For over 20 years, the controversial businessman Marian Kočner was widely suspected of multiple financial crimes, including VAT fraud, forging promissory notes, and even taking over a popular independent TV station. Though police opened investigations into some of these cases, and the evidence of his crimes was publicly available and overwhelming, Kočner was never successfully...
Ivan Golunov is a Russian investigative journalist. In early June he was detained in Moscow on drug-related charges, where he faced a potential 20-year prison sentence. After it became clear that the police planted the drugs on him, a public outrage erupted and thousands of people took to the streets. The detained journalist was –...
Two FSB agents living in Moscow and Slovakia are suspected of allegedly targeting Russian investigative journalist Ivan Golunov. According to Golunov’s colleagues at the news site Meduza.io, the events leading up to the Russian investigative journalist’s shocking arrest began with an article he was working on, which accused two FBS secret intelligence service agents, Alexej...
In a nondescript shopping mall in the industrial outskirts of Venice, a major new European drug route is taking shape. Antonino Vadalà, a hot-headed man who dominates the room, sizes up his potential partner, a local businessman he hopes will help him import hundreds of kilos of cocaine into northern Italy and Slovakia. The plan...
The Balkan mafias were the first major crime syndicates to come to Slovakia, following people from the region who had been invited to work and study there during the communist era. As their businesses spread across their new homeland, so did their influence, which they used to dominate the only organized criminal industries possible under...
Rashad Gafarov, a Azerbaijani businessman who owned businesses in the Czech Republic, sent LCM Alliance €54,900 ($71,043) from his personal account at a Czech bank, allegedly for construction materials. In June 2017, he was murdered. His car crashed into a truck on a one-way street in Holešovice, an arty Prague neighborhood. Doctors treating the injured...