EPILOGUE

The Internet Party of Ukraine. Still based in Odessa, Golubov has developed a political programme that aims at fighting corruption, pornography and drug-dealing on the Internet. He is confident that within a decade he will be elected either Prime Minister or President of the Ukraine, and although at the moment that looks like an outside bet, his drive and ambition should be taken seriously. The Internet Party has fielded dozens of candidates at local council elections in Odessa, and although, so far, it has only won a single seat, there is no question that the movement is growing throughout the country.

Strangely, though, despite his organisation's fierce moral stands on some criminal issues, such as child pornography, Golubov has launched a campaign to secure the release of the notorious carder Maksik from his thirty-year jail sentence in Turkey.

Roman Vega

Roman Vega has been incarcerated since his arrest in Nicosia in February 2003. Transferred to California in June 2004 at the request of the United States, he has been in custody ever since, but has never been tried. At the time of writing he is a prisoner in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn, a dour facility near Gowanus Bay. During this entire period Vega has had no visitors except for his legal repre- sentatives.

In August 2007 a hearing was scheduled in front of Judge Charles R. Breyer in the Northern District of California. Prosecution and defence were ready to sign off on a plea bargain, which would have seen Vega released, having already served the forty-six months' sentence that the lawyers had agreed. On the afternoon before his release a prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York filed a whole new set of charges, requesting Vega's transfer to Brooklyn. The charges were in substance identical to the Californian ones. The prosecuting counsel in New York, however, chose a different statute under which to file the charges, to avoid a double-jeopardy ruling.

The transcript of the court hearing makes it clear that Judge Breyer, a brother of the Supreme Court member Stephen Breyer, was embar- rassed and angered by the tactics of New York's Eastern District. The new indictment was based on information furnished by agents of the US Secret Service.