A total of about 3 million people, i.e. 1% of the country’s population, are held in American prisons.
Most insist on their innocence and are ready to shout about it at intersections, many write to the media and congressmen, but almost all remain in complete obscurity.
The same cannot be said for 44-year-old Ukrainian Vadim Vasilenko, whose name has been on TV news programs and in dozens of newspapers in the United States lately.
For two hours, a white Cessna 172 Skyhawk airplane rode through the cloudless sky over southern Manhattan and Brighton Beach, dragging behind it on a cable large blue letters that read “Vadim Vasilenko has been in prison for more than 5 years – without a trial – is it legal?”.
At the helm of the plane sat Michael Arnold, president of Arnold Aerial Advertising, a well-known company in the aerial advertising field. He said the company charges $1,200 an hour and it’s not the first time he’s done work for a client behind bars.
As Arnold told the New York Post tabloid, he has worked for porn stars, husbands who are trying to win back their estranged wives and a woman who decided to mock the size of her former life partner’s manhood in the sky.
Effectiveness of aerial advertising
Arnold is a well-known advocate of aerial advertising, saying that it is relatively cheap, appealing to a public that loves to watch airplanes, especially on the beach and in traffic where it has nothing else to do.
In late August, Vadim’s mother hired a pilot who flew over the Hudson River with a different slogan: “My son – V. Vasilenko – in jail for 67 months without a trial. Is he Al Capone?”
Before this aerial attraction, Vasilenko had managed to interest only the Ukrainian press and the Russian-language radio station Radio Davidson in New York, which regularly broadcast interviews conducted with him in prison by telephone.
Now he has, albeit fleetingly, made headlines across the country.
Small sentences in exchange for recognition
However, Vadim Vasilenko apparently wanted not so much to become famous as to influence the outcome of his criminal case. That will apparently be more difficult, as the Manhattan prosecutor’s office continues to insist he is guilty and is going to ask the judge for a multi-year sentence for him.
Vasilenko and his wife, Elena Barysheva, who is two years older than him, were first arrested in 2006.
The couple, as well as their son Alexei Baryshev, who is still on the run, were accused of running their Western Express company, which was initially located in the prestigious Empire State Building before moving to the less glamorous Eighth Avenue, of falsifying records and cashing checks, as well as transferring money without a license.
The couple quickly found it in their favor to plead guilty in exchange for relatively small sentences.
Vadim Vasilenko received two to six years, and his wife received one to three years (state law allows for such sentences). Given his pre-trial detention and his exemplary behavior, Vasilenko served a short time: he was brought to the prison in the town of Bear Hill in upstate New York on October 4, 2006, and was released on October 10, 2007, albeit briefly.
Vadim Vasilenko was immediately taken into custody by U.S. immigration officials, who took him to their Batavia jail to await deportation to his home country.
“Cybercrime gang”
But shortly before that, then-Manhattan Chief Prosecutor Robert Morgenthau unveiled a new criminal case against an organization he dubbed the “Western Express Cybercrime Gang.”
This time Vasilenko’s company was accused of a whole bouquet of crimes: from trading in the numbers of 95,000 stolen credit cards and money laundering to organized criminal activity, for which Vasilenko and 16 other defendants were facing up to 25 years in prison.
The new indictment consisted of 173 counts and covered crimes allegedly committed between November 2002 and August 2007.
The names of several defendants were classified and were not made public until September 7, 2009, when prosecutor Morgenthau announced that Russian Vyacheslav Vasilyev (known under the nickname The Vivor) and Moldovan citizen Vladimir Kramarenco (nicknames Inexwor, Envisor) had been arrested in the Czech Republic on July 30, 2008, and extradited to the United States.
Another defendant in the case, Ukrainian Egor Shevelev (nicknames Eskalibur, Esk), was detained in Greece in May 2008. The prosecutor’s office also gave the names of other defendants: Belarusian Dmitri Burak and Moldovan Oleg Kovelin, who at that time were hiding from American justice.
Since October 23, 2007, Vasilenko has been in a Manhattan prison, called “The Tomb” for its appearance.
His wife again quickly pleaded guilty and has long been in Ukraine. But Vasilenko continues to sit in the Tomb and wait for his trial, which is still not coming.
Unlike his accomplices, he does not sit idly by, writing appeals to the press, the public and “the faculty of law faculties”, and not only on the computer.
According to him, the Ukrainian from despair wrote in blood on the wall of his cell: “Judge, be a man – close the case. Where are my constitutional rights?”
A spokeswoman for the prison department, however, told the New York Times that she had no record of the bloody demarche.
Vadim Vasilenko is demanding that he finally be put on trial, at which he promises to prove his innocence, or be released to Ukraine.
The rush hour train station
The Ukrainian Consulate General in New York takes no position on the substance of the charges against Vasilenko, but is puzzled why he has not yet been tried.
Local lawyers agree that Vasylenko is waiting an unusually long time for a trial, but do not believe that this means that his rights have been violated. Even his current attorney, Rick Pasacreta, agrees with them.
“A very, very small percentage of cases take this long,” he says, ”but that doesn’t mean there’s anything violated here.
The reasons are many: New York courts are extremely busy (Manhattan’s Supreme Court, where Vasilenko and his colleagues are being tried, resembles a train station during rush hours), the case itself is complicated, and it involves a large group of defendants.
Vadim Vasilenko, who has changed four lawyers so far, managed to get the judge in 2008 to drop the charge of organized criminal activity.
The prosecutor’s office appealed this decision. The appeal instance considered the issue until April 2011 and finally reinstated the paragraph.
It is now considering the objection raised by the defendants in this regard.
In 2009, the judge offered to give Vasilenko between four and 12 years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea. He declined.
Now that an appeals court has reinstated the heaviest count, prosecutors say they will seek 14 to 45 years in prison for him.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/russian/international/2011/09/110919_vassilenko_usa_prosecution