Home » Latest » World News » How Kim Jong-un Gets His $500,000 Mercedes | Visual Investigations

How Kim Jong-un Gets His $500,000 Mercedes | Visual Investigations

4

InfoSearched 71 0 World News

8.2

SaveSavedRemoved 0

A half-million-dollar Mercedes-Maybach doesn’t just appear in Pyongyang — it takes a five-country smuggling route to get there.

The New York Times’ Visual Investigations team, working with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, spent months piecing together how Kim Jong-un got his hands on two armored Mercedes-Maybach S600 Guard limousines, each worth roughly $500,000. The vehicles should never have reached North Korea at all — United Nations sanctions in place since 2006 explicitly ban the transfer of luxury goods to the country. Using shipping manifests, corporate filings, satellite imagery and AIS tracking data, the investigation reconstructed a shadow supply chain running through the Netherlands, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

• The armored limousines began their journey at the port of Rotterdam in June 2018 before moving by sea through China, Japan and South Korea.
• In late September 2018, the cars reached Busan, South Korea, and were loaded onto the Togo-flagged cargo ship DN5505, operated by Do Young Shipping, which then switched off its AIS transponder for 18 days.
• In early October 2018, three North Korean Air Koryo Il-76 cargo planes — the same aircraft historically used to ferry Kim’s armored convoy to overseas summits — landed in Vladivostok, Russia, and flew the vehicles directly to Pyongyang.

Tracing the Paper Trail

Investigators started with something mundane: shipping manifests and corporate registration records tied to the two Mercedes-Maybachs. Those documents put the vehicles at Rotterdam in June 2018, the starting point of a route that had no obvious commercial logic — except as a way to obscure who was actually receiving the cargo. From there, container tracking data showed the shipment threading through ports in China and Japan before landing in South Korea, a routing pattern investigators say is typical of goods being laundered through multiple jurisdictions to break the paper trail back to Pyongyang.

By late September 2018, the containers were sitting in Busan, one of the busiest transshipment hubs in Asia — an easy place for a couple of containers to disappear into the noise of legitimate trade.

The Ship That Went Dark

From Busan, the cargo was loaded onto the DN5505, a Togo-flagged vessel run by Do Young Shipping, and the ship set a course for Nakhodka, Russia. Then it vanished. The DN5505 disabled its Automatic Identification System transponder and stayed dark in international waters for 18 days — a maneuver sanctions monitors have flagged repeatedly as a hallmark of ship-to-ship transfers and deceptive cargo movements designed to evade tracking.

Satellite imagery and port logs eventually picked the vessel back up entering Vladivostok, not Nakhodka, confirming that the announced destination was itself part of the cover.

Three Air Koryo Il-76 cargo planes — the same aircraft used to fly Kim Jong-un’s armored convoy to overseas summits — landed in Vladivostok and carried the Mercedes-Maybachs straight to Pyongyang.

The Handoff in Vladivostok

Once the DN5505 resurfaced in Vladivostok in early October 2018, the final leg of the operation moved fast. Three Il-76 heavy transport aircraft belonging to Air Koryo, North Korea’s state airline, touched down at the Russian port city and loaded the armored limousines for the flight to Pyongyang. Those same Il-76s have shown up before, wherever Kim Jong-un has traveled abroad, hauling his armored motorcade so he never has to trust a foreign country’s security detail with his safety.

The route exposes a pattern sanctions enforcement bodies have struggled to close for years: shell companies obscure ownership, flag-of-convenience vessels obscure operators, and Russian ports act as the final transfer point before goods slip across the border into North Korea. It’s the same blend of front companies and deceptive shipping practices that shows up whenever illicit cargo — whether it’s oil, weapons parts, or, in this case, a $500,000 sedan — needs to reach a country that’s supposedly locked out of the global market. Readers who want a deeper look at how vehicles get inspected, retitled, and moved through murky channels before reaching a buyer might find some of the same red flags in why it pays to look under the hood before buying any car with an opaque paper trail.

Root Causes of Sanction Evasion

North Korea’s ability to route a half-million-dollar luxury vehicle through five countries without triggering an interdiction says less about Kim Jong-un’s cunning and more about how thin sanctions enforcement gets once cargo crosses into Russian ports. The same transfer points and AIS blackout tactics documented here echo tensions playing out elsewhere along Russia’s periphery, where Moscow’s willingness to serve as a way station for sanctioned goods has become its own point of friction with Washington — the kind of dynamic explored in coverage of why relations between the US and Russia keep hitting flashpoints.

The Mercedes-Maybachs are already in Pyongyang, parked in Kim Jong-un’s motorcade alongside the armored fleet he’s shown off at military parades for years. What the investigation actually exposes is the mechanism — Do Young Shipping, the DN5505, the Vladivostok handoff — and mechanisms like that don’t disappear just because one shipment got caught on satellite. The next test is whether UN sanctions monitors can name and freeze the shell companies behind this specific run before Pyongyang simply reroutes the same playbook through a different port next time.