Inferno, Chapter 1 – Anders
The following is the working draft of the first chapter of a true crime book I am writing (and is still unfolding), called Inferno...
July 31, 2023, Frankfurt, Germany
“Anders is coming out,” Nina texts me on WhatsApp.[1] It’s my Monday morning wake up call.
For reasons that feel strange in retrospect, but were absolutely valid at the time, I instantly felt a flood of relief. I know Lars won’t be overly pleased at the escalated timing, even though we are all viscerally aware that this development is inevitable and highly necessary. Indeed, the Swedish lawyer and former SEAL had just warned Anders not to come until everything had been worked out with the powers that be. Namely, the Berlin police, who have just indicated a willingness to let him enter their witness protection program.
Details were still being worked out. Starting with whether he could deliver the goods or not.
There were clearly promising signs that he could, including a story that seemed remarkably consistent, although equally consistently, lacking some key details that he so far had not given Lars in the eight months they had been talking and then meeting. Or the rest of the team for the last several months as we all tried to decipher what he was telling us via Telegram.
From my perspective at least, no matter the complications, this was still lighting speed for the police finally to be responding with interest, certainly given my experience - and not only with the case so far. Not to mention German civil servants more broadly. Such individuals, no matter the department in which they work, have a well-deserved reputation for being langsam (slow) on just about anything at the best of times. There are several reasons for this, beyond the complexities of German law and the overwhelming paperwork required to get anything done. You even have to go to the court for permission to sue a company or even the government itself.
As a result, such individuals know that theirs is a life-long job, they can (almost) never be fired, and despite the indignities of lower pay than their privately employed colleagues, have a decent chance of actually earning a liveable pension, although those days too are coming to an end.
Their response speed during the dog days of July and August is even more glacial. Everyone is either on Urlaub (vacation), about to be on urlaub, or planning their next urlaube (plural aus Deutsche) decades into the zukunft (future).
Nevertheless, it is inevitable that Anders and I are going to meet. Our work on the case depends on it. So does the police investigation. No matter how valiantly Lars has tried to slow down this development for the last several days with the wisdom that comes with being an experienced lawyer.
As the rest of us, certainly Nina, myself, and Anders himself, have recognized, there is a certain inexorable gravity dragging us all to this point.
None of us, really, at this point, have much choice in the matter. Or at least that is what Anders has led us all to believe. And despite all of his caution, Lars is also worried that Anders might not actually make it over the border at all – and that time is of the essence in terms of getting him into Europe.
I figured that this would not have been discussed, as it had been over the last week between the team if it were not an imminent possibility. As the child of a man whose family crossed Europe’s borders in less than legal ways just under a hundred years ago, fleeing Germany, I instantly recognize that it’s a smart move for Anders to enter Deutschland. I can’t help it. This kind of instinctual knowledge must be written on my genetic DNA imprint somewhere.
I still don’t know all the harrowing details, but I know he is a hunted man. That’s why he is escaping Russia for Europe, no matter what other issues he now faces.
He must have crossed sometime in the dead of night on Sunday. As I later learn, I am correct, with the added detail of having a friend in customs who knew where and when to get him across the border into Europe.
As a result, getting ready for him is really not a big deal. I even defrosted the fridge over the last week.
So, this feels all a bit familiar even as it is a shocking thing to wake up to, no matter the circs. Yet as much as this is yet another sign that things are finally shifting into a much more intense gear, this is not the first shock we have all had during the last six weeks, if not year we have worked together. If not the living nightmare that I have been dragged into over the last two years in the tragicomedy that is Juicy Fields.
This entire state of affairs is one of the reasons Nina and I are now in the habit of touching bases usually first thing in the morning to just check in. We all do, even if just for security. But this development is a dramatic pinnacle we all recognize is another first.
“When?” I ask. The question has been hanging in the air for the last week and a half, ever since Lars and Nina met with the Berlin police. And they in turn, after assigning four full time people over the past year, were forced to admit that they only had a fraction of the information we had on the Juicy Fields scam.
And now Anders, the shadowy whistleblower who has given the litigation team critical information to help us not only crack the criminal case, but pursue the scam’s facilitators all over the world, is on his way to essentially defect.
Even more unbelievably, given the odds, if not what this means to all of us if not justice beyond that, to us first. And we all know that what he has shown us is the tip of the iceberg. Not to mention will, somehow, fit into the puzzle pieces that we have assembled on the other side of the story if not border.
This is also, as we all know, his ticket at least to freedom. But beyond this, this information and proof is likely to be the crux of both the criminal and civil cases now pending in several countries, and of the state led and private kind.
Unlike so many Cold War stories of yesteryear, however, it’s not just from Russia, the land of his birth and most of his life that Anders is leaving behind with this move, but a way of living that has consumed him, and not in a good way, for the past fifteen years. This is something he has told all of us over Telegram and it seems sincere.
Like more classic defectors before him, he is also carrying with him digital evidence that will almost certainly put a number of people in the German if not global cannabis industry in a less than flattering light if not behind bars. Not to mention give the authorities a window into a network of the shadowy masterminds behind the largest global cannabis industry scam to date. And maybe even some bankers and bureaucrats too. It will almost certainly cause a political head or two to role, in several places. And may even be a strike against organized criminals in Russia and Central America, if not against the FSB (the Russian secret police) who seem inevitably behind this all too.
But there are differences to the plot of this already film noir, true crime story that belie all the similarities in perhaps superficially similar historical story lines. This time, Anders is leaving his homeland at a time of war with the West, and just as the Russians are desperate enough to extend the draft to men over forty. Not to mention carrying information that is dangerous to both the “good guys,” and the “bad ones,” in multiple countries. This time, the story is also different in that he is coming to the “other” side not via Berlin, but via Frankfurt. The centre of European banking, and one of the largest financial markets in the world.
Given the implications the information he has for the global banking industry, this is more than a bit ironic in a story already filled with enough ore to commoditize in some currency of at least nominal value, somewhere on the planet.
It has, as a result, already been suggested that should he come out, he should, at least initially stay with me. There are several strategic and tactical reasons for this starting with this one. Rather unbelievably, we are like the two halves of a puzzle, him from the darker, crime side, and me from the “legitimate” side of the industry who have yet to meet, but inevitably will now, as we all realize. We also know that as much as this is a gift, it will also create repercussions. Yet telling the story in a way that will make sense is also extremely important at this point, to everyone.
And then there is this complication that we both recognize as soon as we actually meet. We are both cannabis patients.
But those are the relatively small wrinkles that we know we can solve. The big news is that we know that we have the German police’s attention. Now we need to make sure that they are fair with all of us too. There are many lives at stake.
About 20 minutes after I get the text from Nina, I get a short text from Anders via Telegram.
“I’m in Europe,” he says. “I will be with you tonight.”
The matter of accommodation is now settled.
Holy cow. It’s actually happening. Thank God, actually, that he did not tell anyone before he crossed the border – as irritated as Lars was to get the news. We all know, somehow, that this is not the end, but the beginning of it. A light at the end of the tunnel that really, truly is not just another train.
Anders arrives by taxi about six o’clock. By chance I am at my front window and see him get out of the car. He finds his way around the side of the building, into the courtyard, to the door, and I buzz him up to the apartment.
I live in what is known in Germany as an Altbau, or older house. It is a classic, city apartment building, with a shop space below and apartments above. It was constructed sometime between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The building also survived the bombing of WWII, somewhat miraculously given its proximity to the major railway line entering Sudbahnhof railway station, the second largest and busiest train station in Frankfurt and a major east-west trainline for the ICE trains. These don’t bother with us provincials, but streak directly through to the airport or Hauptbahnhof in the center of the city in a whish of silver and compressed air.
History sits heavily on this small segment of the world, no matter how modernization and rather aggressive turnover of my neighbours in the rapid gentrification and upgrading of rents that has also made its inevitable impact here during the last decade. There is even a plaque that I found on the entrance to the station itself, not too long after I moved here that commemorates that many of Frankfurt’s Jews, including some of my family, were shipped through the station to concentration camps less than a century ago.
Yet the house, like its neighbours in this little preserved village, has survived almost unimaginable world upheavals, more or less intact. There is even an underground passage that survives to this day, connecting its sister houses on the block in a subterranean bunker that served as an air raid shelter for its residents once upon a time.
After the war, during the massive housing shortage that followed, the apartments on each floor were divided. That said, the charm remained. I managed to snag this underpriced piece of heaven after the old lady who lived here died just as my flatmate right next door threw me out right after the holidays in 2020.
As a result, my daily world is defined, quite literally, within and by the shape of this funky curved oasis, with large rooms and tall ceilings and plenty of light. Most luxuriously, I even have a balcony that creates a good air flow through the apartment in summer, and that overlooks a charming urban garden and a cluster of other small buildings that separate me from the tracks directly.
It is kind of my “room with a view,” that I get to live in every day, as perilously as I have survived since I got here – never knowing if I will have the rent to make it through the next several months. Thanks to a combination of my own flight here and battle to become a citizen, not to mention Covid and now this awful scam, my life has been one roller coaster after another for the entire decade I have lived in this country. This place is my one rock in all of that so far, and I have lived here for the last nine years.
If there is such a thing as a “safe house,” this is certainly an unobtrusive if historically significant and appropriate place for a gangster affiliated with the Russian mob to start his new life. For all its centrality, there is a tranquil peace that surrounds my place, with the only intrusion either the occasional siren from the front or the oddly comforting air braked squealing of trains as they come to a stop at the station.
Anders comes up the stairs and we get the first good look at each other. I have, up until this point, no idea of what he looks like. We have only ever corresponded via Telegram via unmarked channels. To the extent that Lars and Nina have already met and talked to him, I have my own mental picture of the man, which is actually only confirmed when we meet.
According to Nina, at least “he’s a good-looking man.”
My first impression is that he looks a bit like a younger, Slavic version of Daniel Craig of the James Bond rather than Girl with a Dragon Tattoo vintage. He is wiry. Bowlegged. Close cropped hair beginning to go grey around the sideburns. He is also highly branded, in the way most modern, certainly international Russians, and certainly of the criminal variety, tend to be these days, in clothes that come exclusively from the West. His wardrobe is YSL, Dior, and Hugo Boss. As I learn his tastes over the next few days, so is his taste in food and soft drinks, starting with an addiction to Coke and Fanta.
He sticks out his hand. “Call me Igor,” he says. “It’s my real name.” I already know this, thanks to the multiple attempts to out him by his former colleagues who he is now intent on turning in to face western justice.[2]
And I take that hand, accepting that this is a good sign that he wants to leave the past behind. And I have become, in my funny, funky flat, with two cat children, his door if not a stage in his passage out.
So, what do you do when a defector on the run from the mob and the Russian police and on his way to a German Witness Protection Program lands on your doorstep?
In my case, the first thing was to give him a joint. To his great relief, he can access a drug that is clear as important to him as it is for me, no matter that I have a movement disorder and he is dealing with the extreme stress of criminal life.
That achieved, I take him grocery shopping. I had been living perilously close to the financial edge for a while now, especially as my last job had finally gone boom the week before. As a result, I had to manage to survive on the indignities of so-called Bürgergeld, or German welfare, that is notorious for the humiliations one has to suffer to get it in the first place, starting with state-imposed poverty that is extremely hard to break out of for those who sink here. Worse, after a year on the support, they almost always force you to move as they reduce your rent payment to an amount about half of market price apartments in Frankfurt with nowhere to go but social housing (itself with over a year wait, in the best of circumstances). I am about five months away from that D-Day. Evacuation plans, including of the kind that I decamp to Sweden, have already been initiated.
Another casualty of my own attempts to both stop the scam, and prevent the damage that subsequently occurred.
Anders buys what he needs and indicates that I should too. I do notice that among his other tastes, an 18-euro salmon steak seems to be a bit excessive for a man entering exile, but perhaps this is just his last taste of a criminal high life he will soon have to leave behind.
After eating, washing off the travel dust and settling in, he finally crashes. It’s been a rather dramatic 24 hours at minimum.
He sleeps, like a dead man, until about 11 the next day. Then he wants to go shopping. For new SIM cards. For cologne. For new sheets and a duvet since I am woefully underprepared to cater to his tastes. That becomes rather evident, rather quickly, no matter his initial gratitude for shelter. I go along for the ride, hoping to elicit some details out of him as we walk.
As we meander the streets of my neighbourhood doing his errands, as I hoped, he begins to tell me pieces of the story in a broken English that is actually fairly easy to understand. Plus, I help fill in pieces that we already know. Our research on this case has put us ahead of the police in multiple countries now, belatedly, trying to put together the pieces of this monster jigsaw of a crime.
Like this nugget. As we are walking down Schweizer Strasse, the high street of my little village just across the river from the financial capital of Europe, to find him lunch, he says “Me and Viktor Bitner opened accounts at all these banks.” He waves down the broad, tree-lined avenue leading to the Main River. In sight are Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, Volksbank and at least one Sparkasse. “Plus, Bank of Bangladesh,” he adds, rather incongruously. And somewhere down the line another Berlin bank.
He certainly has been a busy bee. Nina and Lars have already gotten quite a lot of interesting information from Kekshin about what they did with that money. Including paying off one of the best-known cannabis lawyers in Germany to shill for them online and set up fake deals.[3]
As a result, even on that first day, just being in his presence still feels like the scene of a crime.
We both seem to feel that way. The scandal, always ephemeral and dangerous, seems to surround us tightly, like a strange cloud.
We sit down to eat a light snack at a Columbian restaurant we stumble on as I show him the cobbled streets of Sachsenhausen’s old town. It’s a tiny remainder of the historical maze of life that existed, relatively undisturbed here, until bombed out of existence, except for these small, carefully preserved fragments that dot modern German cities. Like Stolperstein (stumble stones[4]), except a bit more imposing when discovered. This is a way of life that is long past.
Kekshin seems to enjoy losing himself in this little slice of a past time. At least some of the tension that surrounds him seems to fall off a bit – perhaps as a reminder that new beginnings are possible. And he tells me as we eat Columbian food, that he loves it because it is so much like the cooking back home.
Now that he is on his third beer of the day, I also try to cautiously get additional information about the banks. This is a new development and appears to be the first real concrete description anyone has gotten out of him about how the scam actually worked in Germany.
But just as I write down the names he mentioned just half an hour earlier, a cop car drives down the narrow, cobbled streets of Sachsenhausen’s old town and stops right in front of our outdoor table.
Kekshin and I exchange looks, briefly. We don’t freeze. At this point, this kind of dissembling is clearly instinctual for both of us. We just pretend to “act normal.” He smokes. We both sip our drinks nonchalantly. And of course, it just turns out that the owner of the restaurant had parked his car in the alley, blocking further cars from getting through. As the cop clears the alley and proceeds on his way, Kekshin and I make direct eye contact again. Yup, we are both on a personal level of red light, danger alert that most people have never experienced. For different reasons, and on completely opposite sides of the law, this is unfortunately not an uncommon experience for either of us.
He might have been an almost hatched mafia hit man, and me, well, I am what I am, but at that moment, we both stand still in the same surreal space. Trapped by circumstances. Kafkaesque in the extreme. Which is the better option in such circumstances? The frying pan or the fire?
We get back to my apartment late in the afternoon. Between multiple beer and snack breaks, and all the errands he needs to run, we are both exhausted. I have already passed on the information about the banks to Lars, Nina, and Daniel, and they are all excited. Even more excited as Nina comments, that “work has already begun.”
Kekshin immediately falls asleep on the inflatable bed I have put in my office, although first replacing the sheet and duvet with his new purchases.
I lie on my bed and doze. It feels like a year since yesterday. There are many pieces of the puzzle that seem to fall into place with what Kekshin has told me, starting with how the criminals behind Juicy Fields managed to launder money in Germany.
Kekshin wakes up around 7pm and wants to eat again, back to the Columbian restaurant. He wants to take a joint with him. I remind him this is not a good idea, particularly as this is Frankfurt, not Berlin. He takes it anyway and asks that we walk in a park after dinner so we can smoke it. I tell him OK.
The dinner is delicious, a great treat for someone who of late, has been living on peanut butter and tuna fish. The food and the beer puts Kekshin in a good mood. We walk down by the river after dinner, smoking the joint as the sun finally sets against the Frankfurt crystalline skyline. It is a rare break in the straight wall of rain we have had for two weeks. We are lucky. Elsewhere in Europe, wildfires are breaking out as a result of unending temperatures everyone knows are a result of global warming, now on an accelerated speed towards the end of life as we all know it.
But short of that, having Kekshin around also feels Biblical. Kind of like the ending of another world. Both for him and for me. If not the twerps behind a financial crime that could well have partly financed the next war in Europe – namely the one launched against the West in the beginning of 2021 with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
“It’s beautiful,” he says.
“This is my home,” I tell him. “And if things go well with the police, it could be yours too.”
He nods. At this point, despite the insistence that we have now eaten out for every meal except the first we had on the previous night, and his not inexpensive stream of expenditures, he still seems sincere that he is here to change his life.
However, as Wednesday dawns, given the time pressures involved, and the fact that Lars is going back to the Berlin police in just over two weeks, it seems like there should be more urgency to his efforts.
The day is rainy and overcast, just like the last. Kekshin again sleeps late, although this morning, I am hopeful that work might commence before breakfast. I suggest that we take a walk to the grocery store and recycle all the beer bottles I have already begun to collect, thanks to his presence. I also tell him, after rescuing both cans and bottles from my trash, that in Germany, we recycle.
However, the trip to the store is still not on his agenda, and even recycling seems to be a chore that is beneath him. Instead, he wants to take a trip to the “city centre.” I suggest we walk. I need some exercise.
He doesn’t want to do this. In fact, all he wants to do now is eat. I realize that my schedule is hostage to his right now, so I concur. At lunch he only drinks one beer. I decline to join him. Whatever he is going to do this afternoon, including hopefully helping us finalize both a mob organizational chart and a timeline of his employment in the Russian mob, both before and during Juicy Fields.
This is what Lars needs. Indeed, we have all been trying to understand this, for the last several months. This is why all of us, including Nina, Daniel, and myself, were finally connected to Kekshin by Lars. It is complicated, and everyone seems to have at least two names.
In the afternoon, I try to start off by telling him we need the entire passport files he has on his phone, so that we can link these to the organizational chart we are also supposed to give Lars, and subsequently will go to the police. Perhaps he does not recognize that I understand that in doing so, he will be finally and irrevocably breaking omerta, a basic blood oath present in all mafias, not to rat to the police.
Perhaps he does. Whatever the case, he vehemently refuses to hand over the pictures on the disk.
“Lars has all,” he says. “We don’t need to talk about that. I email you.” Then even more mysteriously and ominously he says “Only head of Russian police get everything.”
What?
I call Nina in front of him to tell him that we are working hard. It seems for some reason that Kekshin needs to be told what a stud he is.
The rest of the afternoon, as an exasperated Lars tries to tell me again, what he needs and I tell him that “we are working on it,” I also work on the banking information Kekshin has given me and tie this into the analysis of the client banks we are putting together data on, including every transaction they made and received through a vast network of European banks.
I also tell Kekshin this, so he knows I am not just waiting on him.
For some reason, this seems to annoy him. “No questions on banks. Don’t understand,” he says, even though we both know that we can use our mobile translators if necessary, and as we have already relied on at several key moments. “Must work for Lars.”
Ok. Whatever.
In between his work on his phone where presumably he is writing out what we need to know, he is constantly calling people and speaking in Russian. But not before warning me not to speak to him during the calls in German.
“I don’t want anyone knowing I am here.”
Understood. But there are a lot of calls, and on one of them, I discern the name Viktor Bitner.
None of this, for many reasons, is particularly reassuring. If Kekshin is really on the run from at least two mobs and the Russian police, how come he is still in touch with so many people who speak Russian, and on an hourly basis?
That night, we go to the Columbian place again for dinner. He goes out for a smoke, and a few calls. He has several beers to reward himself. We both hit the hay early.
On Thursday morning, as I call Nina to tell her about our progress, Kekshin rises by 9.30. and drinks the coffee I make for him.
“Have to work today,” he says in broken English.
Good.
Fucking finally.
By about 3 o’clock, he finally looks up at me and says, “Me done. I email you.”
I look in my email, find his magnum opus in Russian, sling the entire thing into Deepl and then prepare myself for the story he was supposed to tell us, as well as to fill in the gaps to the story he had already told Lars, and dropped to me over the last several increasingly drama filled days.
Kekshin had been a criminal for about 15 years, starting with a tenure as a corrupt cop for a Russian bureau designed to focus on economic security. He had been married for 22, with two children. He did not say this, but it was implied that he was part of a criminal underworld in Russia and had been for a long time. Nina later told me he had been jailed for kidnapping at one point, although supposedly for an “altruistic” if highly ironic reason given his current profession – namely to try to help an old woman get her money back from scammers.
As a result of such activities, Kekshin met Sergei Berezin, the real mastermind behind the Juicy Fields crime and a member of the Russian mafia about a decade before the Juicy Fields scam kicked off.[5] As a result, he also knew that Berezin and his team had successfully pulled off a similar heist called Recyclix, in Poland, several years earlier.
Presumably short of cash as many potential hitmen (not to mention other people) were during the tail end of the first year of Covid, he was hired, as of January 1, 2021, to act as the head of security for Juicy Fields.
At first, as Kekshin wrote and I later edited what he had sent and tried to coax more detail out of him, he worked only out of St Petersburg. He was paid the princely sum of 50k euros a month. His job was to oversee both Alan Glanse, the Russian-American public CEO of the company in Russia (who was only paid 5k euros per month), and Viktor Bitner in Berlin. Bitner was hired, clearly from the get-go as a low paid patsy from the start, no matter his public and legal image as the boss.[6] Previous job experience included a career in founding hot dog stands with majestic sounding names like Kaisers Wurst Ltd.[7] His only job at Juicy Fields, according to Kekshin, was initially to put his name on all the establishing company documents, such as the GmbH company formation in Germany. And then sign multiple contracts and bank accounts, not to mention move money between the banks in Berlin.[8]
At some point, as I began to rough out the structured company tree that Lars really needed to show how the internal functions of the gang worked, I asked him who he reported to.
“Paul only,” he grunted. “Big boss.”
“You mean Sergei?” (Berezin). The double if not triple names everyone had was one issue beyond the language barrier that made all of this complicated and time consuming under the best of circumstances.
I noticed again that he flinched when I mentioned Berezin’s name. Kekshin usually preferred to call him “Paul,” – or the name he used during the Juicy Fields scam.
“Yes,” Kekshin says reluctantly. And not for the first time did I also think that he is being deliberately evasive, and using the multiple names to slow us down as much as he is hinting at what was really going on. I had that impression also when I tried to follow up with him about the banks.
But this is what I do get out of him.
After a short stint in St. Petersburg beginning in January 2021, Kekshin was then sent to Central America, most notably Columbia, although also Costa Rica and Mexico.
“I guarded fincas,” he says when I ask him what he did there. When I ask him what a finca was, he grows annoyed. I look it up on the internet. It is Spanish for “plantation.”
“In Medellin,” he says, as if in answer. “Look, I have picture.” He shows me beautiful mountains covered in clouds, somewhere deep in what was obviously drug cartel territory.
“Did you have a gun?” I ask him.
“Of course,” he said looking at me like I am stupid. “I guarded finca.” Ok. Understood. This was not just a regular “Juicy Fields partner” farm. There had been several of these he had already mentioned, some of which had also been mentioned in the cannapress that covered the story at all. This was one of the presumably multiple drug cartel plantations he guarded as he also supposedly carried out business development activities too. With a bodyguard. And his own personal gun.
Right.
“I also got tattoo in Columbia,” he says. And grins, boastfully, pulling up his short-sleeved shirt and flexing to reveal a skull surrounded by various ornate decorations. That kind of tatt design, in mob parlance, is a marker telling others who know how to read the signs, that you have been in jail for murder.
So far, we don’t know that he has, but this suddenly raises all sorts of other unpleasant possibilities.
“You like it?” He grins at me, and at that moment I see not the whistleblower, but full blown and mostly unrepentant Russian mobster.
Shit.
Double shit.
This is the person now sleeping in my apartment. Thank God he was turning over a new leaf. Lars has repeatedly assured me that Kekshin is harmless, but still.
I double down on karma and offer him a newly rolled joint. Peace out, dude.
The more I thought about all of this, however, the stranger it all seemed to get. So he was, no matter his squeamishness about killing Bitner, at the tip of the spear of mob related “enforcement.” Armed, dangerous, and guarded by his own security as he stalked the perimeters of drug farms deep in the Central American rainforest. And, on top of that, clearly on a path to the final ritual of making one’s bones.
Then, according to his timeline, after helping to organize a big conference in Mexico in the summer of 2021 as the world came out of Covid, he was shipped directly to Berlin. All his needs were taken care of. He received a Blue Visa – a hard to attain immigration status that denotes the holder is a highly trained professional with a salary of at least 3.5k euro per month. He was also put up in a high-end apartment hotel overlooking BaFin, the German regulatory authority. This he reenforces with a smirk as I edit his written statement. Oddly, for all that luxury, his employers took out public rather than private health care insurance – and further at a health insurance company known for approving cannabis patients more readily – although this too is highly subjective.
Kekshin’s job in Berlin entailed almost exclusive, full-time management of Bitner on the ground as he opened bank accounts all over Berlin and then transferred money between per explicit instructions from Berezin back in St. Petersburg.
Sometime during October or November, Berezin ordered Kekshin to kill Bitner.[9]
He refused.
There were two reasons Kekshin gave as I tried to tease more details out of him. The first was that supposedly Bitner had stolen money, although this was a story he did not want to include in the formal timeline when I reiterated it. The second, however, was that the organization was actually winding down the scam and was now “afraid” Bitner would go to the police.
“So, what did you do?” I asked.
“I couldn’t kill Bitner,” he said, almost ruefully. “He was Chechen mob. So, you see, I would have problems.”
No shit. Starting with the fact that it wasn’t until this point that he actually realized that he was on a path to mob initiation and killing a member of the opposing mob in Russia was a problem for him? Not to mention the fact that this reinforced the fact that Bitner was always going to be killed. Why the former sausage vendor took the job in the first place, is another question. This is especially true given his remarkably meagre remuneration for leaving his John Hancock everywhere it mattered - and could be easily found.[10] He must never have figured out that he was working for a rival gang.[11] Not to mention also surmised, somehow, that nobody would ever figure out any part of the scam – even the most publicly accessible parts of it – including online – with his name on it.
But what this detail also does is reveal, finally, Kekshin’s real motivations, no matter his pretty words. So far, he has not expressed any remorse to me about what he has done. Beyond this, I make it clear that I expect him to carry his weight as a houseguest. He agreed, at least on the Russian side of the border when we were negotiating the same. Now, the Kekshin I see is just interested in two things. He is pissed that he did not make the money he thought was guaranteed would be his from the scam, and he wants his former colleagues to pay. Including going to jail. Plus getting more money from the next gig. Whatever that might be.
He is not at all interested in being even a good house guest at this point. Perhaps his lack of commitment was what got him in trouble with Berezin. Regardless, whatever his squeamishness at committing murder actually was at this point, it did not matter to his boss. Kekshin was frozen out of the inner circle of the core team.
“After this, the shareholders, I had problems,” he says, looking rather sorry for himself. However, he was not fired. Or killed. Instead, Bitner was cut loose, although his name continued to be forged on bank transfers. This was also around the time that the Swiss crypto maven Francesca Greco stopped working for the company also.[12]
It was not until April 2022 that Kekshin was actually fired, when the scam was clearly and publicly going into its next and what would end up being its final chapter. But as he showed me his health insurance card, he mentioned that this was still active until the end of the year.
What he gave me, in fact, prompted a whole host of other questions, none of which he wanted to answer.
However, for now all we had was my edited version of his timeline.
It is now Thursday night, and Lars is upset.
“I need an organizational chart,” he repeats testily via WhatsApp. I remind him I have been trying to get this from Kekshin since he landed in my apartment.
On Friday morning I try a new tact. Since Kekshin does not want to use a whiteboard to help clarify the organizational chart, I sketch out what I know on a piece of paper and write names on it and force him to look at it. He does not want to do this, but I persist. There is nothing else to do.
I make a picture of the diagram, send it to the team and tell them I am copying this into Powerpoint. That does not particularly help the tension in the group. Lars and Nina are beyond exasperated. It shouldn’t have taken this long to get this. And what is even more irritating is that there are no other details, like who the cartel members in Central America might be.
“I am hungry,” he announces. “Café. Eat.” He seems exhausted by the morning’s mental energy.
I decline to go. I need to finish the organizational chart for Lars.
“Go ahead,” I tell him. “I have to work. Take the keys – you know the neighbourhood by now.”
He smiles, finally, for the first time in several days.
While I am working, I get a call from Nina.
“What’s going on there?” she asks tersely. “Igor has just us that he wants to leave.”
“And go where, exactly?” I ask.
“He didn’t say,” says Nina. “But he is upset that you are not focussing on him enough and keep asking him about the banks.”
Jesus.
I remind her how difficult this week has been, and what I am working on. She seems assuaged.
Several hours later, as I am finishing the charts and diagrams, Kekshin rolls back in. He is positively chipper.
“Done?” he asks.
“I have a few questions, still,” I ask him. There are a lot of people with duplicate names. “We have more work to do.”
“Okay,” he says, reluctantly, “but then I go for weekend.”
Go? Weekend? Where? With whom? This is the strangest fugitive behaviour I have ever encountered.
“Yes,” he says. “Friend in Munich.”
This is not good, but at this point, I know that again, despite our best intentions, nothing is going to plan.
I focus on finishing the organizational chart, so I at least have this to show for our week together. Then he rolls out of my bathroom, spruced up and reeking of the cologne he bought earlier in the week.
“Be back Sunday night, Monday morning,” he says.
And then he is gone.
I call Nina and Lars.
Neither of them is pleased but seem resigned to give him space.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” I tell them. “This is not what I signed up for.”
Everyone is tense all weekend, particularly as Kekshin complains again, about the inadequacy of my lodgings.
On Sunday, Lars and I manage to talk.
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” I tell him.
“He told me he would be back tonight or tomorrow,” Lars says.
“That’s what he told me too, but I have this sense that he is lying. He told me that the only person who was getting his complete set of passport files was the head of the Russian police.”
“Playing both sides,” says Lars. “Let’s take this one day by day.”
Monday comes and goes. No Kekshin.
On Tuesday, he texts Lars and Nina to say that he is changing his mind about turning himself in to the police, has already found an apartment in Berlin and a job, and plans to live and work in Berlin with his old identity, presumably surrounded by his old mob buddies.
Lars finally reaches his limit and lets us all know.
“I told him that he is on his own now. Nobody is to talk to him.”
Kekshin’s only response is that he asks Lars for money. Lars declines. He is angry at Kekshin for behaving this way, but part of this anger is that he is also running out of options to protect him.
Several days later, I get a text from our Russian on the run. “I am so sorry Margarita,” he types into Telegram. “I did not mean to offend you. It’s this Juicy Fields thing. I am a different man because of it.”
I am unmoved. In fact, I am actually quite terrified. This man knows where I live.
There is no way he is coming back to stay with me again.
The team is shocked, but we also know that no matter how strange and odd and scary this turn of events might be, this is far from the first, nor will it be, in any way, the last bizarre twist to the crime that had dragged us all to this point.
Copyright, Marguerite Arnold 2024
[1] Anders was the chosen pseudonym of Igor Kekshin, which he used consistently for almost a year before deciding to out himself to both the media and the police – and about a year after Deutsche Welle, the German broadcaster, outed him in the Russian language version of their site – which is a crime in Germany.
[2] Igor Kekshin approached Lars Olofsson in the fall of 2022 after the scam had gone bust but went by the name “Anders” including in the press, until he decided to out himself in the fall of 2023 in a bid to stay alive after the German police refused to give him and his family witness protection for coming forward. One of the biggest problems at this point was that Deutsche Welle, or DW, the German broadcaster, had already outed him, by name in a Russian language story about the scam in information they received, we believe, from the newsletter put out by the scammers themselves. Olofsson quickly intervened and the name was removed from the story, but not before the story had gone live and subsequently been digitally captured by those watching the developments internationally.
[3] Kekshin named Kai Friedrich Niermann as the lawyer he paid off with bags of cash. Other witnesses also placed Friedrich Nierrmann as a German lawyer working for the company directly, both advising them on completely fake deals to put video cameras over grow houses and feed this into the website, as well as going on social media to discuss the overall state of “German cannabis reform” in a completely unsubtle attempt to excite investors about the potential of this new market. Friedrich Niermann finally admitted to being paid by them to do “advisory work.” Other sources concur that he worked directly for the company.
[4] Stolpersteines or stumblestones are small plaques embedded into the pavements in every Germany city and town and every country that was part of Nazi occupied Europe, commemorating the victims of the Shoah who lived there before they were taken away (both Jews and non Jews). The concept behind this privately funded art project is to constantly remind passers by of those who lived in these buildings before the Shoah, and of course, what happened during the Third Reich. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein. The word in German, generally, is used to refer to something which is a continual mental burden in the background of one’s consciousness, a disturbing niggle that will not go away.
[5] He also went by the name Paul Berkholtz.
[6] According to Kekshin, Bitner was paid only 3,000 euros a month to put his name on official documents and transfer money between Berlin bank accounts he set up, under the direction of Berezin and, as of the summer of 2021, the watchful eye of Kekshin.
[7] https://www.northdata.de/Kaisers-Wurst+Ltd.,+Stockport/Companies+House+07767505
[8] GmbH designation is a German corporate designation roughly akin to a C-Corp in the United States, and requires a minimum of 25k euro to found.
[9] Per information gleaned from the Olofsson investigation, it appears the police actually interviewed Bitner in the fall of 2021, but did nothing further, and apparently, got no information out of him about the larger scam. To this day, Bitner remains free.
[10] John Hancock is American slang for “leaving your signature,” on a document. It is usually used to refer to a situation where responsibility is required, and or shirked.
[11] To make all of this even stranger, there was an individual on Twitter who claimed that Viktor Bitner was actually FSB (Russian Secret Police) and connected to the Michael Steele dossiers. While this individual was very excited about all the attention in Germany over Juicy Fields, he refused to provide any evidence when I and other journalists contacted him directly. According to Kekshin, the FSB association was a stupid theory, and he was always highly contemptuous of his former colleague. However, from the beginning, there had always been the implication, if not hard evidence, that even the Russian mobsters pulling the strings on this particular scam were just part of a much larger, international organization.
[12] Greco is a crypto expert and banker, located variously in Switzerland and Dubai. She was hired at a salary of 30k euros a month after Juicy Fields bought out her company, Alpine Management in 2021. According to Kekshin, she was supposed to bring in “high net worth investors.” This apparently included people with very dodgy backgrounds if not big bank accounts. She also, again according to Kekshin, knew that this was a scam from the beginning.