by Matt Potter
There’s the UN man in Uganda, watching as the plunder comes and goes. Richard Chichakli is somewhere just out of view, drawing the blinds and talking to his webcam about how he’s being persecuted by huge, shadowy forces. And here’s his old stomping ground below: Sharjah airport, glittering with money and promise, just as it always used to. And like stars spread out below, I can make out the constellations of Baku, Dubai, Kabul, and Rangoon; Tripoli, Mogadishu, Entebbe, Kinshasa shining brightly.
And that’s when it hits me. And it’s not just beautiful: It’s perfect.
The Il-76 is packed like a flying skip and it’s handling like one. Gravity toys with us like a killer whale with a seal in its jaws; it comes and goes, then suddenly grips us and sucks us down before tossing us back up, and I swear the wings are shaking so hard they’re flapping. The whole plane’s wobbling about like a seasick sailor, everyone’s gone tense and quiet until we get through this, and even Sergei’s hanging on to his canvas strap. It’s always the same. We all feel it. Maybe this time it’ll be our turn to make crash-report headlines.
But not me, not this flight. I’ve got a strange opiumlike chill rising over the skin. The hairs on my arms are standing on end, the stupidest grin is building up inside me, and I know from the palms of my hands to the soles of my boots that we’ll be fine. Like Mickey would say, zhizn harasho.
Because I know the secret now, the last secret, the trick behind the greatest, most ambitious, most devilishly simple and brilliantly effective illusion that anyone’s ever pulled off.
Me. Out of all the millions who’ve witnessed it, who fell for it, who became its stooges, its victims, its assistants, its marks, its technicians, its master illusionists, all over the world. I know what they did, and I know how they did it. And if we’re not fine, and our number’s being called, then you’ll hear no complaints from me. Because now that I’ve seen it, I can fall through six miles of sky and die happy.
HOW CLOSE THE mafia, big business, and military intelligence got in the white heat of an imploding Soviet Union surprised everybody—even, at first, the mafiosi, the FSB agents, and the oligarchs themselves. All except, of course, the blue-collar types who did their dirty work.
They came from the returning military—the Afghantsy, of course, but also the hundred-thousand-plus soldiers who found, upon returning from their stations across Eastern Europe, that they were now homeless as well as penniless, around a million of them without pensions.
But they also came from the ranks of the workers; the factory floors that howled and hammered through the night, a corridor of yellow light, iron, concrete, and chemical smoke that lit up the giant, smog-clad industrial suburbs of Ekaterinburg and Tankograd. These were the men who made the machines: Mickey’s classmates, his land-bound counterparts, without the wings to fly or his aerial view. They too were desperate. And like him, they had had just about enough.
Today, two unusually well-kept graveyards, one on either side of Ekaterinburg, tell the story. In the roaring official silence, they are all that now testifies to the cataclysmic levels of gang-related violence, murder, intimidation, opportunism, and sheer commercial flair the 1990s brought to Mickey’s hometown. Russia’s former mob-crime capital boasts not one but two dedicated mafiya cemeteries—lovingly tended by relatives and surviving buddies, popular with tourists seeking a little of the city’s badass thrill at a safe historical distance.
At Vedensky Hills and Vagan’kovo, row upon row of polished marble tombstones depict, in huge, lovingly detailed tattoo-art-style engravings, the Bermuda-shirted, bomber-jacketed bratki—mafia “little brothers”—slain in the privatization gang wars of the 1990s. One is clutching a Mercedes key ring; another’s hand is thrust deep into the pocket of his leather bomber jacket in the classic stickup pose. Brand clothing and luxury goods are prominently depicted. It’s the classic language of capitalism’s dispossessed, from L.A. to London: no education, no prospects, no home of their own, but dripping with designer logos, status symbols, and gold.
In the 1990s, in the same convulsing agonies of a broke, faltering state that set Mickey free, these men saw their chance too.
The heavy industry and arms production for which the area was so infamous—though it had been cloaked in secrecy by the government—was on its knees, and organized crime moved in. One such industrial giant, Uralmash, was the Ekaterinburg region’s major employer. An arms, military-transport, chemical, mining-equipment, and heavy-machinery behemoth, it was responsible for a veritable greatest hits of game-changing Soviet weaponry—from the Howitzer M-30 to the T-34 tank—and in modern times, long-range-rocket and aviation manufacturing. Its ties to Russia’s military and its secret service went deeper than supplier-client; it was, effectively, the Red Army’s own weapons-manufacturing arm. Its employees were revered for their skill and importance.
And increasingly, they were feared too. Even before the Union’s breakup, Uralmash factory workers had their own criminal gang, the Uralmash Boys, whose meager and increasingly sporadic wage packets were, in the 1980s and 1990s, first supplemented, then eventually dwarfed, by the money they made from black marketeering, protection rackets, pimping, fraud, and extortion. And when, in 1991, the company found it couldn’t make the payroll, the Uralmash Boys offered it a loan to tide it over. So, was it an offer the board could not refuse? And if it was, what strings were attached?
This was their route to semilegal status, and it quickly set the pattern across the former Soviet Union. This was a world in which mafia hard men not only influenced, but swiftly took over, chaired, and owned the biggest businesses in the country—including thousands supposedly owned by the state.
“The economic aspects of Uralmash’s activities on their own suggest that the Uralmash Boys were the first to find a productive way to use violence and force to protect investments and guarantee property rights,” wrote Vadim Volkov, associate professor at the Department of Political Sciences and Sociology, the European University in St. Petersburg. “According to police data, the Uralmash Boys were behind around two hundred companies and twelve banks, and partially controlled ninety additional companies, from petroleum processing to cellular networks, car dealerships, and breweries.”
By the mid-1990s, the Russian Center for Social and Economic Policy Analysis published its first figures on organized-crime activity in Russia. They made shocking reading: Criminal gangs either controlled or owned outright forty thousand firms, including two thousand supposedly state-owned companies. German and Czech police had made at least half a dozen stings in which Russian organized-crime groups like the Uralmash Boys, with access to the weapons stockpile, began exporting nuclear weapons components to the West.
For their part, the authorities could—or would—do nothing, partly because they were now stakeholders in the mob’s own business. High-ranking KGB then FSB officers refrained from interfering with the mob’s activities in return for a piece of any state-run business they carved up; intelligence officers failed to turn up for work because they were at their “other” office, wearing a newly purchased Armani suit and negotiating the purchase of a new plane to ferry their merchandise in without fear of hijacks, holdups, or their uniformed colleagues’ roadblocks.
In 1999, in a tantalizing glimpse of the mind-set inside Russian intelligence at the time, former FSB man Aleksander Litvinenko, later assassinated in London when a fellow agent exposed him to radioactive polonium over sushi, wrote: “Our secret services are now at that stage of decay when it becomes hard to deal with direct obligations on account of business commitments.” In other words, they had gone the same way as Uralmash: bought out by vested interests, profitable sidelines, and political paymasters, they were too busy doing business with the bad guys to do their jobs stopping them. In 1994, the Urals Transport and Machinery Works factory built eighty-four self-propelled minesweepers and received funding for the Russian government to finish them, even though there was not a single buyer on the books. Somehow, these arms would find their way ou
t there, even if it wasn’t through official channels. Perhaps even to customers the official channels were banned from dealing with. Somehow they would vanish, and reappear in the third world’s savage frontiers. But how?
For anyone with a few connections in the Russian Bermuda Triangle, now wholly owned by the Uralmash Boys Inc. and their shareholders in the FSB, finding the answer to that question meant lots of money. And that meant blood. As the gang factions fought for control, the violence exploded along with cars, homes, and mail parcels. Ski-masked men concluded buy-outs with Kalashnikovs; ambitious executives suddenly and inexplicably fell from high tower blocks, leaving the way clear for what one jewelry trader called “a state-mafioso economy like Nigeria’s, when state institutions merge with criminal structures.”
These graves, their polished marble and buffed black granite glinting in the morning sun, are all that’s left of the unlucky ones—the ones who got as close to the big payday as owning that Mercedes, or buying those Gucci loafers, before being gunned down. But for the lucky ones, busy moving into legit commerce, rebranding themselves biznesmeny, opening subsidiaries in sunny places with easygoing officials, the paydays were about to get much, much bigger. All they needed to go global, really, was a logistics division. Planes. Big planes. And crack crews, too, men who could fly anywhere and needed work. Now where would they find such a division?
And the union steward, the secret policeman, and the banker paused and looked at each other.
The cabin is lit up by the sun now, and the cinema screen shows nothing but a tunnel of gold and blue heaven ahead. And as well as I can, I’ll explain to you how it plays out.
BACK IN THE early 1990s, that seismic rupture in the fabric of the Soviet Union looked like chaos to the West, and believe me, it looked a whole lot more like chaos when you were there.
“It’s maybe difficult for you to grasp the whole scale of what happened,” Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, says over tea at the heavily fortified Embassy building in Brussels. I take another sip from my china cup, holding the saucer carefully as an extra insurance against spilling any on the plush carpet that covers the marble-floored anteroom to his office. Grandly framed portraits of epaulette-festooned Russian generals glare down at us—the ambassador, his deputy, me, and our pale, skinny, and clearly very nervous young interpreter. Though I speak a little Russian, and Rogozin speaks some English, this is clearly considered too important to risk misunderstandings.
Rogozin himself is a huge, disarmingly baby-faced bear of a man—clearly confident, proudly controversial, funny, and instantly likable, he’s got “rising star” written all over him; a self-professed nationalist who cut his teeth under General Lebed in the early 1990s, he tells me with a smile he comes from an aviation background, while his brother-in-law is one of the directors of none other than the Ilyushin aircraft-manufacture bureau and plant head office in Moscow. He also counts himself a friend, he says, of Sharpatov, the pilot of the Il-76 captured by the Taliban back in 1995. He tells me how he observed the collapse of the Soviet air force close to the eye of the storm. “It happened twice—in 1917 and in 1991. One after the other, the armies these men belonged to no longer existed. They didn’t know to do anything else. Sure, theoretically, they could go to civil aviation—but that was shrinking too. So they tried to find a role in a state that had split apart. And even if a very few took the criminal way with their activities, I’d rather not call it criminal but ‘gray business.’ ”
The world’s biggest standing army had been split apart, denied funding, and more or less evaporated. But the men needed something. Nobody could figure out just how it had got this bad, this quickly. Their families were living in tents. Near-starvation brought Mickey and his returning comrades to the brink of civil disobedience; there was almost no air force left. Some planes were mothballed; plenty of pilots, engineers, radio operators, loadmasters, navigators, were all desperate for work.
Then came the order, the understanding, from broad-shouldered, much-loved Evgeny Shaposhnikov, commander in chief of the armed forces, soon-to-be representative of the president of the Russian Federation of the state arms-export operation Rosvooruzhenie, and a few years later, chairman of Aeroflot. They were available for work all right, starting immediately, travel no problem. Here came the “liberation” and overnight respray jobs of all those hundreds of aircraft by men, free and enterprising. The best and the brightest sons of Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian air academies and regiments, spiritual sons of Gagarin and of Shaposhnikov’s fighter-ace heroes, took to the sky again, apparently free agents. They were out of the armed forces, out of uniform. They could take jobs or leave them at market rate, and hunt for whatever else they came across.
So, sure, it looked like chaos—disorganized crime, the free market gone wild, as Mickey and the boys ran goods all over the world, busting sanctions, trafficking those conveniently sold-off arms stockpiles in conveniently sold-off planes, arming rebels and governments, and making big, big money. The law of the jungle.
Take the aerial view, though, and you can trace a certain spooky symmetry.
Viktor Bout’s secret flights armed first the Afghan Northern Alliance, then reportedly the Taliban too—almost as if these freelance delivery men could achieve something with commerce that the Red Army hadn’t managed, and arm all mujahideen factions so well they’d annihilate each other! And all the time bringing money in for all those old weapons to a bankrupted treasury, too. It really could not have been planned better if the FSB itself had been involved. It’s tempting to see the masked commando raid on his house in South Africa—so reminiscent of the secret agents who shook down East Line —as a warning to toe the line. And the “mysterious forces” he spoke of who’d plug him if he spoke—who were they? It’s always tempting to speculate. But we know that this was just Viktor Bout, a lone operator, playing fast and loose with the Northern Alliance and then making a deal to get his plane back from the Taliban, not part of a greater plan or anything. So he came by the money from the planes mysteriously. So what.
That was business in Russia.
Then, of course, there were the African wars. Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Rwanda, the Congo, DRC, Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, all full of presidents and rebels more than willing to trade diamonds, gold, coltan, timber, and other precious resources to import-export hustlers—including owner of Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises Leonid Minin, and taxi driver Viktor Bout—for some of the now-redundant stockpiled weapons these freelance, wildcat operators kept bringing. To the uninitiated, it might seem as if the empty exchequers of the former Soviet Union had found a way to replenish themselves with under-the-counter deals in a way that no state could legally have attempted. But of course we know this was every man for himself. We’re told there was no greater plan. It was business.
Serbia: That was business, all right; these same planes, belonging to the same “network” of aviation outfits, so diffuse and so different but with an odd habit of sharing jobs, people, and methods. Those flights from Ekaterinburg via Belgrade, selling arms to Libya (did they pick up in Belgrade, or were they already full and just making a tech stop there?) weren’t something a government or anybody connected with the establishment could be seen doing, not with UN and U.S. economic sanctions in place and Qaddafi a global pariah for protecting the Pan Am bombers. But they would be very lucrative, undoubtedly; and who knew what private businessmen with shady connections and some cronies in government got up to? These were lawless times, that was all. A series of unfortunate coincidences.
Then came the coalition occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the flood tide of drug money leaving Afghanistan on these privately owned planes—ten million dollars every single day through Kabul alone in 2009—all of it heading to places like ex–Soviet Central Asia, Sharjah and Dubai, home to dozens of crews, networks, and business associates like Mickey’s, where Farah and Braun reported 1,186 bank accounts had been opened by hundreds of different Russians in j
ust one branch alone, suggesting “money laundering on a huge scale.” One wonders who these people were and how much of it worked its way back home every day. In 2004, a diamond smuggler for the mafiya was executed in Dubai along with his entire family. Members of two rival smuggling militias were involved in a massive shoot-out inside one of the emirate’s main tourist hotels in broad daylight. Both incidents bore the hallmarks of professional training. And though these are hugely complex, large-scale operations, again we are led to believe the men are simply rogues, criminals, and lawless deviants.
Now there are arms-for-drugs bazaars down by the old Soviet air bases on the Tajik border, and the steady tide of heroin entering Russia itself. “All of a sudden we hear a lot of declarations about how the threat [from Afghan heroin] is dire, and growing, and something has to be done,” says Soldatov. “It looks like convenient political theater. Someone is clearly giving these flights some protection.”
All those planes, all those crews and their individual sleeping partners, all swarming around the same places—it’s enough to remind you of the good old days, the Air Transport Regiment operations.
I can feel walls dissolving my head. As I shut my eyes, the abrupt end to my exchange with Mickey’s old commander in chief Marshal Evgeny Shaposhnikov crackles back to life:
“Marshal Shaposhnikov, in the mid-1990s, did you know about flights in Il-76 aircraft to supply the mujahideen of Afghanistan with weapons? Or rather, did these flights ever have official (or unofficial) government approval?”
“No comment.”
It’s as if, to misquote W. B. Yeats, each of these falcons could indeed, somehow, still hear the commands of a distant falconer. Perhaps that falconer was no longer a commanding officer; perhaps he’d successfully made the transition to the market economy all by himself, as their boss. Could it be that those three men—former high-ranking Soviets from Byelorussia, Ukraine, and Russia, men whose names we never hear yet who ultimately own every Il-76 in the sky—had suddenly woken up the day the Union was dissolved to discover that, miraculously, they now owned a controlling interest in a fleet of forty Antonov-12s?
