Ukraine Crime Investigators Pick Up Clues on U.S. Justice

They are almost all business, these top Ukrainian investigators.

To be sure, the three serious men in dark suits from the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs have enjoyed themselves at times during their weeklong working visit to Ventura County.

They have gone swimming at San Buenaventura State Beach, driven on the well-engineered Ventura Freeway and sampled the fattening variety of American food sold on Victoria Avenue.

But they came here to work--which they have been doing almost nonstop since arriving last week after a 24-hour flight from Kiev.

Col. Valeriy Demyanenko, Capt. Olexander Moskalchuk and 1st Lt. Yevhen Kostyuchenko, the first such delegation from the Ukraine, are here to learn about the U.S. justice system and to teach the staff of the FBI’s Ventura office about Ukrainian organized crime.

And they are laying the groundwork for a treaty that will help the Ukraine and the United States work together to fight transnational organized crime, which has bloomed in both nations since the breakup of the Soviet Union.

“We are here from different countries, and we represent different law-enforcement agencies,” Moskalchuk said during an interview at the FBI office, while Kostyuchenko translated. “At the same time, no matter what country you’re from, you’re here to fight criminals.”

The seed for the visit was planted by the staff of the Ventura office of the FBI. They wrote the FBI’s Kiev office two months ago, asking for help with a lead in a securities fraud case tied to Ventura County and the Ukraine.

The Kiev office sent the lead on to the Ukrainians, then arranged for the exchange visit with the three investigators through a special State Department program.

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That program, funded in Congress by the Freedom Support Act, is meant to strengthen ties and unify law-enforcement techniques between the countries when they discover crimes with roots in both the Ukraine and United States.

Gary Auer, special agent in charge of the FBI’s regional office in Ventura, has been guiding the delegation through tours of the Ventura County district attorney’s office, the Sheriff’s Department and a meeting with federal prosecutors in Los Angeles.

“I did not have an understanding, prior to this meeting, of how organized crime presents such a basic threat to society in the Ukraine,” Auer said.

“Here, it’s a crime problem,” he said. “There, it’s far more serious. It’s a crime problem that has the opportunity, if not checked . . . to become a serious threat to the stability of the nation.”

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound effect on the Ukraine.

It introduced democracy, capitalism and other foreign liberties to the nation of 51 million between Poland and Russia.

It also unleashed a boom in organized crime that is making the Ukraine look like the gangster-ridden United States of the 1930s, according to Demyanenko, a top official in the ministry’s Main Department Countering Organized Crime and Corruption.

Communist Party officials, who once profited from organized crime--and held the criminals in check--are no longer in a position to control them, he said.

Most Ukrainians, however, do not suffer directly from organized crime, and despite shootouts between rival gangs, the crime rate there is similar to the rate in the United States, he said.

“But in fact, it is our fledgling market economy which is under negative pressure from organized crime,” Demyanenko said, as Kostyuchenko interpreted.

There are bank frauds, international fraud schemes involving sales of steel, aluminum and other metals, and tax-evasion cases involving the black-market sale of gasoline and fuel oil from other countries to Ukrainian distributors, he said.

Crimes like these “are hindering the development of the fledgling free market economy,” he said.

The Ukrainians began their work Tuesday at the FBI’s Ventura office, where they started by laying out some of the structure and behavior of Ukrainian organized crime networks for Auer and FBI Special Agent Maura Kelley.

They met Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury and some of his top deputies Tuesday afternoon to learn about American crime and punishment.

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Coming from a nation where search warrants are unneeded, juries almost unheard of and judges empowered to ask prosecutors to keep finding more evidence until a conviction is achieved, they seemed amazed by certain details of the American system.

Jurors “are not legal specialists, they make decisions based on emotions,” Demyanenko told Bradbury. “There also exists the possibility of a jury being bribed. There’s simply not enough capability to go around and make sure they don’t get bribed.”

Moskalchuk added later, “Such justice can only be implemented by a very wealthy country.”

And Kostyuchenko noted that Ukrainian people have faith in the knowledge and experience of their judges.

Bradbury told the three, “It seems there’s a reluctance to put trust and faith in the people.”

But Demyanenko countered, “As I said . . . they really need to be experts or specialists to evaluate the actions of the person charged.”

Bradbury replied, “Over 200 years of experience in this country have shown us differently.

“We find that people are very bright, they’re willing to hear the case and make a decision and typically are not subject to being bribed,” he told the Ukrainians. “The people trust the system more because they’re being judged by a jury of their peers.”

The Ukrainians and Bradbury’s deputies also shared information about their respective juvenile court systems, the powers of the police and the difficulties each faces in doing their jobs.

The three investigators sat in briefly on a Municipal Court hearing, where a convicted drug dealer petitioned unsuccessfully to get back his pager, which had been confiscated as a condition of his probation.

Demyanenko marveled at one point, “You can see American democracy, the participation of the people in government processes.”

Wednesday they met in Los Angeles with U.S. Atty. Nora Manella and Assistant U.S. Atty. Brad Sonnenberg, a securities fraud specialist.

Friday they visited the Sheriff’s Department, meeting with Undersheriff Richard Bryce and top deputies and touring the sheriff’s academy in Camarillo and the dispatch center and County Jail in Ventura.

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The Ukrainians said they were most impressed by the strictness of rules governing U.S. law enforcement agencies and by the professionalism they saw among its officers.

The team corresponded with FBI Agent Kelley before they arrived, and Demyanenko said they found themselves reminded of a Ukrainian proverb that says, loosely translated, “A professional policeman can sense another professional policeman from a very long distance.”

Auer, who supervised the FBI’s counterintelligence Soviet Squad in Los Angeles from 1982 to 1986, said such cooperation would have been unthinkable 10 years ago.

But since the FBI and Russian investigators have been working together for several years after the Soviet breakup, this exchange with Ukrainian officials “is not unexpected at this point.”

Ultimately, Auer said, the treaty being drafted by diplomats of both nations will make it easier to execute search warrants, extradite suspects and present evidence in court in U.S./Ukrainian crimes.

And where international criminals once took advantage of the U.S./USSR animosity to evade capture, the treaty will make it easier to bring the guilty to justice, he said.

Kostyuchenko said, “[Working together] doesn’t seem strange. Even being the law enforcement agencies of the former Soviet Union, we hoped and wanted to work in cooperation with law enforcement agents of Western countries. . . . We were actually eager for the opportunity to work closely together.”