Authorities have been hunting Hakan Ayik for more than a decade. Now for the first time we have uncovered his life of luxury lived in the open on the border between east and west.
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As snow falls in the fading evening light in Istanbul, a man dressed in black appears in a hotel doorway. Shaky video footage records him standing like an apparition in a snow globe.
Australia’s most wanted organised crime boss then does what he has done so many times before in his decade on the run. Hakan “the Facebook gangster” Ayik turns and walks away.
The video, posted in February last year on the Instagram account of Istanbul’s Kings Cross hotel, is brief and blurry. Yet it offered an important clue about Ayik’s movements many years after his suspected role in a massive 2010 drug shipment put him on Interpol’s most wanted list.