A quiet New Hampshire home out of which a married couple ran their online craft business covertly doubled as a clearinghouse for “millions of dollars in military and sensitive dual-use technologies from U.S. manufacturers and vendors,” which an alleged smuggling ring shipped to Russia over the course of at least five years, according to a sprawling 16-count federal indictment unsealed Tuesday.
Alexey Brayman, one of seven people charged in the case, surrendered to authorities on Tuesday morning, according to The Boston Globe. Prosecutors have asked that he surrender his passport and be held on $250,000 bail.
“They are the nicest family,” a local delivery driver told the Globe of Brayman and his wife, Daria. “They’ll leave gift cards out around the holidays. And snacks.”
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Federal investigators claim that Brayman and his accomplices worked for the “Serniya” syndicate, a procurement network whose activities they described as “instrumental to the Russian Federation’s war machine” in the indictment. The suburban house in Merrimack where Brayman lived was “repeatedly used” as a way station where military-grade and dual-use technologies were packaged and shipped to intermediaries throughout Europe and Asia, officials wrote.
Brayman is a lawful permanent resident of the United States, according to the filing, as is Vadim Yermolenko, a 41-year-old New Jersey man also arrested over the alleged scheme on Tuesday. The other four individuals named in the indictment, all Russian nationals, include Vadim Konoshchenok, 48, who was detained in Estonia earlier this month.
A suspected agent for the FSB, Russia’s primary security agency and the direct descendant of the KGB, Konoshchenok is expected to be extradited to the U.S., the Justice Department said in a statement. Estonian investigators searched his warehouse turned up roughly 375 pounds worth of ammunition from the U.S.
Yevgeniy Grinin, 44, Aleksey Ippolitov, 57, Svetlana Skvortsova, 41, and Boris Livshits, 52, all remained at large on Tuesday.
Beginning in 2017, according to the indictment, Livshits bought millions of dollars’ worth of electronic components, many of them highly sensitive and heavily regulated due to their military capabilities, from American companies. Often using the alias “David Wetzky,” Livshits allegedly misled the companies about how their products would be used, and who would be using them. He then shipped them off to the Braymans’ home, while other agents conspired to shift large quantities of money around, frequently via international shell companies, to muddy the trail.
“They did get a lot of packages,” a neighbor told the Globe on Tuesday, “which I guess makes sense now.”
