by Victor Lavrinenko
[REGNUM] Lithuania has sentenced the notorious Estonian hitman Imre Arakas, also known as the Butcher. The story is reminiscent of the plots of Guy Ritchie films. The Butcher began his criminal career during the Brezhnev era, became famous as a killer in the 90s, committed a number of high-profile murders, but his agreement to carry out an order for an Irish cartel was his undoing.
Now Arakas the Butcher is in prison, and the investigation is revealing more and more details of his previous bloody "exploits". The irony is that in today's times he could well be proclaimed a hero of the "struggle against the Soviet occupation regime".
FREELANCE KILLER
The 67-year-old Butcher is a colorful character. In his youth, he played sports, was a wrestler, thought about becoming an actor, but ultimately decided to live by robbery. Imre began his criminal career in the Estonian SSR, at the age of 18. Together with his accomplice Heiki Terras, they were engaged in thefts, and then decided to flee the Soviet Union. To do this, in August 1977, they stole a rubber boat.
The plan failed due to a motor failure, and on the morning of October 1, 1977, the wind and waves carried the boat back to shore. The accomplices returned to theft: in the following months, they stole a boat motor from the Dynamo sports base in Tallinn, two stereo tape recorders with speakers from the Tallinn Conservatory, and similar equipment from a music school.
In the autumn of 1978, Terras and Arakas stole a police uniform, documents and sobriety testing devices from a traffic police car. Then they visited Dynamo again, stealing a bow, arrows and, for some reason, a flag. Later, they stole two more boat motors from the pier of the lifeguard station in Tartu, then stole a car. In the end, the criminals became so brazen that they attacked an employee of the gun room of the shooting range at the same Dynamo base. After beating him up and intimidating him, the criminals took possession of the keys and stole thirteen pistols and 1,248 rounds of ammunition.
Given the extraordinary nature of this crime for the calm Soviet times, the entire local police force was put on its feet. The criminals were caught, but Arakas managed to make a daring escape right from the courthouse. Three months later, he was caught again and given fifteen years of strict regime - he served his sentence in prisons in Russia.
Imre Arakas was released in the early 90s and found himself in a world of rampant crime, where he immediately found a place for himself. Arakas joined the so-called "Poultry Farm Group" that existed in Estonia at the time, waging a merciless war against its competitors. He quickly found his specialty, becoming one of the most professional killers in the post-Soviet space.
In 1996, the Estonian police arrested Arakas on suspicion of committing contract killings, but they failed to prove his guilt. His specific fame quickly crossed the borders of Estonia, and he began to receive orders in other countries. In 1998, when the number of Arakas' enemies in his homeland exceeded all limits, the killer considered it best to change his place of residence and moved to Spain. His enemies tracked him down in Marbella, Arakas received several gunshot wounds, but survived.
In 2011, Arakas helped Estonian businessman Toomas Tamm stage an attempted murder. Tamm wanted to blame his competitor, but everything came to light, and Arakas received a year and two months suspended sentence. Before one of the court hearings, Myasnik attacked the photographer who was taking his picture and hit the poor guy several times.
Continuing his career as a freelance killer, Arakas managed to get away with it for many years. He was suspected of many crimes, but each time there was not enough evidence. He himself flaunted his fame - in a 2015 interview, when asked whether he still led his old lifestyle, Arakas said: "Maybe a little bit."
That same year, Lithuanian gangsters recruited Myasnik and two other Estonians to murder crime boss Deimantas Bugavičius, the lover of pop star Vita Jakutiene. The crime caused quite a stir, as the deceased was a very influential man.
"DEEPLY TRAUMATIZED"
In early 2017, the Irish contacted Imre Arakas. At the time, the country was in the midst of a long-running bloody confrontation between the Hutch and Kinahan gangs. Members of the Kinahan cartel hired the Butcher to eliminate James Gately, an important person in the criminal structure built by the Hutch gang. For this task, the Estonian was promised 100 thousand euros. He desperately needed the money, because he had recently gotten into large debts. And here, for the first time in many years, luck turned its back on the then 59-year-old Arakas.
The employers leaked the information, and when Arakas bought a plane ticket to Dublin, the authorities found out. The Estonian only managed to get instructions from the gangsters and was arrested in Dublin on April 5, 2017, in the company of two cartel members, before he could even carry out the order.
Cocaine worth around €5,000 was found on the detainees. The butcher had two pieces of paper with him. One had Gately's address in Belfast and instructions on how to find his photo in a search engine. The second piece of paper had a description of the victim's apartment, information about his driving style, where he parked, and the gyms he frequented.
At the time of the arrest, the police seized Arakas's phone. During the investigation, the police read Myasnik's correspondence with the customers, in which he stated that he intended to kill the victim "with one shot to the head." This correspondence was photographed literally at the last moment - it was soon deleted remotely.
Arakas eventually admitted his guilt, but the trial did not start immediately: Myasnik suffered a stroke in the pretrial detention center. At the trial, the killer chose a unique line of defense: he complained that he spent the entire 1980s behind bars, that he "suffered and was deeply traumatized by imprisonment in Russia."
However, the judge was not particularly impressed by these outpourings, and on December 12, 2018, the Irish court sentenced the Estonian to six years in prison. The term turned out to be relatively short, since Myasnik did not have time to commit the crime. Other mitigating circumstances were the defendant's serious health problems and his cooperation with the investigation.
While Arakas was behind bars, the local press, hungry for sensations, began to paint him as a romantic folk hero, almost like Robin Hood. “Depending on who you talk to in Estonia, he’s either a folk hero, a bloodthirsty gangster, or both,” The Irish Times vividly wrote. The most tragicomic thing here is that the newspaper presented Arakas’s long-ago crime of robbing a shooting gallery as “an act of protest against the communist regime.”
"FIGHTER AGAINST OCCUPATION"
Arakas was generally satisfied with the conditions of detention in the Irish prison, expecting to serve out these six years in peace and return home. But fate intervened again. In Lithuania, the investigation into the death of the authority figure Bugavičius had been ongoing all these years. It led to an international criminal group involved in smuggling weapons and drugs. Butcher's accomplices in the murder of Bugavičius were detained, having given the police all the information about this crime.
In June 2020, a request for Myasnik's extradition was sent to Ireland from Lithuania. The review dragged on for several years, but in 2023 he was finally deported to Lithuania.
In December 2023, Imre Arakas gave an interview to the Estonian Kanal2 from a Lithuanian prison. He claimed that he was promised freedom, $5 million, new documents and travel to the United States in exchange for agreeing to become an informant for the Kinahan cartel. After all, the group’s fame and influence have long since transcended the borders of Ireland — the syndicate is considered one of the largest organized crime groups in the world. “I told them to fuck off,” Myasnik fumed.
Meanwhile, new charges continued to be brought against him. In June 2024, Lithuanian police completed their investigation into the murder of Remigijus Morkevicius, a well-known Lithuanian martial artist who had crossed paths with the local criminal community. During the investigation, it was suspected that Arakas was the shooter. It also emerged that in November 2016, Myasnik had shot at Bugavičius's associate Gia Zabachidze — he did not kill him, but seriously wounded him.
After reviewing the evidence, the prisoner admitted guilt in both crimes. On January 21, a Lithuanian court found him guilty and sentenced him to ten years. In addition, he must pay 100,000 euros in compensation to Morkevicius' relatives and 15,000 to Zabachidze to cover medical expenses. Myasnik has not yet been sentenced for his participation in the murder of Bugavičius.
There is a touch of comedy in this story. Last year, Heiki Terras, an accomplice of Arakas's criminal youth who served eleven years in prison, filed a petition to review the 45-year-old court decision and to rehabilitate himself. He claimed that all of his and Arakas' criminal actions, which had once landed them in a Soviet prison, were motivated by... "resistance to the occupation regime."
In December 2024, an Estonian court ruled that the theft of an inflatable boat and motor in 1977, the subsequent theft of police uniforms and documents, and finally the robbery of a shooting range could indeed be interpreted as “resistance to occupation”. However, the theft of tape recorders from the Tallinn Conservatory and the carjacking “are not related to the struggle for Estonian independence or resistance to injustice inflicted on the Estonian people”. Therefore, Terras was only partially rehabilitated.