Spain Comes Down Hard On Russian Mobsters

A gang of Russian mobsters operating principally in Spain’s coastal cities and islands were arrested and put on trial earlier this year in a massive crackdown on Russian mafia activity in the country.

A BBC article from February titled “Major Russian mafia trial opens in Spain” revealed:

A Russian MP, Vladislav Reznik, and 17 other suspects have gone on trial in Madrid accused of massive money-laundering for a Russian mafia gang.

The alleged gang bosses Gennady Petrov and Alexander Malyshev are still at large, believed to be in Russia.

Some suspects are alleged to have Russian government connections.

Mr Reznik told the court he had turned up in order to prove his innocence. Five Spaniards are also in the dock, accused of helping Russian criminals.

The case dates back to 2008, when Spanish police carried out “Operation Troika”, arresting 20 Russian mafia suspects.

Mr Reznik, whose wife Diana Gindin is also on trial, previously chaired the Russian parliament’s financial markets committee. He is a member of the United Russia party, loyal to President Vladimir Putin.

The money-laundering by Russian gangsters in Spain is said to have started in the 1990s, when rich Russians began buying luxury villas in the Costa del Sol and Balearic Islands.

Spanish prosecutors believe more than €50m ($62m; £44m) of Russian mafia money was laundered by the so-called Tambovskaya-Malyshevskaya gang, based in St Petersburg.

Prosecutors have demanded jail sentences of five-and-a-half years for most of the suspects and fines which could reach up to €100m.

A report from January in Yahoo News titled “Spain’s Robert Mueller takes on the Russian mob” details the activities of Spain’s leading anti-mafia prosecutor Jose Grinda and his war on the Russian mafia in Spain.

The focus of Spanish police raids conducted against Russian criminals was in Marbella, a popular tourist city on Spain’s south coast which has long been a hotspot of mob activity.

The article explains:

Dawn’s first rays were streaming through the palm trees in Spain’s laid-back jet-setter paradise Marbella when the crashing of waves was drowned out by the whomp-whomp of hovering police helicopters and the wail of sirens. Roadblocks went up and streets were shut down all morning as more than 100 officers of the Guardia Civil, the Spanish military police, raced across the port city — storming villas, ritzy eateries, yachts, a golf course, the soccer stadium, a bank, even raiding a water-bottling plant deep in the dusty hills.

By lunchtime on that Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017, the police had confiscated 23 luxury autos and hundreds of thousands of euros. They also arrested 11 Russians, including the beloved owner of the local soccer team, Alexander Grinberg, charging him with, among other things, membership in a criminal group — specifically Russia’s most powerful mafia, Solntsevskaya Brotherhood, the world’s richest, said to pull in some $9 billion a year.

A Spanish police report obtained by Yahoo News Chief Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff said the group was involved in “criminal activities including drugs, counterfeiting, extortion, car theft, human trafficking, fraud, fake ids, contract killing, and trafficking in jewels, art, and antiques. This was done on an international scale. Not just in Russia. Solntsevskaya has also demonstrated active cooperation with other international criminal organizations, like Mexican mafias, Colombian drug cartels, Italian criminal organizations (particularly with the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra), the Japanese yakuza, and Chinese triads, among others.”

But the “big fish” of that day’s catch was former Russian hotelier Arnold Tamm, aka Spivakovsky, alleged to be a trusted aide to the notorious Semion Mogilevich — a Ukraine-born economist known as “the Brainy Don” whose photo long resided on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. He was described as a “Global Con Artist and Ruthless Criminal,” accused of bilking U.S. investors out of $150 million in a stock fraud. But above all, Mogilevich is a mastermind of cleaning up dirty money — using financial transactions that make the cash generated from criminal enterprises appear legitimate, and park it in accessible and safe investments in Western countries such as Spain or the United States, valued precisely for their adherence to legal norms.

Which is to say that morning’s drama in Marbella was all about money laundering, in this case more than 30 million euros (around $35 million) of illegal profits cleaned up in businesses from the Marbella fútbol club to the Lady of the Night golf course to the Agua Sierra de Mijas water-bottling plant.

Russian mob ties in Spain lead back to a high-profile Russian banker, Alexander Torshin, who is close to the Kremlin. Spanish police believe Torshin was laundering money through a Mallorca hotel. Torshin suspiciously canceled a planned trip to Spain after he was tipped off that he was being investigated by Jose Grinda.

Russian opposition leader Alexai Navalny has dozens of reports on his YouTube channel demonstrating how top Russian officials close to Putin are involved in enormous real-estate frauds in countries like Spain, Italy and Greece where they hide, launder and wash their ill-gotten cash, largely through purchasing expensive beach-front properties.

Grinda sent some of the evidence he’d collected showing Russian mafia ties to Russian government officials to Moscow’s chief prosecutor in hopes of initiating prosecutions within Russia too. But instead of prosecuting anyone, the Russian side retaliated by fabricating claims that Grinda was a child molester. From the article:

Last year, when Grinda and his fellow prosecutor Juan Carrau sent off a 488-page report to Moscow’s head prosecutor, naming more names of Russian officials and detailing their suspected criminal activities, there was retaliation. Not only did the Moscow prosecutor do nothing with the information, but soon thereafter a Spanish lawyer began accusing Grinda of being a pedophile, a story picked up exclusively by questionable internet sites in Spain.

That seems to be the standard modus operandi of how the Kremlin deals with its critics and accusers: by fabricating lies to discredit them.

Grinda’s investigations into Russian organized crime in Spain has a connection to FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko who was killed with a lethal poison in 2006 in London, most likely on orders of the Russian government. Litvinenko had been giving Spanish authorities information about Russian mob ties to Putin’s Kremlin, and was due to meet with Spanish officials again but was murdered before he could. From the article:

With 12 years experience of doggedly pursuing crime syndicates, tapping their phones and unraveling their financial tentacles, Grinda — who learned some of the ropes from former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko — is now world-famous as an anti-mafia crusader. And that’s a dangerous position to be in. Litvinenko, notoriously, was murdered in London just before he was supposed to meet with Spanish prosecutors to tell them what he knew about Russian mobsters. And Grinda himself, under round-the-clock police protection, has had to fend off accusations of child molestation that he denies and believes were invented by Russian criminals to discredit him.

… When Grinda took over the post as lead special prosecutor in 2006, he inherited a wealth of information from Martínez’s studies abroad. That year, Grinda also made contact with another expert on Russian organized crime, Litvinenko, a former Russian intelligence agent who’d fled to London a few years after Putin became president.

Grinda skirts many details of the collaboration, though he affirms that Litvinenko helped identify individuals and organizations active in Spain and that the intelligence agent had agreed to come to Spain in November 2006 to testify about the Russian mafia activities there. According to Litvinenko’s friend and fellow dissident Alex Goldfarb, president of the Litvinenko Justice Foundation, Litvinenko was planning to link Putin to the Spanish operations in his testimony.

Luke Harding, author of “A Very Expensive Poison,” writes that Litvinenko “was willing to testify in court against Putin … spilling everything he knew about Putin’s alleged links with the Tambov gang. … Enough reason for powerful people in Moscow to want Litvinenko silenced.” Litvinenko was also outspoken about Putin’s alleged links to Mogilevich, even making a taped statement about their warm relations in 2005.

The week before Litvinenko was to arrive in Madrid, he fell ill with radiation sickness; he died three weeks later, poisoned by a lethal dose of polonium. In 2016, the official British investigation into his death concluded that the Russian government was behind the poisoning, and noted that Litvinenko’s planned testimony in Spain may have played a role in his death.

Beyond providing Spain with invaluable information, Litvinenko inadvertently made Grinda famous. In 2010, WikiLeaks dumped FBI cables — including some from January of that year, in which Grinda is quoted extensively. A flurry of press kicked up, including a line attributed to Grinda saying that Russia is a “virtual mafia state.”

“I didn’t say that,” Grinda protests. “I said that was Litvinenko’s theory. And when Russia killed him, people believed he must have been correct.” The Kremlin and Duma didn’t appear squeaky clean when the man accused of carrying out the assassination of Litvinenko, Andrei Lugovoi, despite being wanted by the British police, launched a political career and was elected to the Russian parliament, becoming deputy head of the Duma Committee on Security and Corruption. While the British inquiry into Litvinenko’s poisoning was ongoing, Putin presented him with an award honoring his “service to the motherland.”

A Guardian article titled “Fresh evidence suggests Litvinenko was killed to keep him quiet” touched on the Spanish angle to the Litvinenko case:

When a public inquiry into the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko reports its findings next week, it is widely expected that the Russian state will be held responsible.

But there will be less clarity about the motive for the murder. Why, after the former KGB and FSB agent had been in Britain for six years, was it so important to assassinate him with such apparent haste?

New evidence presented to the Litvinenko Justice Foundation in London suggests he could have been killed to prevent him from testifying about Vladimir Putin’s links with Russian organised crime. A Spanish prosecutor says he had arranged to hear evidence from Litvinenko in November 2006 — a week after he drank a lethal dose of Polonium-210 in London.

José Grinda González, who investigated Russian mafia activity in Spain, said he had decided to question Litvinenko after learning “from colleagues” that he had information about links between gangsters and senior members of the Russian government.

According to a book by investigative journalists Cruz Morcillo and Pablo Muños, Litvinenko had given this information to Spanish security agents at a secret meeting outside the country in July 2006. After returning to Madrid, the agents passed the claims on to a Spanish judge, Fernando Andreu, who issued a summons to question Litvinenko.

Late last year Grinda filed an indictment of the top mafia figures in Spain, which listed Russian state officials allegedly involved in their activities, among them current and former senior government ministers and top law enforcement officials.

The indictment also claimed to reveal wide business connections between the notorious Tambov crime family and billionaire members of the powerful Ozero cooperative founded by Putin. This group has been designated Putin’s “inner circle” by US and EU authorities, who imposed sanctions on some of them in connection with Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Grinda said he had evidence from another Russian expatriate, a former Duma deputy and self-confessed member of the Tambov gang, Mikhail Monastyrsky.

Andrei Lugovoy, a former KGB bodyguard and one of Litvinenko’s accused killers, admitted knowledge of Litvinenko’s contacts with Spanish police. Lugovoy brazenly told a Spanish newspaper that he thought Russian “traitors” needed to be “exterminated”. He was later awarded a medal of honour by Putin and made into an MP.

Bill Browder, an American investor who accused Russian officials of a giant tax fraud against his Russia-based company, which led to his expulsion and the murder (while in Russian police custody) of his Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky, was recently detained in Spain following an Interpol arrest warrant put on him by Russia. Browder was in Madrid to give evidence to Jose Grinda about the links between the hundreds of millions in stolen tax money committed against him by Russian officials and that money’s possible entry into the Spanish economy via Russian mobsters.

All of this flies in the face of the bogus narrative coming out of corrupt elements of the “alternative” media that Russia and Russians are saintly, god-fearing Christians who can do no wrong. Russia’s holier-than-thou Christian facade is a ruse to throw off astute Russia watchers. Over the years the ruthless criminals running the Kremlin have put up many faces to mask their villainy. The Christian thing is just the latest camouflage to confuse observers.

Modern Russia is not the domain of god-fearing, moralisitc Christians. Rather, it is the playground of some of the world’s worst criminal gangs that operate with impunity and act in concert with the Russian criminal state.