Contents
Ján Kuciak – The Murder Mystery
Chapter 1: The Last Day in the Life of the Journalist Ján Kuciak
Chapter 2: The Kočner Years, or How a Country Becomes a Mafia State
Dramatis personae
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
“It’s not that there’s one big case, and that afterwards everything is different. Rather, I believe that society and the public political sphere can grow in such a way that corruption becomes less common. I know that won’t happen in a year or two. Maybe it will take a lifetime. But perhaps I can make a small contribution to this transformation.”
Ján Kuciak in his first interview, less than a year before his murder
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my sincere thanks:
To Jana und Jozef Kuciak, who lost their son, invited me into their house and took a lot of time to talk, and to the brother, Jozef Kuciak Jr, who did the same. To Marek Vagovič, head of the investigative team at the news website aktuality.sk, who was Ján Kuciak’s manager there, nurtured him and together with colleagues wrote the book “Umlčaní” (“Silenced”) in memory of Kuciak. To Árpád Soltész, author, commentator and expert on the Slovak underworld and its connections to the very top. To Zuzana Petková, who was a friend of Kuciak’s, herself worked as an investigative journalist and now leads the foundation “Zastavme korupciu” (“Let us stop corruption”). To Matthias Settele, head of Slovakia’s largest private television station “Markíza” and expat Austrian in Bratislava with a lot of insight. To Matúš Kostolný, editor-in-chief of the portal Denník N and longtime observer of the Slovak political scene. To the courageous and vigilant journalists of Slovakia, who with their tireless research spare no effort to ensure that justice is not just an empty word and that Ján Kuciak’s death does not go unpunished. To Iveta Radičová, the former prime minister of Slovakia, who in a long conversation gave me a glimpse behind the curtains of politics. To all those who, for good reasons, remain unnamed. To my valued colleague on the investigative team at Addendum, Sebastian Reinhart, who was an early and critical reader of the book and who, with his razor-sharp mind, debated the murder mystery with me countless times. To Lucia Marjanović and Stephan Frank, managing editors and proofreaders, whose patience was often tested by the numerous twists and turns in the plot of this case. And to the entire team of the investigative platform Addendum, which made this book possible, encouraged me to write it and did their utmost to help me.
About the author
Christoph Lehermayr, born in 1979, studied political science and Slavic studies in Vienna and Prague. He has been working as an investigative journalist at the research platform Addendum since 2019. Prior to that, he was the head of the international-news department at the current-affairs magazine News. He speaks Czech, reads and understands Slovak and is regarded as an expert on the countries of central and eastern Europe. Since the murder of the investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, he has devoted himself intensively to the case, carried out dozens of interviews, examined documents and followed the trial of the alleged perpetrators and instigators.
I
The Last Day in the Life of the Journalist Ján Kuciak
Ján Kuciak is facing the grand finale. Only six more days, and the underdog journalist will get the government between a rock and a hard place, the prime minister under pressure and the prime minister’s beautiful assistant on the streets of the capital half-naked. But Ján Kuciak’s life will only last another 12 hours.
The familiar quiet bustle that will be familiar from open-plan offices fills the editorial department. If anyone speaks up, everyone looks their way. The journalists sit opposite each other at long tables, type on their keyboards and stare at their screens. Kuciak has the second spot from the window. He’s a young man, 27 years old, in jeans, a t-shirt and a sweater, with bushy dark brown hair and glasses. As usual, he’s wearing large headphones, from which the sound of classical music can be discerned by close bystanders. The music seems to calm him as he looks at his computer. Kuciak looks more focussed than usual, and a little tense.
It’s snowing outside. Winter, which no one had been expecting to return this year, suddenly has Slovakia’s capital in its grip. Today the temperature in Bratislava won’t go above freezing, and a cold snap with up to 30 centimetres of snow has been predicted for the weekend. Traffic on the broad arterial road where the editorial office is located is moving more slowly than usual. Only the snowploughs are defiantly battling the whiteness that has descended on the city.
It’s Wednesday, the 21st of February 2018. Kuciak, known to all his colleagues as Janko, is a quiet, conscientious, but also funny guy. “He’s like a big teddy bear,” says his colleague Annamária Dömeová, “incredibly sweet, helpful and courteous.” If you call Kuciak an investigative journalist, he’s not entirely comfortable with it. “Let’s say I might be on the way to becoming one,” he demurs, smiling. He’s not someone who enjoys taking centre stage, the way some in the trade like to, even when their articles don’t always justify it. Kuciak has crucial days ahead of him. For two and a half years he’s been working on the investigative team at aktuality.sk, the second-largest news site in Slovakia, part of the Swiss-German Ringier Axel Springer group. He digs into scandals that concern the nation. They usually consist of the same pattern of money, greed, corruption and abuse of power. In the best case, the stories put politicians or entrepreneurs – or the popular hybrid of both – under pressure. But often nothing happens at all: the media reports, politicians issue denials, the police stays silent, the judiciary does nothing. This time it ought to be different. Kuciak is in the final stages of an investigation that has barely let go of him for a year and a half. Only a few of the other editorial staff know about it. And for those who do, the anticipation of a journalistic scoop is mixed with an uneasy feeling. This time, Kuciak’s opponent seems bigger, more powerful and thus more dangerous.
Investigative reporter 2.0
Ján Kuciak is not a daredevil, not someone who corresponds to the image of the reporter as portrayed in movies or TV series. He’s not the type to meet shady characters who pass on information at the back tables of smoky bars, nor does he take delivery of thick packages of documents in some underground car park in Bratislava. Instead, he’s got what a journalist who wants to work investigatively in the internet era needs. Like a mole, he burrows online in publicly accessible data and records. In contrast to Austria, where government secrecy is still enshrined in the constitution, it has long been abolished in Slovakia. The country has far-reaching freedom-of-information laws. Public contracts, for example, only become valid once they’ve been published on the internet. That makes Kuciak’s job a lot easier. He scans court decisions, scours land registers, digs up extracts from the commercial register, looks at mortgage deeds and tracks down offshore letterbox companies. From all of this, Kuciak has the ability to spin threads, draw lines, to recognise networks