RFERL reports:

The man in bulky winter fatigues licked his pinky, dabbed it inside the hand-sized package his underlings had just opened, and brought it, covered in white powder, to his mouth.

“Tastes bitter. Numbs the tongue,” he said as laughter filled the room.

It was February 1993 in St. Petersburg, and the man in the military uniform was sampling what was billed as the largest cocaine haul in Russian history: just over a metric ton — with an estimated value of more than $100 million — stashed in cans of corned beef that had been shipped from Colombia and smuggled into Russia by road via Finland.

The man whose security agents had seized the drugs was Viktor Cherkesov, known during Soviet times as a merciless KGB investigator. He was also a confidant of a fellow KGB alumnus serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg: an unremarkable spy-turned-bureaucrat named Vladimir Putin.

At a subsequent press conference, Cherkesov said the bust would result in a high-profile criminal trial of multiple suspects, and that the seized cocaine would be repurposed for medical use.

But no trial ever materialized in Russia. Cherkesov’s office halted the investigation seven months later, saying the main suspects had fled the country.

Nearly three decades later, it also remains unclear exactly what officials did with the 1,092 kilograms of Colombian cocaine, whose route had been tracked by authorities in multiple countries, including Germany and Israel, which ultimately convicted several of its citizens for narcotics trafficking in connection with the illicit shipment.

A newspaper run by Cherkesov’s wife later claimed it had been sent to a facility to produce medicine with it. But the author of the article acknowledged that he had been blindfolded at the facility and did not report actually seeing the cocaine.

The cocaine bust and the mystery of the missing drugs have since been the subject of journalistic investigations and much speculation.

A notorious St. Petersburg crime boss claimed a local police official whom Putin later appointed to a senior federal post had discussed taking custody of the seized drugs. And in 2015, a KGB defector alleged that Putin himself had been involved in drug smuggling.

Neither of these claims has ever been proven. But a new investigation by Current Time and RFE/RL’s Russian Service has uncovered evidence pointing to multiple links between individuals implicated in the 1993 cocaine smuggling case and the St. Petersburg mayor’s office, where Deputy Mayor Putin headed the External Relations Committee at the time. [Continue reading…]

See also the second installment of this investigative project by Current Time and RFE/RL’s Russian Service