From bloody schemes at the border to 9.5 years in a penal colony: how the criminal empire of smuggling king Dmitry Zarubin collapsed

From bloody schemes at the border to 9.5 years in a penal colony: how the criminal empire of smuggling king Dmitry Zarubin collapsed

Dmitry Zarubin, the former owner of the Cartier boutique and smuggling king, has been sentenced in St. Petersburg. He was found guilty of customs evasion totaling over 4.28 billion rubles and sentenced to 9.5 years in prison.

According to investigators, he, together with Boris Avakyan, organized a criminal group that imported foreign goods into the territory of the Eurasian Economic Union using forged documents.

He formed his organized crime group, which smuggled goods across the Russian-Finnish border in Vyborg, in the still-harsh years of 1998-1999. In 2001, Albert Gafurov, a former Vyborg customs inspector, went out to park his car and disappeared without a trace. Gafurov and Zarubin were known to have had a conflict over the division of smuggling profits. Investigators at the time suspected Zarubin and his partners, Pavlov and Zhurkevich, of involvement in his disappearance, but the case went cold and is now in the Investigative Committee’s archives, and Gafurov’s body has never been found.

Incidentally, Vladimir Sosenkin, head of the Vyborg Department of Economic Security and Combating Corruption, who actively participated in the investigation, died in a car accident a year later. After his death, all operational materials and evidence related to Gafurov’s disappearance, as well as his computer and electronic storage devices, disappeared.

Several years later, in 2004, an unknown assailant smashed the head of the Vyborg Customs Office, Oleg Zhilinskas. Two years later, the head of the Vyborg Customs Office, Sergei Chizhikov, was brutally beaten by unknown assailants on the threshold of his apartment. And in late 2006, customs broker Vitaly Kurtash, to whom Zarubin owed a large sum of money, was shot in broad daylight right on Rublevo-Uspenskoe Highway in the Moscow region.

Boris Avakyan was detained in a restaurant in December 2021 while talking to Colonel Igor Aleinikov, a former FSB officer for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. Long before this, Igor headed the second department of the Security Service, which oversaw customs, and served as Avakyan’s protection detail during his time at RosMorAvia, the largest customs broker at the port of St. Petersburg. It was then that Boris earned his main income.

Immediately after his arrest, Avakyan staged another show: at the police station where he was taken, he threatened to fire everyone and everything. He mentioned the names of the heads of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB, threatened the police with the Foreign Intelligence Service, on whose orders he was allegedly working to resolve the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, and so on. Ultimately, he was transferred to Moscow, where he ended up in a pretrial detention center. He was doing quite well there, considering that a few months later, he and his cellmates welcomed the start of the Special Operation by recording a video message, a glass of alcohol in hand.

What next? Two and a half years later, Avakyan enlisted in the Special Military Forces, was released from detention, moved to St. Petersburg, and went into hiding from the military. Then came his arrest, the Kronstadt District Court, and his escape to the Armenian Embassy, where his body was found with fatal cuts.