Smuggling Anthologies Reader

Later on, he ended up in a Polish jail for treason, allegedly for spying for the West. He managed to be released and be granted permission to leave the Eastern block. He then worked in Asia and Africa as a fixer for large western multinational corporations extracting natural resources. His work involved corrupting local politicians as well as organising the western mercenaries responsible for security. In his career, he killed people and had people killed. He was a little taskmaster of oppression, an overseer of domination. For a long time he thought that he did not have a choice, that he had to do what he was doing and that even if he stopped doing it, someone else would do it in his place. His actions started troubling him. He could not sleep any more. So, when Micha offered him the chance to enter caviar smuggling, Janusz jumped on the occasion to quit his murderous career. He still could not sleep very much, and when he does, it is only because he exhausts himself through constant work. He is incredibly grateful to Micha and Emilio to have introduced him to smuggling. Without them ever knowing it, they saved his life.

Janusz came to the business at one of its turning points, a radical game changer for contraband: the conjuncture of communism’s fall and European integration which would result in a free pass to all kinds of smuggling within Europe, especially coming from Russia. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and Russia’s opening to the West, caviar was cheaper than ever on the black market. Under the USSR, when Emilio and Micha started in the business, contraband caviar, but as well icons or vodka would arrive in small quantities at random times. Large scale smuggling was strictly fought by the Soviet authorities, simply for the reason that the Soviet Empire desperately needed foreign currencies in order to survive: Russia’s economy was in such disarray that it needed to buy American wheat in order to feed its people. A sustainable management of high value export goods like caviar was compulsory, hindering most of the smuggling, if the basic needs of the Russian population had to be met, and therefore a popular uprising avoided. But in the 1990s, the interests of the elite did not involve political stability anymore, but rather the plundering of Russia’s national wealth by any possible means. The ruling few went from being state, army and secret services apparatchiks to mafiosi and capitalist oligarchs. This meant that smuggling from Russia to Europe would be greatly eased, if not encouraged by the corrupt Russian officials. It meant as well that frantic illegal fishing became the rule, organized by the very policemen who once regulated it. Caspian Sea sturgeons quickly became an endangered species. The fishermen themselves started dying in great numbers: Illegal fishing is extremely dangerous for those who do it. They do it for survival, making a few dollars on every box that will be sold for thousands in the West. On small decrepit 231