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Bill Clinton, Trumps’ and Renaissance Capital

Primer: The 8th person at the Trump Jr. meeting was Ike Kaveladze. He currently serves as Vice President of the Crocus Group in Moscow. Mr Balber, the lawyer for Kaveladze, said he revealed the identity of the eighth participant after receiving a call from a representative of special counsel Robert Mueller – the first indication that the Justice Department investigator is looking into the meeting. Previously, Federal investigators say Kaveladze immediately began laundering money for Russians.

Kaveladze was the president of International Business Creations, a Delaware corporation. Between 1991 and 2000, IBC and sister corporation Euro-American moved $1.4 billion from Eastern Europe through U.S. banks and back to Europe, the Government Accountability Office found in 2000.

But let’s go back to Bill and Hillary shall we? We may determine just why President Trump backed off his campaign pledge and decided not to prosecute Hillary

THE CLINTON FAMILY BUSINESS There may be no Clinton Foundation office in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but it is not for lack of trying. Bill Clinton received half a million dollars in 2010 for a speech he gave in Moscow, paid by a Russian firm, Renaissance Capital, that has ties to Russian intelligence. The Clinton Foundation took money from Russian officials and oligarchs, including Victor Kekselberg, a Putin confidant. The Foundation also received millions of dollars from Uranium One, which was sold to the Russian government in 2010, giving Russia control of 20% of the uranium deposits in the U.S. —  the sale required approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department. What’s more, at least some of these donations weren’t disclosed. “Ian Telfer, the head of the Russian government’s uranium company, Uranium One, made four foreign donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all such donors,” the Times has reported.

Stephen Jennings is the co-founder and CEO of Renaissance Capital and in 2010 he resided over the launch of Tatu City, a planned community for 60,000 northeast of Nairobi.

Before that Vladimir Dzhabarov was a member of the FSB’s Department “K,” or its financial counter-intelligence division . From 2006-09, he was also the First Vice President at Renaissance Capital, a Moscow-based investment firm, which the 36 year-old Magnitsky claimed was involved in a six-long-year long conspiracy by an organized crime syndicate and Russian government officials to defraud the nation’s taxpayers. Renaissance Capital denies it had any part in any tax frauds; in 2009, the bank’s deputy chief executive Hans Jochum Horn told the New York Times that any illegal transactions involving Renaissance subsidiary companies took place after those companies had been sold off to new owners.

Magnitsky claimed in 2008 that criminals tied to Renaissance Capital, who were allegedly working in lockstep with tax and law enforcement agents, stole some $470 million by orchestrating illegal and complex tax refund schemes. As part of his sweeping investigation, Magnitsky claimed that in 2001-2002, Igor Sagiryan, the former president of Renaissance Capital, had supposedly commissioned named a fellow named Dmitry Klyuev to arrange a series of tax refunds through the corrupt Russian court system. This seconding of a known mobster to a seemingly legitimate financial institution was confirmed by Yuri Sagaidak, a former KGB general who was at the time the vice president of Renaissance Capital, in Russian court testimony.

The Klyuev Group, which U.S. Senator John McCain in 2012 urged President Obama to use an executive order to sanction wholesale as a “dangerous transnational criminal organization,”concocted its first nine-figure refund scheme in 2006, according to Magnitsky and others. The conspirators allegedly included the heads of Moscow Tax Offices 28 and 25, Olga Stepanova and Elena Khimina, respectively; Klyuev’s own attorney, Andrey Pavlov; and an Interior Ministry official, Major Pavel Karpov, who had previously investigated Klyuev for attempting to steal $1.6 billion worth of shares of a profitable Russian iron ore company. (Klyuev received a two-year suspended sentence in that case.)Read more here.

It has now emerged that the US Department of Justice has traced proceeds of the fraud to a bank account in Bournemouth held by Renaissance Capital Investment Management Ltd.

A chart produced by the US Department of Justice shows funds flowing through a series of foreign companies before being channelled into three main firms, including Prevezon, against which the DoJ is taking legal action to seize assets allegedly linked to the money, and the Bournemouth Renaissance account.

Renaissance Capital is a Moscow-based investment bank now controlled by billionaire oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Igor Sushchin, until recently the organisation’s head of IT security, was one of two FSB operatives accused by the FBI last month of hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. An indictment said it was “unknown” whether the firm “knew of his FSB affiliation”. Read more here for details and to help with the confusion.

*** In case you are wondering what Robert Mueller, the special investigator is looking at with this team, hold on this is going to get worse.

Magnitsky tracked money and found it all over the globe before he was murdered in a Russian prison, where the FSB arrested him for whistle-blowing.

According to records obtained by OCCRP, between Moscow and Geneva the money traveled all over the world in a veritable chain of shell companies set up by GT Group — a company that was connected to the sale of arms from N. Korea to Iran as well as laundering money for the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.
The couple used the same Credit Suisse accounts to purchase two apartments valued at US$2 million each at Dubai’s Kempinksi resort for tax office deputies Elena Anisimova and Olga Tsareva. According to bank records, the apartments were purchased using the same bank account Stepanova used.
US$3 million arrived in the accounts on January 3, 2008 via Bristoll Export, a company which had been registered by GT Group in New Zealand. In February, companies incorporated in Cyprus, Moldova, and the United Kingdom sent US$9 million to the Credit Suisse accounts. See detailed information on one of the companies, NOMIREX, which processed US$8 million in its accounts while filing as “inactive” in a separate story.
In May and June 2008, the accounts held by Stepanov and Stepanova sent US$10 million to a shell company called Arivust holding. Records obtained by OCCRP show that through a series of agreements, Stepanov is named as the beneficial owner of the company.
The records also show that Stepanov is the beneficial owner of another company, Aikate Properties, which sent US$2 million to his Swiss account.
Hermitage acquired copies of the Credit Suisse transactions and used them to file a complaint with the bank and the Swiss federal attorney general this spring.
Stepanova remains employed by the Russian government. She resigned from the tax ministry but now works for a new defense agency established by Medvedev that oversees procurement and allocation of police and military equipment to the country’s law enforcement and military agencies.
So do Lieutenant Colonel Artyom Kuznetsov, whose assets were estimated at US$3 million although his official annual salary is about US$10,000; and Russian Interior Ministry Pavel Karpov, whose assets were estimated at US$1.5 million while his yearly pay was only US$10,000. Transparency International ranks Russia as the most corrupt large nation on earth, and the large country most likely to bribe abroad. They also estimate that bribery alone costs Russia US$300 billion annually, the total GDP of Denmark.  Bribery “is not even half of the problem,” according to a US House of Representatives Staffer who did not want to be identified because of his frequent work with Russian officials on policy issues including the Magnitsky case. Yep…more here.

Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with 8 people in the room at Trump Tower in June of 2016. The meeting included Natalia Vesealnitskaya who was hired by and worked closely with Petr Katsyv who is/was the legal owner of Prevezon Holdings. The U.S. Justice Department for the Southern District of New York was prosecuting a money laundering case against Prevezon Holdings and it was settled too quickly directly after Jeff Sessions fired Phreet Bharara. Katsyv is also the vice president of Russian Railways, a state run rail operation run by Vladimir Yakunin and a close confidant of Vladimir Putin. Still confused and overwhelmed? Well there is more here.

Sorry there is yet another name, Sergei Roldugin. This particular Sergei is hardly a money launderer of the garden variety, in fact he is a cellist. But..he is at the center of a global scheme that moved $2.0 billion through Russian state banks, Swiss and Panamanian law firms all tied to Vladimir Putin via the investigation and release of the Panama Papers. Kinda wonder how a cellist is worth $100 million, right? Good question but money mess began at the Bank Rossiya, a top go-to bank for Putin and his inner circle. Oh yeah, Sergei Roldugin the the godfather to Putin’s oldest daughter, Maria.

In September of 2016, Roldugin announced before reporters at the Kremlin that Donadl Trump will be the next U.S. president.

 

Natalia Veselnitskaya, Prevezon, Brooklyn, NY and Money Laundering

Natalia Veselnitskaya had clients to defend in New York. Those clients were Denis Katsyv, Alexander Litvak, and Timofey Krit. Natalia had expensive choices in accommodations in New York where the U.S taxpayer paid the bill.

Prevezon Holdings was part of a money laundering prosecution case in Southern District of New York that for the most part was settled in May of 2017. Prevezon is/was owned by Denis Katsyv and has a principal by the name of Timofey Krit. The Prevezon office was located in Brooklyn, New York. The registered agent for Prevezon is Gabriella Volshteyn.

Gabriella Volshteyn is a founder and a managing attorney of Volshteyn & Associates. The lawfirm boasts the following on the website:

In our Real Estate practice, we have participated in over $1 billion of transactions in commercial and residential real estate involving both the US-based and international corporate entities and individuals.

In our  Business and Contract Law practice, we have represented a full range of clients from individuals and small business owners to large multinational holding companies. We have drafted contracts ranging from simple corporate agreements to complex contractual agreements related to large-scale international events, such as Sochi Olympic Games.

In our Global Corporate and Tax practice, we have considerable expertise in structuring complex corporate, banking and investment accounts for foreign investors and the establishment of offshore trusts in tax-favored jurisdictions, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas, the Netherlands, Antilles, the Channel Islands, Panama, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Madeira.

Our Surrogacy Law practice is an area of passion for this firm as we have been fortunate to help many families from all over the world with bringing a child in their lives.  With the help of our firm, surrogacy has made the dream of having children possible for those who are infertile, unable to become pregnant, or unable to carry a child to term.

(of note, the countries listed above are those that are known to be quite common in use by front companies to hide money, evade taxes and park laundered funds)

*** While Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting on June 6, 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the meeting allegedly had several objectives including opposition intelligence on Hillary Clinton, getting waivers or removal of sanctions from the Magnitsky Act and later Russian adoption. Donald Jr. included Jared Kuschner and Paul Manafort in the meeting without vetting Natalia or on background the sanctions. Natalia also does have ties to former top members of GRU and FSB. As a normal practice, the Kremlin always dispatches operatives that are at least one layer removed from listed official positions of the Russian government.

A particular group of note for which Veselnitskaya was involved and is a large lobby operation in Washington DC is HRAGI, a front operation on human rights known as Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation. Those involved in the lobby operation on behalf of HRAGI and Prevezon include:

A. Rinat Akhmetshin – Russian national living in Washington D.C.
B. Robert Arakelian
C. Chris Cooper – CEO Potomac Square Group
D. Glenn Simpson – SNS Global and Fusion GPS
E. Mark Cymrot – Partner, Baker Hostetler
F. Ron Dellums – Former Republican Congressman (correction, Dellums is Democrat of operative status)
G. Howard Schweitzer – Managing Partner of Cozen O’Connor Public
Strategies

In more detail as published by Senator Grassley’s office:

The Russian Government also has a vested interested in ensuring that Prevezon
Holdings Limited and its affiliated companies successfully defend asset forfeiture
proceedings brought against them by the United States Government in New
York, in which Prevezon is accused of laundering proceeds of the $230 million
fraud.
Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a Russian government official,
Piotr Katsyv. Denis Katsyv currently has $7million frozen by the Swiss General
Prosecutor, pursuant to a criminal investigation by the Swiss authorities into the
laundering of proceeds from the $230 million fraud. More here.

***

Another issue is Jared Kushner.

HRAGI’s other clients include Vladimir Lelyukh, a top executive at Sberbank Capital, a subsidiary of the state-owned Russian bank involved in the real estate, energy, transportation, and automotive sectors. Sberbank Capital’s CEO, Ashot Khachaturyants, is a former senior official in Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and its Ministry of Economic Development and Trade.
State-owned Russian financial institutions are common conduits for surreptitious intelligence work in the country. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has faced scrutiny over a January meeting a top executive at another bank with ties to Russian intelligence, Moscow-based Vnesheconombank. For context and validation, go here.

Vnesheconombank was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2014 due to Russian annexation of Crimea and Ukraine.

Vnesheconombank also known as VEB bank has the following officers:

 

Trump in that Miss Universe Music Video and Agalarov

Primer:   Russian ‘Gun-For-Hire’ Lurks In Shadows Of Washington’s Lobbying World

Rinat Akhmetshin, the man at the back of the room who for nearly 20 years has worked the shadowy corners of the Washington lobbying scene on behalf of businessman and politicians from around the former Soviet Union. In an e-mail response to RFE/RL, Akhmetshin denied that he ever worked for Soviet military intelligence, something he would have had to declare when he applied for U.S. citizenship.

Akhmetshin has paid at least one visit to Congress in connection with new human rights legislation that builds on the earlier Magnitsky Act. Along with Ron Dellums, a former U.S. congressman from California and longtime Washington lobbyist, Akhmetshin visited House member offices on May 17 to meet with Dana Rohrabacher, another California congressman viewed as one of the most sympathetic U.S. officials to Russian causes. Read the full story here for context and timeline.

According to The Daily Beast, the two told congressional officials said they were lobbying on behalf of Prevezon. But Dellums told RFE/RL that his involvement focused on resuming Russian adoptions by U.S. parents.

Senator Grassley was advised in 2016 on the moving parts of foreign agents, the mission to lift sanctions or scale back the Magnitsky Act and other connections.

Aras Agalarov

Real Time Net Worth — as of 7/10/17
$1.92 B
Forbes: Billionaire developer Aras Agalarov and his pop star son, Emin, have close ties to US president Donald Trump. In 2013, the Agalarovs brought Trump’s Miss Universe pageant to Moscow, and, they say, later planned to construct a Trump Tower in Russia. Those ambitions fell apart when The Donald ran for office. Aras began his career in the technology industry, but saw greater business potential in trade fairs. In 1989 he established development firm Crocus, which became one of the country’s largest trade-fair operators. His holdings have since expanded into an array of luxe buildings and shopping malls, including the expansive Crocus City Mall in Moscow. Emin, who once featured Trump in a music video, was previously married to the daughter of Azerbaijan president Ilkham Aliyev. He retains close ties to the Trump family and brand. More here on Aras Agalarov and real estate.

Trump with Agalarov at the Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, on Nov. 9, 2013.

Photographer: Victor Boyko/Getty Images

The last time Donald Trump made an appearance in Moscow was November 2013 for the Miss Universe contest he famously owned. It was a glittering event filled with carefully choreographed photographs and parties. Then another, more private, invitation arrived: Come to Nobu to meet more than a dozen of Russia’s top businessmen, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s biggest bank.

Gref, who was President Vladimir Putin’s economy minister from 2000 to 2007, organized the meeting together with Aras Agalarov, the founder of Crocus Group, one of the country’s largest real-estate companies, which was hosting the beauty pageant at one of its concert halls.

“There was a good feeling from the meeting,” Gref said in an interview. “He’s a sensible person, very lively in his responses, with a positive energy and a good attitude toward Russia.”

Trump’s two-hour gathering at Nobu, a 15-minute walk from the Kremlin, suggests that the president-elect’s circle of contacts in Russia is wider than previously reported and includes a close confidant of Putin’s. More here from Bloomberg.

Facebook check-ins can be damming.

Rob Goldstone, the man who says he connected Donald Trump Jr. with a Russian lawyer who claimed to have damaging information about Hillary Clinton, is a British-born music producer with ties to a Russian billionaire through his pop star son.Trump Jr. confirmed in a statement that he and other Trump campaign officials met with Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. The person who asked Trump Jr. to attend the meeting was Goldstone, a music producer with ties to a Russian pop star named Emin Agalarov, according to The Washington Post.

The New York Times broke the story that Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had attended the meeting, although Trump Jr. says Veselnitskaya never produced information negative to Clinton.

A special prosecutor is investigating whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference into the 2016 presidential election. Goldstone is a colorful addition to the cast of characters in the Trump/Russia controversies. More here from Heavy.

US President Donald Trump was “not aware of and did not attend” a 2016 meeting between his son Donald Trump Jr and a Kremlin-connected lawyer who was offering damaging information on then Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, his lawyers say.

Mr Trump’s then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner also attended the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower on June 9 last year, two weeks after Mr Trump won the Republican nomination, the New York Times reported, citing three advisers to the White House.

Donald Trump Jr acknowledged the meeting, but said Ms Veselnitskaya had “no meaningful information”.

*** So who is Natalia Veselnitskaya?

By her own account, the Russian lawyer that managed to slide her way into Trump Tower last year and meet with President Donald Trump’s eldest son, his campaign manager and son-in-law is a former Moscow prosecutor who had been denied a visa to enter the United States.

Natalia Veselnitskaya filed an affidavit in a federal case in New York describing how she managed to get special permission to enter the United States after the visa denial to help represent a Russian company called Prevezon Holdings owned by the Russian businessman Denis Katsyv in a case brought against it by U.S. prosecutors.

“I represent victims in many criminal cases involving economic crimes. I have been retained by Denis Katsyv and the defendants in this action to assist their attorneys in the United States, Baker & Hostetler LLP to prepare their defense,” she wrote in the January 2016 affidavit filed in court in New York City.

“As counsel to Defendants, it is important that I be able to participate in the defense of this action by traveling to the United States. For that reason, I applied for a visa to enter the United States, but was denied,” she added. “I also applied for entry visas for my children, so that they could be together with me over the Christmas holiday while I was working in New York on this lawsuit, but this was also denied. However, the United States did issue a parole letter for me to enter the United States in order to help defend this lawsuit.”

It was apparently during the time she was in the United States on that parole entry that she arranged to meet with Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner and former campaign manager Paul Manafort on June 9, 2016 at Trump Tower.

During the meeting Veselnitskaya raised the issue of restoring U.S. adoptions inside Russia if the United States would repeal the Magnitsky Act, a law passed in 2012 punishing Moscow for human rights violations in connection with the death of a lawyer who had discovered a massive money laundering scheme inside the country. More here from Circa.

 

The Dark-World with U-47700 and Bitcoin

Congress should sanction China operations due to synthetic opioid production and should also list all variants of synthetic opioids as weapons of mass destruction under the chemical and biological weapons convention. DEA now has offices in China to work with officials there and investigation trafficking patterns.

The United States consumes 85% of all the world’s natural and synthetic opiates, which in 2015 factored in 33,091 U.S. deaths, up more than 4000 from the previous year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled since 1999. When average U.S. life expectancies for men and women edged downward last year, for the first time in decades, many health professionals blamed opiate abuse.

The opium poppy is no longer the starting point for many of the opiates on the street. The new compounds, often sold mixed with heroin, originate in illicit labs in China. “For the cartels, why wait for a field of poppies to grow and harvest if you can get your hands on the precursor chemicals and cook a batch of fentanyl in a lab?” says Tim Reagan, resident agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) Cincinnati office.

In late 2015, the drug agency persuaded its Chinese counterpart to add 116 synthetic drugs to its list of controlled substances; fentanyl and several analogs were included. In response, underground Chinese labs began tweaking the fentanyl molecule, which is easy to alter for anyone with basic knowledge of chemistry and lab tools. By adding chemical groups, unscrupulous chemists have created new, unregulated variants, some of them even more potent than the original.

Hoping to stem the tide of synthetic opiates, DEA has taken the fight to China, as prolific a maker of illicit drugs as it is of legitimate chemicals. According to a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission report last month, “China is a global source of illicit fentanyl and other [new psychoactive substances] because the country’s vast chemical and pharmaceutical industries are weakly regulated and poorly monitored.” In response to U.S. pressure, China has scheduled fentanyl and several other derivatives. More here.

U-47700
COMMON NAMES
U-47700
EFFECTS CLASSIFICATIONS
Opioid
CHEMICAL NAME
3,4-dichloro-N-[2-(dimethylamino)cyclohexyl]-N-methylbenzamide
DESCRIPTION
U-47700 is a short-acting synthetic opioid analgesic that first became available via online vendors in late 2014. It has only a short history of human use. U-47700 has been detected in counterfeit pharmaceutical opioids and associated with deaths.BASICS EFFECTS IMAGES HEALTH DOSE CHEMISTRY
Mar-Apr 2016 – Fake oxycodone tablets containing U-47700 are seized by law enforcement in Ohio and fake Norco tablets containing U-47700 and fentanyl appear in the Sacramento, CA area.

An 18-Year-Old Girl Died From a Synthetic Opioid She Bought Online. Here’s How Portland Police Cracked the Case.

A fatal overdose in East Portland leads detectives into the Dark Web, where lab-created opioids are bought with Bitcoin.

Courtesy of Jessica Collins

Even by Portland standards, the weather was dreary on the day Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died.

It was late morning Feb. 16 when Jessica Collins drove through a 40-degree drizzle to the pink and yellow townhouse on Southeast 84th Avenue, where Aisha, her 18-year-old daughter, lived.

Collins drove gingerly down the rutted, dead-end gravel street. It’s the kind of street that’s often lined with abandoned shopping carts.

She got out of her truck, walked into Aisha’s townhouse and climbed the stairs with a sense of dread. For the past 12 hours, Collins had been unable to reach her daughter.

Just two weeks earlier, Aisha had overdosed, her life saved when a roommate called paramedics.

As Collins entered her daughter’s bedroom, Aisha was sitting lotus-style on her bed.

“Each step closer I could tell something was really wrong,” Collins recalls.

Aisha had a syringe in her right arm, and a shoelace tourniquet tied around her biceps. She wasn’t breathing. Her skin was cold.

“I know it sounds strange,” Collins says, “but a sense of peace came over me—that she’s OK now—even though she was dead in front of me.”

Drug overdoses now kill more people than firearms or automobile crashes in Oregon, according to state figures, and are the largest cause of accidental death in the U.S. As the country’s overdose death total continues to soar, Oregon officials have responded far more effectively than officials in most states (see chart below).

Source: Centers for Disease Control
While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority
While opioid overdose deaths nationally rose 57 percent from 2010 to 2015, they actually dropped slightly in Oregon over the same period. Source: Oregon Health Authority

But even in Portland, which has slowed overdose deaths resulting from heroin and prescription opioids such as oxycodone, Aisha’s death is part of a new and dangerous development.

The drug that killed her was a potent “synthetic” opioid manufactured in China—a drug so new that narcotics investigators and Portland’s public health officials had never encountered it before.

“What we don’t have a lot of here yet is the synthetics,” says Dr. Paul Lewis, the Multnomah County health officer. “That could change.”

When Portland Police Bureau detectives arrived at Aisha’s townhouse, they were initially stymied. Their investigation would eventually lead them across the country and into the deepest recesses of the internet: places where the common currency is Bitcoin, and where buyers and sellers are anonymous and far removed from each other. Bitcoin is used for a lot of other purposes though, as people find it a lot easier to buy bitcoin. It just depends on the circumstances though obviously.

The trail would take them to a condo in South Carolina, and to one of the Dark Web’s most prolific synthetic opioid sellers.

“We’d never done a case like this,” says the Police Bureau detective who led the investigation. “We weren’t familiar with the substance. And we had no idea where it came from.”

Aisha Zughbieh-Collins traveled a long way in a short life that started on the Gulf Coast of Florida.

She was petite—barely 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a quick smile. She loved animals: She used to have a cat named Bebe and a Burmese python named Applejack. She liked sushi and Thai food, root beer and cream soda. She listened to Bright Eyes and Nirvana.

In November 2015, Aisha ran away from a foster-care facility in Baltimore, where her mother says she’d been assaulted. Aisha reconnected with her mother, who was also living in Maryland but who had lost custody of Aisha three years earlier.

Rather than return Aisha to foster care, the pair decided to head west to begin new lives. They left shortly before Thanksgiving. “We didn’t know where to go, but we wanted warm weather,” Collins says.

They drove west in a sunflower-colored Nissan Xterra, using throwaway phones and paying cash at cheap motels. They feared authorities might be looking for Aisha, who was 17 years old and still a ward of the state.

They arrived in Oregon in February 2016, and Collins found work as a host in a remote campground in Mount Hood National Forest.

They liked the woods, but for Aisha, there was little in the way of entertainment—nobody her age, nowhere to eat, and no WiFi. “It was hard for Aisha to be without the internet,” Collins says.

In May of that year, Aisha found a place to live on Craigslist and moved to the Brentwood-Darlington neighborhood just east of 82nd Avenue, sharing with several housemates the townhouse where she would eventually die.

Collins says her daughter had been using hard drugs in Maryland, and had started using again when Collins moved to Portland, living near Aisha.
She told her mother she was using a drug called U-47700.

U-47700, known sometimes as U4 or “pink,” was developed by the pharmaceutical company Upjohn in 1976 as an alternative to morphine but never received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval. As a result, it was never placed on the FDA’s schedule of illicit drugs, so for decades there was no prohibition on its manufacture or distribution. It existed in a gray zone—neither approved for use nor specifically illegal.

And while Upjohn never manufactured the drug, laboratories in China—where law enforcement officials say many synthetic opioids are made—figured out how to do so.

U-47700 is also lethal—nearly eight times more potent than heroin. Records show the feds first became aware that people were using U4 to get high in October 2015, although they weren’t sure where the drug was coming from.

In the next year, they recorded 46 overdose deaths, most on the Eastern Seaboard. In November 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, “responding to the imminent threat to public health and safety,” made U-47700 a schedule I substance, classifying it among the most dangerous street drugs.

“I told Aisha U4 was suicide,” Collins recalls. “You can’t choose whether you live or die. It’s like Russian roulette.”

Rising Synthetic Tide: Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids rose much faster last year than overdose deaths from heroin or prescription pain pills.

Source: Centers for Disease Control
Source: Centers for Disease Control

The day Aisha died, Portland narcotics detectives arrived at her townhouse. The lead detective is a stocky cop, with salt-and-pepper hair and, considering his job, a cheery demeanor.

The detective later spoke to WW but insisted on anonymity because he works undercover. He sees a lot of dead bodies: There are about two fatal overdoses a week in Portland, most opioid-related.

But this one stood out, the detective says, not only because he’d never heard of the drug that killed Aisha, but also because she was a woman, and so young—the average overdose victim in Oregon is a man over 35.

The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)
The house where Aisha Zughbieh-Collins died. (Hilary Sanders)

Portland’s approach to overdose deaths changed in 2007, when Kraig Crow, a Lincoln High School graduate, fatally overdosed.

“Our policy here is different from other jurisdictions’,” the detective says. “Before, we just walked away and let the medical examiner handle it.

“After the Lincoln case,” he continues, “we started asking, ‘What can we find at the scene that can allow us to investigate further?'”

When Portland detectives respond to an overdose death now, they are looking for witnesses, phones and the packaging in which drugs are delivered.

In the Crow case, prosecutors won convictions of six defendants, including what’s called a “Len Bias conviction” for the top dealer.

That law, named after University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986 after being picked second overall in the NBA draft, became a potent tool for prosecutors because it replaced lighter sentences with a 20-year prison term for those who deal drugs leading to a death.

Federal prosecutors in Oregon are recognized as national leaders in bringing Len Bias cases.

Investigators try to determine how the fatal dose moved from the original source to the consumer, establishing a chain of custody. “Every person in the chain is potentially liable for the overdose death,” says Steve Mygrant, an assistant U.S. attorney who has prosecuted several dealers in fatal overdose cases. (Local and federal officials often cooperate on Len Bias cases.)

Aisha’s mother told detectives she thought her daughter bought U4 online, and she provided them with Aisha’s email address.

The detectives also found unusual materials in Aisha’s bedroom—distinctive packaging suggested someone had carefully disguised the U-47700 to send it through the mail.

The drug Aisha bought had been hidden in a VeriQuick brand pregnancy test kit—sold only at Dollar Tree stores—and appeared to have arrived from an unknown seller in a U.S. Postal Service shipping envelope from South Carolina.
Those were clues. But the detectives couldn’t work their way up the usual chain of delivery as they do in heroin cases.

“Our calls usually come from people complaining about a neighborhood drug house,” the detective says. “This online stuff is at a completely different level.”

The next day, the detectives asked for help from federal experts who knew how to navigate the deepest recesses of the internet.

In 2013, federal agents busted Silk Road, a vast online bazaar for drugs, child pornography, illegal weapons, stolen credit cards, valuable personal information, hacking services and even contract killers.

Silk Road operated on what’s called the Dark Web. That’s the term used to describe the vast array of websites that operate out of reach of the average web surfer.

The internet is like an iceberg: Experts say less than 5 percent of websites are visible using typical browsers such as Safari, Firefox or Chrome.

Some of what’s under the surface is benign material that is simply password-protected: legitimate financial and medical records, for instance, that are shielded for privacy reasons. But it is also used by dissidents in countries where free speech isn’t allowed—and by criminals of all kinds.

Dark Web users need a couple of things to access such sites: a specialized (and easily downloadable) browser called Tor and, if they want to remain anonymous, a tool that encrypts their communications and preserves their anonymity. Aisha used what’s called a PGP (“pretty good privacy”) key to hide her activity.

And for people who wish to buy or sell goods or services on the Dark Web, using Bitcoin or another virtual currency adds another layer of anonymity. Bitcoin, which Aisha used, allowed her to purchase drugs without creating the kind of easily traceable trail that credit or debit cards leave behind.

“But once you clear the smoke,” says George Chamberlin, chief of the FBI’s Oregon Cyber Task Force, “it’s not that different from the visible internet.”
When Silk Road disappeared because of the indictment and conviction of its creator, other Dark Web marketplaces took its place. One, called AlphaBay, offers a staggering array of illicit drugs.

Sellers hawk their wares aggressively and encourage buyers to rate their experiences just as customers do on conventional sites such as Amazon, Yelp or Trip Advisor. But instead of rating tacos or hotel rooms, buyers are rating heroin, meth or the newest kind of illicit narcotic, synthetic opioids.

“The game is changing,” the FBI’s Chamberlin says, “especially because of synthetics. They are different because of their potency and because they are trafficked on the Dark Web.”

Detectives found that Aisha had written an alphanumeric code on a pad in her bedroom. That code identified her PGP key.

They determined that Aisha’s PGP key had been used to buy drugs on AlphaBay.
The detective learned that, using her PGP, Aisha had purchased U-47700 on Feb. 11, five days before her death, from a vendor who called himself “Peter the Great”—like the Russian emperor.

A U.S. postal inspector determined the envelope found in Aisha’s bedroom had a fictitious return address but was purchased at a post office in Greenville, S.C.

In April, the Portland detective bought U4 over the Dark Web from Peter the Great. The drugs arrived, wrapped in material from Dollar Tree.

The person who purchased the shipping labels—presumably Peter the Great—used secure email addresses. The investigators then filed a subpoena for all records related to those addresses.

They turned up a name: Ted Khleborod, a resident of Greenville.

Peter the Great—who detectives now believed was Khleborod—was a prolific salesman: Figures on AlphaBay showed he’d done 9,553 transactions.

The Portland detective contacted federal officials in South Carolina. “We scared the crap out the assistant U.S. attorney back there when we told him about the substance and volume of sales,” the detective says. “This guy was sending out the equivalent of bombs.”

Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)
Ted Khleborod (Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office)

Khleborod, now 28, was born in Moldova, part of the former Soviet Union. When he was in high school, records show he spent time on bodybuilder chat boards, discussing the benefits of steroid use and posting as “Arnoldismyhero,” a tribute to former California governor and champion body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger.

He later studied at the University of South Carolina, where, according to his Facebook page, he was pre-med. He graduated in 2016.

Khleborod lived well for a college student, records show, driving a BMW—with a vanity plate that read “TEDALICUS”—and a Ducati motorcycle.

In late April, Portland detectives flew to Greenville to coordinate with local police.

For three days, they staked out Khleborod at his condo. They saw his girlfriend, Ana Barrero, leave his place twice to mail dozens of parcels, with labels matching those they’d found earlier in Aisha’s room and identical to those matching labels from the drugs that investigators bought over the Dark Web from Peter the Great.

They also obtained video of Barrero buying 71 VeriQuick pregnancy test kits at a Dollar Tree in Greenville.

On April 26, officers arrested Khleborod as he left work at an urgent care clinic. “He was a quiet guy, contemplative,” says the Portland detective. “I don’t think he used his own product, and based on his numbers, he could have made a million bucks in the past couple years.”

Khleborod, who is now in custody, faces federal charges in South Carolina. (His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

When officers served a search warrant on Khleborod’s condo, they wore hazmat suits to guard against the toxicity of U-47700. They hauled away 9 kilos of the drug, worth $270,000.

They also found a book, written for prospective doctors, called Kill as Few Patients as Possible.

The Portland detective says Aisha’s case revealed to him a new world of synthetic opioids and the Dark Web. He says he also realized that despite all the technically sophisticated tools dealers like Peter the Great employ, they are subject to human mistakes.

“Internet privacy—even with encryption—is not as great as you think,” the detective says. “People on the Dark Web still leave breadcrumbs we can follow.”
Jessica Collins says she’s happy police arrested Khleborod. But she remains heartbroken over her daughter’s death.

“I feel like she’s with me every day,” Collins says, “and I worry about how many other families this might happen to.”

Cam Strahm, the DEA chief for Oregon, applauds the police work that led to Khleborod’s capture. But he says after 26 years of chasing drug dealers, he’s come to understand the limits of that work.

“Addiction is a treatable disease,” he says, “and we’re facing an epidemic. We can’t arrest our way out of it.”

Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)
Aisha Collins (Courtesy of Jessica Collins)

The Wages of Synthetics

The new challenge from synthetic opioids marketed over the Dark Web comes at a time when the trend in overdose deaths in Oregon is relatively positive.

Opioid deaths here have declined in recent years, while the trend in the rest of the country is still sharply upward. (The New York Times recently reported deaths jumped nearly 20 percent nationally in 2016.)

“When you look at the rest of the country, flat is good,”says Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Paul Lewis.

There are two reasons for the good news. The first is naloxone, marketed under the brand name Narcan, a nasal spray that reverses overdoses. Under the leadership of former Multnomah County Health Officer Dr. Gary Oxman, the Portland area was a national pioneer in making naloxone widely available (“Who Wants to Save a Junkie?WW, March 13, 2013).

And Oxman’s successor, Lewis, pushed large metro-area medical systems to decrease the number of opioid pain pills prescribed to patients. That number has decreased each of the past five quarters.

Together, those two developments have caused the number of overdose deaths in Oregon to decline, a result most states would envy.

But deaths such as Aisha Zughbieh-Collins’ highlight a new danger: synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, carfentanil and U-47700 that are not prescribed by physicians but instead manufactured and sold illegally.

Lewis says there have been just two confirmed deaths in the metro area in the past 18 months in which U-47700 was the primary cause. But synthetic opioids are now the nation’s fastest-growing cause of overdose deaths. The death toll in some states is extraordinary: Last year, for instance, there were 34 deaths from synthetics in Oregon in 2015—and 949 in Massachusetts.

“The synthetic thing is new to everybody,” Lewis says. “We thought heroin was the foe, but now these synthetics come along. It’s a new chapter, and we don’t know how it ends.”

Cam Strahm of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration notes that synthetics such as fentanyl and carfentanil are dozens or even hundreds of times stronger than heroin.

Strahm says synthetics are also less predictable than heroin, which is now fairly standard in quality and potency. The dealers who sell synthetics often mix them in nonstandard “cocktails” and also frequently misrepresent what they are selling.

“When you are making illicit purchases from anonymous sources, you can’t depend on purity or that what you think you are buying is what you actually get,” Strahm says. “You really don’t know what you are purchasing. It’s like going on a vacation without knowing your destination.”

UNESCO declares Hebron shrine Palestinian

  Israeli soldier guards at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron

You would think by virtue of a UN heritage committee known as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, they would get history right. Israel has provided proof and historical evidence, where is that from the Palestinians?

The Tomb and the city of Hebron is the second holiest site in Judaism, after the Temple Mount and its Western Wall, he noted. The Bible clearly records its purchase by Abraham. The committee of T21  members are: Angola, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso, Croatia, Cuba, Finland, Indonesia, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, United Republic of Tnzania, Vietnam and Zimbabwe. Anymore questions on the countries that refuse history and remain Anti-Semitic?

Now is the time for the United States to defund UNESCO and the UNRWA.

Following the resolution passed by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee regarding the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, today (Friday, 7 July 2017), decided to cut an additional $1 million from the membership funds that Israel pays to the UN and to transfer it to the establishment of “The Museum of the Heritage of the Jewish People in Kiryat Arba and Hebron” and to additional heritage projects related to Hebron.

Against UNESCO’s denial of the past, Prime Minister Netanyahu is determined to present to the entire world the historic truth and the Jewish People’s deep connection – of thousands of years – to Hebron.

***

Tomb of Sarah, wife a Patriarch Abraham

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The U.N. cultural organisation declared an ancient shrine in the occupied West Bank a Palestinian heritage site on Friday, prompting Israel to further cut its funding to the United Nations.

UNESCO designated Hebron and the two adjoined shrines at its heart – the Jewish Tomb of the Patriarchs and the Muslim Ibrahimi Mosque – a “Palestinian World Heritage Site in Danger”.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called that “another delusional UNESCO decision” and ordered that $1 million be diverted from Israel’s U.N. funding to establish a museum and other projects covering Jewish heritage in Hebron.

The funding cut is Israel’s fourth in the past year, taking its U.N. contribution from $11 million to just $1.7 million, an Israeli official said. Each cut has come after various U.N. bodies voted to adopt decisions which Israel said discriminated against it.

Palestinian Foreign Minister, Reyad Al-Maliki, said the UNESCO vote, at a meeting in Krakow, Poland, was proof of the “successful diplomatic battle Palestine has launched on all fronts in the face of Israeli and American pressure on (UNESCO) member countries.”

Hebron is the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank with a population of some 200,000. About 1,000 Israeli settlers live in the heart of the city and for years it has been a place of religious friction between Muslims and Jews.

Jews believe that the Cave of the Patriarchs is where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and their wives, are buried. Muslims, who, like Christians, also revere Abraham, built the Ibrahimi mosque, also known as the Sanctuary of Abraham, in the 14th century.

The religious significance of the city has made it a focal point for settlers, who are determined to expand the Jewish presence there. Living in the heart of the city, they require intense security, with some 800 Israeli troops protecting them.

Even before Netanyahu’s budget announcement, Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan signalled Israel would seek to further make its mark at the Hebron shrine, tweeting: “UNESCO will continue to adopt delusional decisions but history cannot be erased … we must continue to manifest our right by building immediately in the Cave of the Patriarchs.”

(Additional reporting by Ali Sawafta in Ramallah and Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Editing by Robin Pomeroy)