crime, corruption and mafia in the heart of Europe

ARTE – TUESDAY AUGUST 23 AT 11:40 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

On February 21, 2018, as night fell, a young couple is shot dead in his small house located about sixty kilometers from Bratislava, the Slovak capital. Jan Kuciak, renowned investigative journalist of the news site Aktuality, with an in-depth knowledge of financial flows – capable of flushing out, behind the figures, VAT fraud and tax evasion, investigating personalities as powerful and corrupt as the formidable businessman Marian Kocner or Prime Minister Robert Fico –, is one of the victims. The other is his partner, Martina Kusnirova. Their wedding was scheduled for early May 2018.

In a country integrated into the European Union, which between 1996 and 2006 became a real economic power in Central Europe, this double murder awakens public opinion, which will demonstrate en masse for the truth to come to light.

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In Slovakia, the state apparatus is plagued to the highest level by corruption and oligarchs linked in particular to the formidable Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta. “Whether it was the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, the courts, the police, all these bodies were in the hands of a mafia-like system created by the oligarchs”summarizes the sociologist Michal Vasecka, one of the many witnesses (parents, lawyers, journalists, investigators, police officers) questioned in this documentary constructed with rigor and which carefully dissects how the authors and the sponsor of the double assassination were finally able to be identified.

like a thriller

At the base of this television project which can be seen as a thriller: the enormous investigation file of the Slovak police (70 terabytes of sensitive data), made available to Jan Kuciak’s colleagues by a whistleblower. After calling on a few experienced journalists from other newsrooms, Kuciak’s colleagues discreetly analyze the voluminous and revealing police file. Then they pass it on to director Matt Sarnecki, who specializes in organized crime subjects. A way to put the evidence away, in case members of the government involved return to power.

Magistrates, policemen, politicians, the rotten were everywhere. And often in high places

The information revealed by the police investigation is overwhelming. We discover how a state apparatus, in the heart of Europe, allowed itself to be plagued by corruption. The contents of USB keys and text messages seized from oligarch Marian Kocner, finally accused of having ordered the double assassination, the revelation of secretly filmed or telephone conversations reveal the extent of the scandal. Magistrates, policemen, politicians, the rotten were everywhere. And often high places.

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“With the revelation of all these interconnections between the Supreme Court, the prosecutor’s office and the police authorities, we realize how monstrous it was. And you have to call this monster by its name: the Mafia”, summarizes the father of Jan Kuciak. For journalist Pavla Holcova, a Czech colleague who was working with the journalist at the time of his death, “Slovakia is going through a revolution that was started by the murder of Jan, the investigation and exposure of all this corruption. The whole system is collapsing”. The film is also a beautiful tribute to investigative journalism, essential to democracy.

Double Murder Investigation: Jan Kuciak, documentary by Matt Sarnecki (Slo.-Tch.-Dan., 2022, 90 min). Available on Arte.tv.

Alain Constant