Оглавление
Christoph Lehermayr. Ján Kuciak
Ján Kuciak. The Murder Mystery. A nation is subverted by the mafia. In the end, the journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée are murdered – fifty kilometres east of Vienna. A true-crime political thriller
Acknowledgements
About the author
I. The Last Day in the Life of the Journalist Ján Kuciak
Investigative reporter 2.0
The model and the Mafia
The children of socialism
Three shots, two dead
A contract killer confesses
“Janko fought for all of us”
II. The Kočner Years, or How a Country Becomes a Mafia State
The “Pig” and the “Accountant”
The prosecutor’s banker
“I’m going to find dirt …”
The surveillance commando
A decoy, and just one goal
The prosecution’s scenario
The Threema message with the skull and crossbones
A nation in shock
“Evil personified”
The Smer System
“Governments change, we’re staying”
An end and a beginning
III. The Trial. A nation struggles for self-purification
Hunting murderers with satellites
Operation “News”
The story of a betrayal
Trauma and catharsis
“In that case another one would just have to go”
The drumming of the gorillas
A billionaire and marionette?
Masks, gowns and handcuffs
Is Marian Kočner innocent?
Kočner breaks his silence
“After all, I had everything”
Clutching at straws
“Endless greed for power and money”
“I may not be a saint, but I’m no murderer”
IV. The Verdict. An embarrassed judiciary in an angry nation
Shock and guilt
Return and emergence
Отрывок из книги
Ján Kuciak – The Murder Mystery
Acknowledgements
.....
Now the gun’s ready to go into action, for him, the contract killer. He gets out of the car wearing a black hood and makes sure that he immediately gets away from the main road. Nobody should see him now, remember him later or notice anything that could later be communicated to the police. He keeps his head down, stalks across the local club’s football field, and climbs through a hole in the fence back onto a road. It’s a shortcut that he’s scouted out. Together with his partner, who’s also his cousin, he first drove to the village about two weeks ago. They discovered the cameras monitoring traffic at the intersections, and worked out a way to get around them. Now it’s not much further to Brezová Street, and their target. In the village, smaller, older houses dating from the communist era stand next to newly built bungalows with paved driveways leading to garages in which big cars are parked. By now the man knows the way by heart. He’s studied it and internalised it so that now, when he’s under pressure and the adrenaline is pumping through his veins, he won’t make a mistake. The victim lives in the third house on the right, at the exact address given to him and his cousin. His cousin’s biography is similar to his own. He’s an ex-policeman who also went to sea as a security guard working on freighters off the coast of Africa. When he came back he bought himself a motorbike and set out on road trips that also took him to Austria. Photos on Facebook show him at a rest stop on the Semmering mountain pass. The two former public servants are known in their neck of the woods on the Hungarian border as “problem solvers”. They’re regarded as guys for shady jobs, the kind you call when nothing else helps. Together they’ve inspected Kuciak’s house. It resembles a concrete cube, straight from the building blocks of socialism. All over Slovakia there are houses from that era that look exactly the same: two windows on the front, a narrow recessed balcony at the entrance to the living room, and often a shed in the garden. Kuciak and Kušnírová bought their residence just a few months ago with the help of a loan. With their modest means and lots of work, they want to slowly transform it into an idyll. Altogether, the two men have checked the house over five times, very early in the morning, in the middle of the day and again at night. They used different cars for each trip, and checked whether the routines which had been communicated to them were actually correct. They wondered how and when they should best get rid of their victim. They spent an evening deliberating in a pizzeria. They considered first kidnapping Ján Kuciak and then murdering him later. His body ought to disappear afterwards so that it would never be found by the police. At least that was their mission. But they rejected the plan. There are cameras everywhere nowadays, said one. And what if the police stopped them and they found an unconscious person lying in the trunk, asked the other. The risk seemed too high, and the alternative was clear: Ján Kuciak had to be shot in his own house. Two days ago, the muscular man had already had his finger on the trigger and was ready to carry out his assignment – until he peeked through the window and saw a woman whose identity they didn’t know. So they postponed their mission. Until today.
The crime scene, the house in the village of Vel’ká Mača
.....
