A Russian Hacker's Decade Behind Bars: Solitary, a Pigeon Named Baksik, and Extradition in Chains

Vladimir Drinkman spent more than a decade in foreign prisons for his role in what U.S. prosecutors called one of the largest credit card data thefts ever charged. Drinkman described for the first time the day of his arrest, his years in European detention, and his extradition to the United States in chains.

Arrested on the way to the airport

Drinkman was detained on 27 June 2012 in the Netherlands, the same day he had planned to fly home to Moscow. By his account, several cars boxed in his taxi on the road to the airport, and plainclothes officers he immediately clocked as armed identified themselves as Dutch Royal Marechaussee acting on a request from the U.S. Secret Service.

He was arrested alongside Dmitry Smilyanets, a member of the same group. Drinkman says he had always stayed in the shadows and believed nothing tied him to the scheme. Had he traveled only with his wife, as first planned, he says he would have flown home without incident.

The group is accused of breaking into the networks of foreign companies and siphoning off "dumps," the digital copies of payment card data, from their infrastructure.

Two months of solitary, and a pigeon named Baksik

Drinkman says he spent about three years moving through several European facilities before extradition. The harshest, he recalls, was Nortsingel in Rotterdam, a building he says was originally a psychiatric hospital before being turned into a prison after the Second World War, and one that housed some of the most dangerous inmates.

There he spent two months in solitary, permitted to speak only with his lawyer, by phone and under supervision. His only regular company, he says, were the pigeons that landed at his window. He fed them rolled pieces of bread, and one white pigeon became a daily visitor he named Baksik. If Drinkman was late with the 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. feeding, he says, the bird would tap on the glass.

The "four-star hotel"

Conditions changed sharply after he was moved to Alphen aan den Rijn, near Amsterdam, when Nortsingel was closed. Drinkman describes it as a four-star hotel with limited freedom: a real gym three days a week, a choice of good food, a weekly grocery budget, and a shared kitchen where he cooked lamb steaks and, on weekends, pancakes and borscht for other inmates from the former Soviet bloc. It was still a prison, he stresses, with a strict regime, but far more humane than what came next.

Ten years, and a story still being told

In all, Drinkman says he spent roughly three years in Europe and about seven more in American prisons, more than ten years behind bars. In this first part of the interview he recounts being extradited to the United States wrapped in chains.