The elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic were held on the first weekend of June 2006. We could watch the results on TV around 5 pm and it was not a broadcast for calm natures. The fight between the Social Democrats and the Civic Democrats, with Paroubek against Topolánek, was characterised by anything but decency, gentlemanly clash of substantive arguments and calm. Let us recall the events that preceded the citizens’ speech behind the curtain of the polling station.
Death of Zdeněk Janicek
The first of the unresolved events connected to the last year before the elections is the violent death of Prague Police Deputy Director Zdeněk Janíček. He was found hanged in the basement of the apartment building where he lived after being stabbed and slashed with a total of 29 wounds. The official version of this death is that it was a suicide. Although we know that all sorts of difficult-to-explain events happen in life, some things are hard to believe. The idea that a top police officer, with no obvious signs of distress or intractable problems, would not shoot himself but cut his wrists and then hang himself, stabbing himself thirty times with a kitchen knife in the process, is simply not believable to anyone unfamiliar with the conditions of the Prague police at the time. First of all, he could not know that this policeman had probably experienced a lot in his three decades of work in the police and formerly in public security. Also, a gullible person would have to ignore the fact that shortly before his death, another armed force had arrested five subordinates for underworld contacts and that Janicek might have shed enough light on the whole case. After all, his name also appeared in the phone taps in the case. The more plausible theory seems to be that someone helped Janicek to the land of shadows, either by direct involvement or, for example, by administering some substance that would encourage his departure from this world.
The escape of Radovan Krejcir
The end of the reign of four Social Democratic prime ministers was characterised by a power struggle between several mafia bosses. However, the breakthrough that occurred during the elections to the Chamber of Deputies would not have taken place as it did if the two biggest villains had not left the Czech scene. In the case of František Mrázek, it was a departure for eternity, in the case of his criminal colleague and rival Radovan Krejčíř, to exotic regions and local prison facilities.
As mentioned elsewhere in this book , Radovan Krejcir has been accused of committing dozens of offences and crimes over the years since the turn of the millennium. The machinations of which Krejčíř was the apparent perpetrator would make for a very thick catalogue: one would encounter in it crimes of property, economic, corruption and against life and health. Krejčíř also served quite a long time in custody, which is a crucial event for the rest of the story. At that time his father Lambert disappeared and there is no doubt that someone murdered him. Anyway, Krejcir got out of custody due to a mistake of the prosecutor’s office and started to deal with his father’s disappearance quite harshly. In June 2005, he was arrested again and a search of his luxury villa in Černošice began. However, due to coincidence, previous preparation for this situation and the negligence and stupidity of some police officers, he managed to escape from his home. His wife, son and dogs followed him abroad. The only one left was the shark in the aquarium. The impact on public life was extraordinary and as a result of the botched search of the Blackshirts’ villa, the police chief resigned. But more fundamentally: The tailor had become involved in organised crime a continent further south, and activities in South Africa soon landed him in jail there. His ability to influence public life in the Czech Republic was thus greatly diminished.
Death of the Mafioso František Mrázek
As we mentioned in the previous chapters, one of the main mocipans in the previous period, i.e. during the governments of Jiří Paroubek, Stanislav Gross and politicians related to them, was undoubtedly František Mrázek. This man was able to “arrange” the smallest contracts with friendly officials of small municipalities, to mediate the connection of huge assets in the privatisation of mammoth state enterprises, but also to take care of his opponents and send them to the other world. According to some criminologists, he has used the latter option in nearly forty cases.
František Mrázek’s reign over the Czech underworld ended in a split second when an apparently hired gunman seized the moment between leaving Mrázek’s office in Prague’s Lhotka district and entering a highly secure car. From the point of view of the mission of this publication, it is not without interest that the shooter also disposed of a considerable amount of cash, apparently intended for bribery, which Mrázek had tucked into his coat in a lethal hit. Thus, in the freezing cold of January 2006 in Prague 4, the life of the biggest post-revolutionary Czech mafioso was not only over after his heart was shot through, but also a time when organised crime bosses such as Radovan Krejčíř, Tomáš Pitr and Jaroslav Starka shared power. The period between this event and the elections was characterised by endless attacks on politicians from both main camps, but also by strange events.
There were a number of suspicions about who hired Mrázek’s executioner: from Tomáš Pitre and Radovan Krejčíř to the top leaders of the Social Democrats to Andrej Babiš. All of these players had something to pay back to Mrázek, or may have benefited in some way from the mafioso’s death. The problem is that there are minimal clear clues; therefore, there are no answers to questions such as who did the shooting, who hired the shooter, and who helped the crime to take place, for example, by calling off the police officers from following Mrázek on the fateful day, preventing camera transmission, or throwing stones under the feet of later investigators. Also crucial is where the so-called Mrázek archive, a collection of all sorts of information that Mrázek collected on a wide range of people over decades, ended up.
Jan Kubice and his report
The already rather sultry June 2006 pre-election atmosphere of that year became even thicker just a few days before the polls opened. Jan Kubice, the director of the Organised Crime Detection Unit (ÚOOZ), delivered an important report to the Defence Security Committee of the Chamber of Deputies. And it was no ordinary report: against the background of several key cases, such as the investigation into the death of František Mrázek and the bioliquor case, he described how organised crime was intertwined with the top politics of the time. He explains how there was communication between leading state officials (e.g. Pavel Pribyl, head of the Government Office under Gross) and the merry-go-round mafia around Václav Kočka. The report also mentions that the anti-mafia unit managed by Kubic faced pressure from some state power units linked to organised crime. To illustrate: at the time, investigators from another unit confiscated computers from detectives from the ÚOOZ.
However, the report, which was handed over to the MPs of one committee in a protected mode, was promptly leaked to the public by the People’s Party MP Pavel Severa and further uproar was ensured. Jiří Paroubek, who, in the manner of the saying “He who shouts the loudest is the one who gets away with it”, rejected everything, branded Kubice a liar, later as the mastermind of a plot to damage the ČSSD in the elections, etc. For the sake of completeness, we would like to add that Jiří Paroubek later went to court to sue Jan Kubice, but the court threw out his motions to confirm the attack on his privacy and civil rights as unjustified. Kubice left the police after another year and a half with a loud slamming of the door. At that time, as a man linked to dissent, his cooperation with the deputy police president Houba, whom he described as a former Aesthete, proved to be unbearable. After leaving the state service, Kubice devoted himself to his work in the security agency, only to find himself four years later in the office of the Minister of the Interior as its main user, replacing Radek John, on whom and his marketing political entity, Věci veřejné, too much had fallen apart by then.
Election results and what followed
After eight years of CSSD rule, the Civic Democratic Party came to power after the 2006 elections. First there was a one-colour government without the confidence of the parliament. This period may be reminiscent, for example, of the presence of Vlastimil “Tecek” Tlusty in the Ministry of Finance and the hastily arranged settlement in the arbitration with the Nomura bank. Subsequently, after six months of this government, which had a similar function to the first government of Andrej Babiš, i.e. to quickly cleanse the state administration of hostile elements, a coalition of ODS, KDU-ČSL and the Green Party was finally agreed. So, “Téčko” again declined the seat of the finance minister when he vacated it to Miroslav Kalousek.
