Pre-trial hearings were held in New York in the huge case of the Costa Rican company Liberty Reserve, accused of laundering more than 6 billion dollars.
Before gray-haired federal judge Denise Coate stood Azzeddin El-Amin, arrested in Spain and extradited to the United States, Mark Marmilev, who lived in Brooklyn, and 27-year-old Russian citizen Maxim Chukharev, who was born in Uzbekistan and emigrated to Costa Rica with his parents 15 years ago.
Chukharev was arrested by authorities there last year and extradited to the U.S. in late March.
The main purpose of the hearing was to agree on a timetable for filing motions and to agree on the start of the trial.
Consular support
While a large group of family and friends came to the court to support Marmilev, the white-haired, short-cropped Chukharev was backed only by a skinny Russian diplomat, Yegor Ivanov, whose job it is to care for his compatriots imprisoned in the United States.
El-Amin, who refused court-appointed French and Spanish interpreters, was supported only by his lawyer.
Mirmilev needed no interpreters and spoke animatedly with his defense attorney, Seth Ginsberg, a prominent New York mob lawyer.
In 2011, Ginsberg was banned from Manhattan’s MSS federal prison after guards found a plastic bag of marijuana in his briefcase. Ginsberg’s younger brother later testified under oath that the drug belonged to him, and the lawyer got off scot-free.
Chukharev was provided with a court interpreter, former Baku resident Valery Gleich, and a free defense attorney, Sarah Kunstler, daughter of legendary left-wing lawyer William Kunstler.
According to Costa Rican press reports, Chukharev sewed his mouth shut with dental floss and cut open his stomach in protest before being extradited to the United States. The protest injuries, according to prison officials, were not life-threatening and did not require hospitalization.
Chukharev now appeared healthy and was chatting cheerfully with Kunstler, sitting at her right hand at the defense table.
Criminal International
The case also involves two founders of Liberty Reserve – Ukrainian Artur Budovsky, who had U.S. citizenship but later renounced it and obtained Costa Rican citizenship through marriage, and 41-year-old American citizen Vladimir Katz, who pleaded guilty in October and is still awaiting sentencing.
Budovsky, 40, was arrested in Spain last May 24. As prosecutors have now told the judge, he is currently appealing the Spanish court’s decision ordering his extradition to the U.S., is unlikely to succeed, and is therefore due to be escorted to New York in August at the latest.
“What if he wins the appeal?” – Ginsberg asked, implying that it might be a little early to set a trial date. Last Wednesday, Kunstler sent a letter to the judge making a similar point, pointing to the sheer volume of dirt promised by prosecutors to the defense.
According to Kunstler, the amount of evidence that the prosecution is legally obliged to present to the defense for review exceeds 30 terabytes. The defense noted that one terabyte is roughly equivalent to 28,000 cardboard boxes. The catalog of the cyclopean Library of Congress takes up 2 terabytes.
Coate nonetheless set a firm date for the trial to begin – April 27 next year – assuming Budowsky is flown in from Spain by then.
A $400 sham marriage
As the Costa Rican newspaper Tico Times reported last summer, Budovsky’s wife Jessenia Valerio, whom she admits he married in a sham marriage, has filed a lawsuit demanding a share of his assets confiscated by authorities after his arrest in Spain.
According to the plaintiff, in 2008, when she was selling empanadas from a stall near the immigration office in the Costa Rican capital of San Jose, she was approached by Budovsky’s lawyer, who offered her a sham marriage to his client for 200,000 colones (about $400).
Valerio’s lawyer told the local press that she saw no grounds for divorcing Budovsky, from whom four Rolls Royces, a Mercedes and a motorcycle had been seized, and was demanding a portion of the money from their sale. According to Costa Rican law, the seized property is sold under the hammer by the local “Drug Institute” and the proceeds are used to fight drug trafficking.
Handy by nature, Chukharev was fond of computers from a young age and at the age of 21 joined the Hewlett Packard Corporation, where he was paid $400 a month, the same amount for which Budovsky allegedly got married. This money was not enough for Chukharev, and he took a part-time job installing alarm systems at local companies. One of them was Budovsky’s Liberty Reserve.
They met in 2010. Chukharev says he had no idea at the time that Budovsky had by then been convicted in the U.S. of operating an online payment company without a proper license and had moved to Costa Rica after his release. Chukharev says Budovsky introduced himself to him as a financial consultant and hired him as a programmer.
Chukharev’s Costa Rican defense attorney, who asked to remain unnamed, told the Tico Times that her client was a computer programmer and had no idea he was running one of the largest money laundering operations in history.
The Russian consul in Costa Rica, Ekaterina Baryshnikova, suggested that the U.S. insisted on extraditing Chukharev “not because of the facts of the case, but because of his citizenship.” U.S. representatives reject the political background and say it is a purely criminal case.
Prosecutors, for example, will tell jurors that when Budovsky was arrested in Spain, several credit cards in Chukharev’s name were found in his possession. Two bank accounts in his name were also found in Cyprus. Prosecutors say the leaders of the scam began transferring millions of dollars into them from Costa Rica after they learned investigators were interested in them.
The prosecution’s evidence base also includes e-mails that were sent to Marmilev from Holland and allegedly contain data incriminating Chukharev.
The latter says that he knew nothing about credit cards or bank accounts in Cyprus, and that Budovsky could easily steal his personal data.
Chukharev was only six months away from obtaining Costa Rican citizenship, which would not then extradite him. Transferring money without a license, which the defendants in this case are accused of, is not considered a crime in Costa Rica. But the crime is considered there another act imputed to them – conspiracy to launder money.
The extradition of Chukharev, who was put on a United Airlines plane without prior notice to his parents, Dina and Igor, or the Russian ambassador to San Jose, Alexander Dogadin, sparked protests from the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Most countries, however, do not announce prisoner transfer schedules in advance.
Extradition controversy
Russian Foreign Ministry protests over the extradition to the U.S. of Russians arrested in third countries have been heard regularly in recent years, but so far have been inconclusive.
In late February, for example, Marina Talashkova, a 26-year-old Transaero flight attendant arrested in Canada on January 15, 2012, was brought to the United States. She pleaded guilty in late March to laundering criminal profits and is awaiting a sentence that is unlikely to exceed the time she has already served.
In exchange for the guilty plea, the Los Angeles federal prosecutor’s office has pledged not to ask the judge for more than 24 to 30 months in prison for her. Talashkova will also have to pay at least $350,000 in restitution. Collecting this money from her will be difficult because she will be deported to her home country at the end of her sentence.
In light of the futility of the protests, Moscow is trying to prevent the extradition of Russians to the United States in other ways. In particular, on April 10, the Russian Foreign Ministry for the second time appealed to Russians who suspect that U.S. law enforcement agencies may make some claims against them with a recommendation to refrain from foreign travel, especially to countries that have concluded mutual extradition treaties with the United States.
The Foreign Ministry says that a list of such states is posted on the State Department’s website.
Another way is to make a counter-request for the extradition of the accused to Russia. For example, last October 15, Russia requested the extradition from Holland of Moscow-based Vladimir Drinkman, who was arrested in Amsterdam on a U.S. warrant on June 28, 2012.
Federal prosecutors in New Jersey accuse Drinkman and four other defendants of hacking into the computers of 17 U.S. companies and financial institutions, such as 7-Eleven and NASDAQ OMX Group, and stealing more than 160 million credit and debit card numbers.
A cyber fraud case has been filed against Drinkman in Russia.
“This is an old Russian trick to sabotage extradition to America through a rival request,” said New York-based Lawyer Bukh, Arkady Bukh, who has defended a number of hackers from the former Union, including Ukrainian Sergei Litvinenko, who was extradited to the U.S. from Croatia and pleaded guilty to cyber fraud on April 23 in exchange for prosecutors’ promise not to seek more than seven to nine years in prison for him.
On April 16, a Rotterdam court ruled that both the Russian and U.S. requests for Drinkman’s extradition were sufficiently justified. The fate of the Muscovite will finally be decided by the Dutch justice minister, who may, among other things, refuse to extradite him at all.
Last Wednesday, the Dutch Supreme Court received Drinkman’s appeal against the decision of the Rotterdam court on the validity of the American request for his extradition. Drinkman did not challenge the decision on the validity of a similar request from Russia.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2014/05/140512_us_money_laundering_case