EUREKA, Mo. — After falling out with his partner at a limousine company in the St. Louis suburbs, Martin Zlatev recently sought a lucrative new business opportunity: selling $30 million worth of rockets, grenade launchers and ammunition to the Ukrainian military.

Mr. Zlatev and his new business partner, a local osteopath, took their first crack at international arms dealing. Contract documents and other records obtained by The New York Times show that the deal relied on layers of middlemen and transit across seven countries. And it exists in a legal gray area, designed to skirt the arms-export rules of other countries.

“Time is of the essence,” the pair recently wrote to Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. They outlined a plan to sell American, Bulgarian and Bosnian arms to Ukraine.

Since the Russian invasion in February, the Biden administration has quietly fast-tracked hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of private arms sales to Ukraine, slashing a weekslong approval process to a matter of hours. In just the first four months of the year — the latest data available — the State Department authorized more than $300 million in private deals to Ukraine, government documents show. The department authorized less than $15 million worth of such sales to Ukraine during all of the 2021 fiscal year.

That has helped open another stream of weapons to the Ukrainian battlefront, but it has also enticed new players like Mr. Zlatev and his partner, Heather Gjorgjievski, into a shadowy market. Weapons sold through private brokers are far more likely to end up on the black market and resurface in the hands of American adversaries, according to government advisers and academics who study the trade. Recent experience in Afghanistan and Syria shows that, without strict tracing policies, weapons can end up with terrorist groups or hostile military forces.

These private arms sales are a pittance compared to the more than $17.5 billion worth of machine guns, anti-tank missiles and other security aid the White House has sent to Ukraine. But those deals have stringent tracking requirements to help ensure the weapons go to their intended recipients. Private sales come with less oversight. The sellers, the buyers and the weapons are all kept out of the public eye.

“It’s the Wild West,” said Olga Torres, a lawyer who represents arms exporters and serves on the federal Defense Trade Advisory Group. “We are seeing a lot of people who were previously not involved in arms sales getting involved now because they see the opportunity.”

In recent months, Ms. Torres said, she has consulted with a Texas nonprofit that tried to send weapons to Ukraine without realizing it needed U.S. permission, and a broker who wanted to sell Indian weapons to Ukraine but illegally claim they were American. (She said she did not ultimately represent the broker.)

Just as it has cut the approval time for deals to under a day, the State Department has also accelerated the registration process for new arms dealers.

“Generally, this is a process that takes 60 days,” Mr. Zlatev wrote in a letter to the Ukrainian defense ministry. “We were approved in seven days.”

At home on a suburban cul-de-sac on a recent Tuesday, Mr. Zlatev, 45, came to the door and denied any knowledge of an arms deal. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said when shown copies of contracts for rockets, grenade launchers and bullets drafted by his company and the Ukraine Ministry of Defense.

Leaving her medical office later that day, Dr. Gjorgjievski, 46, acknowledged knowing about the deal but would not discuss it.

Richard El-Rassy, a lawyer for Mr. Zlatev’s company, later sent an email explaining that the company aimed “to facilitate potential defense trade transactions with allied foreign nations.” He said the State Department had approved the company’s request to move ahead with a deal.

With a typical arms broker commission, the pair would stand to make more than $2 million.

Records show the deal was in its final stages, with both sides having reviewed and revised the contract.

But after The Times asked both Mr. El-Rassy and the Ukrainian government why the deal relied on falsified documents to evade foreign export laws, the lawyer sent a new statement saying the deal was off. Both Bosnia and Bulgaria, two key weapons sources in the deal, have publicly said they do not allow arms exports to Ukraine.

The Biden administration encourages private sector deals for several reasons. It saves the Pentagon from further depleting its own armory after months of sending arms to Ukraine. And private sellers can provide weapons that the government cannot — like the Soviet-style weapons already used by Ukrainian soldiers.

Not all private sales carry the same risk. Foreign governments, for example, frequently buy weapons from major American defense contractors. Deals like the one Mr. Zlatev proposed are different. Rather than selling directly, they involve brokering arms sales from other countries, with numerous middlemen in between.

Records show that Mr. Zlatev and Dr. Gjorgjievski planned to supply Ukraine with bullets produced in the United States and weaponry from Bulgaria and Bosnia.

Each of the deal’s many intermediaries is a potential point for weapons to be diverted, experts say. That’s especially true when dealing with countries like Ukraine and Bulgaria with well-documented corruption and free-flowing black-market arms.

“All the risks — diversion, escalation, corruption — are all magnified by the fact that we don’t have visibility into these private-sector deals,” said Elias Yousif, a researcher with the Stimson Center, a Washington research group that studies the arms trade. “You encourage this entire economy that exists in this gray space across borders and with people of questionable motives.”

While lawyers say they have seen an influx of new brokers, a State Department spokesman said that the department had not compiled data for 2022 to say for sure. Regardless, the spokesman said that brokered arms deals like the ones Mr. Zlatev proposed represent a small fraction of the American-authorized arms trade.

The State Department has a tracking program that examines a portion of the deals, looking for risks of arms being diverted, among other concerns. Of the 19,125 export requests that the department authorized in fiscal year 2021, the tracking program checked 281.

Mr. Zlatev, who is originally from Bulgaria, got into the arms business last December during a perilous moment both at home and abroad. Russian troops were massing near the Ukrainian border. The pandemic destroyed business travel to St. Louis, crushing the limo industry, and Mr. Zlatev had a falling out with his business partner.

He based his business, BMI US LLC, in Eureka, a small city on the far outskirts of St. Louis. The company shares an address with a firearms training facility, next to a Mexican restaurant. A trainer there said Mr. Zlatev rents space because federal regulations require some arms dealers to have a physical address.

Later corporate filings show Dr. Gjorgjievski as a partner. They got BMI letterhead with cross hairs over the “I.”

The timing was perfect. Ukrainian authorities were soon scouring the world for weapons, looking to quickly spend whatever was necessary to bolster the front lines. For instance, a state-owned Ukrainian company began contacting American arms brokers, looking to buy tanks, mortars and Soviet-style MiG-29 fighter jets, according to letters obtained by The Times.

The American side of the BMI deal was relatively straightforward, documents show. Once the Ukrainian government deposited about $25 million in the company’s Bank of America account, BMI would pay a middleman for 2.2 million rounds of surplus U.S. military ammunition and fly it to Poland. From there, drivers would truck the bullets to Ukraine.

Separately, BMI would buy 540 anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launchers and 22 mortars from a Bosnian producer. These weapons would travel by truck convoy through Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia and Poland to the Ukrainian border, according to the deal documents.

Mr. Zlatev also planned to ship 900 air-to-ground rockets from Bulgaria, through Poland, to Ukraine.

The Bosnian and Bulgarian deals, worth about $5 million, were complicated by the weapons export bans in both countries.

Records show that BMI planned to get around that by providing documents to the Bosnian and Bulgarian governments falsely claiming that the arms would end up in Poland, rather than Ukraine, according to a plan Mr. Zlatev sent to Oleksandr Liiev, a former Crimean tourism official who now procures weapons for the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The legality of using falsified records is murky, say lawyers and academics who work in the field. BMI’s documents say it was honest with the State Department about the weapons’ real destination. But the use of subterfuge abroad would make an already murky trade even more opaque, and risk upsetting allied foreign governments.

“Anytime there’s fake end-user certificates, that should be a red flag to the State Department,” said Jodi Vittori, a Georgetown University professor who studies the arms trade.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment on whether such practices would violate U.S. laws. A spokesman for the Ukrainian defense ministry would not discuss the BMI deal.

Whether the deal goes forward or not, the BMI documents show that the Ukraine war presents an opportunity to charge big prices. The bullets that Mr. Zlatev planned to sell were 50 percent more expensive than those publicly listed by other vendors. His grenade launchers were selling for more than twice what is listed on a price list for United Nations peacekeeping forces. Experts say these increases typically help pay the middlemen — at the expense of a nation in the middle of a war.

The bullets, rockets, mortars and grenade launchers that Mr. Zlatev planned to ship were unlikely to meaningfully tilt the war in Ukraine’s favor, said Mr. Yousif, the researcher. But the process of establishing middlemen, trade routes and agents with falsified documents could have a lasting impact.

Once the war is over, he said, Ukraine could turn into a hub for black-market weapons dealing: “The illicit market will emanate from this country for the next 30 years, as it did just after the Cold War.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5206761&forum_id=2#45288391)

559.91K

Simon Davis

10/16/14 11:10AM

Filed to: INTERVIEWS

In 1994, a South Florida man who goes by the name Gelding was surgically castrated. In 2011, he had his penis removed as well. He's a "nullo": A cisgender man who removes his external genitalia completely as a form of body modification, and he recently agreed to answer our questions—from "why?" to "what do balls taste like?"

Gelding is a nudist and describes himself as a submissive bear. Apart from his desire to use a pseudonym, he let it all hang out (so to speak) when I reached out to him and graciously answered every question I had.

Is nullo your preferred term to describe yourself and others like you who are castrated and have removed their penis?

Yes, the reason that we use that it is not transgender. It's simply nullification of what you've got. A friend of mine Mack in San Francisco likes to use the term "mascunull", because I remain as masculine as they come with fur and so forth. But I no longer have the parts.

What are some misconceptions people have about nullos?

A few men don't know their own physiology to the point where they think if they lose their balls they can't come any more. And that's false. If you look at the physiology you see that the fluids are made by the seminal vesicles and the prostate. Very little of the fluid and the content is produced in the testes. I still unload.

But the active ingredient for impregnating someone isn't there.

Right.

Do you get a lot of people who think you're trying to become a woman?

Absolutely. And it's mostly the medical profession who sees the sexes as either male or female. And anyone who wants to alter any part of that is in some way suffering from gender dysphoria. They don't like themselves for some reason and they want to change gender. And that's absolutely false.

It's not a dysphoria. I see it in the positive way of working toward something, rather than away from something. Many of the guys instead of putting a negative feel on it see it as a positive. Being castrated is a positive to them. Rather than removing something that they dislike, they are moving in the direction that they want. I went through a long set of psychological evaluation sessions with a psychologist here in town, because that was necessary in order to have the penis removed.

You've previously discussed your 1994 castration. However, I didn't find anything on your penis removal in 2011. Can you talk about that?

I knew I was uncomfortable in having frankly large male parts. I would quite often sit on my own balls because they were loose unless I wore something tight and held them in I would sit on them and squash them. That got me into trouble playing soccer in college when they forced us to wear these hard plastic cups. What happened was I fell on a guy's upright knee with the weight of another player behind me, so two of us fell on the knee. The knee happened to hit the middle of the plastic cup and imploded and tore me up. I was severely injured.

The doctor saved everything but over a period of time the nerves gave me some problems and I had aches in my testicles all the time. When I was in the military service they tried doing a varicose vein removal but that didn't help, it just made matters worse. They thought I was suffering from varicose veins. So after leaving the service I had them removed. And that removed that little problem but I still had the nerve sensations in the penis which woke me up at night. So I could get erect, but it was painful.

So I talked with my urologist and he said the only treatment for that was to make it numb, which is very dangerous because if you make something like that numb then you don't know if it's infected for some reason. Or remove it, but to do that he needs to cover his ass and asked for a psychological evaluation. And my own doctor is a professor at Nova Southeastern University here in. She is the most brilliant doctor I've ever met. So, I asked her about this problem and she was very forthright and said "well, we'll have to treat you". She didn't consider it something that was wrong with me, she said "we have to investigate." I went to see a psychiatrist and he spent a good 90 minutes with me and said "yes, I have just the person that can work with you." So the psychologist did a battery of personality tests and said "you're perfectly fine, your only problem is that you've got these physical problems which work on your nerves." And I said "yeah." And he said "it also works with your personality" because I'm a gay submissive and I always have been and it wasn't working right. So in order to to fix it I worked toward a goal of having things removed. And that was it. I'm working in a positive way to solve my own personal problem.

But was castration something you were contemplating prior to the injury?

Yes. For whatever reason I was always embarrassed by the size of what I had. It didn't fit my personality.

Do you remember when you the fantasy to remove your testicles first occurred?

I had a baby face in high school, there was one of these bullies and he said "you have a man's equipment but you're still a boy" and he squeezed my balls in the shower. He was on the football team, I was on the soccer team showering together and he said "you shouldn't have such big equipment" so he squeezed my balls and at that point it was just a fantasy for me. So how about getting rid of them for some reason?

When did it go from fantasy to aspiration?

It became a fetish thing where I would do sort of more self destructive things with them like putting rubber bands around them and needles through the balls and whatnot. It's a progression which a lot of guys go through. It's something that works on them and they say "Well, how about if we just have them off? Then I won't be bothered by this constant urge to hurt them". And this is where a psychologist gets into the dysphoria. It's very difficult to distinguish whether it's a dislike for something or instead you're working towards something else. I always thought when I was on the beach—I was also on the swim team—and we had Speedos, it was difficult to pack everything in frankly. I would be embarrassed and everybody was looking and here I am and I've got the biggest package and I'm not the biggest guy and I got a whole lot of looks from everybody.

I had a big dick, it got damaged and I was a bottom. I didn't want to use it, I got pushed into using it, I had to take all sorts of medications and was tired of being somebody else's tool.

Broadly speaking, how can someone know that being a nullo is something they actually want to go through with as opposed to something they fantasize about?

That's something really for a psychologist to answer, but in talking to all the guys that I've been talking with, they try to come up with all sorts of different rationalizations to justify it. In my case, my medical situation really didn't justify it because I was just uncomfortable with what I had. It wasn't medically necessary. But I felt that I would be much more comfortable having the issues of having the sensation but not being able to use it well. It was something like a guy having a useless appendage and it's something he has to carry around, and it becomes baggage after a while.

If someone starts/botches the process on their own, what would you recommend they do? Should people use a cover story to avoid getting in trouble?

No. Go to the emergency room. Today, they have been exposed to a lot more of the literature out there than they were 20 years ago. They're not going to be institutionalized. I mean years ago they used to institutionalize guys that were gay.

How would you say the breakdown is between gay and straight men for nullos?

I would have to say it's mostly gays. I don't know of a straight guy who became a nullo.

You had said in a previous interview that for castrations it's about a two to one for gay to straight men that decide to do it.

I've heard of a couple of straight guys who decided that they were making too many babies so they had their balls off so they could take testosterone and continue. I know quite a few bodybuilders both gay and straight whose testes have shrunk because of the steroids they are taking which are bad for their health. So they got castrated and now they're on medically injected testosterone which is good for them. It's not as harmful as oral steroids are or some of the other shit that they're pumping into themselves.

How would you recommend people do their penectomy and castration?

In the last couple of years, my friend Mack from San Francisco ran into Dr. Crane from Brownstein & Crane and he met him, and I don't know how the two of them had the discussion, and then I had a phone interview with Dr. Crane and I explained my situation with him and now Dr. Crane is no longer doing just transgender type of procedures but [also] genital modifications.

So in a way, you educated him.

The protocol that the doctors use for transgender people is called the Harry Benjamin protocol. So for example Dr. Reed in Miami, before you go to his clinic you have to take female hormones for six months and show some development of breasts and whatnot, some feminine characteristics before he will deal with you. And why do that when you simply want to get the genitals removed?

If anything, wouldn't additional testosterone be what you'd need after castration?

Men who get castrated, they do get depressed if they don't start fairly right away on testosterone. Because the falling hormone causes hot flashes first of all, and then the loss of libido. You lose all interest in sex and everything else.

Are there any changes that occur to the body as a result?

Body changes are minimal really. If you lose your balls, you won't lose all your hair.

What about voice? Is that a myth?

Voice doesn't change, no. The larynx is a hard tissue, and the voice box and everything else is a hard tissue. But the timbre of your voice is a factor of the larynx. I sang in the college choir, I know about these things.

One thing I noticed while reading testimonials is that many people seem to try their hand at castration and penectomy but then go to the doctor only if it goes wrong. How much of this would you say is due to the medical profession's reluctance to remove healthy body parts and how much is due to people's general fear of discussing this type of thing with their doctor or therapist?

You know about the Hippocratic oath right? "First do no harm". They have to be convinced that what they are doing is in fact an improvement on your health. Which is why the surgeon is requesting a psychological evaluation. And the psychologist comes back and says "yeah, he's going to be uncomfortable where he is, he's going to be more improved, better mood, better this, better that" and so forth. So from a totality point of view, it's going to get better after he gets modified.

And let me tell you my mood has improved dramatically since going nullo. I don't miss the baggage. I don't miss the fact that I get into sex with a guy, he expects me to perform in some ways, now he doesn't have that expectation. In fact, quite a few guys find it very arousing that they don't have to have that distraction.

Are there other benefits?

Another thing is, guys who are aroused by my situation are very aroused. I've got some guys who are pursuing me a lot. And they just like this idea, because there's nothing there to be in the way. Face to face fucking is very pleasurable. And when they're doing that I actually wet their stomachs with my fluids. And this one guy, he likes to go down on me. He's a bi guy and he said he does this with his girlfriend so he goes down there and starts licking me. And he just loves that idea. He loves the idea that I have a hairy chest and what is to him a very tiny vagina that he can't fuck but he can lick and he can enjoy being the male role. I've even got a straight guy here in town who likes to fuck me because I don't have any male genitals and he doesn't feel threatened by that.

Are there any downsides?

One of the most obvious cons is I have to sit to pee, or I have to use one of these female urination devices. It's an odd funnel shaped device that you can use if there's only a men's urinal. Also, some times I get urinary tract infections. There's a shorter path to the bladder through what I've got now. So I've got to be very careful and keep it clean. I can't get guy fingering me down there because it's the inside of the urethra so it's sensitive.

Do you ever get "phantom dick" syndrome when you are reaching for it out of habit?

A lot of the nerves are bundled on the base of the penis where most of the sensation comes from. It's not along the length of penis but on the base of the penis is where most of the sensations are. And I wake up in the morning with a feeling that I have a big dick that's erect.

In your experience, what percentage of castrations are done by non-medical professionals? How about penectomies? What are the safety risks for each? Would you say one is more difficult than the other for a layman?

I would above three quarters [by non-medical professionals]. And that number is lower than say twenty years ago. There are not as many today.

Which are not as many?

The amateur cutters. There are a lot of wannabes that are successful that manage to stay below the radar of the authorities because they run into trouble because of their lack of skill. Because if you mess up there are problems there. But if you're very careful in choosing the men you work with so that you have very low risk involved, which is age (you don't do old men), you don't do very overweight men, you don't do men who smoke, who don't take drugs and anything else. If you take these fairly low-risk guys and you do it well, then there won't be any problems. Once these guys get castrated, most of them simply become very private and they don't brag about things. They sort of withdraw from pursuing anything else because they've reached their goal.

So is the the percentage of amateur cutters lower today due to more people with medical training performing castrations?

Yes. They are finding that there is a living in this if they do it among other things.

How about with penectomies? I would imagine (and hope!) there's fewer amateurs performing these.

Almost all of them are done by medical professionals. That's tricky, yeah. More tricky. It's sort of major surgery and it's been done by some amateurs. They're fairly good with their surgical techniques. I was actually at one and the guy did a fairly good job but it took a long time and it was a very involved, very slow process. I've heard of only three or four done by cutters in the past and they have left active participation in this.

When you do a penectomy you have to re-route the urethra, yes?

Yes, what I did with this is I knew where I was going with this in 1999 and I contacted my urologist in Hollywood [Florida], an old guy who was just about to retire and I talked to him very carefully and said "in the future I'm going to want the penis removed". And he said "OK, we can do a urethral relocation in the base of the penis".

So how do things like ejaculation and urination work when you've rerouted the urethra and no longer use the penis for them?

With ejaculation, just before you reach the peak, all the fluid is there at the base of the penis, and right before orgasm happens it's the urethra that acts like a rail gun and expels the semen. So when you don't use the penis, there's no force behind it. It just flows out.

What happens to the body parts after removal?

Quite a few [cutters] collect them. They preserve them, they put them in jars. One guy embedded his in plastic and now it's an ornament somewhere. This typically happens when you're in a master/slave dominant/submissive relationship and the submissive gives up his balls to his partner for keepsake. And then you get into this S&M thing where the dominant partner controls and regulates the libido of the submissive. Especially if the submissive is on say androgel where the turnaround time from full sexiness to limp dick is about on the order of a week. The reaction time for the transdermal is very fast. Whereas the injections wear off after two to three weeks. The half life of the testosterone I'm taking is eight days.

You mentioned consumption of body parts in another interview. Is that for real?

It is for real, yes. Some guys do that. Think about the Testy Festy, where they go there and every year there they have concentration of people who are into eating sheep and bull nuts and rocky mountain oysters. I know a few cutters that don't charge anything for their work, the only charge they have is that they get the nuts afterwards.

Is this something that you've tasted?

Yes, as a matter of fact they do taste a little like chicken. Actually I would have to say they taste as much like chicken as they do roast pork. But it all depends on how you cook them. If you cook them in salted butter then they might be saltier than they might otherwise be.

How do you like them cooked?

I went to a cutter's place and he was having an event where he cut a number of guys and I was assisting him there. And what I did is I cooked them up in some butter with some mushrooms. Quite good with a nice red merlot wine.

Cheers to that, Gelding.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5206761&forum_id=2#45289106)

but if the person is autistic enough to dive into the rules and regulations then anything is possible

I would personally hate this murky shit full of nerves and unknown endings

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5206761&forum_id=2#45295016)