How Putin, the KGB, and St. Petersburg city hall officials are linked to the disappearance of cocaine that an Israeli drug cartel tried to smuggle through Russia
28.05.2022
In a joint investigation by Current Time and Radio Liberty about Vladimir Putin's first steps in power, the future Russian omnipotent being's connections with the Colombian and Israeli drug mafias are also touched upon. We present to your attention fragments of the text written by Mark Krutov and Andrei Soshnikov.
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St. Petersburg, February 1993. A group of men stand in the snow-covered courtyard of the "Big House" on Liteiny, 4. Next to them is a cargo trailer with an orange sea container hoisted onto it. One of those present, wearing a winter military uniform, reads the container's number into a microphone - 8965927. "We're opening the container," he says to the camera, after which two assistants help him open the heavy metal doors. Inside are carelessly folded cardboard boxes, one of which immediately tries to fall to the ground. It is caught in time and hoisted back into place.
The next shots show the same people already indoors. They open one of the boxes and take out cans with the word Blony written on them. "When you open the box, there's meat and potatoes in it," the man in camouflage continues, his assistant opens one of the boxes with a can opener, and then with a regular knife. "There's some kind of conglomerate in the box," the "military man" explains. Instead of meat and potatoes, a cylindrical bundle is pulled out of the can. Another man opens the bundle with a knife, and a man with a microphone tastes the contents to the laughter of those gathered. "It tastes bitter. It makes your tongue go numb," he says into the camera. The recording ends.
This video (another fragment of it was included in the 1996 documentary "Men's Work") is an operational film, and the man with the microphone in camouflage looks like Viktor Cherkesov, who at the time was the head of the Ministry of Security's Directorate (UMBR) for St. Petersburg. Cherkesov is called "Putin's man"; he worked in the KGB Directorate for Leningrad and the Leningrad Region from the same year, 1975, as the future president of Russia.
According to the documents, the container contained 18 tons of Colombian stew, but Russian customs officers who stopped the cargo on February 16 at the Torfyanovka checkpoint on the Finnish border found cocaine in some of the boxes, a total of 1,092 kilograms. The Russian security officers passed the video to Channel One of the Israeli public television, which used it in a film about a local criminal group involved in smuggling this batch of drugs.
The filming was staged. As one of the former members of this group, who was personally present in Colombia during the packaging and shipment of cocaine to Russia, told us, a pallet of boxes, in which there were drugs in cans instead of meat and potatoes, was hidden in the center of the container and only he knew its exact "coordinates". It was impossible to find the cocaine without first removing several rows of boxes. Obviously, the customs officers in Torfyanovka were the first to turn over the container.
This man's name is Shemtov Mikhtavi - he spent 32 of his 70 years in prisons in Israel and the United States. The operation to deliver a container of cocaine produced by the Colombian Cali cartel to Europe via Sweden, Finland and Russia was supposed to make him rich, but everything went wrong: the smugglers were being watched by the police of several countries and Interpol, whose goal was to track the shipment and arrest as many of those involved as possible. The operation, as one of the witnesses in the criminal case confirmed to us, failed. In Russia, the container was unexpectedly detained for everyone, and, having fallen into the hands of the security officers, the cocaine disappeared forever from the field of view of the international police organization, as did the opportunity to prove the guilt of the intermediaries and recipients of the cargo in Europe.
Researchers of the biography of the Russian president have repeatedly tried to unravel the mystery of the container of cocaine, which, according to one version, could have really enriched Vladimir Putin and his friends. There is indirect confirmation of this version in the stories of Shemtov Mikhtavi, in open sources and in the materials of his criminal case.
Having once again studied the circumstances of this story and the court documents, as well as having talked to its participants, we found out:
The documents for the container listed the "Mayor's Office of St. Petersburg" as one of its recipients, as well as the city's sanitary service.
One of the offices of this service was located in a neighboring building with a branch of a company that was registered with the assistance of the Committee on External Relations under the Mayor of St. Petersburg, headed by Vladimir Putin. It was owned by an Israeli, whom the Israeli authorities also suspected of involvement in the smuggling of this batch of cocaine.
The members of the Israeli criminal group, through an intermediary, arranged the delivery of "canned meat" with an official of the Mayor's Office of St. Petersburg, and he, as one of them claims, personally with Anatoly Sobchak.
The Israelis involved in the cocaine transportation operation were also involved in other crime stories involving high-ranking Russian officials: for example, the theft of ancient manuscripts from the Russian State Library, for which former government adviser and Russian Prosecutor General Dmitry Yakubovsky served time.
February 24, 1993, the same UMBR building on Liteiny, 4. Viktor Cherkesov gives a press conference about the detention of an unprecedentedly large batch of cocaine at the Vyborg customs office. On the table in front of him are not only cans of cocaine, but also a large rectangular brick. How did it get there?
"It was a gift from people from Cali, who wanted to express their gratitude and trust to us, Israelis, in this way. The container was supposed to contain 1,032 kilograms, but at the last moment they gave us another 60, three separate packages of 20 kilograms, each containing 20 kilogram briquettes. In the photo is one of them. This is my gift, which never became mine," explains Shemtov Mikhtavi.
We meet in the industrial zone of a small town located not far from Ben-Gurion Airport, in the office of the publishing house where he printed his book about this story. Mikhtavi is visibly worried: his book is being prepared for publication in English. He looks the least like a hardened criminal, but in the book and in our conversation he specifically apologizes several times to everyone he could have harmed with his actions.
Shemtov Mikhtavi, as he himself says and as follows from the protocol of his interrogation by the Israeli police, which Radio Liberty and Current Time have become familiar with, personally transported the accompanying documents for the container from the Netherlands to Columbia and back. In order not to get caught, he hid the papers in the lining of his briefcase. According to him, the customer and recipient of the cargo in Russia was listed as "the city hall of St. Petersburg" (this is partially confirmed by documents from the Israeli prosecutor's office, which we will show below), and between Anatoly Sobchak, who allegedly knew about the delivery, and the Israelis there were two intermediaries, one of whom was a friend of Shabtai Kalmanovich, a scandalous Russian-Israeli businessman who served 5.5 years in Israel on charges of espionage for the USSR. Kalmanovich, in turn, was a friend of Sobchak: according to one version, the last person to see him before his death, according to another, the person who was directly present at it. Kalmanovich was killed in Moscow in 2009.
After the arrest of the rest of the criminal group, Mikhtavi managed to hide from justice for almost half a year in the Netherlands, where he learned details of the operation to detain the container from his friends.
- Do you think Sobchak knew that the container was carrying cocaine, or did he think that it really contained food?
- He knew. He definitely knew. Of course, he didn’t talk about it with anyone except Bakhshiev and the second intermediary. We know that Sobchak was involved in corruption, fled to France, and when Putin became president, he returned and had no problems.
- So you think that Sobchak knew everything about the cocaine, but didn’t tell Putin?
- I’m absolutely sure of it. And then the container was detained, those who detained it saw the address to which it was supposed to be delivered, and after that the cocaine disappeared.
– How much money did you expect to receive if the operation was successful?
– 4-5 million dollars. Each of our group invested money and received their share of the cocaine in the container to make a profit after it arrived in Holland.
– If the plan had worked, were you going to send more cocaine to Europe this way?
– Of course, that was the plan. This container was a test. If everything had worked, we would have sent one container after another. And if everything had worked out, we would have sent not only cocaine from the Cali cartel, but also cocaine from the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar.
Even today, almost three decades after the container was seized, attempts to find out anything about this story are met with obstacles. Including from Israeli television journalists. As soon as they hear about the interest in Putin, they stop communicating.
Shemtov Mikhtavi claims that the recipient of the container with cocaine, according to the documents, was the St. Petersburg mayor's office. He also claims that the accompanying papers mentioned the city's sanitary service (then officially called the "Center for State Sanitary and Epidemiological Surveillance"). One of its buildings was located at number 5 on Moldagulova Street. In the neighboring house on the same street (7/6) there was one of the offices of the St. Petersburg business empire of an Israeli entrepreneur living in Belgium. Among other things, it housed the largest customs clearance center for goods. The ZAO itself was registered in 1991 by the Committee for External Relations of the city mayor's office, shortly after it was headed by Vladimir Putin, who, by virtue of his job, was supposed to be involved in coordinating such matters. It was to the terminal belonging to the Israeli, as the newspaper Vecherniy Petersburg wrote, that container SCPU-896592-7 was sent with a ton of cocaine hidden in it, detained by Russian customs officers at the Torfyanovka border checkpoint on February 16, delivered to Vyborg, and then to the building of the former KGB and future FSB on Liteiny, 4.
In 1999, the newspaper "Versiya" published an article in which the version was first put forward that Putin could sell ships of the naval base through the port of Lomonosov. As one of the authors of the article, journalist Oleg Lurye, later wrote, he got this hypothesis from the "dossier on Putin", allegedly compiled by the FSB and circulated in high offices shortly before his appointment as Yeltsin's successor. In 2003, Boris Berezovsky reproduced the same information on the pages of the newspaper "Kommersant", which he owned. "Putin was engaged in selling ships of the naval base through the port of Lomonosov. This port, located on the territory of the former naval base and created by Sobchak, Putin and Cherkesov, is a checkpoint for the smuggling of natural resources from Russia and the import of imported goods into our country," the businessman claimed. The owner of the customs terminal had Israeli friends who by 1993 had long been involved in smuggling art, drugs and jewelry. Their group, whose names were listed in the Israeli request to the Finnish police, was dubbed the "Tel Aviv Cartel" by Western journalists. It was these people who devised and carried out the operation to deliver a ton of cocaine from Columbia to Europe via Russia.
It all started with the marriage of one of them to the daughter of a high-ranking representative of the Cali cartel. 1992-1993 was the height of the drug cartel war in Colombia, the bloody rivalry between the Rodriguez brothers and Pablo Escobar. This war was compounded by problems with drug supplies to the United States due to the fact that American intelligence agencies, in cooperation with the Colombian police, were increasingly able to block existing supply channels. As a result, the people from Cali came up with an idea: to concentrate on the European market, but to deliver drugs through Russia so that the cargo would not arouse suspicion at the destination. St. Petersburg turned out to be an ideal transit point, and the Israelis, who had previously been involved in the supply of small quantities of cocaine to Europe, were ideal partners.
"There was poverty in Russia, there was a shortage of food, so we decided to choose cans of stew for smuggling. And the total corruption of officials in St. Petersburg made this option ideal," recalls Shemtov Mikhtavi.
Mikhtavi's book, in which he talks about his adventures, is called "Operation Acapulco." This is the name given to the international police operation to track this shipment, involving the authorities of Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium and a number of other countries. It began in the same year, 1992, when an Israeli intelligence agent working in Colombia began to notice that Israeli names were increasingly appearing in the conversations of drug dealers she was listening to. Thus, the joint operation of Cali and the "Tel Aviv cartel" ended up under the surveillance of Interpol.
We have read the indictment from the criminal case of Shemtov Mikhtavi, who fully admitted his guilt, was sentenced to 9 years in prison for smuggling Colombian cocaine, but served only six years, being released early in 1999 - to soon be arrested again in another case, about smuggling ecstasy to the USA.
There is another detail in the story with a ton of cocaine. The organizers of the cocaine transit through St. Petersburg were involved in another criminal scam in 1992 - which is also connected with a high-ranking representative of the Russian government: former adviser to the government and the Prosecutor General of Russia, and then lawyer and businessman Dmitry Yakubovsky.
In the early 90s, Yakubovsky was involved in the transfer of property of the Western Group of Forces to Germany and received the nickname "General Dima" (although in fact he was only a colonel). Yakubovsky was accused of having ties to the Solntsevskaya criminal group, and there were reports of his friendship with Vladimir Putin's bodyguard and one of the most influential people in St. Petersburg in the 1990s, Roman Tsepov (who repeatedly denied all such connections).
From 1994 to 1998, Yakubovsky served time in prison for his participation in the theft of ancient manuscripts from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. As Kommersant, which reviewed the case materials, wrote, Yakubovsky was supposed to take manuscripts out of Russia, the regular theft of which was first organized by those same Israelis with the help of the custodian of the rare manuscripts department of the National Library of Russia. Among the stolen valuables were French medieval manuscripts, Central Asian copies with miniatures, but most importantly, Jewish manuscripts, including Torah scrolls, which, as the investigation suspected, were "ordered" from Israel. The scam was uncovered when the stolen Hebrew marriage contract, the Ketubah, was purchased by members of the Friends of the Israel Museum at a book auction in New York and donated to the National Library of Israel, which notified Russia after seeing in the catalogues that the manuscript belonged to the National Library.
As a lawyer, Yakubovsky defended, among others, Anatoly Sobchak's widow Lyudmila Narusova in 1999, when Sobchak himself was in France after a case was opened against him for bribery and abuse of office. The Russian prosecutor's office then accused Narusova of slander for her statements in which she accused the department of "bias." Ksenia Sobchak linked the case against her father with "the Yeltsin team's fight against Putin." In November 1999, the case against Sobchak was closed, he returned to Russia, unsuccessfully tried to become a State Duma deputy and governor of St. Petersburg, after Yeltsin's resignation he supported Vladimir Putin in the presidential elections, but in February 2000, without waiting for the vote, he died on a trip to the Kaliningrad region "from heart failure" - as the above-mentioned Shabtai Kalmanovich claimed in an interview with Fontanka, "in his arms." Lyudmila Narusova also said that Kalmanovich was the first person to see Sobchak dead. Narusova did not answer Current Time's questions.
Despite the lack of direct evidence, Mikhtavi is sure that it was Vladimir Putin who actually appropriated his cocaine. The Israeli does not hold a grudge against the Russian president, although he believes that it is time for him to leave the political scene.