“Vanea the Writer” and Gîrleanu hid in Romania, mostly in the capital Bucharest and in the city of Iași in north Romania, where they obtained Romanian citizenship. According to the Moldovan authorities, both are lieutenants of Ion Gușan, a feared Moldovan vor-v-zakone- thief in the code, a term in the former Soviet Union that was an equivalent of a top organized crime figure.
A Romanian prosecution indictment that charges Ion Druță with cigarettes smuggling portrays him as a highly dangerous person. "The Writer managed to corrupt policemen and prosecutors after he established himself in the city of Iași. He managed to control part of the Corduneni clan, a powerful organized crime group in Iași and he humiliated members of the clan by forcing them to kneel in front of him in the street" say Romanian prosecutors who also add that The Writer and his group operate four or five clandestine cigarettes factories in Romania.
In 2010, Gîrleanu was arrested in Romania for cigarette smuggling unrelated to the murders. The Romanian prosecutors say that Gîrleanu was the leader of a smuggling ring after they discovered over 650,000 packs of cigarettes hidden in a warehouse in Urziceni, Romania. Romanian authorities said that the unpaid tax for these cigarettes was about €1 million. Gîrleanu was freed on bail pending trial in the smuggling case. He was arrested again in June 2011 in the triple murder case and is still behind bars.
Druță, according to Moldovan authorities, ordered the triple assassination that was carried out by Gîrleanu but he has many other criminal business ties to Gîrleanu. Druță is currently charged with providing protection to Gîrleanu's cigarettes smuggling network. Romanian prosecutors mention in documents obtained by OCCRP of an instance where a competitor in the cigarette smuggling industry, Ion Mesina, was kidnapped and threatened at gunpoint. Mesina was, according to an indictment, smuggling in the same region with Gîrleanu and the latter wanted him out. The Writer's younger brothers, Grigore and Tudor Druță, were arrested earlier this year for the 2011 murder of Valeriu Damian, a controversial businessman from Bacău Romania. Romanian authorities believed they ordered the torturing and killing of the businessman.
