In This Black Market, It’s Caviar Emptor

RYBNY POSELOK, Russia —  The wind lifts the nets drying on the beach. A caviar poacher’s rowboat has been pulled up on the hot sand. Muscles gleam on a fisherman’s bare shoulders, and his pale, watchful eyes reflect the dance of the tides.

Magomed the smuggler limps down the beach in southern Russia where he has come, most days this year, to buy supplies for his underworld trade: basins of gleaming black fish eggs, straight from the slashed belly of the sturgeon.

Once he has canned his dollops of one of the world’s most precious foodstuffs, labeling them either “Russian caviar” or “Iranian caviar,” depending on the whim of his client, they go to the regional market at Makhachkala, the capital of the Russian republic of Dagestan, or to the Middle East or to gourmet stores in the West where they retail at $50 an ounce. “My caviar goes to the ends of the Earth,” he says with deep satisfaction.

Magomed, an engineer by trade, could not have foreseen, in his previous years on the shore of the Caspian Sea, his having any part in what has become southern Russia’s biggest scam. With a stable job, family, house and passion for chess, he was all set for a law-abiding lifetime in Soviet suburbia.

Then fate intervened. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and the factory where he designed specialized radio parts closed down. There was no more state work, no more command economy, just hyper-inflation and hunger. Looking for a way out of the ruins of his past, the only hope Magomed could see was crime.

So the articulate Soviet engineer became a post-Soviet caviar smuggler. “Look, what choice did I have?” he says philosophically. “I had responsibilities, and kids to feed. This was all I could do.”

The work he has chosen is dangerous. The swarthy, silent fishermen he buys from no longer die only in the sudden storms that turn the Caspian Sea into a boiling gray nightmare, washing bodies up on the beach every year. Now they also find themselves snared in mysterious gun battles at sea; smugglers caught by the police go to jail for 2 1/2 years.

Still, Magomed is far from alone. Newspapers talk of the lawless “brotherhoods of the reeds” in northern Dagestan, drifters from all over Russia drawn to the easy money of poaching. Local police figures show that 500 caviar gangs now operate along Dagestan’s 300-mile Caspian Sea coast. Perhaps more realistically, Magomed says that figures like these are only part of the truth.

In fact, he says, his whole society--cops, robbers and politicians alike--has been criminalized by the huge profits that can now be made by stealing from the sea where 90% of the world’s caviar is harvested. In a time when 90% of caviar is poached, the human food chain connects every group in Dagestan, which has a Muslim majority.

“They make up statistics to hide the fact that they’re in the racket too,” he says easily. “The only police who might arrest you are the ones you haven’t paid off. The truth is, everyone’s at it: everyone in my town, everyone in every village up and down the coast. Nowadays, what else is there to make money out of except the shadow economy?”

True, the massive overfishing of the Caspian Sea that has followed the Soviet collapse means that the three local kinds of sturgeon--the sevruga, osetra and the giant beluga--are in danger. An old agreement on fishing limits between the Soviet Union and Iran, which once shared the salty inland body of water, can no longer be enforced now that there are four competing post-Soviet republics bordering the sea: Russia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

Already, there are only a third as many sturgeon in the Caspian as there were in the 1970s. Andrea Gaski, an official with the World Wide Fund for Nature, warned last year that sturgeon species were “poised on the brink of extinction.”

But everyone here has someone else to blame for that--poachers from other countries or the oil drilling that has begun off the coast of Azerbaijan. Sitting at a decaying beach hut in what used to be a cheerful Soviet seaside resort, Magomed takes no responsibility for the ecological disaster his trade in smuggled caviar is helping to create.

“It’s not us damaging the fish. There’s always been smuggling here, even if there wasn’t so much before. And look how many eggs a sturgeon lays. Even if only a few survive each generation, it’s still enough,” he insists. “Anyway, we’re only little people. Out on those seas, the Azerbaijanis are poaching in big ships. And the real danger is pollution from their oil. If that spreads into our waters, the fish could all die off.”

Nowadays, unused nets full of barnacles lie on the beach. Rusting machines dot the scrubby grass. A concrete latticework stretches down the sand, testimony to a bygone age when Soviet scientists hatched sturgeon eggs here and released millions of fry into the sea to keep numbers up.

But survivors of the Soviet collapse scarcely notice the decay. For the moment, Magomed--who for obvious reasons prefers not to be fully identified--is pleased with his bargain with fate. He has a quick tongue and knows how to bribe the men in uniform who, at least in theory, try to stop him trading. He has regular clients. His living might be precarious, but it is profitable. He makes thousands of dollars every spawning season and has just invested heavily in his future by paying $10,000 for a caviar sterilizing machine.

He runs his own business from home, in a town a few miles away from the beach. In Magomed’s workshop, a heavy metal date stamp is screwed to a table. An ungainly device with more levers than a small cappuccino-maker--used to seal lids onto Russian caviar jars--is plugged into the wall. Boxes containing hundreds of the jars, identical to those used for official exports, are piled against walls. Magomed buys them openly from shops in Makhachkala.

The sealing machine is shared among the many other respectable-looking smugglers of this town. Every time one of them receives an order from a Makhachkala client--typically, to can 60 to 80 pounds of caviar, an order that takes them three days and earns them $1,000--the smuggler comes by and collects the machine, which is wrapped discreetly in a dishcloth. Magomed says 15 such machines circulate.

There’s an official ban on all trade in caviar except for small licensed sales through officials. But it is sold in Dagestan anyway, with a wink and a rustle of rubles in a police officer’s hand.

In Makhachkala, fish stalls take up a whole side of the bazaar. A nervous police officer hovers, ignored by locals. “Don’t worry--he’s been bought, he’s tame,” one saleswoman says. But the morning mood is cautious. Whispers from lazily grinning men float after the visitor: “Psst . . . caviar?”

By the afternoon, however, they loosen up. There is vodka on the traders’ breath and a wild recklessness in the air. Drunken men with gold teeth and dirty pants proudly display their wares. The police officer fades away.

Several uniformed forces are supposed to fight caviar smuggling along Dagestan’s coast: Dagestani Interior Ministry police, a special water police, officers of the prosecutor and Russian border guards. But there is no shared command and plenty of mutual suspicion. Each force tells tales about how the others break the rules.

Abdulatip Guseinov, deputy chief of Zapkasprybvod, the Western Caspian Basin Management water police force, reluctantly admits that one group of Russian border guards was caught stealing sturgeon last year. “We detained two of them, but it wasn’t their fault. They’d been ordered to do it by their commander,” he says. “They didn’t know any better.” Guseinov does not know whether the Russian commander was punished.

Russian border guards have fewer scruples about accusing Dagestanis of negligence. Capt. Sergei Strizhov, deputy commander of a Caspian Brigade ship, told Russian television with a shrug: “We haven’t come across the Caspian water police at all. I get the impression they don’t exist.”

Dagestan is now in the grip of a crime wave. Drive-by shootings, explosions and unexplained assassinations are rife. Fish police are kidnapped and killed regularly. Finance Minister Gamid Gamidov was killed by a car bomb in 1996, and his rival, Deputy Prime Minister Said Amirov, has survived four attempts on his life.

In November 1996, an explosion destroyed an apartment block that housed the families of Russian border guards trying to stop poaching. It killed 56 people and was widely interpreted as a warning from the caviar gangs.

“All this violence and all this death are connected one way or another with the illegal business that underpins our economy,” said Timur Dzhafarov, a journalist at the Makhachkala weekly Novoye Delo.

There is no visible legal source of wealth in Dagestan. But amid the crumbling housing and shabby stores of Makhachkala, a new class of rich is building a district of fantastic soap-opera mansions, known mockingly by people who can’t afford to live there as “Santa Barbara.”

One resident is Dagestani Fisheries Minister Magomed Khachilayev, whose fabulously expensive armored Humvee-style vehicle is the pride of his bodyguards and the envy of half of Makhachkala. He gets angry when asked whether last year’s attack on the Russian border guards’ building was part of a “caviar war” in Dagestan.

“The Russian newspaper Top Secret wrote an utterly absurd and brazen article about me in connection with that,” he fumes. “They almost came out and called me the ‘head Mafioso, the King of Fish.’ They are trying to label me as a criminal. They want all the mud they’re slinging to stick to me. But no one human could possibly blow up a houseful of people for caviar or money.”

He can’t say how much money caviar smuggling is draining from Dagestan’s official economy, arguing: “There is no official economy, just chaos. People are swept along by the tide of life and stay alive as best they can. Smugglers clearly work for people in power, and a lot is lost. But I can’t say how much.”

The powerlessness of Russian and other ex-Soviet officials to fight caviar smuggling has prompted the outside world to try and save the endangered sturgeon. In June, the United States and Germany pressed for tough new restrictions limiting caviar imports, recognizing that the burden of conservation will have to fall on wealthy importing countries.

America is the biggest importer of caviar, buying about 60 tons of the eggs a year. From next April, it and other signatories of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species will monitor their imports more carefully; Caspian states will set quotas for beluga exports.

But whether these restrictions will do any good remains to be seen. Asked what impact they might have on smuggling in Dagestan, Khachilayev looks puzzled, then answers gruffly: “I don’t know anything about them.”

Even the smugglers from the old days of rigid Soviet management--like former fishing inspector Sergei Bodagovsky, freed from 10 years in jail for smuggling in 1992--have only scorn for the amateur butchers now emptying the sea.

“The sea is home to the fish, but it will soon be empty, because these amateurs don’t let the fish grow,” he said. “A sturgeon needs seven years to grow, a beluga should weigh at least 300 pounds, but they catch them young.

“There’s never been anything like this--that people catch fish for money and trawl in those military boats through a sea so festooned with nets that the fish hide in the sea, not knowing how to escape,” says Bodagovsky, 43. “In a maximum of two years, those fish will only exist in our memories.”