Meanwhile, operatives of the Moscow RUOP had set out to fly to Greece after receiving information from Butorin that Solonik lived in the small village of Baribobi on the outskirts of Athens. Following the directions Butorin had given them, on February 3, 1997, the RUOP officers discovered Solonik s body. If they had arrived a day earlier, they might have found him alive. But the people who drew up the timetable for their operation knew just who should arrive where and when, and they were late precisely because they were not supposed to find Solonik alive.
That, in general terms, is the official version of events. What actually happened we shall never know. Solonik had left four audiocassettes with his recorded memoirs in a numbered safe in a bank in Cyprus. In January 1997, a few days before he met his end, he phoned his lawyer Valery Karyshev and asked him to publish the contents of the tapes in case of his death. When Solonik departed on February 2, for some reason he took the money from his account with him. Somehow, Solonik s fingerprints disappeared from his case file, and the girl friend who was with him in Baribobi disappeared into thin air.
With typical lawyer s alacrity, Karyshev published Solonik s tapes that same year, and it became clear that the book, which told a lot of stories, but without naming names, was
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Solonik s special insurance policy: don t come looking for me, or I will name the names.
Incidentally, Butorin, who was put on the federal wanted list for committing especially heinous crimes was never found. They say he became a big businessman. He always had several foreign passports, so he could easily have left Russia altogether.
Another free-lance special group was the organization of GRU Colonel Valery Radchikov, the head of the Russian Fund for Afghan War Invalids. The group was founded in 1991 via the GRU. At the final count thirty-seven people connected with the invalids fund were killed, and another sixty-two were injured.
In 1994, the fund s first manager, Mikhail Likhodei, was blown up in the entranceway of his apartment block. In October 1995, Radchikov only survived by a miracle when he was seriously wounded by six bullets but managed to evade the killers who attacked him in his car. However, his legal advisor and deputy, Dmitry Mateshev, never recovered consciousness and died following the shoot-out. On November 10, 1996, fourteen people were blown to pieces and twenty-six mutilated by an explosion at the Kotlyakovskoe Cemetery. The dead included Likhodei s widow, Elena Krasnolutskaya, who was financial director at the invalids fund and Likhodei s friend and successor, Sergei Trakhirov. Radchikov was accused of planning the bombing. On September 3, 1998, when Radchikov was already in jail, another of his assistants, the general director of a new Afghan War fund, Valery Vukolov, was shot dead.
For all these years, money had been embezzled from the fund, which, after all, is only the norm in Russia, but the extent of the embezzlement was exceptional. The most conservative estimates put the amount at about 200 million dollars. The case was investigated by the finest men in the public prosecutor s office, led by investigator for especially important cases Danilov. He was assisted by four other big-wigs and over 100 operatives (making in total a team of over 180). But they were unable to work out where the millions stolen from the Afghan War invalids had gone. Radchikov himself was accused of stealing only two-and-a half-million.
A few days after Radchikov s arrest, his deputy at the fund, Valery Voshchevoz, who monitored all of the fund s cash flows and was one of Yeltsin s agents for the presidential campaign of 1996, was hastily dispatched to the Amur Region as the president s plenipotentiary representative. The trial of Radchikov and his two accomplices, Mikhail Smurov and Andrei Anokhin, lasted ten months. On January 17, 2000, the state prosecutor demanded sentences of thirteen, fifteen, and ten years for the accused.
Radchikov was accused of plotting in 1996 to kill his competitor in the Afghan movement, the chairman of the invalids fund, Sergei Trakhirov, and of giving a pistol and at least 50,000 dollars for this purpose to one of his neighbors in the apartment block, the Afghan War veteran Andrei Anokhin. Anokhin, in turn, persuaded Mikhail Smurov to take part in the murder for 10,000 dollars.
Killing Trakhirov was not easy. Everywhere he went he was accompanied by bodyguards from the Vityaz unit, which was under the command of S.I. Lysiuk, who worked closely
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with the FSB. Hero of Russia Sergei Ivanovich Lysiuk, the founder and first commander of the Vityaz interior forces special operations unit of the MVD RF, had been recruited into the ranks of the secret agents of the Special Section of the KGB, when he was still a senior lieutenant. The last member of the special service to act as Lysiuk s contact was the head of the military counterintelligence unit, Vladimir Yevgenievich Vlasov, who actually removed Lysiuk s name from the listings of the FSB s secret agents (so that he would not be given a new controller) and made him a so-called archive agent. Lysiuk won his Hero of Russia for commanding the Vityaz unit in the defense of the Ostankino television center in 1993. He was the one who gave the order to open fire on the supporters of the putsch.
In the new circumstances, Vlasov was one of Lysiuk s deputies in his commercial firm.
Operational information actually indicates that the commercial activities of Lysiuk s firm included training contract killers, including members of Lazovsky s group, but Lysiuk himself might not have known anything about that, even though the Moscow Region criminal investigation department reported frequent sightings of Lazovsky at Lysiuk and Vlasov s base.
So the conspirators decided to blow up Trakhirov at the Kotlyakovskoe Cemetery during the wake for Mikhail Likhodei, the chairman of the Afghan War invalids fund who was killed in 1994. Amazingly enough, just a few days before the bombing, Trakhirov s bodyguards were changed. The new bodyguards were killed in the explosion, but the old ones from Vityaz survived. We can assume that Lysiuk might have known about the forthcoming assassination attempt from Vlasov or other people in his entourage.
The court hearings on the case of the bombing concluded on April 18. The accused were offered the final word, and all three of them said they had nothing at all to do with the terrorist attack and asked the court to find them innocent. Radchikov s lawyer, P. Yushin, declared that the case had been deliberately fabricated. On January 21, the Moscow District Military Court, under the chairmanship of Colonel of Justice Vladimir Serdiukov, acquitted the accused because their involvement in the crime committed had not been proved. The court regarded the arguments of the investigation into the case of the explosion at Kotlyakovskoe Cemetery as unconvincing. The acquittal was founded on the results of the court s analysis of the remains of the explosive device, which diverged significantly from the results of the analysis carried out during the investigation. In addition, a female acquaintance of one of the accused, Mikhail Smurov, testified that on the day of the explosion Smurov was at home and could not possibly have set off the explosive device as the investigators accused him of doing.
Valery Radchikov was also acquitted on the charge of embezzling two-and- a-half million dollars from the fund. All three accused were released directly from the courtroom. On July 25, 2000, the Public Prosecutor s Office lost its appeal to the Supreme Court for the acquittal to be set aside. Radchikov was intending to take the dispute to the European Court. However, at about eight o clock in the evening on January 31, 2001, he was killed in an automobile accident thirty-nine kilometers along the Minsk Highway on his way back to Moscow in a Moskvich 2141 automobile. That same day the
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Novosti press agency announced that the law enforcement agencies were of the opinion that Radchikov s death might not have been a simple accident.
Dozens of dead bodies, millions of dollars missing, and not a single criminal caught- taken altogether this is simply a statistical impossibility for the world of crime. You don t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work out who was behind this complicated and highly successful game in which the main player suffered a fatal automobile accident at such a convenient moment.
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Chapter 9
The FSB organizes contract killings From 1993, Lazovsky s brigade included the Uzbek Quartet. All four of the group were Russians who had been born in Uzbekistan. They were also former special operations group officers who, according to the head of the 10th Section of the Moscow RUOP, Vitaly Serdiukov, were supremely skilled in using all forms of firearms and could improvise powerful bombs from items that happened to be at hand. These four criminals specialized in contract killings. Provisional estimates by operational agents made the foursome responsible for about twenty hits carried out in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Lipetsk, Tambov, Arkhangelsk, and other cities. Behind the killers stood a general contractor, a kind of operations manager who accepted the contracts. With that kind of organization it was effectively impossible to identify the clients who ordered the killings.
Tskhai was the first to figure out the Uzbek system, which always kept the client out of the picture.
The Uzbek Quartet lived in one of the houses on Petrovka Street, close to the Moscow GUVD building. The hitmen s victims apparently included several oil and aluminum magnates, bankers, and big businessmen. It is quite possible that the quartet was also responsible for the murder of the vice-governor of St. Petersburg Mikhail Manevich; the general director of Russian Public Television (ORT), Vladislav Listiev; the chairman of the Republican Union of Entrepreneurs, Oleg Zverev, and many others. In any case, the RUOP operatives claimed that the only possible comparison for the quartet in terms of the number of its victims and the quality of its work was the Kurgan brigade. The Kurgans, however, killed mostly legitimate villains and underworld bosses.
The Uzbek Quartet and Lazovsky s people were suspected of abducting Felix Lvov, the Russian representative of the American corporation AIOC, from the VIP lounge at Sheremetievo airport, and later killing him. Lvov s firm was competing for control of the Novosibirsk Electrode Plant, which was the main supplier of electrodes to the Krasnoyarsk Aluminum Plant (KrAZ). In late 1994, the management at KrAZ, headed by the general director Yury Kolpakov, signed a contract with AIOC, which worked closely in Moscow with the Yugorsky commercial bank. The bank s president, Oleg Kantor, and his deputy, Vadim Yafyasov, were planning to make KrAZ one of the bank s clients and earn big money from restructuring the bank to service the financial requirements of aluminum plants.
The negotiations were proceeding successfully. In March 1995, Yafyasov was appointed deputy general director of KrAZ for foreign trade. Lvov, who already worked with the management at KrAZ, had succeeded in getting the flow of virtually all of KrAZ s goods and raw materials channeled through AOIC, and was working towards getting the American company put in charge of the Achinsk Aluminum Plant, with the subsequent sale to AOIC of twenty percent of the shares. On April 10, 1995, four days before a
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meeting of the Achinsk Plant s shareholders, which was due to appoint a new general director, Yafyasov was killed in his own car outside the entrance to his home in Moscow.
It is natural that Felix Lvov was frightened by this event. In late May, he testified before a session of the State Duma concerning illegal operations for the purchase of shares in Russian aluminum plants and the involvement in this business of the Uzbek and Russian mafias. But his appeal to public opinion and the authorities did no good. On the afternoon of July 20, the president of the Yugorsky Bank, Oleg Kantor, was stabbed to death on the grounds of a dacha complex outside Moscow, which was guarded twenty-four hours a day. In late July, yet another signal was given when persons unknown abducted a driver from the firm Forward, which belonged to Lvov, and then released him after a few days.
On September 6, 1995, Lvov was flying to Alma-Ata from the Sheremetievo-1 airport.
He had already gone through customs, when he was approached by two FSK officers who showed him their identity passes and led him away. Witnesses later identified one of the FSK officers, a tall, lean man with black hair, from a photograph. He was Lyokha, one of Lazovsky s warriors. There is good reason to believe that in addition to Lazovsky, Pyotr Suslov was directly involved in this abduction.
On September 8, Felix Lvov s body was discovered lying on a heap of rubbish, just five meters from the asphalt surface of a rest stop, 107 kilometers from Moscow along the Volokolamsk Highway. He had been shot five times. His pockets contained 205,000 rubles, Lvov s card as a member of the board of directors of Alpha Bank, and a Ministry of Foreign Affairs identity card with Lvov s photograph on it, and a false name (Lvov had nothing to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
The killers in the Uzbek Quartet were only caught by chance, when the leader of the group, who was known as Ferganets (i.e. a person from Fergana) was caught trying to cross the Tadjikistan-Kirgizia border with false documents. A check of the files showed that Ferganets was wanted on suspicion of having killed Manevich. Under questioning he stated that the other members of the group were in Kirgizia. In mid-July 1998, Ferganets accomplices were arrested, and all four were taken to Moscow under special security arrangements. Their place of arrest was kept secret.
In fact, the public prosecutor s office of St. Petersburg suspected another St. Petersburg criminal group, also based on special operations personnel, of the murder of Manevich.
The group was headed by forty-year-old former Warrant Officer Vladimir Borisov ( Ensign ) and former tank forces Captain Yury Biriuchenko ( Biriuk ). Criminal investigation officers managed to identify the group late in the summer of 1998. On August 21, almost simultaneous attempts were made on the lives of two brigade leaders in the Sharks criminal grouping, Razzuvailo and Los, who were also officers in the army s special operations forces. The first was fatally wounded in the hallway of a house on Ligovsky Prospect by a killer with a pistol, who had been disguised as a vagrant by professional make-up artists at the Lenfilm film studios. An attempt was made to blow up the second in his BMW automobile on the Sverdlovskaya Embankment of the Neva