The illegal trade in black caviar

Sturgeon have been around for some 250 million years and their eggs were appreciated and consumed in many ancient cultures (Shadrina 2007; Nikolaev et al. 2009). Around 2400 B.C., the ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians prepared sturgeon eggs with salt and vinegar. According to Aristotle, the Greeks were also no strangers to caviar: they served it on platters garnished with flowers (Gordon 2003). Many centuries later, the Russian tsars imposed a caviar tax on fishing for sturgeon, which may have formed the basis for the exclusivity of caviar.

According to Georg Simmel, the value of an object is not an inherent quality, but a valuation of the object (Simmel 1978: 72–73). The value will increase as the meaning of the object in a certain social context increases. During various historical periods this has happened with, for instance, sugar, tea and diamonds. In his work on the development of the sugar industry, Mintz (1985) showed how Europeans transformed sugar from an exotic luxury product to a daily necessity. Tea was originally considered as a luxury product for the wealthy elite, but in a relatively short period of time drinking tea was adopted by the lower classes, who began to copy the fashions of the upper classes. The creation of the value of diamonds took a new direction when, besides socio-economic processes, political factors began to play a role, such as in the case of blood diamonds. Against the background of violent conflicts in Angola and Sierra Leone, the diamond, a symbol of love, has also become a symbol of war and misery (Siegel 2009).

Luxury goods can become status symbols for the elite, but they can also manifest themselves as ‘national symbols’: in our time, caviar – along with vodka and matryoshka dolls – is seen as a typically Russian product. But how are symbols created and by whom? Why is it that caviar has attained the status of ‘edible gold’?

In the Middle Ages, caviar became a popular dish in Russia, because fish and fish products were allowed on the days when it was forbidden for Russian Orthodox Christians to eat meat (Saffron 2002: 47–53). The Russian word for caviar is ikra (икра), which literally means fish roe. In Judaism and Islam, on the other hand, caviar is considered unclean.⁶ In the days of Ivan the Terrible (1530–1584), fishermen supplied sturgeon to the court of the tsar, where caviar was served at receptions for foreign diplomats. Peter the Great (1672–1725) established a ‘Fishery Head Office’ in Astrakhan and made it responsible for the delivery of so-called ‘troitshnaya’ caviar, i.e. caviar transported to St. Petersburg by troika (a sled drawn by three horses) within three days. At the same time, caviar was considered a dish for the poor. In the 17th century, it was sold cheaply in the markets and taverns of towns and cities all over Russia.

For a long time, sturgeon fishing in Russia was controlled by the Don and Volga Cossacks. There is no consensus among historians and anthropologists on who the Cossacks really were: whether they were a nation, a subsection of a tribe, or a caste of warriors. What the experts do agree upon is that relations between the Cossacks and the Russian tsars have always been complicated. In the 17th and 18th century, the Cossacks became associated with criminality. Some of their atamani (leaders) were not only known as bandits, but also as pirates, such as the legendary Stepan Razin (Siegel 2005: 48–49).

Although European traders first came across caviar around the 14th century, it took some time for the product to attain ‘luxury status’. The Europe-oriented tsar Peter the Great encouraged the production of caviar and allowed the Cossacks to secure an exclusive position in the sturgeon fishing industry. In the 18th century Russia began to attract foreign investors. One of the important figures in the history of caviar was Ioannis Varvakis, a Greek sea captain and trader who ‘discovered’ Russian caviar around 1780 and subsequently began to promote the consumption of caviar to the European upper classes (Saffron 2002). His trade marked the beginning of a process of transformation, as a result of which sturgeon eggs were no longer regarded as peasant food, but came to be seen as a globally recognised symbol of wealth and power.

Two important developments have contributed to the popularity of caviar: the Industrial Revolution with its improvements in transportation and the emergence of a new class of consumers willing to pay good money for new exotic products. At the beginning of the 20th century, only wealthy Russians could afford to eat caviar (ibid: 76), while in Europe eating caviar became a trend among the nouveaux riches of the Belle Époque, alongside champagne and oysters. This was a drastic change compared to the 19th century, when Russian farmers fed caviar to their pigs or threw it out with the garbage.

During the First World War, after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Communist regime took over the Caspian fishing industry. Sturgeon catches in the open sea were strictly prohibited by the Soviets (Vaisman 1997; Ruban and Khodorevskaya 2010). The Soviet Union ended up controlling 90 % of the world production of caviar. Foreign entrepreneurs were not allowed near the caviar fishing industry (Saffron 2002: 114).

This total control over caviar production guaranteed the value of the product. At the same time, caviar was the food of the nomenklatura and a lucrative black market emerged. In Soviet times, corruption and the abuse of power were regarded as inevitable consequences of the socialist economy and the lines between legal and illegal were often blurred (Siegel 2005: 63). According to the Russian sociologist Konstantin Simis, Soviet citizens needed two things to survive in the Soviet system: money and connections to the underground business world (Simis 1982). ‘Caviar became an underground currency, a luxurious way of greasing palms and extracting favors’ (Saffron 2002: 116). The positive side of the Soviet monopoly was that the fishery was closely monitored: with an eye on a balanced population, sturgeon fishing was outlawed in the Caspian Sea as early as 1962.

The Soviet authorities guarded the production of caviar in a way which was comparable to how De Beers protected its diamond mines. Production was centralised under a highly efficient state monopoly. However, after the fall of communism the caviar trade was privatised. In the first years after the economic reforms, sturgeon was overfished and caviar was exported in large quantities. Under pressure from environmental groups steps were finally taken to regulate the fishery and fishing companies were issued with licences.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to the collapse of existing management and control systems, the subsequent overexploitation of wild sturgeon stocks, and the involvement of criminal networks (De Meulenaer and Raymakers 1996; Birstein et al. 1997; Raymakers 2002). Since 1998, the caviar trade has been regulated under CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, to combat unsustainable harvesting and illegal trade. Currently, the international trade in sturgeon and sturgeon products, such as eggs for caviar, is only allowed when shipments are accompanied by the appropriate import and export certificates (Oldfield 2003; European Commission 2010).

CITES is signed by 181 countries, including the countries around the Caspian Sea: Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran and Azerbaijan (with the exception of Turkmenistan), and implemented by the European Union in a joint regulation that applies to all EU member states.⁷ All international shipments of caviar must be accompanied by CITES permits, with the exception of a maximum amount of 125 g of caviar per person to be used for non-commercial purposes (CITES II/appendix B sturgeons).⁸ Caviar containers are required to bear non-reusable labels⁹ and the caviar must be packaged in such a way as to permit visual evidence of any opening of the container. As of 2006, the EU has mandated that not only the original packaging, but also repackaged caviar must be affixed with a non-reusable label. Repackaging companies must be registered with the CITES authorities.¹⁰

Due to large amounts of illegal catches and the decline in sturgeon populations, CITES proposed an export ban on caviar for the countries around the Caspian Sea in 2001. Subsequently, Russia, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan committed themselves to a range of measures, including export quotas to reduce overfishing (Raymakers 2002). Since 2007 when the sturgeon population had declined significantly, Russia completely banned wild sturgeon harvesting under the pressure of different international organizations. This ban was joined by all Caspian littoral states in 2014 (Nellemann et al. 2014) and has led to the further criminalization of sturgeon catches.

In Russia, the punishment for the illegal fishing of sturgeons is a fine of up to 500,000 roubles or three years imprisonment, including the seizure of equipment and vehicles used during poaching and compensation for the damage to the species (Maltsev 2009). In different EU member states the maximum punishments for the illegal trade in caviar vary from a fine of several thousand euros to years of imprisonment (Traffic 2014). Despite such regulations and measures the sturgeon population in the Caspian Sea has decreased dramatically. Due to the overexploitation of sturgeon for the caviar industry, 85 % of the sturgeon species are now threatened with extinction in comparison to 44 % in 1996 (Bronzi and Rozenthal 2014). At the same time the value of caviar increased disproportionately to thousands of euros per kilo because of the declining sturgeon populations and various criminal groups became involved in the illegal trade in this pre-historic fish.

Western Europe appears to be the largest importer of caviar, both in terms of quantity and value (Engler and Parry-Jones 2007: 33). Between 1998 and 2006, more than 1300 t of caviar were traded, 45 % (or 491 t) of which was destined for the EU and 24 % (313 t) for the US (Schneider 2012: 58–59). The EU is also one of the most important illegal markets with over 7 t of illegal caviar seized by European law enforcement agencies between 2000 and 2007 (Traffic 2009: 2). In Europe, a wide range of caviar dealers, fashionable restaurants and Russian shops are being supplied with illegal caviar.²⁹

The 1585 seizures of illegal caviar in the EU³⁰ between 2001 and 2010 indicate that the size of the batches of contraband vary from a few hundred grams to hundreds of kilos, mainly originating from countries around the Caspian Sea. For example, an investigation revealed that two caviar businessmen smuggled at least 1.4 t of caviar into the EU market in a single year (European Commission 2006). In total 10 tons of caviar were confiscated between 2001 and 2010 in the EU with a peak during the early 2000s, both in volume and incidents.³¹ Over 40 % of all seizures come from Russia (N = 579, 41 %).³² The annual value of legally exported caviar by the top exporter Russia is estimated to be between 40 and 100 million dollars, while the illegal Russian export of caviar is estimated to be no less than 250–400 million dollars (Pikitch et al. 2005: 241; Schneider 2012: 59–60). Other major countries of origin of illegal caviar are Azerbaijan (N = 190, 13 %) and Kazakhstan (N = 68, 5 %), with Ukraine (N = 199, 14 %) and Poland (N = 75, 5 %) as important transit countries. Germany (N = 832, 53 %), France (N = 293, 19 %) and Italy (N = 77, 5 %) appear to be major outlets in the EU for the illegal caviar trade (Fig. 1). For decades, these countries have been well-known for having substantial demand markets for legal and illegal caviar in the EU (Raymakers and Hoover 2002; Knapp et al. 2006; Traffic 2009).

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On its way to Europe, caviar is hidden in special compartments in trucks and private cars or in personal hand luggage, with the complicity of airline employees (Knapp et al. 2006). Caviar is not only attractive to smuggle because it is valuable and available on the market, but also due to it is relatively easily concealable and removable (Moreto and Lemieux 2014). Smugglers of caviar can be divided into three types. The first type is the ‘tourist’, who buys caviar as a souvenir. Under this category are well-known artists and performers who buy their caviar at the markets in Moscow: “Rich people, movie stars and famous artists buy their caviar at the Dorogomilovsky market (...) This market is very famous and expensive (…) it is the best you can get in Moscow”. ³³ They are usually unaware of the rules regarding the trade in caviar and try to bring back home more than 125 g. The second type is the ‘opportunist’, mainly truck drivers or former residents, who try to sell several kilos of caviar in the country of destination to make some profit or to compensate for the fuel used. As described by an Iranian greengrocer in The Netherlands, “Besides the fact I really like caviar, especially from Iran, I sell it to friends and acquaintances to reduce the fuel costs”.³⁴ The third type is the ‘well-organized smuggler’ who is part of a criminal network and uses sophisticated methods. A smuggler interviewed highlighted: “We smuggle the caviar in these plastic buckets of 1 k in refrigerated trucks (…) around 40 k each time.”³⁵ Middlemen in Baku and Atyrau explained how they deploy airline employees to smuggle caviar out of the country. “No problem. This is a traditional smuggling method in which they [airline employees] hide caviar in their luggage. (…) Of course we have to bribe the customs officials.”³⁶ The tins are then sold or repackaged and resold, but caviar is also being used as barter; for instance, a 500 g tin of caviar in exchange for a stolen western Mercedes (Neve et al. 2012).

Based on seizures most illegal traders turned out to be Russian, French and Polish businessmen, while a remarkable number of facilitators (civil servants, lorry drivers and food merchants) are also involved in the illegal trade. A middleman in Moscow explained that it is useful “to have connections with Russians in countries abroad (…) to deliver the trade (…) my boss has such connections, those are often friends, acquaintances or Russians who he met during his business trips.” Various respondents underlined that caviar is regularly smuggled by cars from the Caspian Sea to Moscow where the caviar is collected by middlemen and then smuggled through Belarus via Poland into the EU. The same middleman continued: “There is no border control between Russia and Belarus, we use this border and enter the EU by bribing Polish border officials.”³⁷ According to Raymakers (2002: 21) Polish traders are involved in the illegal business, as Poland is traditionally used as a transit country to smuggle caviar from Russia to the EU. Hamburg in Germany is an important hub where caviar is laundered by corporations (Knapp et al. 2006; Neve et al. 2012).³⁸ This smuggling route is confirmed by an illegal trader in the East of The Netherlands. He explained that he orders his caviar from a German trader who works together with a network of Russian entrepreneurs that deliver wild caviar by refrigerated trucks to Hamburg and Düsseldorf and then onwards to The Netherlands.³⁹ According to an important middlemen in Baku substantial amounts of caviar are now smuggled from Russia and Azerbaijan through Georgia and Turkey into the EU,⁴⁰ mostly by road, which is confirmed by confiscations (Fig. 2).⁴¹

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Russian criminal groups also use counterstrategies in the European countries. In the UK, a raid in London by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (Operation Ribbon) associated illegal caviar trade with murder, extortion and corruption by Russian organized crime (Duffy 2010; Schneider 2012). In The Netherlands there are also indicators that the Russian mafia is involved in the caviar trade (AID 2009). In the early 2000s, when a large volume of illegal caviar from Russia was confiscated, Russians arrived at the national CITES office in Dordrecht to claim their caviar and threaten the employees.⁴² On another occasion, Russian criminals intimidated a law enforcer after caviar seizures by threatening him in front of his house (AID 2009). The inspector explained: “There was a lot of Russian caviar seized, nearly 10,000 k. (…) I was on the train home and got a call from my neighbour who said there were people sitting in a black Mercedes in front of my home and they were taking photographs. I asked her to give me the registration number and got in touch with my colleagues in the police. It turned out to be the same Russians who were involved in this illegal shipment”.⁴³ These examples serve to illustrate how illegal caviar enters the European market and how criminal groups in Western Europe are active in smuggling and protecting their trade.

Organized crime never operates in a social vacuum; it always interacts with its social environment, which provides fertile ground for their activities (Van de Bunt, Siegel, Zaitch, 2014). The ‘caviar mafia’ is another example of this intertwinement between the illegal and legal world. These criminal groups in the caviar trade are regularly embedded in legal enterprises that are used to shadow their illegal activities. According to different informants, in the post-Soviet period the official directors of the current fish farms in Russia were the ‘big fishes’ in the illegal trade in caviar. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Russian mafia largely assumed the role of transferring economic assets into private hands. The mafia had taken over this responsibility of the state due to the inability of the state to provide order and the necessary services (Volkov 2002). The shadow economy in the mid and late 1990s constituted between 20 and 45 % of the gross domestic product in Russia (Kosals 1998: 59).

In the post-communist period, legally registered companies use various methods to launder illegal caviar. The most common of which involve: the use of false or forged documents or labels, lids of illegal caviar tins and jars imitating well-known brands such as Russkaya Ikra, or bogus information about the producer, such as the non-existent Russian Ministry of Fishery (Lawson 2002; Knapp et al. 2006). The trade in empty caviar tins and jars, lids and labels is flourishing. A middleman in Baku presented several lids of counterfeit caviar brands from Azerbaijan and Russia. He explained how, in this way, locally poached and produced caviar from Azerbaijan is sold as Russian caviar.⁴⁴ Furthermore, official CITES certificates are often reused illegally: “The dealer orders a small batch of legal caviar, sends half of it back, and then uses his import license to sell illegal caviar.” According to a 2009 police investigation named Platina, this is one of the most often used methods.⁴⁵ Mislabelled caviar is also being detected in the EU (Knapp et al. 2006). Several authors mentioned illegal caviar from Russia smuggled through Dagestan and Azerbaijan to Iran where it is repacked together with legal Iranian caviar and send to destinations such as Europe (e.g. Zabyelina 2013). Another example is 1.6 t of caviar from Kazakhstan that was confiscated in 2006 because the tins were originally from Astrakhan (Russia). The tins were exported as being Kazakh caviar as the quota in Russia was already full (AID 2009).

Although aquaculture is mentioned to be the solution for the decline in the sturgeon population, it could also be a risk to wild sturgeon (Kecse-Nagy 2011; Jahrl 2013; Sellar 2014). Sturgeon farms are expensive to run, require highly trained staff and it takes a long time before sturgeons actually spawn (Knapp et al. 2006; Zabyelina 2013).⁴⁶ The involvement of aquaculture operations in ‘laundering’ wild-sourced caviar into ‘cultivated’ caviar is highlighted by several respondents. Sturgeon farms are cropping up all over the world, sometimes in unexpected places (Knapp et al. 2006; Sellar 2014), such as the Bulgarian stretch of the River Danube (Jahrl 2013) or the Caspian delta, where sturgeon is also found in the wild.⁴⁷ Based on the author’s observations, these possibilities are plausible: at two farms only a few sturgeons were spotted, while the companies claimed to produce annually more than half a ton of caviar. Moreover, one of the directors highlighted: “It is 100 % possible that farms in Russia have such a laundering system”. ⁴⁸ Furthermore, several commercial farms have documents to fish for sturgeons under the scientific quota. This is especially since it is undertaken by commercial fishing companies on behalf of the research facilities. These commercial fishing companies were more than willing to sign these agreements (Sellar 2014). An employee of a fish trade centre explained: “A famous caviar company in Atyrau has been involved, for a long time, in the trading of illegally caught sturgeon under the pretence of scientific purposes.”⁴⁹ Statistical data covering several years after the ban demonstrates that 600 t of caviar from sturgeon were fished out of the Caspian Sea for ‘scientific purposes’ (Zabyelina 2014). In comparison to the price of ‘wild’ caviar it still leaves the price of farming caviar non-competitive (Nikolaev et al. 2009). According to Levi and Reuter (2006) money laundering involves the transformation process of illegally obtained money into legitimate money. In the trade in caviar, illegally obtained caviar is mixed with legal caviar or transformed as being legal caviar.

A trend in the opposite direction has also been observed by several informants: ‘wild caviar is wanted’ because it is rare and therefore special. The idea has taken hold that wild caviar, which is supposed to be ‘pure and all-natural’, is of a higher quality than caviar from cultured sturgeon.⁵⁰ Moreover, wild caviar is illegal and therefore hard to get. The principle that ‘what is banned or unavailable is always attractive’ plays a major part here, but the consequence is that caviar from cultured sturgeon is now increasingly often being sold as ‘illegal’ wild caviar, simply because it fetches a higher price. In keeping with this ‘blackwashing’, i.e. ‘reverse laundering scheme’, caviar dealers are encouraged to sell legal caviar as if it were an illegal product. This is a fairly new mechanism: legal caviar extracted from cultured sturgeons is being sold as illegal caviar. As a result of this, wild caviar retains its mystique and exclusivity as a ‘banned’ luxury product that is increasingly more difficult to come by.⁵¹

The sturgeon, as one of the few species that survived the dinosaurs, is today one of the most endangered groups of animals on the Red List of endangered species because of overexploitation (IUCN 2010). However, to serve this delicacy at the table, one has to pay thousands of euros per kilo, because, similar to other endangered species, the economic value increases as the numbers of species decline (Courchamp et al. 2006; Van Uhm 2012, 2014). Due to the high value of caviar criminal networks are attracted, but also a circuit for imitation and ‘long-life’ caviar arises, whereby substances which are normally a danger to health are found. To preserve caviar for a longer period (around 10 months), prohibited bunion drugs were used. This is just one example; however, there is a wide variety of harmful activities as a result of sturgeon fisheries. Although not all of these forms of anthropocentric or environmental harms are criminalized by law, from a green criminological perspective the central question is not whether something is or is not punishable, but whether something is harmful (Wyatt 2013; White 2008: 33–35; White 2011). This is necessary to identify crimes or future crimes by studying inequalities among people, ecosystems and wildlife (Van Uhm 2015: 580).

Due to the excessive and commercial sturgeon fishing, a ban on fishing for sturgeon in the Caspian Sea is active. This criminalization of the fishing for sturgeon can lead to ‘protest fishing’, where local fishermen continue to fish because they believe that it is their right to do so. These fishermen are being deprived and experience social harm because this source of income has disappeared due to overexploitation (Nurse 2015). Especially for Dagestani fishermen the ban can have far-reaching consequences, since entire generations live of sturgeon fishing and caviar sales. Moreover, it is not exceptional that the authorities respond in a ‘military’ fashion - inspectors in the Caspian Sea area are generally armed with automatic rifles – and subsequently fishermen militarize themselves to gain access to the fish resources. This results in armed conflicts and overexploitation (Hauck 2007: 272–274). The ban may even lead to an escalation of tension between territories, such as Dagestan and Kazakhstan (Raymakers 2002).

Furthermore, from an ecocentric harm perspective the massive poaching of sturgeon puts pressure on the marine ecosystem. All species interact in complex ways and the survival of indigenous species such as the sturgeon in the Caspian Sea is an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. If a species decreases the balance in the ecosystem may be adversely affected (Wilson and Kellert 1993). In the Caspian Sea, one of the world’s most precious and unique ecosystems, the extinction of the sturgeon can lead to the disappearance of species and even the collapse of an ecosystem. Especially since certain sturgeon species are considered to be a keystone species (Rossum 2013; US Environmental Protection Agency 2009). Thus the caviar trade is not only harmful to humans, for example with regard to food safety and natural resources disappear for local fishermen, but also harmful to the sturgeon as a species (biodiversity/animal welfare) and its natural environment (the ecosystem).