The raid started with a 150-strong armed unit being handed photos of 32 suspects. It ended with arrests that silenced the Istanbul police headquarters that day and ultimately changed Turkey over the following year.

"We knew we would be taken off duty within hours,” Topcu, the former deputy head of the financial crimes unit in the city, said in an interview 12 months after the operation. "In fact, Ankara’s response was slower than we thought.”

Among the group of suspects were the sons of three government ministers, a mayor, an Iranian gold trader married to a Turkish pop star, a real estate billionaire and the head of the largest state-run bank that’s listed on the Turkish stock exchange. Prosecutors alleged that those in custody were part of a network of corruption extending to the inner circle of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has led Turkey since 2003.

Erdogan, prime minister at the time and now president, denied any corruption and branded the investigation a coup attempt orchestrated by his former political ally, the imam Fethullah Gulen. He then went after those involved, all of whom denied any wrongdoing.

What happened over the following year would alter Turkey in ways that continue to reverberate, reshaping institutions and threatening its 55-year bid to join the European Union.

Case Closed

"Turkish politics lost much of its rationality in the aftermath of the probes,” Mehmet Muderrisoglu, a Turkey analyst at Eurasia Group, said by telephone from London this week. "Erdogan’s party used the probes to achieve full control over state institutions, and Turks find themselves on different sides based on their assumptions about whether or not the corruption investigations were an attempted coup.”

The case against the men detained on Dec. 17 was shut, while a parliamentary committee voted this week against seeking to prosecute four former ministers, three of whom were accused of receiving bribes from the Iranian gold trader, called Riza Sarraf. Sarraf’s lawyer, Seyda Yildirim, said in an interview last year her client was innocent.

Erdogan, 60, said this week the corruption probe had cost $120 billion "with the most conservative accounting.” Erdogan’s office and Gulen’s U.S.-based representatives didn’t respond to e-mailed requests for comment for this story.

Taking Control

Topcu is among thousands of policemen who were dismissed or reassigned in the wake of the probe, according to a report last year by Idris Bal, a lawmaker who resigned from Erdogan’s party before the investigation became public. The purge also saw journalists and prosecutors removed from their jobs. Many await trials that may put them in jail for life.

"The December 2013 probe was significant in that it accelerated Erdogan’s drive to consolidate power in his own hands,” Anthony Skinner, head of analysis for Middle East and North Africa at U.K.-based forecasting company Verisk Maplecroft, said on Jan. 5. "The probe has also intensified his tendency to root out opposition, silence dissent and ensure that there are no challengers on the political scene.”

Most Turks support the government’s crackdown on groups it says are trying to destabilize the country, according to Etyen Mahcupyan, chief adviser to Ahmet Davutoglu, Erdogan’s successor as the governing AK Party’s leader and Turkey’s prime minister.

Coup Threat?

"The great majority of people in Turkey believe corruption occurred, including at least half of AK Party voters,” Mahcupyan said in an interview on CNN-Turk on Nov. 25. "They decided to live with corruption for a little while longer to save themselves from the danger of a coup.”

Erdogan won election to the presidency on Aug. 10 with 52 percent of the vote, granting him security in office until 2019 as well as a self-declared mandate to eradicate his enemies.

The government said the corruption probe was an organized political attack by followers of Gulen, who leads an Islamic movement that refers to itself as "Hizmet,” or "Service,” from his compound in Pennsylvania. Erdogan on Jan. 6 said the group would be added to Turkey’s list of security threats.

The government says Gulen's followers in the judiciary and police force illegally placed millions of wiretaps, including on ministers with immunity from prosecution. The corruption raids were ordered only after Erdogan moved to shut down Gulenist schools, a key source of funding and influence for the movement, according to the government.

Falling Out

Gulen and Erdogan were once allies, uniting to quash the power of the secular military with trials against top officers beginning in 2008. Hundreds were jailed on accusations of trying to undermine Erdogan’s Islam-inspired government.

The two men fell out as Erdogan extended his power over Turkey’s institutions after elections in 2011, lurching into a full-blown conflict last year that turned supporters of each camp against each other.

"While they were in cahoots with the government, they were responsible for some of the worst abuses of the rule of law,” Dani Rodrik, a Turkish economist and Albert O. Hirschman professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, said by e-mail on Dec. 18. "Nothing good will come out of the fight between Gulen and Erdogan.”

Rodrik’s father-in-law, Cetin Dogan, was an army general sentenced to life in jail using evidence that Rodrik has said was fabricated.

The damage caused by the internal power struggle pitting Gulen followers in the bureaucracy against other members of Erdogan’s government was raised in the European Parliament.

Creating Monsters

"Our dream of a European Turkey has turned into a nightmare,” Marietje Schaake, a member of the European Parliament from the Netherlands, said at a hearing on press freedom last month. "Members of the Fethullah Gulen-Hizmet movement and the AKP have created monsters together by helping each other in a coalition that long turned against anything on their combined path. Now they turn against each other, leading to even more violations of the rule of law.”

Topcu, the former deputy police chief, denied that the corruption investigation was a Gulenist plot and said he isn’t connected to the group or its supporters.

"We would be burned later if we decided to bury the investigation,” he said in the interview last month. "Someone from the department would eventually talk when a different government was in power and we’d face all sorts of criminal allegations for not acting on the evidence we had.”

Topcu's Report

Before Topcu was dismissed, he concluded a 309-page-report detailing his unit’s findings on a bribery scheme centered around Sarraf, the 31-year-old gold trader.

Sarraf said in an interview with AHaber television last year that his relationship with ministers was appropriate and his business helped Turkey’s economy. Sarraf told AHaber that he exported about $12 billion in gold to Iran, or roughly equal to 8 percent of the value of Turkey’s total annual outgoing goods.

The report on Sarraf’s activities made up the backbone of the parliamentary committee investigation into former Interior Minister Muammer Guler, former Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and former EU Minister Egemen Bagis. Erdogan Bayraktar, Turkey’s former minister for housing, was the subject of another investigation and answered to the same committee.

All nine members of Erdogan’s AK Party on the committee voted against sending the former ministers, who are also party members, to a high court. The five opposition members on the committee voted to have them tried. All the former ministers denied any involvement in corruption.

Erdogan has said the timing of the initial raids is evidence that they were aimed at bringing down the government. Topcu’s operation was one of three on the same day.

Cover Blown

According to Nazmi Ardic, former head of the organized crimes unit in Istanbul, chiefs in different divisions decided to execute raids simultaneously after some suspects became aware that they were being watched.

"Our cover was about to be blown,” Ardic said at a panel in Ankara marking the first anniversary of the arrests.

The investigation began in 2012 with a tip-off from money changers in Istanbul’s 500-year-old Grand Bazaar about large cash transfers to Iran, Topcu said. Detectives then uncovered a way Turkish and Iranian middlemen were allowed to export gold.

The prosecutors didn’t say the trade was illegal, only that Sarraf was bribing ministers and the chief executive officer of a state bank to facilitate it, allegations he’d denied.

The police operation was kept top secret with only about 30 people aware of each probe, including prosecutors and judges who signed off on arrest warrants, Topcu said.

Even Huseyin Capkin, Istanbul’s police chief at the time, was kept in the dark. Ardic and Yakub Saygili, then chief of the financial crimes unit, arrived at Capkin’s residence to tell him about the operation at 7:30 a.m. that morning, shortly after all the main suspects were detained.

Repercussions

"He was in close contact with the minister of interior, who was a suspect himself,” Ardic said at the Ankara panel. "The police chief thanked us for not telling him earlier. If we had done so, he would be a suspect in the probe too.”

On Dec. 19, 2013, two days after the arrests, Capkin was dismissed. The repercussions then increased over the following months after the government passed laws restructuring the courts, adding new judges and reducing the years of seniority required to be appointed.

On Aug. 11, 2014, Ardic was removed from his post. On Dec. 30, 2014, all four prosecutors involved in the original corruption probes were suspended.

"When a prosecutor gives the go-ahead, you have no choice but to follow the orders,” Topcu said. "I didn’t know that I would be stumbling on ministers and their sons when we started this operation.”

 

(Bloomberg)