STOPCRIME.RU - THREE MYSTERIOUS MURDERS

Piccadilly restaurant in the very beginning of Leninsky prospect is really not the most favourite place for police agents of the MDA central machinery. Located a hundred metres from the building on Zhitnaya St. (office of MDA of the Russian Federation), earlier it was quite a popular place for the top officers for dinners, festive parties and business meetings, that was then, but not anymore. Until the Department of Internal Security of the MDA and the Administration for Internal Security of the Federal Security Agency installed tapping devices on a few tables. Nikolay Petrovich flatly refused to go to Piccadilly. That’s why a general of the Chief Administration for Control of Organised Crime at MOI, let’s call him Nikolay Petrovich, and I met in Shokoladnitsa, a café for young people, on Yakimatka St., right across the street from the private entrance to his own agency. Having settled at one of the tables close to some students, we talked in half-whisper. Many generals have kept this manner, apparently, back from the Soviet times. They’d better speak in a whisper at Piccadilly. During our conversation, I had to ask Nikolay Petrovich to repeat himself a few times, and I spent a few hours then transcribing the dictaphone recording. Well, I couldn’t help it: secrecy!
– You see, it’s not correct to say that the Chernys had a ‘front’ among the criminals. Rather, the other way round. It was Misha who established connections in the gangster community. Of course, they were necessary at that time for business. First of all, Cherny had acquaintances in the Izmaylovo and Golyanovo organised criminal gangs. The Izmaylovo’s had the leader Oleg Ivanov, an underworld leader from Kazan. By the way, his destiny is unknown to me. He disappeared somewhere. But it was he who, on Lev and Mikhail’s request, dragged his criminal mob to Siberia for conquering the aluminium market. At the same time, I wouldn’t overstate the personality of the second leader: Anton Malevsky. Yes, he was always an authority, but was first of all a good organiser, a sportsman – he was friends with the tennis player Zhenya Kafelnikov, and Shamil Tarpishchev. In 1997, the General Prosecutor’s Office together with the Investigation Committee of MDA tried to determine the connections of the Cherny brothers with the major organised criminal gangs, whose backbone was represented just by Golyanovo and the Izmaylovo guys. A lot of interesting details were found out. For example, the fact that the Chernys used truly criminal schemes for their business: money from the gang’s common fund, cheap credits from criminalised banks and, of course, forged advice notes. It was written about it, both in books and in the press. This, in essence, was their initial capital, with the help of which the seizure of the metallurgical industry plants happened later on. But who used whom? It was not the gangsters who made a fortune on it in the first place. They received leftovers and were mostly executors of the plans of their business managers. Anatoly Kulikov who was the then MOI in due time confirmed that the showdowns in Krasnoyarsk and Bratsk were held with the active participation of the Moscow criminal mob. But you’d better talk about this with him. As for me, I can tell for sure that Misha Cherny, for instance, actively used kingpins, too. There was the kingpin Tyurik. If I’m not mistaken, a lot is said about their relationships in specialised militia literature. Besides, one can find it in open sources, too. Tyurik, using his connections with the managers of, for example, Bratsk aluminium smelter, was responsible for supply of aluminium to the London Exchange via the Israeli, Spanish, and American companies controlled by him. And the Uzbek kingpins Gafur and Salim were responsible for supply of raw materials to the same Bratsk and Krasnoyarsk smelters, when those were under the Chernys’ control. Even Anton Malevsky is more related to Mikhail Cherny, because they had both lived for a long time in Israel and because they had a common friend: Alik Taiwanchik, a.k.a. Alimzhan Tokhtakhunov. It was he who acquainted them. By the way, Mikhail once was even arrested in Switzerland for this ‘friendship,’ but was then released. (I would have to hear this mysterious passport story a few more times. – Editor’s note). But the ‘front’ was, in essence, if you mean the aluminium business itself, of course, the brothers themselves. They didn’t let anybody to ‘the top of the iceberg.’ Neither Anton nor even Tyurik. They just worked for them. As for the brothers, they shared their roles. For example, Mikhail maintained the connections with the political establishment, with politicians and was responsible for security and foreign relations. A lot was told about this even by Anatoly Kulikov. I can find a transcript of his speech at the meeting of the State Duma for you. Their names and the names of companies are mentioned there. However, we couldn’t advance very far. Very many important witnesses who could have told the truth about how the aluminium business was conducted in those years died in strange circumstances.
I talked with Nikolay Petrovich for about a further forty minutes. When we parted, I was sure: I would need his assistance very much. It was just interesting why he flatly refused to talk in his office on Zhitnaya St. Are there still bugs there, really? Or is the topic itself still so horrifying even for a general of the MDA?
I stayed in the café in order to make an attempt to analyse all I heard. So, the militia was well aware that in 1992-1993, two major economic diversions were held simultaneously. On the one hand, it was laundering black money in the aluminium industry, accompanied by the mass export of ‘aircraft metal’ abroad, which had become gratuitous. On the other hand, it’s the theft of hundreds of billions of roubles from the state budget with the help of those notorious advice notes. In the opinion of the MDA investigators, there could also be a ‘single brain’ behind conducting those business diversions. But the law-enforcement authorities couldn’t move far ahead in their investigations. Here is the reason. At first, the ‘fake money’ is transferred directly to the aluminium enterprises, then it is preferred to cash it via a range of sham phony companies. And the schemes of transactions were so intricate, that when the investigators detected fraud, they just couldn’t determine whom to consider the offended party! In this sea of offshore companies, as Alexander Dobrovinsky once told me, only a single company could return profit to the real owner of the business – the one registered somewhere in Monte Carlo or on Maine Island. It is interesting, was it just like that in Mikhail Cherny’s business story, that a single small company somewhere in the Virgin Islands made him a true billionaire? But how could the trace of this company be found without knowing the entire scheme? And the law-enforcement authorities didn’t have their man inside the ‘aluminium king’ gang.
There was one more difficulty: As soon as the detectives identified one of the key figures in this multi-step business fraud, soon that person was either stopped by a killer’s bullet or killed in a car accident. The lives of the aluminium managers Igor Beletsky and Alexander Borisov who made forged advice notes on behalf of Sobinvest Co., Deputy Chairman of the Russian Metallurgical Committee Yuriy Koletnikov, who supervised the aluminium industry, stopped under car wheels. Besides, the ‘cooperation’ of the offshore businessmen with the Siberian plants was accompanied by countless criminal showdowns. In Krasnoyarsk alone, five ‘aluminium generals’ were killed. The famous entrepreneur Vadim Yafyasov was also killed; he worked with NkAZ (Novokuznetsk) under a mandate of the Cherny brothers. Yes, this is the same Yafyasov, the main witness of the advice note case. In the summer of 1993, he got, I would say, into a big scrape, when the law-enforcement authorities found out that the transfer of 900 million roubles to the smelter’s account was made by a forged advice note from Dagestan. Yafyasov promptly changed NkAZ for Yugorsky bank and disappeared for a while from the view of his former ‘partners.’ Then, as police agents state, Vadim finally agreed to tell about several economic frauds to the officers of the MDA and the General Prosecutor’s office. Probably, Yafyasov could really clear up a lot for the investigators, but on April 10th, 1995, as the information agencies told, ‘in the yard of an apartment house on Kutuzovsky Prospect, two unidentified criminals rained bullets into the BMW-750 car, in which there was Vadim Yafyasov, Vice President of Yugorsky bank, just assigned Deputy Director General for Foreign Economic Relations of Krasnoyarsk aluminium smelter, where the bank had bought a considerable stake lately.’ Later, the only crime victim who survived – driver Vadim Tishaev – managed to report a few important details. About two days before the incident, he was together with Yafyasov in the banker’s apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospect. At 8 pm the telephone rang. The driver didn’t know the meaning of the conversation or the name of the caller, but he noted that after the call, Yafyasov definitely became nervous and behaved very tensely. The police agents identified that for a few days before the murder, Yafyasov’s car had been watched. He was constantly followed by a red BMW. The detectives had almost broken their back before they found out the name of the person spying on Yafyasov. According to the criminal investigation, it turned out to be Alexander Borisov, TWG’s representative in Russia. However, during the interrogation he absolutely refused to have anything to do with the Cherny brothers’ company and told that he had established his own business long before, that he had a conversation with Yafyasov on the topic of joint business, and it had a peaceful and friendly nature. However, the investigation, as noted by the information agency of the FLB, had somewhat different information available. The day before his death, the terribly scared Yafyasov met Oleg Kantor, President of Yugorsky bank. Yafyasov said that they talked about the state-owned shareholding of Achinsk alumina refinery. A representative of the Cherny brothers’ company allegedly threatened Yafyasov, stating that he was ‘condemned to death’ for the fact that Yugorsky bank started laying claims to the assets in the aluminium industry, which were under control of the Cherny brothers. But the investigators didn’t manage to find out anything else. Yafyasov’s killer, as usual, wasn’t found.
It is interesting that in 1995 the same Yafyasov, when he worked at Yugorsky bank, began lobbying the interests of one American industrial group (AIOC), the main competitor of the same Trans-CIS Commodities, whose activities were controlled by Mikhail Cherny. Yafyasov began hindering someone very much. But his death was just the first one in a series of people involved in or witness to the aluminium cases. Soon after Vadim’s death, Oleg Kantor, President of Yugorsky bank was brutally killed. In July 1995, he was slaughtered by unidentified criminals at the threshold of his house. Such a death had to horrify, scare those who learned the details about it: Besides the throat cut from ear to ear, the killer ripped open the banker’s chest, inflicted on him about two dozen deep wounds, and as a finishing stroke stabbed the instrument of crime into the victim’s chest. Oleg Kantor’s country house in Snegiri settlement was literally covered with his blood. Kantor’s security guard was also killed: He was a professional bodyguard, an Afghan war veteran. It is interesting that the banker’s widow Olesya a few years later would become the common-law wife of Leonid Nevzlin, a top manager of YUKOS, whose Menatep bank was the major financial partner of Mikhail Cherny. The irony of fate…
The investigators who were thoroughly studying all circumstances of the case and the situation in Yugorsky bank came to a definite conclusion: The banker’s murder was related to his plans to obtain the controlling stocks of Krasnoyarsk and Bratsk aluminium smelters. The direct connection with the murder of Kantor’s partner, Vadim Yafyasov, could also be traced. The press also expressed the opinion many times, which only confirmed the story of my interlocutor from the MDA. The murders of Yafyasov and Kantor were interrelated; they were links of the same chain which led to the offshore business. New light on this story was shed by the revelations of Boris Fyodorov, the former President of the National Sports Foundation. The transcript of his private conversations was published by one of the Moscow newspapers. (The story about the appearance of this recording should be told separately a bit later.) The sports functionary openly talked about certain commercial relations between the Cherny brothers and Shamil Tarpishchev, Mikhail Barsukov who was then Director of the Federal Security Agency of Russia, and Alexander Korzhakov, Head of the Security Service of the Russian President. Fyodorov also hinted that ‘the President’s favourites’ knew who killed Oleg Kantor and what for… Fyodorov also mentioned the murder of a certain Felix. Apparently, he talked about Felix Lvov who headed the Russian representative office of AIOC – a large industrial group, one of the major Western aluminium traders. The story of his murder surfaced many times during my interviews with very different people in the course of this investigation. It is known, and Nikolay Petrovich also confirmed it, that Lvov at some point began cooperating with the Russian intelligence agencies, assisting them to collect compromising evidence on the ‘aluminium generals.’ He managed to report quite a lot about the Cherny brothers, too. This is discussed by Alexander Maksimov, the author of the book ‘Russian Crime. Who is Who?’ which I have already mentioned:
‘Lvov, apparently, paid for the information about the Cherny brothers with his life. The killers who showed him the ID’s of the officers of some intelligence agency kidnapped him right in the airport, from the passport control area. Taking into account that a year and a half before his death, Felix sent an application to the General Prosecutor’s Office with accusations against the Cherny brothers; he most likely didn’t have much time left in this world. In May 1995, he made a speech at the State Duma hearings. In September, he was killed. Mikhail Cherny was a person involved in the criminal case on Lvov’s murder, but the case itself was soft-pedalled. It is interesting that, being an AIOC employee, Lvov dealt with the supply of electrodes to the Krasnoyarsk smelter and aluminium trade, and it was his interests to the prejudice of the Cherny brothers that were lobbied at KrAZ by Vadim Yafyasov. This murder was also related to Kantor’s murder.’
In the messages of the Russian press, I managed to find another curious fact connecting all three murders. So, what did the information agencies report?
‘On September 6th, 1995, Lvov accompanied by his security guards came to Sheremetyevo airport. After processing the documents for the flight, the security guards left. Lvov passed through the pre-flight security and was in the passenger lounge with other passengers. When 15 minutes were left before the flight, two men came up to him. They introduced themselves as officers of the Federal Security Agency, presented their ID’s and suggested that Lvov followed them. All three of them were seen for the last time when they left the territory of the airport. Two days later, Lvov’s corpse with five gunshot wounds was found at the side of Volokolamskoye Shosse on a rubbish pile.
The investigators immediately related Lvov’s death to the case of Trans-CIS Commodities, since the dead man many times, including at the State Duma hearings ‘On the status of privatisation in the aluminium industry’ on May 30th, 1995 strongly opposed the participation of the Cherny brothers’ company in this business on the territory of Russia. And shortly before his death, Lvov, as the Russian press had stated many times, had passed certain materials to the investigation group for Oleg Kantor’s and Vadim Yafyasov’s murders, in which Oleg Soskovets and the Cherny brothers appeared. The materials clearly traced the conflict of those characters with the killed financiers due to the re-division of the aluminium industry, as well as participation of Vice Prime Minister Soskovets in the activities of the Cherny brothers. Plus, the police agents managed to record Lvov’s prejudicial evidence where he stated that the murders were related to the aluminium affairs and Trans-CIS Commodities. He also told that the Cherny brothers had extensive connections among the criminal leaders, and maintained contacts with the intelligence agencies of Uzbekistan, first of all via the leaders of the local organised criminal gangs Gafur and Salim, as well as their childhood friend Taiwanchik. All of them helped the Chernys to establish the criminal ‘front’ above KrAZ. For those revelations, Lvov was openly threatened on numerous occasions by the same representatives of Trans-CIS.
And in July 1995, right after Kantor’s terrifying death, there happened an event which could be interpreted as the final warning. Unidentified people kidnapped Lvov’s driver Volin from the office of his company ‘Forward’ and kept him in an unidentified location for a few days, after which they set him free with the demand to pass a reprisal threat to Lvov.
Another mysterious and inexplicable story of the aluminium wars is also related to the Cherny brothers. After the murder of Yafyasov, a certain person came to the police agent who dealt with this criminal case in the criminal militia agency of the Western district of Moscow. Having presented the ID of a current officer of the Federal Security Agency, he unfiled the photographs of the Cherny brothers without drawing up the documents prescribed in such cases. To the question of the police agent where he could find the officer of the Federal Security Agency if he would need the photographs, he replied that he would appear himself if needed. During the follow-up inspection, it turned out that there had never been an officer of the intelligence agencies with such a last name at the Federal Security Agency. As supposed, it was this sham officer of the Federal Security Agency who entered the territory of the closely guarded Snegiri complex and killed Kantor. It was him again who participated in kidnapping and killing Lvov. None of those murders in Russia have been solved. And Boris Fyodorov told about all those murders! He knew the whole story perfectly. The revelations of the former sports functionary were extremely dangerous and right after their publication led many people to the thought that Fyodorov could be in danger… Boris Fyodorov was first injured, when an attempt was committed on his life in central Moscow, and then he died unexpectedly, allegedly from drug abuse. Very few people believed his story, however.
The following information appeared after his death in the information agencies, when journalists started looking for the reason for the murder of the former sports functionary:
‘In June 1996, Boris Fyodorov, President of the National Sports Foundation, recieved a gunshot and four knife wounds in the centre of Moscow, and shortly before that had refused to cooperate with Trans World and had publicised certain details about the Cherny’s business and partners in Russia. On the night of April 24th, 1999 Fyodorov suddenly died at home in Moscow in unknown circumstances…’
In his monologue published in the press, Fyodorov also hinted at the connections of the sports functionary Shamil Tarpishchev with the leaders of the Izmaylovo gang and the Cherny brothers. Later on, the video confirming it appeared on the NTV channel. The record made in Ben Gurion airport has already been mentioned. Yes, it was that very record where Tarpishchev’s luggage trolley was pushed by Anton Malevsky and Mikhail Cherny. Later Vladimir Gusinsky, owner of NTV and Most media empire, confessed that the record was made by the officers of his security service. A serious scandal flared up. Partly, it was just that material of NTV which prompted Anatoly Kulikov, Minister of the Interior, to make a report at the State Duma meeting, in which the Cherny brothers were mostly discussed. And Nikolay Petrovich told me about the same report on that morning at Shokoladnitsa café. I dialled his phone number again and asked him to find the transcript of Kulikov’s speech as soon as possible, and at the same time go on with our conversation. Nikolay Petrovich, as I reckoned, promised to help. But before that, I needed to figure out what made Boris Fyodorov oppose Mikhail Cherny so openly in the press. I knew that the story of Fyodorov himself, both as a businessman and President of teh National Sports Foundation, was not irreproachable. He got the foundation just when it was headed by Shamil Tarpishchev (Fyodorov’s predecessor in this position), received enormous benefits – he was exempt from customs duties, traded imported cigarettes and alcohol. The money made on this was just tremendous. Until that very scandal with Fyodorov’s recorded conversation flared up…