Cornucopia

by John Francis Kinsella

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  Francis was old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis, a moment when the world looked nuclear destruction in the face: apocalypse, tens of millions of deaths and even more agonisingly from the effects of radiation and the terrible hardships of an inevitable Nuclear Winter. To someone of Liam Clancy’s age it was almost pure science fiction, a scenario straight out of a Hollywood disaster movie; he was too young to have remembered Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

  To all the others present: Barton, Kennedy and O’Connelly, they had barely known the Cold War, when the US and the USSR starred each other down, their fingers on the buttons that could have launched a storm of ICBMs: American Polaris and Minuteman or Soviet SS4 and R30 missiles, that would have certainly sent the world back to the Stone Age.

  In 2015, as negotiations were being finalised in Cuba for the normalisation of US-Cuban relations, an hours flight from Cartagena, those who remembered the drama of the Cuban Missile Crisis were enjoying their retirement, and its principal actors long dead, with the exception of Fidel Castro - a frail, trembling ruin of his once fiery self.

  What worried Francis was the recent turn of events in Moscow that brought the threat a new confrontation. Not that Russia had the economic power to face off the US, but there was its nuclear arsenal, the world’s biggest, and a substantial rearmament programme. Come what may Vladimir Putin was bent on taking his country down the dangerous path of nuclear blackmail.

  A GALLEON

  Pat first met John Ennis in Hong Kong at a Sotheby sale. Ennis, a wealthy Parisian gallerist, had become an international celebrity after his fortuitous exploits in Borneo had made world headlines following an astonishing palaeoanthropological discovery1. What fascinated Pat was not his anthropological discoveries, but his underwater exploration of treasure laden junks in the South China Sea. Not only gold and silver, but rare Chinese porcelains, the estimated worth of which was put at hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Pat was plunged into his canal project when he received a cryptic message from Ennis inviting him to Cartagena. An early eighteenth century wreck had been discovered off the Colombian coast: a galleon loaded with a rich cargo of treasure.

  The Spanish galleon had been found near Cartagena where it had been sunk by an English fleet during a battle in 1708. The San Jose was part of a Spanish fleet that had set out for the long voyage to Spain loaded with gold, silver, emeralds and valuable Chinese porcelain, but was ambushed and attacked off the Islas del Rosario. A few miles out from Cartagena, Commodore Charles Wager, with four English warships under his command, including HMS Expedition, led the attack on the San Jose, to capture its precious cargo. Unluckily for him it blew up and sank.

  Ennis described the San Jose as the holy grail of undersea wrecks, a seventy metre long Galleon armed with sixty four cannons, which had been carrying six hundred crew and passengers, en route from Portobello, on the coast of what is now Panama, to Cartagena and then Spain.

  Portobello and Cartagena

  The treasure from King Philip’s vast, rich, New World Empire, had been lost when the San Jose was mortally hit by a broadside, going down almost immediately and carrying her treasure to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. Ennis informed Kennedy that sonar images showed gold chalices and coin had been found on the wreck together with bronze cannons, porcelain and other artefacts.

  The news coincided with extraordinary eruption of the 1,297 metre high Momotombo Volcano, not far from the city of León on the shores of Lago de Managua in Nicaragua. To Pat’s vaguely superstitious mind the two events were a sign, of what he was not sure, in any case it diverted his attention from the bad news on the business front: China’s falling exports and slowing economy; the meltdown of mining shares - a humongous eight percent down in London trading after losing nearly eighty percent over the previous twelve months, plunging Biliton, Glencore, Anglo American and Rio Tint into turmoil.

  The volcano, after laying dormant for one hundred and fifty years, suddenly erupted, spouting large plumes of smoke and ash into the sky. Momotombo lay at the opposite end of the lake, forty or so kilometres from Managua and though its sudden eruption posed no immediate threat to the city and its inhabitants, it underlined the dangers of volcanic activity along the planned route of the Nicaragua transoceanic canal.

  The next morning Pat flew to Cartagena to meet John Ennis. It would be his last stop off before heading home to London for Christmas, where he planned to relax with his family and take time to reflect on the eventful year.

  1. The Lost Forest written by the author published in 2003

  COSTA DEL SOL

  Liam Clancy was riding high. With the insight and experience he acquired since joining INI, he had succeeded in putting his small Spanish financial services company, MFS Associates, back into the black. By introducing London based über rich Russian investors to once in a life time property deals in and around Marbella.

  The situation in Spain, if anything had grown worse; to all intents the country was bankrupt, or very near to it, and fabulous properties were being put on the market at fire-sale prices, an extraordinary opportunity for Russians with deep pockets who wanted a luxury home in the sun not too far from London.

  Liam supplied his investors with banking arrangements, his business partners, Dolores Laborda-Carvallo and Hugh Murray, looked after the marketing, sales, financial and legal services.

  As Spain slumped, Russians rolled in money thanks to the demand for oil and commodities and rocketing prices. It was an easy task to sell expatriate Russians in London the idea of acquiring a home on the Costa del Sol. His only problem was to avoid money laundering, a task that was not easy.

  The Spanish authorities welcomed investors and Russia was awash with money as its economy boomed, however, criminal elements linked to money laundering and other doubtful financial dealings had set up shop on the Costas.

  To make matters worse the Costas had become infested with criminals fleeing British justice. Amongst them were the Halcrows, one of whom, the son of George Halcrow, had by chance befriended Liam on his arrival in Marbella in 2009. The Halcrow family had its base in Benidorm, where they owned restaurants, bars and nightclubs. Once Liam realized the sinister nature of their business and their connections with Russian Mafiya, implicated in drugs and illegal arms trafficking as well as extortion and murder, he quietly distanced himself from the family and avoided connections with suspect Russians.

  Spanish prosecutors had Russian Mafiya activities under surveillance since they had began using Spain as a base of operations in the nineties to launder profits from illegal activities in Russia by recycling them in Spanish real estate.

  With the help of Alexander Litvinenko, police had identified a number of Russian Mafiyosa operating in Spain, including Vladislav Reznik, a prominent MP for Putin’s ruling United Russia party, and other high ranking Russian officials.

  These were believed to have helped one of Russia’s most infamous Mafiya organisations, the Tambov gang, infiltrate state structures, police, port authorities, private banks and businesses. The Tambov gang was formed in St. Petersburg in 1988 by two men from the Tambov Oblast, a Russian province four hundred kilometres to the south-east of Moscow: Vladimir Kumarin and Valery Ledovskikh, who ran heroin in St Petersburg in the nineties and laundered the profits in Spain.

  Kumarin commenced his criminal career with the illegal possession of arms, gangsterism and possession of a forged passport in St. Petersburg where he owned strip joints and night clubs. A long career ensued as leader of the Tambovskaya crime family, then in 2007 he was charged by the Russian police with money laundering, contract killings and organized crime and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment.

  Two of the gangs associates, Gennady Petrov and Sergey Kuzmin, came to the notice of the Spanish authorities in Marbella when a company owned by him, Isparus, was suspected of money laundering. Both were shareholders in Bank Rossiya in the late nin
eties along with several of Putin’s close associates in the Ozero Cooperative near St Petersburg.

  When the Spanish police searched a villa owned by a Duma Deputy it was revealed the politician had connections with the three Spanish firms, associated with Gennady Petrov. These firms were involved in deals set up by a local firm relating to the purchase of a villa worth over one million euros and a boat worth more than two million euros1.

  In addition Petrov banked more than sixteen million euros in accounts in Panama, Latvia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Virgin Islands and Russia.

  Shortly before Litvinenko was due to give evidence to Spanish prosecutors he was murdered in London when his tea was laced with polonium-210 a deadly radioactive substance.

  Senior Russian government officials close to Putin were targeted by the Spanish police in 2015, notably deputy prime minister Dmitry Kozak; former prime minister Viktor Zubkov; and former defence minister Anatoly Serdyukov, Zubkov’s son-in-law; and Leonid Reiman, a former communications minister.

  To understand Putin it is necessary to know the miserable conditions in which he grew up in post war Leningrad2 and in his links to the underworld which was said to have had a considerable influence on his way of thinking. He himself wrote of how street gangs of his native city of Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, had influenced him in his youth. At that time, when thousands of gangs roamed the streets of Russian cities Leonid Ionovich Usvyatsov, Putin’s judo coach, was suspected of having connections to organized crime and served two ten year prison terms, one for rape and the other for illegal currency dealings.

  Between serving his two jail terms, Usvyatsov met Putin, along with other young men who later became members of Putin’s inner circle: Arkady Rotenberg and his brother Boris. At the time Putin was Deputy Mayor of Petersburg, the Petersburg Fuel Company, a network of petrol stations in the region, owned by the Tambov gang and run by Vladimir Kumarin, was awarded an exclusive contract to supply the city.

  Later those close to Putin used the Tambov Gang for money laundering laundering in Spain. Then Kumarin, who at the time was reputedly the head of the Tambov Gang, was arrested and sentenced to twenty five years in prison on the order of an unnamed individual who was referred to as ‘the czar’.

  The news that George Halcrow was being questioned by Scotland Yard and Spanish police came as no surprise to Liam Clancy. Halcrow was accused of aiding and abetting a certain Danny Craig, one of Britain’s most wanted criminals, who was hiding in Spain after having fled the law at home. Liam had by chance briefly met the London gangster on a visit to Benidorm in the company of Halcrow’s son and had immediately recognised him for what he was, a vicious gangster.

  Benidorm – Spain

  Craig, one of the many unsavoury acquaintances of the Halcrows living on the Costa Blanca, described as a dangerous fugitive, had been grabbed by the Spanish Grupo Especial de Operaciones as he relaxed by the pool at the Halcrows’ villa. Wanted for a Royal Mail hold-up, Craig had been on the run for more than four years.

  The Mediterranean resort, known to Scotland Yard as the Costa del Crime, was a long standing refuge for British criminals, and Craig, according to the UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, had turned his hand to drugs, selling cannabis and other narcotics to expatriates in Benidorm and other resorts along the coast.

  Liam was greatly amused at Halcrow’s reported protestations when police discovered materials for packing drugs as well as guns and ammunition in his villa.

  The spread of crime could have been put down to the economic crisis. Spain had been harder hit than other EU member countries with unemployment hovering around the twenty five percent mark and fifty for the under twenty fives. It was evident that austerity begot austerity, transforming the Costas into a breeding ground for international crime.

  1. Russian Mafia https://rumafia.com/en/dosje/61

  2. The New Tasar Steven Lee Myers 2015