Outlaws Inc. Read online

  Mickey enjoys the life, he says. “I became a pilot because I love flying. So that’s my life. I can choose most of what I do. The people are nice. It’s a job.” He does that modest Mickey shrug thing again. “Zhizn harasho.” It’s all good.

  I believe Mickey. He comes across as a decent, reliable man trying, like all of us, to carve something out for himself. But I also know a couple of things that he’s omitting to mention in what, at this stage, is just a casual conversation.

  Because as they line up anonymously on runways, jungle tracks, and military air bases across the world beside the hundreds of aboveboard, legitimate operators with their own liveried ex-Soviet warhorses, there’s a shadier side to some of these crews, to a fair few of the outfits they fly for, and to their missions. Theirs is work that means big money—millions upon millions of dollars—changing hands, often through elaborate networks of bank accounts in places like Cyprus, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and Dubai. And this money doesn’t come from aid organizations, the U.S. military, the UN, or anyone else whose real name appears on the receipts.

  Because, according to recent reports by the United Nations and monitoring groups like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Amnesty International, and the International Peace Information Service—the world’s elite trafficking detectives—many of these phantom pilots, in their “untraceable, migrating flocks of Ilyushin Il-76 planes,” are also the key channel for the illicit transport of “destabilizing commodities” like narcotics, banned weapons, mysterious diamonds, arms to illegal or terrorist armies, and secret supply lines to rogue regimes looking to bust sanctions. They, and their even more elusive network of business partners, have over the past two decades fueled the growth of the global black market, the rule of warlords, and the rise of the mafia, in Eastern Europe and far beyond.

  It’s a tantalizing glimpse of the other world these men inhabit—a world in which nothing is as it seems. One in which a hold full of blankets bound for a disaster zone can apparently transform, midair, into fifteen tons of land mines for the local rebel militia or bootleg goods for the local mafia. One in which a man can be savior and warmonger at the same time, and the very flight that’s full to capacity with doctors and medicine can also magically conjure up the Kalashnikovs that will, within days, be used to execute the patients. A world in which the words mercenary, pilot, aid worker, and trafficker have become dangerously interchangeable.

  “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The tagline and refrain of the 1995 Bryan Singer film The Usual Suspects describes the methods of fictitious Hungarian trafficker, murderer, and crime lord Keyser Söze—a shape-shifting master of disguise whose murderous wake is obscured by rumor, myth, and the failure of the authorities to grasp his endless subtlety, resourcefulness, and determination. To this day in Italy and the United States, Mafia trial juries are flummoxed into making acquittals at the highest level by defense attorneys’ arguments that there really is no such thing as the Mafia—that it’s just a fantasy projected by Hollywood and a few overzealous and deluded prosecutors onto what really are discrete, one-off crimes unworthy of further investigation.

  Even the existence of the most talked-about movement of the twenty-first century is in dispute. Many investigators contend that the very idea of a formal organization called al-Qaeda is primarily an American invention; that the phrase al-Qaeda was first brought to the attention of the public in the 2001 trial of Osama bin Laden and the four men accused of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in East Africa, although there “was no organization,” wrote BBC documentary journalist Adam Curtis for his series documenting neocon policy, The Power of Nightmares. “These were militants who mostly planned their own operations and looked to bin Laden for funding and assistance. He was not their commander.” He points to evidence that bin Laden had not used the term al-Qaeda to refer to the name of a group itself until after September 11th, “when he realized that this was the term the Americans had given it.”

  In fact, these investigators claim that the idea of the organization was promoted by the U.S. Department of Justice post–9/11 because in order to charge bin Laden in absentia, they needed to use the existing Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which in turn meant they needed to demonstrate he was the head of an organization that could be commanded. Because if he commanded it, it could be uncovered, monitored, disrupted, and stopped. In the words of one senior U.S. State Department official, “When all you’ve got is a hammer, the whole world looks like a bag of nails.”

  To U.S. prosecutors and public officials of all stripes, whose very existence hinges on structures of affiliation, allegiance, command, transparency, and accountability, the alternative—that people, goods, and historical forces are conducted by a motive power over which they have no influence or oversight—verges on the literally unthinkable. Because without control and command, any movement becomes diffuse, shape-shifting, threatening, and fundamentally unassailable: Al-Qaeda becomes a state of mind. The Mafia becomes a series of unfortunate coincidences. Osama bin Laden becomes Keyser Söze. And, like Mickey says, “I’m just a postman.”

  To most of us—from you and me right up to the charities themselves, the Pentagon, international law enforcement, and the UN—this twilight world of migratory cargo and global networks of rootless, unaccountable, nonunionized, go-anywhere-carry-anything airmen, each with a briefcase full of different life stories and enough ID to prove every single one beyond doubt, simply does not exist. We put a coin into a charity jar or sign a direct debit form, and we trust that what we send gets to where we’re told it will go. In our world, what goes into a container at one end of a journey is what comes out at the other. Hammer it in, see the same nail come through.

  So the idea of airmen declared dead after a crash apparently rising to take control of a plane in a different part of the world, or massive cargo aircraft disappearing midair, only to turn up at the same instant thousands of miles away a different color, and with a different life story and owner, is the stuff of spine-chilling bedtime stories and David Copperfield Vegas TV spectaculars. And like the ships that carried the Black Death along with their grain, any connection between the goods we knowingly send and the growth of black markets, terrorism, the mafia, the narcotics trade, brutal regimes, civil wars, and global instability is, for most of us, so obscure, so off the radar, that it doesn’t even register until it’s too late.

  Luckily, there are some men and women, at the UN and international monitoring organizations, who’ve put cause and effect together and are tasked with tracking, disrupting, and halting the underground movement of contraband. But even for dedicated trafficking monitors and plane spotters, these countless Ilyushins and the outfits and men who fly them are ghosts, drifting in and out of sight—almost unstoppable, untraceable, and unpunishable. Meanwhile, to the rest of us, these ghosts don’t even exist.

  That is, until we see them for ourselves. I only became aware of these phantom aircrews, clandestine flights, and deadly cargo by accident—or rather, by a series of accidents—that led me from the last days of Soviet collapse, through a job advertising arms deals, to the mafia heartland of Milošević’s Serbia.

  As a young journalist, filing freelance reports from around the world for the BBC while holding down a day job on business magazines about Eastern Europe, I’d already seen the implosion of the old Soviet Union up close. While in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1992, I’d watched spellbound the everyday effect on people’s lives as the system, the rule of law, the economy, the whole Soviet dream went into meltdown, seemingly almost overnight.

  Suddenly, the wide, classical prospekts of St. Petersburg became dark and dangerous places. Office workers and factory hands began stripping lightbulbs, chairs, fittings, ornaments, and cables from their workplaces and heading out into the squares to sell them alongside the householders hawking their belongings. I witnessed one waiter stealing his own restaurant’s cutlery while serving guest
s.

  But if it looked like chaos, there were also tantalizing hints of new, more organized forces at work. The mafia groups were already all-powerful—a well-intended clampdown on alcohol by President Gorbachev between 1985 and 1987, culminating in partial prohibition, had both sunk the state coffers in a country where alcohol is often more a career than a pastime and allowed a countrywide black market for smuggled, stolen, and homemade vodka, wine, and other booze to take root and grow out of control. Now, even amid the masses of patched-up vans and backfiring Ladas, one could see here and there conspicuously shiny Japanese-made jeeps with tinted glass, guarded or ridden shotgun by hulking, shaven-headed, ex-military types.

  The Chechen mafia took over Moscow’s exclusive, thirty-two-hundred-room “foreigners-only” Hotel Rossiya next to St. Basil’s Cathedral, and I watched as they shook down guests and directed their army of bruised, overcoat-clad prostitutes to work the filthy lifts and hammer on guest rooms, attempting to sell sex, heroin, and amphetamines they called cocaine.

  Meanwhile, on Moscow’s lively Arbat Street, bony AWOL soldiers sold off liberated army gear—their uniforms, supplies, live bullets on the roll. Western defense analysts were already hurriedly trying to place and trace the last known locations of the billions of tons of explosives, bullets, nuclear and biochemical material, and military technology now lying loose and unguarded and very much for sale.

  A lifelong Russophile, I was horrified. But in a funny way, I was fascinated too. This dangerous, dirty place on the verge of anarchy, full of the dark antiglamour of desperation and violence, was everything my middle-class home wasn’t. And most of all, I was curious. What will these people do now? In a place this powerful and this unstable, what happens next?

  Back in London and struggling in journalism, I worked briefly in a dead-end job at a journal publisher, whose titles included a defense trade magazine and several Russian business titles. Though the publishers can’t have known it and ran them in good faith, I couldn’t help noticing how occasional ad pages seemed to function as discreet clearinghouses for any MiG-29 fighter planes or bits of other hardware that Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian biznesmeny or impoverished state concern had acquired and wished to convert into currency. Taking copy of the “We are your ideal partner in Russia for sell top military plane” variety, dictated by a man who only ever referred to himself as “The Contact” over a crackly phone line from a dacha* in the Caucasus seemed to fit, somehow, with what I’d seen myself a year or so earlier. None of them ever paid for their ads.

  But with their dachas and deals, these men were clearly at the top of the tree: the winners from the big shake-up. I couldn’t help wondering about where that money was going. About who could possibly have a use for all these Soviet planes. And about who was going to fly them. What ever happened to all those regular Joes down below?

  Then in 1998, I found myself in what was left of a rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia—the war in Bosnia over, the NATO intervention in Kosovo imminent—on what I hoped would become a freelance piece for the Sunday Telegraph. And with the currency collapsing and the Serb mafia and regime cronies holding court in the hotels of Belgrade, I considered myself pretty well versed in Eastern European anarchy. I thought I’d seen it all before.

  What I hadn’t prepared myself for was the first glimmering of an answer to the questions I’d been asking myself all along.

  * We became quite friendly eventually, and he posted me a photo of the interior, log-clad with huge animal skins stretched out on the walls and rifles above the door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  What Am I Doing Here?

  Serbia, 1998

  THE FREEZING NIGHT RAIN COMES IN DRIFTS, smashing onto the driveway of the Hyatt Regency Belgrade with the force of an airborne tsunami. There’s no point pulling my collar up against the roaring night, but I’m relieved to have made it out of the boozy, pistol-packing driver’s cab. For a few seconds, the universe is chaos. Then the glass moves and I cross into the bubble of warm-blown air and light music.

  Inside, cops are everywhere, flashing sidearms, smoking cigarettes, and drinking with mobsters. The atrium is crawling with “security”: some state, some private, some mafia, some uniformed, some not. Packing the lobbies, restaurants, and business centers, press, diplomats, and NGOs bide their time, flipping between CNN and BBC World and swapping stories about how close we are to the inevitable backlash against Milošević’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, his increasingly flagrant disregard for international diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis, and his mafia-sponsored grip on Serbia itself.

  Right now, this hotel is the branded international heart of Belgrade: a relatively safe environment where diplomats and anchormen stay and work, and where Serbia’s own VIPs play. The once-proud Hapsburg city and former capital of Yugoslavia has by 1998 become the tattered gangland capital of a state now consisting solely of Serbia, its tiny mountainous neighbor Montenegro, and whatever claims on Kosovo it could make stick. Even now, it’s obvious to everyone but the regime itself that these are its final days. Just like the Moscow I’d left in 1992, this freewheeling, broken Belgrade is a honeypot for the new rich, the scene of almost daily mafia assassinations, and home to an honest, increasingly desperate majority still grimly holding on for better days.

  It’s also the playground of the Milošević regime’s cultivated army of cronies, mobsters, and mercenaries, and the black-market heart of the remaining economy: the town’s official structures are ruled by “Red Businessmen”—gangsters given carte blanche by the regime to kill and traffic to their hearts’ content, in return for their loyalty to Milošević when it’s head-cracking time. Only now, they are falling too—blown up in cars, machine-gunned by ski-masked assailants, stamping desperately on sabotaged brake pedals, having outlived their usefulness to the regime or simply aroused the paranoid suspicions of an ever-shifting inner circle around the president. Even the most feared aren’t safe: Before long, regime favorite, Serb militia commander, color-supplement pinup, and war criminal Arkan will be gunned down in the lobby of the InterContinental next door.

  “One of theirs got assassinated upstairs,” nods my young, slick-coiffed, and Italian-shoed fixer Sasha (not his real name) across the room at a smart young American Psycho look-alike. “A man called Knele in room 331. Checked in, left strictest instructions that nobody was to be allowed up to his room without the front desk calling to announce the visitor. Then a visitor walks straight into his room and blows his brains out.” His hands trace an imaginary room layout on the table. “Think too much about that and you will become very paranoid. Because if somebody let the killer up to do his work, then you know nothing is forbidden.”

  It’s a while before I figure out just why his phrase is nagging at me so badly.

  Serbia is, to all appearances, isolated in the world. The government is careering into its last madness, ordering hit after hit, crackdown after crackdown. Someone on the hotel TV is talking about the latest arms embargo passed against Belgrade by UN Security Council resolution 1160, aimed at forcing what was still officially Yugoslavia to open a dialogue with Kosovo Albanians. Amid the economic collapse and stop-start hyperinflation at home come varying degrees of sanctions, downgrades, embargoes, and censures applied over the past few years by the EU, the United Nations, the United States, and other individual states and organizations in a list as long as your arm.

  On paper, Belgrade is a city in which a great many things are forbidden. Outside the glass bubble, ordinary Serbs pick through rubbish, sell off their last belongings, teeter between poverty and desperation. Yet among the chosen out here in New Belgrade’s luxury palaces, champagne corks pop. International news teams eat fresh fusion cuisine and get whatever protection, transport, and kit they need at the click of a finger. Cash is showered about with ostentatious largesse—no weak Yugoslav dinar here, just fresh deutsche marks and U.S. dollars. All over Belgrade, for the favored few, cocaine is freely available. Guns, luxury
goods, and substances that should be scarce are ubiquitous. Where’s it all coming from?

  “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” smiles one local businessman over lunchtime drinks at the Hyatt the next day. “Some stuff you can theoretically get legally, but it’s too difficult and costs too much to do it. I can tell you one thing: If anyone in this city tells you their business, their government ministry, their shop, their restaurant, whatever, could survive for a single week without some benefit, directly or indirectly, knowing or unknowing, from the smuggling pipeline, you can tell them from me they’re talking bullshit.”

  Food and fuel, he confides, are smuggled by land on a nightly basis across the border from Romania and Hungary. Other more specialist items for shops arrive on unpoliceable successions of plain container barges up the Danube, where New Belgrade gets first shout. Some basics designated as “humanitarian aid” get diverted, either en route or upon delivery into the hands of black marketeers. Meanwhile Yugoslav- or Soviet-made arms and other goods are sold for hard currency abroad: dollars, marks.

  “All that sort of thing comes and goes by plane,” he tells me, laughing at how cloak-and-dagger he sounds. “The dealers have their delivery men.”

  Soviet planes have been coming and going with noticeable regularity for a couple of years now, says the businessman. This has opened up a black-market wormhole through which anything—guns, people, cash, black-market goods, drugs—can appear or disappear. It makes sense. When you drive through impromptu barricades all day, these mysterious giant Soviet-era planes begin to sound like no-brainers—no stickups, shakedowns, or quasi-military roadblocks at thirty thousand feet. But they also sounded expensive. The fuel for a journey from anywhere outside the Balkans would cost hundreds of thousands of (theoretically unavailable) U.S. dollars. Someone has to be flush.