Ján Kuciak E-Book

Christoph Lehermayr

• Herausgeber: Ecowin
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 210

Beschreibung

On 25th February 2018, the Slovak investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova are found shot dead in their small house. They are 27 years old. The investigations which follow the double homicide lead to a story of power and its abuse, to servility and sex, to a mafia-like network that committed murders and planned more. A system emerges which has been hollowed out and subverted by crime, privatised and instrumentalised by criminal groups whose tentacles reach far into the judiciary, the police and to the very top of politics. Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova had to die because they lived in a mafia state.

Leseprobe

Contents

Ján Kuciak – The Murder Mystery

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1: The Last Day in the Life of the Journalist Ján Kuciak

Chapter 2: The Kočner Years, or How a Country Becomes a Mafia State

Chapter 3: The Trial

Chapter 4: The Verdict

Dramatis personae

 

Ján Kuciak

The Murder Mystery

A nation is subverted by the mafia. In the end, the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée are murdered – fifty kilometres east of Vienna.

A true-crime political thriller

“It’s not that there’s one big case, and that afterwards everything is different. Rather, I believe that society and the public political sphere can grow in such a way that corruption becomes less common. I know that won’t happen in a year or two. Maybe it will take a lifetime. But perhaps I can make a small contribution to this transformation.”

Ján Kuciak in his first interview, less than a year before his murder

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my sincere thanks:

To Jana und Jozef Kuciak, who lost their son, invited me into their house and took a lot of time to talk, and to the brother, Jozef Kuciak Jr, who did the same. To Marek Vagovič, head of the investigative team at the news website aktuality.sk, who was Ján Kuciak’s manager there, nurtured him and together with colleagues wrote the book “Umlčaní” (“Silenced”) in memory of Kuciak. To Árpád Soltész, author, commentator and expert on the Slovak underworld and its connections to the very top. To Zuzana Petková, who was a friend of Kuciak’s, herself worked as an investigative journalist and now leads the foundation “Zastavme korupciu” (“Let us stop corruption”). To Matthias Settele, head of Slovakia’s largest private television station “Markíza” and expat Austrian in Bratislava with a lot of insight. To Matúš Kostolný, editor-in-chief of the portal Denník N and longtime observer of the Slovak political scene. To the courageous and vigilant journalists of Slovakia, who with their tireless research spare no effort to ensure that justice is not just an empty word and that Ján Kuciak’s death does not go unpunished. To Iveta Radičová, the former prime minister of Slovakia, who in a long conversation gave me a glimpse behind the curtains of politics. To all those who, for good reasons, remain unnamed. To my valued colleague on the investigative team at Addendum, Sebastian Reinhart, who was an early and critical reader of the book and who, with his razor-sharp mind, debated the murder mystery with me countless times. To Lucia Marjanović and Stephan Frank, managing editors and proofreaders, whose patience was often tested by the numerous twists and turns in the plot of this case. And to the entire team of the investigative platform Addendum, which made this book possible, encouraged me to write it and did their utmost to help me.

About the author

Christoph Lehermayr, born in 1979, studied political science and Slavic studies in Vienna and Prague. He has been working as an investigative journalist at the research platform Addendum since 2019. Prior to that, he was the head of the international-news department at the current-affairs magazine News. He speaks Czech, reads and understands Slovak and is regarded as an expert on the countries of central and eastern Europe. Since the murder of the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, he has devoted himself intensively to the case, carried out dozens of interviews, examined documents and followed the trial of the alleged perpetrators and instigators.

I

The Last Day in the Life of the Journalist Ján Kuciak

Ján Kuciak is facing the grand finale. Only six more days, and the underdog journalist will get the government between a rock and a hard place, the prime minister under pressure and the prime minister’s beautiful assistant on the streets of the capital half-naked. But Ján Kuciak’s life will only last another 12 hours.

The familiar quiet bustle that will be familiar from open-plan offices fills the editorial department. If anyone speaks up, everyone looks their way. The journalists sit opposite each other at long tables, type on their keyboards and stare at their screens. Kuciak has the second spot from the window. He’s a young man, 27 years old, in jeans, a t-shirt and a sweater, with bushy dark brown hair and glasses. As usual, he’s wearing large headphones, from which the sound of classical music can be discerned by close bystanders. The music seems to calm him as he looks at his computer. Kuciak looks more focussed than usual, and a little tense.

It’s snowing outside. Winter, which no one had been expecting to return this year, suddenly has Slovakia’s capital in its grip. Today the temperature in Bratislava won’t go above freezing, and a cold snap with up to 30 centimetres of snow has been predicted for the weekend. Traffic on the broad arterial road where the editorial office is located is moving more slowly than usual. Only the snowploughs are defiantly battling the whiteness that has descended on the city.

It’s Wednesday, the 21st of February 2018. Kuciak, known to all his colleagues as Janko, is a quiet, conscientious, but also funny guy. “He’s like a big teddy bear,” says his colleague Annamária Dömeová, “incredibly sweet, helpful and courteous.” If you call Kuciak an investigative journalist, he’s not entirely comfortable with it. “Let’s say I might be on the way to becoming one,” he demurs, smiling. He’s not someone who enjoys taking centre stage, the way some in the trade like to, even when their articles don’t always justify it. Kuciak has crucial days ahead of him. For two and a half years he’s been working on the investigative team at aktuality.sk, the second-largest news site in Slovakia, part of the Swiss-German Ringier Axel Springer group. He digs into scandals that concern the nation. They usually consist of the same pattern of money, greed, corruption and abuse of power. In the best case, the stories put politicians or entrepreneurs – or the popular hybrid of both – under pressure. But often nothing happens at all: the media reports, politicians issue denials, the police stays silent, the judiciary does nothing. This time it ought to be different. Kuciak is in the final stages of an investigation that has barely let go of him for a year and a half. Only a few of the other editorial staff know about it. And for those who do, the anticipation of a journalistic scoop is mixed with an uneasy feeling. This time, Kuciak’s opponent seems bigger, more powerful and thus more dangerous.

Investigative reporter 2.0

Ján Kuciak is not a daredevil, not someone who corresponds to the image of the reporter as portrayed in movies or TV series. He’s not the type to meet shady characters who pass on information at the back tables of smoky bars, nor does he take delivery of thick packages of documents in some underground car park in Bratislava. Instead, he’s got what a journalist who wants to work investigatively in the internet era needs. Like a mole, he burrows online in publicly accessible data and records. In contrast to Austria, where government secrecy is still enshrined in the constitution, it has long been abolished in Slovakia. The country has far-reaching freedom-of-information laws. Public contracts, for example, only become valid once they’ve been published on the internet. That makes Kuciak’s job a lot easier. He scans court decisions, scours land registers, digs up extracts from the commercial register, looks at mortgage deeds and tracks down offshore letterbox companies. From all of this, Kuciak has the ability to spin threads, draw lines, to recognise networks where others see only chaos. For him, going out and working in the field, as it’s known in the trade, comes, if at all, only at the very end – when he’s collected everything and is able to confront the person in his sights with what he knows.

Doing things this way had long been his dream. But the reality looked very different when, while still a journalism student, he began work at the nation’s most respected financial newspaper five years ago. He stayed for a year and dutifully filled the empty columns with stories. But there were so many times when he would have loved to have dug deeper, asked more questions and found out more. “Work investigatively, are you crazy?” a shocked colleague once asked. “Something like that’s much too dangerous, especially if you step on the wrong person’s toes.” At the time, Kuciak just smiled. “The worst thing that can happen in Slovakia is that they sue you.”

When he left the financial paper at 24, Ján Kuciak wasn’t sure if journalism was for him. He had grown up in a small village in northern Slovakia. No one outside the region knew the place, and if they did they simply thought he was from an impoverished backwater. Him – suddenly a journalist in the capital? There, 50 kilometres from Vienna as the crow flies, was where the young nation’s wealth was concentrated. More and more skyscrapers were shooting up. The glossy investors’ brochures talked about the “Dubai on the Danube” (a pun: Dubaj na Dunaji) that was coming into being. Major corporations were basing themselves in Bratislava, and wages were approaching what was paid just across the border in Austria. The capital was booming and prospering, had traffic jams every wekkend, and Austrian border towns like Kittsee and Hainburg became its suburbs. More and more residents of Bratislava started buying land and houses on the Austrian side because they were much cheaper than in their own capital. Did Ján Kuciak fit into this city? And was he ready to look into the abyss that lay hidden behind the glass facades? It would give him more than enough material.

In the autumn of 2014, Ján Kuciak was determined to find out. The Czech Centre for Investigative Journalism held a workshop to which Slovak university graduates were also invited for the first time. Their mentor was experienced investigative reporter Marek Vagovič, a wiry guy who usually wore a hoody at work, and had occasionally had his tyres slashed or a dead cat dropped on his doorstep. By the end of the course, each team was to develop a story to the point that it could be published. Kuciak was in his element. Together with his colleagues, he decided to follow up an anonymous hint that big pharmaceutical companies had treated Slovak doctors to holidays in the Caribbean. Kuciak drew up organigram charts that showed clearly who the key players in the business were, which connections they had to politics and how contracts were awarded there. Vagovič noticed that Kuciak had a good nose and an ability to connect the dots, while others were at a loss. When confronting doctors and pharmaceutical reps, he remained polite, appeared neither insecure nor arrogant, and argued calmly and objectively. Accusing them of corruption was no mean feat for a budding journalist. Yet Kuciak was sure of himself. The “Hunter-Gatherers”, as his group called themselves, presented their results after three months’ research and came in in second place. Kuciak’s real victory came when his mentor Vagovič told him, “You’re coming with me right away and start to work with us.”

The model and the Mafia

And so now, finally, on this bitterly cold day in February 2018, the grand finale, the scoop, the big story that Ján Kuciak has been working on for so long. His story is to deal with the entanglements between Slovak politicians, entrepreneurs and the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta – the most powerful Mafia organisation in Europe. The matter is delicate, which is why only a small circle is in on Kuciak’s investigations. In the afternoon, he sends an encrypted message to a colleague in the Czech Republic with whom he’s been working on the story. He’s found another link between the Italians and a member of the governing social democratic party, Smer. When the editor-in-chief reads the rough draft, he’s stunned. Never before has a journalist succeeded in describing the workings of the Italian Mafia in Slovakia nearly as accurately.

In his article Kuciak suggests that the ‘Ndrangheta is laundering money from its global cocaine trade in the east of the country. There, almost 500 kilometres from Bratislava at the other end of the republic, the manners and customs are rougher than in the capital and the wages half as high. Kuciak has identified a certain Antonino Vadalà as the head of the clan. Vadalà came to Slovakia years ago after a job in Rome, in which he was to “punish” another man, didn’t go quite according to plan. The article exposes Vadalà’s whole story, names are revealed, places identified. Kuciak assumes that the drug money is used to buy large areas of farmland. In this way, the Italians, who’ve long been considered major landowners in the region, are not only able to legalise their dirty money, but also siphon off EU funding through the agricultural land they’ve acquired. At this point it’s clear to Kuciak that this kind of fraud can’t function without the cover and possible participation of the highest levels of government. Which is why the investigation culminates in a revelation: the longtime lover and former business partner of the Mafioso Vadalà is now the closest assistant of the head of the Slovak government. The beautiful Mária Trošková comes to play a fundamental role in Kuciak’s report. The former Miss Universe contestant, who has also posed for nude photos on occasion, is the personified link between the Mafia and those in power. It’s no coincidence that the social democrat prime minister Robert Fico has done his utmost to avoid commenting on her role at his side. Only much later will it emerge that she called her ex-lover, the Mafia boss, around 300 times from the government palace, and that Fico himself also spoke with him on the phone. “We’ve got him! This can trigger an earthquake, it can topple the government and trigger an early election!” says investigative head Marek Vagovič on this Wednesday, visibly proud of Kuciak’s research. Together with the editor-in-chief they discuss what still needs to be done before the story can go online. When Kuciak says goodbye in the evening, it’s the last time Vagovič will ever see him. Ten days later he’ll stand in front of Kuciak’s coffin.

Ján Kuciak sprints down the stairs and pushes open the door. A biting, snowy wind hits him. The next day, Thursday, he wants to work from home, adding the finishing touches to his story and preparing himself for his confrontation with the Italians. This he’s planned for the following Monday. Together with a photographer, he wants to make the journey east and call on the men of the ‘Ndrangheta on their farmlands – from where they pull the strings, and threaten anyone who gets in their way.

The children of socialism

In his mind, Kuciak probably goes through his research over and over again as he hurries on in the cold. He follows a route that’s already familiar to those planning an attempt on his life. From the office by bus to the station, and from there aboard the regional express that comes hourly from Vienna on to the town of Galanta; around a half-hour journey. Then the last few kilometres by car to his house. It’s Kuciak’s daily routine – and his killers are aware of it. Without noticing or even suspecting it, Kuciak has been being shadowed. Photos which will be secured much later show him leaving the offices, waiting for the bus and even at home, renovating his house. His murderers know who he is, what he looks like and where he lives. They have access to data that has come direct from inside the security apparatus. On orders from the very top, a “spider” of Kuciak has been downloaded and passed on. The term is police jargon for a network of relationships with the wanted person at the centre, complete with address, car registration number and any entries in the criminal records. Lines lead from the centre to information about family members. Ján Kuciak has been spied on, shadowed and screened. And today, the 21st of February 2018, he’s due to die.

Outside the station in Galanta a woman with shoulder-length brunette hair is waiting for him: Martina Kušnírová, his fiancée. Both the same age, the pair met in 2013 when they were students at the university in Nitra, and they’ve been a couple ever since. In about two months, on 5th May, they plan to get married. Until then, they’re busy with preparations for the big day. Kušnírová has spent the afternoon at home. She’s been on the internet, looking for nice labels for the wine bottles at the wedding. Later she’ll call her mother, who’d confessed the day before to taking out an extra loan for the wedding. “But Mum, that’s not necessary,” says Kušnírová, annoyed, “Janko and I have enough money put aside.”

Her mother is a widow, and has had to scrimp and save her whole life just to make ends meet for herself and her two children. For the Kuciaks, with three children, it was also often a struggle to get by, in spite of all their hard work. When the mother fell pregnant with her first child Ján in 1989, everything that had once seemed certain for the family changed. As her belly grew, outside the rotten “Real Socialist” system was crumbling. Ján Kuciak was born on 17th May 1990 into a different country: the Velvet Revolution had been accomplished, the system had been toppled, Václav Havel was president, a new era had begun – and everything was going downhill. Especially Slovakia, which in 1993 became independent from the wealthier Czech part of the country, was looking into an economic abyss. Many of its desolate factories closed, and soon one in every three people was out of work. All of that makes the parents even prouder of their children. They’ve made it – Kuciak as an up-and-coming journalist, Kušnírová as an archaeologist. Right now she should be at excavations in the east of the country, and not standing at the station waiting for her fiancé. But the snow that’s been falling for days and the cold that has central Europe in its grip has thwarted her plans. In the parking area in front of the station is an old dark-green VW Passat station wagon, a 2003 model, which the couple bought a while ago and which has been giving them problems ever since. The day before, Kuciak had been unable to unlock it with the remote control. A defective battery, his brother-in-law-to-be had surmised, correctly, on the phone last night. It’s after half past six in the evening as Kuciak gets off the train and hugs his fiancée. In the dark he manages to open the trunk of the Passat, climb through it, open the hood and take the battery home to charge it.

Three shots, two dead

It’s ten kilometres from the station in Galanta to the couple’s home in the village of Vel’ká Mača. The route runs through flat and, in summer, extremely fertile land, where wheat, corn, sugar beet and vegetables are grown. The Danubian Lowland in southern Slovakia is coloured by the country’s Hungarian minority. Hungarian is the dominant language, especially in smaller towns, but mixed marriages are becoming increasingly common and tensions between the two ethnic groups have recently decreased noticeably. Kuciak and Kušnírová, both originally from the more mountainous part of Slovakia, moved here deliberately. Both of them grew up in the countryside, and they love nature and the sense of community in a village. The idea of living in a small, overpriced apartment in the urban canyons of Bratislava seemed less than appealing. It’s long been dark as Kušnírová starts the small service pickup truck at the station. The wind is sweeping over the flat countryside. The car speeds past fallow fields. The ground is frozen, and it’s snowing lightly. Frost-covered trees appear like ghosts in the beam of the headlights.

She drives the same route that two men in a Citroën Berlingo took shortly before. At 6:28pm this car stops at the edge of the village, just before the cemetery, right at the town sign. Underneath the sign, an extra panel in Slovak and Hungarian advises that the municipality is subject to video surveillance. One of the men gets out of the car. He’s a big, strong guy, muscular, with a shaved head. It’s clear from his appearance that he was once a professional soldier, working on missions abroad, most recently with the UN in Cyprus. After his discharge, he signed on as a security guard on one of the big container ships that cruise the oceans, and which need to protect their freight from pirate attacks in the Indian Ocean. He’s familiar with weapons, and so he knows how to handle the Luger pistol, model number P9R made by the Hungarian brand FEG, which is in his jacket pocket. It’s a nine-millimetre-caliber semiautomatic weapon, also used by the Hungarian police and military. The man acquired it last autumn, on the black market for €700. An acquaintance modified the pistol, filed the barrel, and attached a silencer.

Now the gun’s ready to go into action, for him, the contract killer. He gets out of the car wearing a black hood and makes sure that he immediately gets away from the main road. Nobody should see him now, remember him later or notice anything that could later be communicated to the police. He keeps his head down, stalks across the local club’s football field, and climbs through a hole in the fence back onto a road. It’s a shortcut that he’s scouted out. Together with his partner, who’s also his cousin, he first drove to the village about two weeks ago. They discovered the cameras monitoring traffic at the intersections, and worked out a way to get around them. Now it’s not much further to Brezová Street, and their target. In the village, smaller, older houses dating from the communist era stand next to newly built bungalows with paved driveways leading to garages in which big cars are parked. By now the man knows the way by heart. He’s studied it and internalised it so that now, when he’s under pressure and the adrenaline is pumping through his veins, he won’t make a mistake. The victim lives in the third house on the right, at the exact address given to him and his cousin. His cousin’s biography is similar to his own. He’s an ex-policeman who also went to sea as a security guard working on freighters off the coast of Africa. When he came back he bought himself a motorbike and set out on road trips that also took him to Austria. Photos on Facebook show him at a rest stop on the Semmering mountain pass. The two former public servants are known in their neck of the woods on the Hungarian border as “problem solvers”. They’re regarded as guys for shady jobs, the kind you call when nothing else helps. Together they’ve inspected Kuciak’s house. It resembles a concrete cube, straight from the building blocks of socialism. All over Slovakia there are houses from that era that look exactly the same: two windows on the front, a narrow recessed balcony at the entrance to the living room, and often a shed in the garden. Kuciak and Kušnírová bought their residence just a few months ago with the help of a loan. With their modest means and lots of work, they want to slowly transform it into an idyll. Altogether, the two men have checked the house over five times, very early in the morning, in the middle of the day and again at night. They used different cars for each trip, and checked whether the routines which had been communicated to them were actually correct. They wondered how and when they should best get rid of their victim. They spent an evening deliberating in a pizzeria. They considered first kidnapping Ján Kuciak and then murdering him later. His body ought to disappear afterwards so that it would never be found by the police. At least that was their mission. But they rejected the plan. There are cameras everywhere nowadays, said one. And what if the police stopped them and they found an unconscious person lying in the trunk, asked the other. The risk seemed too high, and the alternative was clear: Ján Kuciak had to be shot in his own house. Two days ago, the muscular man had already had his finger on the trigger and was ready to carry out his assignment – until he peeked through the window and saw a woman whose identity they didn’t know. So they postponed their mission. Until today.

The crime scene, the house in the village of Vel’ká Mača

Photo: Ricardo Herrgott