Outlaws Inc. (10 page)

The airport, its hangars and loading bays, rapidly became a sanction-breakers', black marketeers', and traffickers' playground, and a natural honeypot for Mickey's connections and, quickly, Mickey himself. Soon, air-conditioned restaurants with Russian-only menus, discreet vodka bars, and handling-agent types from Odessa and Vitebsk were part of the crew's monthly, if not daily, routine. Bank accounts were opened, apparently without ID or with the same people using different passports every day, in names nobody knew; paper companies were born, registered, and then immediately seemed to disappear. Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, investigative journalists and the coauthors of
Merchant of Death,
wrote that by the end of the 1990s, when HSBC Sharjah did a housekeeping audit, it found that some 1,186 bank accounts had been opened by hundreds of different Russians in one branch alone. The speed at which the accounts opened, were used to transfer huge sums, then closed again, was, they concluded, proof of “money laundering on a huge scale.”

Across Sharjah and neighboring Dubai, the
hawala
system of Islamically correct banking, in which large sums could be given, loaned, invested, and repaid without the need for interest—or, crucially, transfer records or receipts—was an open door for smugglers, launderers, and mafia from all countries looking to “clean” the suspiciously large profits from their illicit ventures. Airline employees taking home less than two thousand dollars a month would receive transfers of millions in and out of their accounts. In one incident, bemused investigators challenged one such aviation worker, whose indignant response was that he'd just been amazingly lucky with a few flutters on the stock exchange. (As scrutiny grew in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and the world's eyes turned to the Emirates as potential havens for terrorist funds, Dubai at least set up an investigation team—though many view it as lip service. Later that year, a Sharjah national on the Dubai Central Bank's money-laundering investigation team had his house attacked by a group of suspected Russian money launderers. With uncanny timing, another promptly began receiving death threats.)

But through the mid-1990s as free-and-easy Sharjah grew, such scrutiny seemed unthinkable. First more planes and crews, then more menus, prostitutes, and businesses were from the former Soviet Union. There was no doubt who was running things now. Mickey began first visiting, then staying. Seemingly without anybody noticing, the Man with No Name who blew into town with a battered old Il-76 or a couple of fuel-guzzling An-12s to his name had become the Man with a Dozen Different Names and Bank Accounts. The only difference was that in this spaghetti western, when he disappeared off into the sunset nobody even asked who that enigmatic stranger was.

But Sharjah wasn't the only one of these wild frontiers rapidly becoming a honeypot for screaming super planes, local mafia, contraband, and hell-raising former Soviet aviators. There were many others, from Ostend in Belgium to Maribor in Slovenia, which locals call “Mafiabor,” though Mickey and Sergei affectionately call it “Marlboro” in honor of the huge mob-run cigarette-smuggling pipeline from Serbia and Montenegro to the EU that its airport served through the 1990s. And yet more from Freetown in Sierra Leone to the former Soviet states in the Caucasus, who were close enough to political fault lines, rogue regimes, and war- and disaster-prone areas to know a good business opportunity when they saw it and jump on the open-market bandwagon.

Like Bavarian beer or Savile Row suits, says Mickey, every airstrip had its own “thing”—its own specialism. For Afghanistan's Kabul, Herat, Jalalabad, and Kandahar, it was humanitarian aid, illicit booze, consumer goods, arms, and cash in; heroin, siphoned-off aid money, raw materials, artifacts, people (both willing clients and unwilling marks) out. Across the Balkans, it was humanitarian assistance, luxury items, black-market cigarettes, guns, heroin, and cash. For Rwanda, Congo, and the rest, humanitarian aid, guns, and helicopters crossed paths with raw materials, foodstuffs, and natural resources—including blood diamonds.

The transportation business model was perfect in its evenhandedness, in the way it spread the money around: the operator, the owner, the crew who fill up whatever extra space they can find with their own cash jobs. But the best part was the way the dynamics of catastrophe meant they got paid by both sides, on their way in and out of each destination. The crews will never fly empty if they can help it, so on the way out they make sure they fill up with whatever it takes. And on runs in and out of “fucked” countries, that could be anything—chickens, fruit, fish, wood, rugs, bricks, sand, coffee, whatever.

In his 2004 film,
Darwin's Nightmare,
about the effect of globalization on Central Africa, Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper recorded the sudden coming together of aid, business, and smuggling in the holds of the now-ubiquitous Il-76s flocking to Africa on fat aid contracts and even fatter gunrunning jobs, and the birth of a new kind of chaos wherever Mickey's hordes went. He issued a statement explaining what he called the film's “trigger”:

In the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997, I witnessed for the first time the bizarre juxtaposition of two gigantic airplanes, both bursting with food. The first cargo jet brought forty-five tons of yellow peas from America to feed the refugees in the nearby UN camps. The second plane took off for the European Union, weighed down with fifty tons of fresh fish. I met the Russian pilots and we became
kamarads
. But soon it turned out that the rescue planes with yellow peas also carried arms to the same destinations, so that the same refugees that were benefiting from the yellow peas could be shot at later during the nights. In the mornings, my trembling camera saw in this stinking jungle destroyed camps and bodies. This booming multinational industry of fish and weapons has created an ungodly globalized alliance on the shores of the world's biggest tropical lake: an army of local fishermen, World Bank agents, homeless children, African ministers, EU-commissioners, Tanzanian prostitutes, and Russian pilots.

The picture Sauper paints is like a scene from a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch. But as with Sharjah, the sense of chaos and confusion may not be quite as accidental as it seems. Indeed, the appearance of disorganization is a positive boon to crews and their charter masters keen to traffic in illicit goods.

“The illicit stuff is how your crew makes its
real
money,” says Johnson-Thomas, who's flight-managed former Soviet crews on Il-76s and An-12s all over the world. “Most of these particular pilots are freelance—they don't work for anybody, just whoever needs them. And because they're freelance, they're not in any union, or on any payroll, so they're very,
very
difficult to keep tabs on, and they can carry whatever they like.”

He can't help beaming with admiration as he recalls how one Il-76 crew hit on the brilliantly counterintuitive idea of making more money by offering to do all their aid flights for charities for free. “The pilot made his fortune on the fifteen secret tons of belly cargo he'd carry in addition to the official payload. Depending on the destination, he'd fly something for free for you—he'd fly all the official cargo for no charge whatsoever
—
providing you let him carry what he wanted in the belly cargo space. The aid organizations, bless them in their innocence, all just thought he was being enormously public spirited!”

The thing is, most people didn't know that it was there. But even if they did know, money talks, so it was no problem just the same. The organizations were getting their main cargo to the destination for free, so they kept taking him up on it. On a typical trip, remembers the veteran flight manager, he'd take his official cargo of aid or pineapples between Mogadishu and Ostend, but in the belly cargo he'd have fifteen tons of whatever else. It might be ammo in or coffee sacks out.

“That's what eventually got him his lovely house,” says Johnson-Thomas, “and his-and-hers sports cars. And not one penny of that money showed up on any cargo manifests, let alone the tax returns! It wasn't on any declarations, and as far as the world was concerned, the plane was full to capacity with the official cargo.”

Like that anonymous master of commerce, Mickey and Sergei make it their personal business to know the perennial hot tickets in most cities, too—devouring local news, sweeping for rumors everywhere they go, and even checking in with distant contacts by telephone constantly. “Sometimes you hear things when you're out or talking even to airport and customs officials,” shrugs Sergei. “Someone will maybe say, we really have trouble getting toothpaste, or we can always use more mineral water, or whiskey. Maybe you will know if a new business is coming to your city, and you tell us. And then we know what to do next time we are in town. It is quite easy.”

“These crews are the epitome of globalization,” says Moisés Naím, former executive director of the World Bank, Venezuelan minister for trade, and author of
Illicit
, an award-winning report on “how smugglers, copycats and traffickers are hijacking the global economy.” “The common theory is that this was chaos. But there's nothing chaotic about it at all! What we've been witnessing here is not
dis
organization—it's markets at work.

“There were superpowers, and now they've gone. But that doesn't make it chaos—anything but. This is like saying that before, you had an organized oil and energy market because you had the Seven Sisters—the seven big oil companies—and that was an organized market, and that now you have a disorganized market because you have thousands of independent oil companies. Wrong: What happened is that the barriers to entry in that market have lowered. So now you have new people—you're right, they are not foot soldiers, they are SME businesses—operating in this market. Before, they were dominated by big organizations that had first-mover advantages and were able to capture a large chunk of the market. Then as a result of competition, government intervention, disruptive technologies, changes in consumer behavior, changes in supply, demand, financing, logistics, and everything else, that same market is no longer dominated by the equivalent of the Seven Sisters—the Mr. Big types, the Viktor Bouts and Pablo Escobars—but it's an open market where you have hundreds or thousands of independent players. Some are very big, some are very small, some are medium, and it's all just a market.”

Like any SME, the key advantages they had from the start were things like agility, their flexibility, their low overheads, and their speed. But there's an added dimension, too: They're importing tax-free and pay not a penny in transport costs.

Whoever Mickey, Sergei, Lev, and Dmitry are flying for, they are a business within a business: The client gets what they get, they overload with whatever will make them quick cash, and everybody wins. Once they know their next stop, says Sergei, they can make swift decisions about what to buy in Belgrade, Bangkok, Minsk, Frankfurt, Istanbul, or Shanghai; essentially, what will be most profitable and easiest and safest to sell, leverage, or drop off at their destination. Dealing with customs isn't their problem for the main loads—they just drop the shit off and the client will have to get it released. But for whatever they want to keep for themselves, keeping customs sweet is a must.

Then there's selling on what they've got. The smaller and more shady the client, the harder it is to shake money out of them. Cash flow is a constant headache—hence the value placed on regulars, from the Taliban to charities, Dow Jones 100 companies, and the UN. Because if Mickey's loose network of clients, charterers, airlines, and contacts don't pay their invoices on time, they don't get credit. And if they don't have credit, fuel, parking, maintenance, and overflight, permissions suddenly become unavailable. A twenty-five-year-old Il-76 drinks fuel like nobody's business—and without it, you're left with a useless metal sculpture in the shape of a plane at the end of some Central Asian or African runway, costing you thousands of dollars for every hour it sits there. Eventually, they just come and push you off it into the sand. Like the remote Afghan outpost where the crew dumped their crocked Candid, the dusty runways of sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia are lined with rusting Soviet tin—some of it charred and twisted, but most of it just out of the cash it needs to stay airworthy and refueled.

It's this insatiable appetite for avgas combined with the pressure on costs that often leads airline bosses to skimp on maintenance and to “encourage” crews to fly with planes that shouldn't leave the ground. But the temptation to make savings they can trade, to make extra diversions for a little private business, and to fill up on unlisted consignments of their own can also tempt crews themselves to skirt the very edges of the possible when they fly.

The case of the Antonov-12 crew who simply ran out of fuel in midair on a run from Georgia to Turkmenistan because they forgot to factor into their knife-edge calculations the amount needed to start the engines on the runway at Yerevan has become legendary among these men, but only partly for its gallows humor. The sober truth is that it's a cautionary tale, one drummed into newbies: about how much fuel restarting your engines a couple of times will cost you (close to a ton); about how to eke the last bit of vapor from your tanks (raise the landing gear while you circle for landing); about talking to ATC so they don't keep you circling even when you divert to Baku for an emergency belly flop; and about keeping your eye on the money.

With the flights and their activities often shrouded in mystery, superstition develops. Among the crews, some tell me they believe there's a mysterious sky-drunkenness, a narcosis that affects judgment and invites deadly errors, just as it does for scuba divers and the World War II bomber pilots who regularly saw “gremlins” on the wings at fifteen thousand feet, sabotaging their engines and giggling. In their accident-attrition log, Russian aviation experts Dmitriy Kommisarov and Yefim Gordon reported on one An-12 crew who, running low on fuel high over Siberia, collectively and mysteriously “changed their mind” about stopping to refuel. “The available fuel was not enough for a non-stop flight to Irkutsk, and the captain soon had misgivings. However, inexplicably, he pressed on, wasting several opportunities [to land and refuel en route]. The result was as predictable as it was deplorable: 120 km from their destination, the outer engines quit, followed one minute later by the inboard ones with the aircraft at 5,250 feet.”