by Iain Overton
The photographer’s voice could just be heard above the roar of the fountain, and the bride shrieked as the wind picked up and sent a spray over her. Her hair was tight on her head and pulled back her features, making her look stern. She came over and asked me to get off the bench I was sitting on, so that she could get a better picture. Her bridesmaids, all dressed in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, stared at me. I wasn’t going to ruin the photo opportunity, so I moved.
Starting my visit to Odessa with the sight of a wedding felt apt. After all, it has a strong reputation as a place to find love. My internet searches for the shipping companies that operate out of here ran constantly up against a tide of adverts for young brides and the promises of a lonely heart being filled.
But love was not the only relationship that flourished here. Everywhere you saw signs of the coming-together of business and trade. Above the airport’s passport control were three adverts for freight service companies, one showing a lorry fitted with aircraft wings. Others highlighted offshore financial services. Speed and discretion were the key offerings here.
Once it was grain merchants that had made Odessa the fourth-richest city in the Russian Empire. Now its exports had diversified. Women and guns were new lures that hooked people here. I smiled at the posing bride and walked down to the docks. Small groups of Japanese tourists had left their cruise-ship and were being shown around. I passed them, listening to their guide explaining how Odessa was a city of immigrants – more European than Russian, of course – and I carried on down through a shaded park filled with broken concrete steps and on to the port.
The Black Sea spread into the glare of the morning sun, and across the bay a line of rust-metal ships were slowly being unloaded. Unlike in Oktyabrsk, you could see here cranes swinging endless containers through the warm sea air. The screech of tortured metal sounded, and other cranes stood unmoving, like mute robots, idling beside ships with glittering names such as the Bosphorous Queen. But this queen had long ago lost her regal shine and listed lightly against the dock, decaying in the sharp light.
There was nothing to see here that revealed Odessa’s gun trade to me. I pushed back, up the Potemkin Steps, the formal entrance-way to the city, past heavy men encouraging tourists to pose with white-tailed eagles, and made my way to Number 10 Bunina Street.
At this address stood Odessa’s most renowned shipping company, Kaalbye. It was a firm that prided themselves on shipping high-value military cargo. The US Navy’s Military Sealift Command once hired them to transport mine-countermeasure vessels to Japan and a coastal security ship to Cyprus.74 And their fleet certainly transported cargo from Oktyabrsk.75
I passed through Odessa’s charming, decaying neo-classical streets, until I came to the address – the Maritime Business Centre – a ten-storey building of glass and secrets. Three men stood in the foyer, one of them with a pistol on his hip. I asked for Kaalbye shipping and they showed me to a small office on the side. There sat a young woman, dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt. She gave me a bright smile as I walked in. I explained that I had emailed the company and no one had answered, so she told me to follow her and led me past the armed guard to a discreet lift at the end of the corridor.
Taking out a key, she pushed the button for the top floor, and the door closed. When it opened again, we were met by two kitsch statues: Poseidon and Mercury in gold gilt. They stood in front of two gaudy panels of painted glass – maps of the ancient seas – flanking heavy double doors that led on to a reception. Entering, it felt like stepping into Alice in Wonderland’s study: seven doors branched off to hidden rooms, and in between them badly painted seascapes were hanging on wood-panelled walls. An early medieval galleon stood in a glass cabinet opposite a silver globe – an attempt at refined taste that fell short.
Behind a thick, marble-topped reception desk was a carefully coiffured woman staring at me strangely. She was dressed in a purple dress that would have looked in place at a cocktail party. I walked up and explained I was there hoping to see one of the directors. She looked pleased and told me that everyone was on holiday. She was sorry, there was nothing she could do.
My attempt to get an interview had failed, so I left a number and was escorted out. But no director called me. Instead, I got a phone call from their lawyer. His name was Andrew Friedman, with an ‘expertise defending investigations involving . . . foreign corrupt practices . . . export controls and contractor corruption’.76
‘I am representing Kaalbye shipping,’ he said. ‘I represent the company in litigation in the United States.’
‘Right, so how can I help?’ I was in the dark. Did they need a lawyer to give me an interview?
‘Because there is pending litigation over what has been written about them – they are going to decline to comment. There was a research firm in the US that wrote a report . . .’
‘In what context?’ I asked, interrupting him. I was annoyed.
‘In the context of arms shipments.’
‘Where?’ I said. I must have sounded like an asshole, but he was getting to me.
‘It’s online if you search,’ he said.
The research firm he spoke about was called C4DS, a Washington-based investigative unit. C4DS had claimed Kaalbye was connected to an arms transfer to Angola in 2001; to an unknown shipment from Russian to Syria in 2012; and to a transfer of arms from Russia to Venezuela in 2012.77 I wasn’t sure what that had to do with me and told him as much. I said I wanted to interview Kaalbye about legal armament shipments – that was all. I had no evidence that they were doing anything wrong.
‘They are going to decline to comment.’
‘Why would you need a lawyer to call me up to tell me that?’ I said.
‘I am not in any way trying to intimidate you. I am doing it because my client asked me to call you to let you know . . . rather than just kind of silently ignore you.’
It was a courtesy call to tell me that I wasn’t going to get an interview. And, oh, by the way, we are suing someone. It felt heavy-handed, but I guess when you start looking at the international shipments of weapons, you don’t meet pushovers.
And that was it. My attempt to get some clarity on how guns are legally traded ended with a lawyer on the phone. Heaven knows what I was going to run up against when I started looking at the illegal trade.
13. THE SMUGGLERS
Catacombs and criminals in Ukraine – anarchy in Somalia, shopping in Mogadishu’s market for AK47s – human rights abuse in Northern Ireland – how governments get involved in gun smuggling – the Second Amendment’s long reach – the plea for no more US guns in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
In early November 2013 the Greek coastguard intercepted a Sierra Leone-flagged cargo ship called the Nour-M near the Imia islets of the cobalt-blue waters of the eastern Aegean. Allegedly, there were 20,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles on board, along with 32 million rounds of ammunition. The ship had left Ukraine a few days before.1
According to the vessel’s captain, Hüseyin Yilmaz, their final destination was the Libyan port of Tripoli. He said the Nour-M’s cargo had been purchased by their Ministry of Defence, and all was above board. But Greece’s media reported differently.2 They said that the Syrian port of Tartus was listed as the ship’s final destination by marine traffic systems, and the captain had typed Syria into the navigation system, changing it to Libya only after his boat was challenged.3 If this was true, then the ship was breaking an arms embargo.
Like so much in the world of smuggling, it will be hard ever to know the truth. The Nour-M was intriguingly to sink within thirty days of its seizure, battered into the depths by a storm off the port of Rhodes.4 The Greek authorities have never clarified what happened to the 20,000 rifles.5 But if, as the authorities and media suspected, the Nour-M was indeed smuggling arms out of the Black Sea, it would have been part of a long tradition of Ukraine’s involvement in international illicit activities, one that was focused around the urbane streets of Odessa.
&
nbsp; In the first half of the nineteenth century that elegant seaport grew in wealth and opulence, buoyed by the profits of a vibrant free trade zone set up by the Russian tsar. They were to call it the Porto Franco, and soon Odessa became a global centre, perhaps the global centre, for the trade in illicit gods. Porcelain came from China, flowered perfume from France, heady wine from Greece and, of course, muskets and rifles were there aplenty, because where contraband of illegal pleasures are found, so will there be guns – either as a weapon to defend the profits of the haul or just part of the haul itself.
Riches followed. Odessa’s citizens had travelled there from Austria and France, Italy and Spain to create a better life for themselves. And if smuggling was the way to do that, well then, that’s what they would do. They did it well. When the tsar considered withdrawing his financing of the Black Sea state, they sent 3,000 of Greece’s finest oranges to Moscow to change his mind.6 Each fruit was wrapped in a parchment inscribed with a list of all the benefits of the port to him. This bribe in fruit worked. Odessa kept its privileged status and evolved into a city that blinded the Russian imagination with its light architectural beauty and its dark tales of illicit luxuries. So the virtues of bribery and smuggling were here, visibly reinforced in every new building and in every clandestine delight.
It was a hidden character of this city that was pointed out to me by Valentyna Doycheva, a bob-fringed and elfin twenty-eight-year-old history graduate, who worked as one of the guides at Odessa’s Contraband Museum. Showing me around the museum’s modest exhibition floor, Valentyna described to me the catacombs of Odessa – the longest in the world – spreading like entrails deep beneath our feet. They once were used to store the city’s surge of contraband. The museum itself was confined to five small-chambered rooms in the basement of a townhouse. Lined with glass cabinets filled with smuggled items, like clocks stuffed with cocaine or honey jars filled with melted dope, it was a noble institution seeking liberal truth. When criminal behaviour is so endemic, it takes courage to stand up and point out what was right and wrong. Even more so to dedicate a museum to it.
This is especially the case when you realise that today the culture of smuggling and organised crime still lies deep in the soul of this city. Since the fall of communism, Ukraine has emerged as the place to go for illicit goods, singled out as the epicentre of post-Soviet arms trafficking.7 It is a quasi-criminal city where the government’s involvement in smuggling is more than just looking the other way.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘we get guns coming in from Russia – illegally, of course. And these guns are brought in by different criminal groups. There are a lot of them in Ukraine nowadays. It’s a pity.’
Certainly the Ukrainian government has been culpable. In 1992 a commission concluded the nation’s military stocks were worth $89 billion.8 By 1998 $32 billion of it had been stolen and resold. As Andrew Feinstein wrote in his book The Shadow World, ‘So explosive were the [commission’s] findings that the investigation was suddenly closed down, seventeen volumes of its work vanished and its members were cowed into silence.’9
Behind this massive theft was a new breed of men – the so-called ‘Merchants of Death’.10 When the Cold War thawed, arms smugglers with names like Victor Bout and Leonid Minin swooped. Huge stocks of Ukrainian weaponry were bought up and sold to groups like the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and FARC forces in Columbia.11 Men like Minin became major brokers of arms to Charles Taylor in Liberia, a country under an arms embargo. Minin did things like send 9 million rounds of ammunition and 13,500 AKM rifles to the capital Monrovia in two air-freight deliveries, listing them as headed for Burkino Faso.12
Today, though, things have changed. Experts have confided in me, in a way where even things that were not secret were phrased as being such, that the age of the Merchants of Death has ended. Instead, they said, new realities have created a different type of smuggler – often even more explicitly sanctioned by governments. One arms dealer said, ‘I don’t know if there could be another Viktor. He rose through the ranks at an opportune time. It was a sort of serendipity – the right time, right place. Viktor was there when the governments fell – he had connections. There is no Soviet Union today with vast quantities of surplus. The situation isn’t right for that now.’
Today the global illicit trade in guns is just as prolific, but possibly more diverse. It happens at the point of production, where guns are stolen from the manufacturers, or – as in Pakistan – produced in extensive unregistered gun industries. It happens later – when guns are smuggled out of police and military arsenals, or seized when rival factions clash with each other.13
‘Sometimes the goods are lost on the way,’ said a Black Sea gun manufacturer I met. ‘One of the things you have to look for is when small arms are taken by sea vessels. If there is a direct flight, then if it goes via sea it makes no sense. That’s a tip-off something is going on.’
Then he told me a story. There was a time when a consignment of arms he had sold, in the belief the guns were headed to Jordan, ended up being earmarked for Libya. They would have been sent there, too, had the shipping company not inadvertently emailed his company a copy of the bill of lading. It claimed the container was filled with packets of soap powder, not 9mm pistols.
Of course, stemming such illegal flows of firearms is incredibly difficult. Unlike cluster munitions or landmines, guns have legitimate police, military and recreational uses. You can’t just ban their manufacture and sale. This means it’s even harder if a government is working in cahoots with the smugglers.
A few months before, I had met a man called Daniel Prins. He was chief of the UN’s Conventional Arms Branch and headed up a department that oversaw attempts to prevent the trade of illicit weapons, without infringing upon their legal use and trade. In 2006 the UN had reported that a quarter of the $4 billion annual global gun trade was illegal.14 He had his work cut out.
‘I’ll give you a hypothetical example,’ he had said as we sat in a New York diner a stone’s throw from the UN’s grey-glass building on 1st Avenue. ‘If you’re an arms broker with a passport that’s from Ukraine and you work from Cyprus, but your bank account is in the Virgin Islands, and you broker a deal for arms that are made in the USA but are being shipped from Bosnia to Sudan . . . if you want to deal with this from a law enforcement perspective, where do you start? Whose regulations, whose laws do you need to follow? Is it the laws of Cyprus, where this person happens to be?’
He was a carefully spoken man, but frustration infused the little he did say to me, weighing his words down. ‘The Russians tell us that they don’t have a problem with arms brokers, because only one company is allowed to be an arms broker in Russia. But isn’t it true that there are half a dozen, if not more, brokers around the world who do their work? And the answer that we get is: well, yeah, but that’s not in Russia.’
Looking back, I wondered if he despaired in his New York office of all the traders in Ukraine who did Russia’s dirty business.
‘Globalisation means that with a cell phone and a computer it’s easy to work from anywhere and to do your shipments and organise illegal shipments in a whole different way than it used to be, let’s say, during the Cold War,’ Daniel said. ‘Nowadays, middlemen arms brokers don’t need to be where the arms are.’
That was why places like Odessa were so attractive to so many smugglers. There, they could avoid controls. It was a place where the government would look the other way, at least if you filled their pockets when they were doing so.15 In Odessa’s tree-lined streets, criminals had the best of it. The weather was temperate. Women renowned for their beauty stalked the city’s squares with lithe legs and feline eyes. There were nightclubs and restaurants to blow a bootlegger’s profits. And, across this gilded and decaying city, there was easy access to supply chains, front companies and dubious handling agents prepared to do fraudulent paperwork. You could casually commit evil here without ever seeing the impact you were having.
Odessa had shown me what happens when governments allow their ports and businesses to become a logical extension of vast criminal networks and the corruption of officials permits unofficial trafficking. But, I thought, despite all of this, at least Odessa had the semblance of order. I had seen places where order had totally failed and where the smuggler had flourished: not because of the state, but because of the absence of one.
The only flight into Somalia from Kenya was an aid flight, and we were the only passengers. As we swung low over the flat spread of bush and shrubs that marked the Somali landscape, the emptiness and endless sand scudded beneath us. Just bush and the occasional dot of a herder with his cattle. Then our plane banked, and we headed sharply down to a line of sand and rocks traced far out on the outskirts of the ruptured capital of Mogadishu. It was the improvised international airport, without border guards or terminals, for the most lawless country on earth.
As we climbed down from the plane, six Somalis in battered pick-up trucks, each armed with machine-guns, met us. One leaned onto the ugly, heavy anti-aircraft weapon that had been bolted onto the top of his car. It was 39°C, but you felt the tension faster than you felt the heat.
I was part of a BBC team, fronted by the reporter Simon Reeve, making a series called Holidays in the Danger Zone. Given the number of guns here, the title was apt: weapons were in everyone’s hands. About two-thirds of Somali men had at least one, and some estimates put the total national number as high as 750,000.16
Open-air gun markets were also common here. And we had come to Somalia in part to visit the biggest of them – a place where over 400 arms dealers sold smuggled AK47s to anyone who could afford one. Our film was about how a state survives when its government and entire infrastructure have collapsed. Somalia, wrecked by years of civil war, was the perfect example of ungoverned chaos.
