Seven time nominated BEST BRITISH TRUE-CRIME PODCAST at the True Crime Awards, Independent Podcast Award and The British Podcast Awards, and voted 4th Best True-Crime Podcast by This Week, iTunes Top 25 Podcast, Podcast Magazine's Hot 50, The Telegraph's Top 5, Crime & Investigation Top 20 True-Crime Podcasts, also seen on BBC Radio, Sky News, The Guardian and TalkRadio's Podcast of the Week.
The Marriott at 134 George Street in Marylebone / Paddington @Googlemaps Sept2022
EPISODE THREE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO: On Sunday 28th of March 2004 at 8.20pm, Police were called to either Room 701 or 703 at The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street near Marble Arch, London, W1. Concerned for the guest, he was found naked, in the bath, in what looked like it could have been an accident or a suicide. It had all the hallmarks of a professional hit by experienced assassins of the Russian Mafia who were hired to whack-out a rival for the sake of money, revenge or respect. Yet it ended with a cataclysmic cock-up which showed these hitmen to be truly incompetent.
SOURCES: a selection sourced from various archives:
MUSIC:
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: What’s the stupidest mistake that professional assassins could make? Find out on Murder Mile. Today, I’m standing outside of The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street, Marble Arch, W1; a few doors down from the senseless killing of artist Harry Michaelson, two streets north of the failed assassination of the ex-Iraqi Prime Minister Abd ar-Razzaq Said al-Naif, two streets south of The Blackout Ripper’s first official killing, and a short walk from the green-fingered maniac - coming soon to Murder Mile. Situated on the corner of George Street and Forset Street, a discrete side-street at the back of Edgware Road, The Marriott is a 4-star 13-floored hotel, as used by businessmen, tourists and a wealth of utter numpties who are in town to blow their dole money at the casinos. All dressed in a shiny gold suits (courtesy of Primark), they toss their £5 chips onto the table like it’s a cool million, evil eye their pie-eyed opponent (a bin man called Clive) like he’s an evil agent of Spectre, and hug two octogenarians honeys called Enid and Nora like they’re Bond Girls (obviously, not the most beautiful Bond girl, sigh). So, it makes no sense that the victim, an inveterate gambler who lived and died here, booked himself into this venue, being one of several large hotels in the area which didn’t have a casino – but he did. This was a cruel murder which initially baffled the police. It had all the hallmarks of a professional hit by experienced assassins who were hired to whack-out a rival for the sake of money, revenge or respect. Yet it ended with a cataclysmic cock-up which showed these hitmen to be truly incompetent. My name is Michael, I am your tour guide, and this is Murder Mile. Episode 342: The S-Hitmen. The day was Sunday, the date was the 28th of March 2004 and the time was 8.20pm. The newspapers were slim, as the main stories were Hurricane Catarina hitting Brazil and resulting in no casualties, the Hamas leader declaring war on the USA again, and the death of actor Peter Ustinov at the age of 82. Having been contacted by their colleagues at Kent Police, a patrol had arrived at The Marriott to do a ‘welfare check’ on one of the guests, unaware of what they would find. Staff had knocked on his door, but they got no reply. The room’s phone was rang, but again, nothing. And to preserve any forensics should a crime have been committed, the door to either Room 701 or 703 (depending on which source reported this story) was only opened by the manager with a pass key in the presence of the Police. There were no signs of a break-in, and the hotel’s key-card system confirmed he had entered his room earlier that morning at 9:54am, and that was the last time the key-card used, and he was seen alive. Inside, the room was a standard double, spacious and comfortable; the light and TV had been left on, the red and yellow sheets on the King sized bed were crumpled as if they had recently been slept in, but the duvet was empty and the suitcase was open and partially unpacked. The room was messy, which could have implied there had been a struggle, or as all hoteliers know, some customers are pigs. Across the pillow was patches of blood, as if the occupant had a severe nosebleed, and struggling to stem the flow, he had stumbled to the bathroom, stepping in his spilled fluids, and that was where he was found; naked, in the bath, up to his neck in a slightly pinkish water, stone cold and decidedly dead. 98,000 people die each year in hotel rooms across the world, with many 200 room hotels experiencing one or two deaths annually whether by sickness, accident, suicide, poisoning and very occasionally a murder, and although drowning due to an embolism was mooted, with this deemed ‘suspicious’ as his cause of death was uncertain, the room was forensically examined and an autopsy was ordered. The unidentified victim, a male in his mid 40s of Eastern European or Middle Eastern origin, bald with short greying hair, had been dead at the time his body was found for just over 12 hours. With blood and bath water in his airway, it was obvious he was alive when he bled, but close to dying by the time he had got into the bath, which made no sense at all, as how did he get there and how did he undress? The hot water of the bath had caused his skin to swell and redden, which had masked a series of faint bruises; some looked as if he had been grabbed, dragged, and others like he had been beaten by fists. With his blood and saliva found on the pillow’s underside, it was clear that he had been smothered, and manually strangled by possibly one or two people, and although by putting him in a hot bath, that had eradicated many of the forensic clues, four partial lines of ripped out hairs at the wrists and ankles and faint traces of adhesive suggested that he had bound with duct tape, removed after his death. The Pathologist concluded “he had not died by natural causes”, and with no witnesses to the killing or clue to his killers, Police determined this was a ‘professional hit’, most likely a mafia or gangland killing. And what baffled them further was the victim’s identity; as he had checked in using a Greek passport, he had an Israeli passport under the name of Yermia Yunataev and a Russian one under Simion Turkov. His identity was so confusing, his death was registered by the Westminster coroner twice under both names, but with his blood matching a profile on the DNA Database, his true ID was later confirmed. This was Simion Turkov. Born on the 17th of March 1958 in Russia, Simion Turkov known as Simon was raised in Cold War era Moscow, right through to the beginning of the collapse of Communism in the late 1980s and the slow dissolving of Soviet State in 1991 when democracy mistakenly seemed to have change Russia for good. Little is known about his early life, being raised by his father Ram and his mother Zinayda, we know he was university educated and had a smart business brain, but as one of 750,000 Russian Jews who fled the USSR as it collapsed, in 1989, he emigrated to Tel Aviv in Israel, set his parents up in a well-appointed flat in an industrial city 8 miles north-east of Tel Aviv, and descended back into criminality. On the surface, Turkov came across as charming, sociable, quick witted and flashy, a businessman who loved to gamble. But underneath, he was a prominent member of the émigré Russian mafia in Israel, who an intelligence source stated “he was very much a big player”. And yet he also lived a double life. Prior to fleeing Russia, in the mid to late 1980s, “Turkov had ambitions to break into London through his mafia contacts”, and keen to keep himself low-profile, he adopted the unassuming identity of a hardworking man. In the mid-1980s, he met Maureen McShane. In June 1987, they had daughter called Danielle, in April 1989 they married, and in February 1991, a second daughter called Mishka. With two loving children, a softly-spoken wife, a three-bedroomed semi detached stone-clad house at 15 Palmerston Road (a quiet residential street in Upton), driving an unremarkable Vauxhall Cavalier and earning a living as a doorman at the Victoria Sporting Club casino in Bournemouth, he seemed like any other émigré who’d come to England to make a better life for himself, living legally and honestly… …but although Poole, a pleasant coastal town in Dorset is famous for its stunning scenery across the English Channel, it is a port town equally as famous for its long history of piracy and smuggling. Turkov was a man with big plans who lived beyond his means, and having lost his job as a doorman at the casino, in 1991 at Bournemouth Crown Court, he was given a 12 months suspended sentence for two years for falsely obtaining over £18,000 worth of credit from Barclay’s, Club 24 and Allied Trust. Some he spent on a BMW, a TV and jewellery, but most was to pay off his ever escalating gambling debts. The Judge, Jeremy Gibbons said “gambling was his Achilles’ heel”, but so was money and crime. On the 14th of May 1996, having boarded the ferry at Cherbourg, Turkov and his friend, Brian Lawence, a market trader from Cosham, arrived at Poole ferry terminal having smuggled in the petrol tank of a Luxemburg registered Ford Scorpio, 26 kilos of cannabis resin worth £75,000 (or £154,000 today). At the same time, his friend, Alan Mohsen and a French colleague were driving a similar saloon and were stopped at the French/Spanish border with 31.5 kilos of resin – totalling £200,000 (£410,000 today). They were caught at a spot-check by a keen-eyed customs official who said “two men in a large saloon is very suspicious and saloon petrol tanks are popular with smugglers”. All four men were arrested and tried at Bournemouth Crown Court, but as would become his habit, on the 19th of February 1997, the last day of his trial, when his co-smugglers were sentenced to six years in prison, Turkov fled the court, and phoned his solicitor to say “I’m abroad. I’m not coming back. I can’t face a prison sentence”. Convicted in absentia, he fled to Tel-Aviv using a fake Israeli passport in the name of Yermia Yunataev, and abandoned his wife and children. But as a selfish greedy thief, Israel was where the money was. In the years leading up to the ‘second intifada’, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict beginning in September 2000, Israel had become a hot spot of organised crime, as with country ripped apart from car bombs, civil unrest and war, “the Israeli police had lost control of the country's organised criminals, who are making millions from gambling, prostitution and drugs”. Ex-Israeli police chief, Asaf Heretz, claimed $2.5bn in "dirty money" had had flooded into Israel, as where there’s war, there’s profit to be made. Turkov set up a fake Israeli company called BMD Ltd, which vaguely claimed to “import and export products and merchandise”, which wasn’t a lie just as it wasn’t strictly the truth, as according to the Evening Standard “he exported cocaine and heroin to Europe and Britain” and young women for sex. According to an informer, “(Turkov) brought in prostitutes from all over the world”, mostly from Eastern Russia and the Ukraine. He smuggled them in, gave them fake papers to “prove” their Jewish ancestry, he paid his suppliers £35,000 for each girl, and controlled four brothels with around 40 girls. Turkov was a greedy thief who only cared about himself… and although he was already married with two children, he bigamously married Denise Makdona, set her up in the flat he had arranged for his parents through his ill-gotten gains of drugs and sexual slavery, and made her the other Mrs Turkov. But time would soon run out for this cowardly narcissist. In 2001, as if he hadn’t brought enough misery to the world, Turkov tried smuggling 100,000 ecstasy tablets into Israel from Egypt, but cocking up, the cargo was seized, Turkov was sentenced to eight years at Tzalmon, the largest prison in Israel, and with the shipment owned by the Russian mafia having been destroyed, Turkov would be in debt to them until it was paid back with money or his life. He would be dead if he returned to Russia, tortured if he returned to Israel, and although a wanted man in Britain for drugs smuggling, in 2003, two years into his sentence, being allowed a home visit, this time abandoning his second wife, Denise, using his fake Greek passport, he fled back to England. According to an unnamed Israeli intelligence source: “London is seen as being safe (for criminals)… it is one of the organised crime centres of the world; Russian mafia, Albanian, Greek Cypriot, Columbian, and Israeli, who with the Russians are among the nastiest of the lot. In my view, Turkov had hoped to base himself in London and to restart his criminal career, well away from his old cronies in Tel Aviv”. One week after his birthday, on the St Partrick’s Day of 2004, using his fake Greek passport, Simion Turkov booked into The Marriott Hotel at 134 George Street in Marylebone, W1. He was meant to be keeping a low profile, but as a “big player on the London casino scene… he was very well known”. And again, as a selfish greedy pariah and a bloodsucking leech who sucked all the goodness and joy out of life’s heart – having abandoned his wife, his children, his parents and his bigamous wife – like a cartoon gangster, he lived with his Russian mistress in the hotels of Belgravia, he planned to bring his vile brothels to London, and he laid as low as he could as the Russian mafia wanted his head. Every day, he looked over his shoulder, expecting but never knowing if someone had been sent to kill him. But oddly, it wasn’t the gangsters, the pimps or the drug dealers who ordered his death… …but a rival gambler from Belgium called ‘Misha’, who he owed £200,000. As with all professional hitmen, almost nothing is known about them, as - unlike Turkov, the attention seeking champagne-swilling playboy gambler - their job is to stay off the radar and remain anonymous. The first was 31-year-old Andrei Melnikov, who looked more like a surfer than an assassin, and only appeared in the press twice in his early years; in 1993, when as an English teacher, he chaperoned a group of Russian school children on a 40-day placement in New Jersey, and in 1995, when as a hotdog vendor in Moscow, he spoke to the press about his disinterest in voting at the upcoming ‘free’ election. As for the second, 53-year-old Michael Antoneli, a businessman from Antwerp in Belgium, nothing is known about his life or his crimes, but both men were suspected (not proven) of being Russian mafia. On Saturday 27th of March 2004, a few hours before the killing, using fake but perfect passports, the hired assassins, Melnikov & Antoneli entered Britain via the ferry port at Dover, just before midnight. Their entry would go unnoticed by customs, they would deliberately break no laws (such as speeding) so as to not arouse any attention, and having murdered Turkov as agreed, they would head back to Calais in less than 24 hours, and using a non-descript day return ticket, they would vanish into Europe. They would be fast, efficient and low-key, they would meet him, and already knowing him, they would greet him as a friend, and under the guise of a business meeting, they’d kill him, making it look natural. That was their mantra; get in, get the job done, get out and be long gone before the body was found. In a phone box outside of The Marriott hotel, Melnikov called Turkov's mobile. Moments layer, Turkov arrived in a taxi, and according to the driver, he looked “anxious and agitated”. The CCTV captured the men meeting, and (to make him feel comfortable but maybe also for the cameras) they embraced him warmly like a friend, and the three of them went into The Pickled Hen, the hotel’s bar, where they sat drinking coffee and whiskey, reminiscing about old times, and generally having a very pleasant chat. As the night headed into the wee small hours of Sunday of 28th of March 2004, the three men headed to The Gloucester, a Grosvenor Casino inside the Millennium Hotel on Harrington Gardens in South Kensington, and being seen on CCTV walking together along Gloucester Road at 3:45am, this aroused no suspicion, as London can be a 24-hour city if you know where to look, and for many tourists, it is. Melnikov & Antoneli made Turkov feel comfortable, they got him drunk and they made sure he had a good night as a false sense of security, as if a hit hadn’t been placed on his head. They drank, but never to excess. They chatted but were never loud. They dressed down, and were never flashy. And only placing small bets, they were polite but forgettable to the casino staff, having blended into the crowd. At 9:05am, Turkov travelled back to The Marriott alone, the black ComCab arrived at 9.05am, and as he sat alone in the hotel lobby drinking coffee, at 9:50am, he took the lift to his room on the 7th floor… …and moments later, with no witnesses hearing a sound, Simion Turkov was murdered. With no damage to the door and with so many guests checking out at that hour, as no-one saw his assassins enter his room, either they had knocked and been invited in, or they’d acquired a spare key. Detective Chief Inspector Julian Worker who headed up the investigation, initially said "It was a very professional job and will be difficult to solve". In a public appeal, he stated "We are trying to piece together his last movements… (and) to trace the man seen walking with him along Gloucester Road in the early hours of Sunday morning. I am seeking a black Comcab driver who dropped Mr Turkov at the hotel at 9.05am. If you're a cab driver and were working in the area, do you recognise the two men? Did you pick them up? Even in the early hours of a Sunday, this is a busy part of London and I'm confident there are people who can help", as so far, they had done everything to remain anonymous. To solve the case, the detectives worked with local, national and international police forces, whether in Dorset, France or Israel, and although the killing of Simion Turkov had been ruthlessly planned to perfection, what aided the investigation most was a few simples mistakes by these half-witted hitmen. Inside of the room, Turkov was gagged, so nobody heard him scream. Having pinned him to the bed, with his ankles and wrists bound with duct tape, he couldn’t fight back, flee or knock anything over to alert the neighbours. And with the TV turned up to a moderate level, nothing seemed suspicious. As punishment for reneging on the £200,000 debt he owed ‘Misha’ in Belgium, he was beaten about the body in parts where the bruises wouldn’t be as obvious, and possibly tortured to give up the site of his money, but whether he did or whether he had any left is unknown, and for that, he was killed. One of his assassins held the pillow over his face so he couldn’t breathe. To ensure he would die, the other strangled him with his hand, pressing their thumb into his windpipe so as to not leave an obvious bruise of four fingers and a thumb. And with him bleeding and barely breathing, they stripped him of his blood-stained jeans, Versace belt and jacket, dragged his limp and lifeless body to the bath as he bled, and being barely conscious and unable to hold his head up straight, into the hot water, he sunk. Anyone who would have found him – lying there, maybe with a glass of whiskey, cocaine in his night-bag, bleeding from the nose and with no clear bruises – would assume that he’d overdosed and died. It was a textbook hit, which gave the assassins enough time to flee, as with it initially seen as suspicious but likely a suicide, the Police wouldn’t be looking for a killer. But several questions were unanswered by the crime scene; if he was unconscious, how did he get from the bed to the bath; why was his blood and saliva on the underside of the pillow; why did he have adhesive tape glue on his wrists and ankles; and – more bafflingly, given then fact that it looked as if he had a nose bleed and had drowned in the bath – why did he remove the hotel’s stationery from the room, how did he get in using the room key and where was it now, and how did he undress before entering the bath, and where were his clothes? Dead men don’t go to laundrettes… they also don’t dispose of their own rubbish. But these were small mistakes, innocent little slip-ups, which no-one would notice for hours, and by which time, with the unseen anonymous assassins already heading back to the Dover ferry port to catch their pre-arranged return trip back to Calais, and then into Europe, there they would vanish. Their escape was perfect. They left The Marriott at different times via separate exits, no later than an hour after the murder. Meeting at a pre-determined spot, far from any cameras, they drove away in a Mercedes they had rented for the day, and at a legal speed, they drove towards the ferry terminus. It was precision personified… and then, they made a massive cock-up. At the Tollgate service station near Gillingham in Kent, a small but serviceable petrol station on the A2 at Gravesend Road, Michael Runter was busy washing his car, when a Mercedes pulled up beside him, and in broad daylight, two men talking in Russian (which for many is odd enough) opened the car boot, and with one wearing bright yellow Marigold gloves on his hands (as if he had just been washing his dishes), he pulled out a yellow carrier bag, dumped it into the wheelie bin, and then they drove away. Hmm, either he was a germophobe with some rubbish to dispose of, or this was something sinister? Uncertain, Michael peeped inside the bin and spotting some bloodstained towels, he called the Police. Underneath the towels (used to clean-up the crime scene), forensics found a real treasure-trove of evidence, such as; Simion Turkov’s bloody clothes, a receipt for the hotel bar where they had shared a drink, a set of complimentary stationery, and – bafflingly of all – the key-card to the murder scene. As planned, the hitmen drove to Dover, hopped the ferry to Calais, and again, going their separate ways - with Antoneli heading to Antwerp and Melnikov to Tel-Aviv – they believed they had vanished… …but at 8:20pm, that evening, officers arrived at The Marriot, concerned for Simion Turkov. DCI Worker initially stated "It was a very professional job and will be difficult to solve", but with access to the room, the key-card and the hotel’s CCTV, even though they had no idea who the victim was, with CCTV of the assassins dumping their rubbish, they worked backwards to link them to the hotel, forwards to find out where they had fled to, and soon enough, the assassins were identified. (End) In co-ordination with Interpol, Europol and the Israeli Police, Melnikov & Antoneli thought they were safe in their countries under the Mafia’s protection for a job well done, but while the investigation was hotting up and evidence was being procured, they were both kept under surveillance. On the 13th of April 2004, barely two weeks after the murder, in a co-ordinated swoop, both men were arrested; Antoneli at his work place in Antwerp, Melnikov on a street in Tel-Aviv, and being held on international arrest warrants until they could be extradited to Britain, they were later questioned by British Police. Charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice, false imprisonment, conspiracy to murder and murder, 53-year-old Michael Antoneli & 31-year-old Andrei Melnikov were tried at the Old Bailey. Richard Whittam for the prosecution stated to Judge Richard Hone QC, “this is an extraordinary trial. It is only before you because of the vigilance of a member of the public who witnessed the disposal of evidence which allowed police to detect Mr Turkov far earlier than they would have done”. And even though Melnikov & Antoneli denied murder, both being found guilty, on the 25th of July 2005, they were both sentenced to life terms, for a minimum of 20-years, and to be deported upon release. As far as we know, the Russian Mafia never successfully launched a hit on Simion Turkov’s life, and it is said, that the £200,000 he owed belonged to Michael Antoneli, although this cannot be verified. As of today, Andrei Melnikov remains in a British prison, although he is eligible for parole. But having served 17 years of his 20 year sentence, on the 9th of February 2021 at HMP Long Lartin, a maximum security prison, Michael Antoneli (who was then 69) contracted Covid-19 and he died six days later. Had they been better as hired hitmen, it’s likely that Melnikov & Antoneli may have evaded capture, but having made such a colossal cock-up, it’s only fitting that they are known as ‘the s-Hitmen’. The Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast has been researched using the original declassified police investigation files, court records, press reports and as many authentic sources as possible, which are freely available in the public domain, including eye-witness testimony, confessions, autopsy reports, first-hand accounts and independent investigation, where possible. But these documents are only as accurate as those recounting them and recording them, and are always incomplete or full of opinion rather than fact, therefore mistakes and misrepresentations can be made. As stated at the beginning of each episode (and as is clear by the way it is presented) Murder Mile UK True Crime Podcast is a 'dramatisation' of the events and not a documentary, therefore a certain amount of dramatic licence, selective characterisation and story-telling (within logical reason and based on extensive research) has been taken to create a fuller picture. It is not a full and complete representation of the case, the people or the investigation, and therefore should not be taken as such. It is also often (for the sake of clarity, speed and the drama) presented from a single person's perspective, usually (but not exclusively) the victim's, and therefore it will contain a certain level of bias and opinion to get across this single perspective, which may not be the overall opinion of those involved or associated. Murder Mile is just one possible retelling of each case. Murder Mile does not set out to cause any harm or distress to those involved, and those who listen to the podcast or read the transcripts provided should be aware that by accessing anything created by Murder Mile (or any source related to any each) that they may discover some details about a person, an incident or the police investigation itself, that they were unaware of.
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AuthorMichael J Buchanan-Dunne is a crime writer, podcaster of Murder Mile UK True Crime and creator of true-crime TV series. 
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