DarkMarket_ Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You - Misha Glenny [116]
So Çagatay Evyapan, their theory goes, was actually just a lieutenant for the real CEO of Cha0 Criminal Holdings. Çagatay would be the Vice President for the cybercrime division and he was content to return to jail because he is, speaking metaphorically, ‘taking a bullet for the boss’. Perhaps Sahin is the CEO of the whole company. Were that the case, Mert’s ‘Sahin’ might exist, but Inspector Sen would still have arrested the correct man.
DarkMarket was closed down in October 2008, but nobody – whether from law enforcement or among the criminals themselves – has a grasp on what its real history was and its real significance is. Three years on and only a tiny proportion of the nearly 100 arrests carried out around the world have made it to trial.
Legal systems are finding it extremely hard to come to terms with the highly technical nature of evidence in cybercrime, but the pattern that sees most crimes committed in third countries also creates tremendous barriers to the detection and prosecution of the offences. Ambiguity, doubt, illusion and dissemblance have always played an important role in fathoming the ways and means of organised crime. And the Internet magnifies their power severalfold.
40
MIDDAY EXPRESS
Tekirdag Prison, Western Turkey, March 2011
A vaguely handsome man in an elegant black suit and black tie scrutinised me carefully as he entered the small, oblong room. His black eyes under a slightly receding hairline accentuated the hypnotic stare and, momentarily, I was tongue-tied. Here was the man I had been reading about, talking about, thinking about for nearly two years. Now, when I finally met him, I was suddenly unable to think of anything appropriate to say.
He may have been wasting in prison for two and a half years, but he had lost neither his poise nor his careful self-control. Throughout our three hours of discussion I was keenly aware that he was interviewing me just as much as I was interviewing him.
My first brief stay in Tekirdag occurred in 1976, just before publication of the book Midnight Express, which was later made into a successful film by Alan Parker. It tells the story of Billy Hayes, a young American who was caught smuggling drugs out of Turkey. The hideous ordeal he suffered at the hands of a sadistic prison officer shocked audiences throughout Europe and the United States. Turkey had a reputation as a brutal and unforgiving country at the time; indeed, while I was there I had been attacked, while sleeping in a tent, by a group of hoodlums, to the accompaniment of demands for foreigners to go home.
Thirty-five years later I approached Tekirdag prison. Like the one where Hayes had been kept, it was a top-security facility. Lying a mile or so up a moderate incline, it was surrounded by barren fields as far as the eye could see. Behind a thick curtain of heavy snow I spotted the prison’s high, faded cream walls and watchtowers manned by silhouetted machine-gunners. My first impression suggested that nothing had changed since Parker’s movie.
Inside, however, I was relieved to learn that in this part of the country at least prison conditions had improved beyond recognition. All inmates had a television, shower and toilet in their cell. The food was a touch spartan, but undoubtedly nutritious and reasonably tasty, while the guards acted with courtesy, not just towards me, but towards the prisoners as well. In several respects conditions here were preferable to those found in many British prisons.
There were some notorious convicts in Tekirdag, including the instigator of the murder of Hrant Dink, the ethnic Armenian writer assassinated by extremists for, well, being an ethnic Armenian writer. It was also no surprise that the prison contained some of Turkey’s most notorious drug lords.
And among the terrorists and mafia dons there was a representative of the most state-of-the-art form of malfeasance – cybercrime. It had taken me more than a year to get an audience with Çagatay Evyapan: I had needed to convince both the Turkish authorities and Evyapan