Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski was a most ingenious conman. The world at large never knew about him because he stayed in a little circle of corrupt political and financial insiders with whom he was doing his dirty businesses. In a mind-blowing interview that I had with Günter Mittag, the East German minister of finance, I first heard something about Golodkowski. The collapse of Communism allowed Mittag to speak more freely. Communist East Germany, he said, had always been an economic disaster, so much so that he had never dared tell Erich Honnecker, the Party first secretary, the truth that the state had no money. Mittag made up the numbers. For cash to keep up the pretenses, he turned to Golodkowski, giving him permission to do whatever he thought might be profitable. The measure of Golodkowski’s success was the CIA’s preposterous judgement that East Germany had the tenth-largest economy in the world.
Golodkowski operated through KoKo, a company set up for him freed from the laws and restrictions of both Communism and capitalism. A colonel in the Stasi secret police, he had protection the Mafia would have envied. Through bankers in West Germany and Switzerland he set up false accounts and shell companies. He was an arms trader, a speculator in commodities, and a specialist in bogus insurance claims. One of his scams was to “liberate” 600 old master pictures from the Dresden Museum and sell them. In 22 years of illegal operations, Golodkowski himself estimated (with understatement no doubt) that KoKo had amassed 27.8 billion East German marks.
“I was for years in contact with senior West German politicians,” this paragon said smoothly, “None of them ever mentioned to me they thought the arrangements we made were illegal.” Rumor of his dealings with Franz Josef Strauss, the Bavarian politician, was particularly unsavory. Crowning his career, he settled under a false identity close to a lake in Bavaria, keeping prosecution at bay by threatening to publish the secret files he had brought from East Germany. The blackmail worked.
Peter Przybylski, an investigative journalist, published two volumes that are the best source that I know for these crimes that cross frontiers and ideologies with no hindrance at all. Europe, whether capitalist or Communist, appears to be in the hands of cigar-smoking men with double chins and no conception that there might be more to life than making money by all available means. Only a novelist as great as Balzac could do justice to the subject. Golodkowski has just died, and he may at last take his rightful place among the supreme international crooks.