Acquitted American Crabber in Russia Still Not In The Clear

Acquitted American crabber in Russia still caught up in criminal justice system

By Will Englund
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 12, 2011; 4:24 PM

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Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Russia -- An American who carved out a place for himself in the rough-and-tumble crab business here ran afoul of a capricious criminal justice system that suddenly turned its sights on him, and after three years in jail and an acquittal, he's still not in the clear.

Russian crabbing is a notoriously corrupt industry, with tight quotas that invite kickbacks and shakedowns. Arkadi Gontmakher, 53, who immigrated to Seattle from Ukraine in 1993 and has become a U.S. citizen, had been doing business in Russia for 20 years at the time of his arrest, and he knew how the game was played. He was a major buyer of crabs for export to the United States; they were all routed through the port of Pusan, South Korea, where Russian captains unload their over-quota catches.

He was not a powerful oligarch who earned the Kremlin's ire, the way the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky did. Nor was he making accusations against the authorities, as the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was before he was thrown into a Moscow jail, where he later died.

But like them, Gontmakher was caught up in a criminal justice system that makes doing business here a high-risk enterprise - one in which those in power, or with access to power, routinely use the police and courts to crush their commercial rivals, and in which being tried twice for the same crime is a matter of course, if that's what it takes to keep someone out of circulation.

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