HI all, Hey, anyone ever heard of Kaliningrad? Where the Soviet's had their main fleet I think? Apparently this is the biggest route of drugs into Europe, as they transit this port through the Russian mob's hands. The Balkans route is the one that gets attention, but what about the Russians? (other than for you Mike) Here are some clips from a couple notes to me from a friend on this issue, on the FARC getting their arms from the Russians, then washing their money through the NY banks, as I recently quoted Mike saying in an article for HT. Peace, Preston "Virtually all the Russian ordnance that moves into Colombia goes across the docks at Turbo in Uraba State on the Caribbean, and Uraba State is run entirely, lock, stock and gunbarrel, by the rightwing Autodefensas militias of Carlos Castano. Which means that the initial coke-for-arms exchanges in Colombia are necessarily brokered originally by thugs under Castano's effective jurisdiction. The FARC actually gets most of its ordnance smuggled in the back way, through Ecuador and Peru, I understand, and they pay for all this snuff stuff with money, not directly with cocaine. Which means that when it comes to DIRECT dope-for-arms transactions, it's Castano's rightwingers who rightfully ought to get lambasted and finger-pointed in print for it. Whereas the poor FARC has to take its cocaine money and wash it a couple times before they pay for guns with it. Of course, they're paying it to exactly the same Russian thugs who are moving arms through Turbo to Castano's people, so it all gets horribly complicated and economically incestuous, and I don't believe it makes enough of a difference that we have to bother elucidating the difference here--as long as we're aware of the difference ourselves, anyhow." "When it comes to dope moving from Colombia to Russia, the one place which the US State Department has NOT made a big deal of fingering is this little patch of Russian territory between Latvia and Poland that used to be called Ekaterinberg, or Ykaterinberg, I forget the spelling exactly. (note-This is Kaliningrad he means here, as he wrote me to correct himself later-Preston) It's a little chunk of property on the Baltic Sea (or maybe the North Sea), all to itself, unconnected to Russia, which the Russians have controlled as sovereign territory since the late 1800s or thereabouts. All it really is, see, is the home port of the main Russian naval fleet. And as soon as the USSR broke up ten years ago, the Russian naval commanders there went straight into business with the old Medellin cartel, it seems. So when you hear about Colombian cocaine being moved by submarines, that's where the subs came from. And so on. Anyhow, this little far-flung chunk of Russia has its own congressfolk in Moscow, its own governor, and its own protectors tight with the Kremlin inner circle--Voloshin and Berezovsky and those thugs. And NOBODY makes a big deal about it, including the high and mighty US Department of State. I got the impression that if somebody in the Alternative Press were to look into Ekaterinberg (or whatever it's called nowadays) (Kaliningrad-Preston) and start drawing attention to it, the bowels of the Mighty here in the US government might be disturbed exceedingly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ <FONT COLOR="#000099">SALESFORCE.COM MAKES SOFTWARE OBSOLETE Secure, online sales force automation with 5 users FREE for 1 year! </FONT><A HREF="http://click.egroups.com/1/2658/6/_/475667/_/961654645/"><B>Click Here!</B></A> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
