”—though not of the air-conditioned-mall variety. In late-2000s Kampala and Jinja, we brokered deals together for ten-kilo sacks of this, cases of that, paid in cash, got it into a rusty old Mercedes with a flatbed trailer, and drove to the plane, lugged on and pushed down and covered over. The next morning, he took me shopping at an open-air market in Kampala, stacked high with bald car tires and bolts as big as your forearm, “for spares.”
Wreathed in the barbecue smoke, the tumbledown avionics marketplace straddles the muddy disused railway line by the side of the highway. Festooned with garish, hand-painted ads and hoardings featuring lurid approximations of Nokia phones, medical symptoms, pop stars, and Heineken cans, these pile-it-all-on-the-dirt-floor markets are as close as it gets to repair centers for the lower-end Antonov and Ilyushin jockeys passing through. Gigantic, bald tires lie in heaps; dials and panels are stacked and swept into table corners; wing and tailplane flaps weigh down the canvas roof coverings in the African breeze; more bolts, screws, and washers, nuts and clips, glisten among assorted tat (the front half of a VW camper van, sawed off; dozens of “found” car registration plates from South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya; seats torn from an airliner).
“Everything’s very cheap,” says Mickey, “but only if you don’t tell them how much you need it.”
The stallholder says he had a flight recorder here once. I am surprised. “Who wants them?” I laugh, without thinking.
“Maybe somebody just wants theirs back,” deadpans the merchant.
Only later, when I read about the cloud of uncertainty around so many crashes here, and the semi-illicit nature of some of the flights that have come down, do I realize he’s not joking at all. If I was behind at least a couple of the flights that have come to grief somehow in Africa over the years, and about which the rumors of sabotage and weapons running refuse to die—and when clients include warlords, corrupt military, big business, and government interests from Somalia to the Congo—there’s plenty of scope for pissing off the wrong people and racking up scores that need settling, as well as the paranoia and suspicion that lingers around any unexplained incidents. I’d want to get my flight recorder back from whichever fisherman found it, and pretty badly.
The make-do-and-mend attitude to using whatever you’ve got on hand spills over into other areas too. If we’re short on time, we eat whatever’s on board, and some of us—but never Mickey, and never Dmitry the navigator—take our bottles of beer, Coca-Cola, or spirits with us to finish during the flight. Once the flight’s over, it’s fair game for everyone, but on the wing, it’s only Sergei who really unwinds—sometimes unravels—with the airborne partying, knocking back anything he can find among the cargo and from time to time hitting the aviation spirits.
For loadmasters, the job’s pressures come in quicker bursts than most. They are the ones who must cajole, wisecrack, and charm everyone from local herders to militiamen and customs officials to airport baggage handlers into helping get everything in. They are the ones who need to remember what’s where and who knows it. And if that means Sergei self-medicating to the brink of psychosis with whatever’s handy, so be it. I’ve seen him sleep on the runway, in the shadow of the plane, joint in hand, and I’ve seen him drink to celebrate takeoff. On one flight he gashed his head so badly falling off the pile of crates where he’d been dozing that the skin on his temple opened like a hatch, and the hot, greasy floor began to stink like an abattoir with his congealed blood. He’d been drinking neat spirit and African waragi, or “war gin”—a potent, home-distilled alcohol made from yam or banana plants that regularly kills whole villages in East Africa. Even while we cursed, bandaged him, and poured water into his mouth, Sergei only woke up enough to mutter and turn over. I next spoke to him shortly after landing, where he appeared bright as a pin, though as pale, skinny, and bloody as a Times Square down-and-out. He coyly ruffled his bandaged wound as if I’d complimented him on a new haircut, and seemed quite baffled by my concern that he get to a doctor. After a while the others were pretty much leaving him to it. “Sergei is Sergei,” shrugged Mickey when I told him.
Just how close Sergei came to death that day doesn’t dawn on me until a few months later, when three Russian aviation technicians on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi die, having been found staggering, vomiting, and complaining of breathing difficulties. Toxicology tests will later confirm they were killed by drinking methanol—a highly toxic form of alcohol used for aircraft maintenance. In fact, Sergei falling off the crates midclimb because he was dizzy may have saved his life. In the Islamic hinterlands of Indonesia, Sudan, and Somalia, where drinking alcohol is illegal, potentially lethal local moonshine or, failing that, aviation spirit is the scourge of expat aviation guys.
One high-ranking Russian diplomat and Afghan war veteran speaking to me on condition of anonymity recalls garrisoned Soviet pilots out on “the spirit” in Kabul. In a curious twist, it was noticed by Soviet commanders that the pilots and crew who drank their aviation spirit, though they were often unreliable and occasionally died, never came down with hepatitis or parasites because they drank it instead of water, which was often unsanitary. It became an article of faith among veteran crews that methanol drinkers enjoy a net gain in lifespan. Still, through accidents, liver disease, or OD, it was a winter-warmer habit that would kill thousands.
And so Sergei drinks. And try as I might, I can’t understand the continued allure of the life for men in their mid-fifties, or the need Mickey and the rest of them, one way or another, have for taking risks. Their very continued existence feels like an airborne contradiction to me, a Self-Preservation Society for kamikazes, an ultimate survival course for men who don’t seem to fear death at all. Which concerns me greatly, because I’m a dedicated chickenshit with a healthy aversion to any kind of danger.
Sometimes the combined promise of the big payday and this unshakable faith in their own continued existence leads Mickey and the crew to take on the world’s Premier League death trips. One day Mickey asks me, just casually, if I’d like to stow away, for a small consideration, on a flight to Mogadishu the next time he flies there. “See-It-and-Definitely-Die Mogadishu,” as one expat pilot cracked to me, is officially the most corrupt, lawless, and dangerous place on earth, patrolled by pirates, stalked by the Islamist guerrillas of al-Shabab, and a graveyard for shot-down Candids. Even Soviet Air Transport’s Evgeny Zakharov calls it the most dangerous of them all. “For operations in very dangerous places, like Somalia,” he says, “people know what they’re doing. We pay big, big money for people to fly there.”
The Indian Ocean is regularly awash with cash, the strongboxes and parachute pods used for drops bursting on impact with the ocean occasionally. But if you believe Mickey, there’s another side to it all, beyond the money, that makes Mogadishu both genuinely scary and weirdly exciting to fly into. We don’t get it together this time. The UN’s got it sewn up officially, and the crew have nothing on with them this week, though the Candids flying U.S. military contractors on Somali black ops are an open secret, as are the regular “rogue” flights carrying arms for al-Shabab, and it’s anyone’s guess as to who else is coming and going. But Mickey tells me not to miss it if I get the chance. “It is,” he assures me with the weird half smile of the connoisseur, “something very special.”
But then so, it turns out, is his specially formulated approach method, which is even more taxing than the crazy downward lurch into trigger-happy Kabul. Or more suicidal. On missions to Somalia, with pirates rattling off machine-gun rounds from their boats and the local al-Shabab militia firing antiaircraft rockets from the ground, Mickey’s gang have learned to barnstorm in, wave-hopping low over the water, dropping to “well under” a thousand feet, skipping the spray straight onto the salty tarmac at Mogadishu’s beachfront air
port.
This is a navigator’s favorite nightmare—Dmitry hunkered down there in the glass blister hanging beneath the cockpit for one long panning shot across the bright blue ocean as shoals of fish, ground-to-air missiles, and more shoals of fish zip past below. Weird, he says, how the presence of pirates has done wonders for the local sea life; now the Moonraker-style Japanese supertrawlers have got kidnap fear and are staying away like everyone else. All very beautiful, “like Eden.” The navigator distracts himself by thinking about such things because, well, what else should he think about? In fact, the whole crew knows Mickey must get his approach absolutely right again—and that they have to be lucky.
If Mickey needed anything to focus his attention on the takeoff and landing in Mogadishu itself, it came in the form of two Il-76s piloted by friends shot down within days of each other amid the Battle of Mogadishu.
On March 9, 2007, the crew of a Byelorussian Il-76 were flying into Somalia from Entebbe carrying a top-secret African Union cargo—described as aid. The plane was on its final landing approach, just under three kilometers from the runway at Mogadishu International Airport, when a rocket fired from a small boat a few hundred meters out to sea blew a hole in the left of the fuselage, damaging the landing gear. The rocket should have exploded, sending shrapnel through the plane, and yet mysteriously, neither crew nor passengers received a scratch. Unverified reports suggest this is because it hit the armor plating of an unlisted piece of secret cargo, unknown even to the Ugandan troops on board—a tank hidden in among the cargo in the hold. As it was, the plane caught fire but the pilot managed to wrestle it to the ground safely. While the fire spread, the crew and passengers—Ugandan soldiers—smashed through the escape hatches. Their speed saved their lives: Mogadishu airport’s only fire engine took more than an hour to reach them because of a fuel shortage. An airport employee had to run and fetch a can of petrol and fill it up first.