Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice (42 page)

Jamie and Sanches exchanged a few more emails and agreed to meet each other on August 27, 2010. The plan was for them to sit down, and if Sanches appeared legitimate, Jamie would call Vadim to join them to go over the documents.

Sanches suggested the Polo Bar at the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair, which was ominously close to where Litvinenko had been poisoned. Terrified that something awful would happen, I called our security guy, Steven Beck, to come up with a plan.

Steven surveyed the location and decided to bring in four men to watch over Jamie and Vadim. Two were ex–Special Forces and two were former British intelligence officers. At 2:30 p.m. on the twenty-seventh these men began to show up in the Polo Bar one at a time. They took up strategic positions—two by the exits, one near the table where the meeting would occur, one at the end of the bar. They blended in seamlessly. One carried a device that could detect and jam any surveillance equipment similar to the kind that we thought Sagiryan might have used for the meeting at the Dorchester Hotel. Another did a discreet walk-through with a Geiger counter to check for any radiation, since Litvinenko had been poisoned with a highly toxic radioactive isotope of polonium.

There were no guarantees, but I knew that if things got ugly, Steven’s guys would get Jamie and Vadim out of there in a hurry.

Jamie got to the Polo Bar early, entering through one of the steel-and-glass double doors. He walked through the low-ceilinged art deco lounge to the reserved table. He sat in one of the blue velvet club chairs with his back to a wall, a picture of the Empire State Building hanging over his shoulder. The position was strategic, deemed by Steven to be the safest place in the room. Jamie tried to pick out the guards from the crowd of tourists but was at a loss. He looked along the length of the green-and-black marble bar as the bartender shook a martini and poured it into a frosted glass. A waitress brought him a small tray of complimentary snacks, and he eyed the smoked almonds before thinking better of it. He ordered a Diet Coke with a slice of lemon. When it arrived, he let it sit on the table untouched.

Anything could be poisoned.

Sanches arrived fifteen minutes late. In his early forties, he was about five feet ten inches and had a paunch. He was wearing a tan sport jacket, dark slacks, and a white shirt with no tie. His brown hair was unkempt. His skin was milky, his eyes nervous and intense. As soon as he spoke, it was evident that he was no Alejandro Sanches.

“Please excuse the alias, Mr. Firestone,” he said in Russian, “but I have to be careful.”

“I understand,” Jamie answered, also in Russian, wondering if all the other people in the bar were security personnel for Sanches.

“My real name is Alexander Perepilichnyy.”

Jamie motioned for the waitress as Perepilichnyy dropped into a chair. He ordered green tea as Jamie tried to size him up. Perepilichnyy did the same to Jamie.

The tea was served.

Perepilichnyy said, “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

“Of course. We’re very interested in what you have to say.”

Perepilichnyy lifted the teacup and took a careful sip. He put the cup down. Both men stared at each other in awkward silence. Then Perepilichnyy said, “I got in touch with you because I saw the videos about Kuznetsov and Karpov. Magnitsky’s death was shocking.
Every Russian accepts corruption, but torturing an innocent man to death is crossing the line.”

Bullshit
, thought Jamie. He knew that these days most Russians didn’t operate on high-minded principles like these. Everything in Russia was about money. Making it, keeping it, and making sure no one took it. Jamie had no idea what Perepilichnyy’s real agenda was, but he was confident that the man wasn’t sitting here because he cared about Sergei.

“The information in your email is good but incomplete,” Jamie said. “Do you have any more documents?”

Perepilichnyy said, “Yes, but not with me.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair, the ice in his Diet Coke shifting as it melted. “Would you mind if one of my colleagues joined us? I’d like him to go over the documents you provided. When we’re sure we understand them, we’ll tell you what else we need.”

Perepilichnyy agreed. Jamie pulled his phone from a pocket and texted Vadim, who was waiting on New Bond Street right around the corner. Two minutes later, Vadim pushed through the entrance, made his way to the table, and introduced himself.

As Vadim sat, Jamie pulled out Perepilichnyy’s documents. Vadim leafed through them and asked, “Do you mind walking me through these?”

“Sure. This is a Credit Suisse bank statement for an account owned by Vladlen Stepanov, husband of Olga Stepanova.” Perepilichnyy indicated a line midway down the page. “Here’s a transfer for one point five million euros on May twenty-sixth. Here’s one for one point seven on June sixth. And here’s another for one point three million on June seventeenth.” He ran his finger over several other transactions. All told, in May and June of 2008, €7.1 million had been transferred into this account.

Jamie squinted at the documents. “Where did you get these?”

Perepilichnyy shifted uncomfortably. “Let’s just say I know some people.”

Jamie and Vadim didn’t like this, but they didn’t want to spook Perepilichnyy so they didn’t press him.

Vadim flipped through the papers. “This could be very useful, but I don’t see Vladlen Stepanov’s name in any of the bank statements. How are they connected to him?”

“That’s simple. The account belongs to a Cypriot company owned by Vladlen.” Perepilichnyy pointed to an ownership document with Vladlen’s name on it, but not his signature.

Vadim lowered his glasses. He’d been investigating corporate fraud for over thirteen years, and his standard practice was to assume everything was a lie until he saw evidence to prove otherwise. “Thank you. But without proof that Stepanov actually owns this company, there’s not much we can do with this. We need copies of these ownership papers with his signature.”

“I understand,” Perepilichnyy said. “This was just meant to be a first meeting. I can come back with what you’re asking for if you’d like to meet again.”

“Yes, that’d be great,” Jamie said. With that they finished the meeting and shook hands, and Perepilichnyy got up and left.

When Vadim returned to the office to report what had happened, I was suspicious and said, “It sounds like a scam.”

“Maybe. But if what he’s saying is true, this would be the first time we could show exactly how some of these people got money from the tax-rebate fraud.”

“Fair enough. Let’s see if Perepilichnyy can produce what he promised.”

A week later, they agreed to meet again. This time they would be joined by Vladimir Pastukhov, who, because of his near blindness, had an amazing sixth sense for people.

The following Tuesday, Vadim and Vladimir met Perepilichnyy back at the Polo Bar. True to his word, Perepilichnyy produced a copy of a signed document showing that Vladlen Stepanov owned the Cypriot company with the Credit Suisse bank statements.

When Vadim and Vladimir came back to the office and showed me the document, I was not impressed. It looked like a simple piece of paper with some illegible signatures on it. Anyone could have made it or forged it.

“What is this? I can barely read it.”

“This is from Stepanov’s auditor,” Vadim said.

It seemed to me that they were too ready to believe Perepilichnyy. “This could be anybody’s signature. Do you really think we should trust this guy?”

“I do,” Vadim said. “I think he’s for real.”

“What do you think, Vladimir?”

“I believe him too. He seems honest.”

They continued to meet over the following weeks, and we learned some interesting things. In addition to the Swiss accounts, Perepilichnyy told us how the Stepanovs had purchased a six-bedroom villa and two luxury condominiums in Dubai on the Palm Jumeirah, a massive man-made archipelago shaped like a palm tree. The market value of these properties was around $7 million. In Russia, the Stepanovs built a mansion in the most fashionable suburb of Moscow that was valued at $20 million. In total, they’d amassed bank accounts and properties worth nearly $40 million.

To help illustrate just how lavish and ridiculous these expenditures were, Vadim got hold of the Stepanovs’ tax filings, which showed that since 2006 their average annual income was only $38,281.

This information was so good that I was sure it would go viral if we produced another YouTube video. Adding Olga Stepanova to our collection of “Russian Untouchables” would shake the Russian elite right to the core.

There was one problem, though.

Perepilichnyy’s story wasn’t just good. It was
too
good.

It was entirely plausible that Perepilichnyy was working for the FSB, and that this was a well-planned operation to destroy my credibility. It was right out of their playbook: create a character with a
believable story; have this person pass valuable information to his target; wait for the target to disclose this information publicly; then show how the information is false.

If this scenario played out, it would entirely compromise all the work we had done over the last three years with journalists and governments throughout the world. It wouldn’t take long for policy makers to ask, “Why are we backing this liar at the expense of our important relationship with Russia?”

If we were going to make a video about the Stepanovs, I had to be certain that what Perepilichnyy said was true—and I also needed to know how he’d gotten his information.

For a long time he was cagey on this point, but finally, he let down his guard. He told us the reason he had so many of these financial documents was that he’d been a private banker for a number of wealthy Russians, including the Stepanovs.

This vocation worked well for Perepilichnyy until 2008, when the markets crashed and he lost the Stepanovs a lot of money. According to Perepilichnyy, instead of accepting these losses, the Stepanovs accused him of stealing the money and demanded he repay them. Since Perepilichnyy had no intention of covering their market losses, Olga Stepanova used her position as head of the tax office to get a criminal tax-evasion case opened against Perepilichnyy.

Perepilichnyy promptly fled Russia to avoid arrest. He moved his family to a rented house in Surrey, a fashionable London suburb, where he lay low. He first watched the Kuznetsov and Karpov videos there and came up with an idea. If he could get us to make a Russian Untouchables video about Olga Stepanova and her husband, then it could possibly compromise them to such an extent that it would make his problems go away.

When Vladimir told me this, it made sense, and I was finally ready to go ahead and use his information to make a video.

But just as we started to get comfortable with Perepilichnyy, we received a new message from our source Aslan: “Department K furious
about Kuznetsov and Karpov videos. Large new operation being planned against Hermitage and Browder.”

We asked for clarification, but Aslan didn’t have any more details. My fears that Perepilichnyy was part of an FSB plot came roaring back. Maybe everything
was
going according to plan. It didn’t matter how compelling his information was. Before going forward I had to be doubly sure that we weren’t falling headfirst into an FSB trap.

One of our top priorities starting in the fall of 2010 was to be certain that Perepilichnyy wasn’t scamming us.

We began by verifying the property outside Moscow and quickly found that the sixty-four-thousand-square-foot lot that their suburban mansion was built on belonged to Vladlen Stepanov’s eighty-five-year-old pensioner mother. She had an income of $3,500 per year, but was somehow sitting on this plot of land with a market value of $12 million, and that was before anything had even been built on it.

But the Stepanovs
had
built something on it. They’d hired one of Moscow’s leading architects to design two hard-angled, modernist buildings totaling twelve thousand square feet. These were made of German granite, structural glass, and polished metal. When I saw the pictures of the houses, I thought they looked more like they belonged to a top hedge fund manager than a midlevel Russian tax collector and her husband.

Next, we turned to Dubai. Using an online property database, we confirmed that the villa there, which was bought for $767,123, was indeed registered to Vladlen Stepanov. Unfortunately, the other two condominiums, which together were worth more than $6 million, were still under construction and hadn’t been registered. We knew about them only because of some wire transfers from the Stepanovs’ Swiss accounts.

The Swiss accounts were the strings that tied everything together. Not only had they been used for these lavish purchases, but they also held more than $10 million in cash that, according to Perepilichnyy,
was wired in after the tax-rebate fraud occurred. If we could confirm that these accounts were real, then we could make a Russian Untouchables video about Olga Stepanova and her husband that would light up the Moscow sky.

Everything now hinged on the authenticity of the Swiss accounts.

In an ideal world I could just have gone to Credit Suisse and asked if the statements were genuine, but Swiss bankers are so secretive that they would have told me nothing.

I could also have approached acquaintances at Credit Suisse, but they wouldn’t have helped. Divulging confidential client information was a fireable offense, and I didn’t know anybody well enough that he or she would take that risk for me.

Our only remaining option was to file a complaint with the Swiss authorities and see where that led. My London lawyer drafted the complaint, and when it was ready to go, I asked how long he thought it would take to hear back.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Anywhere from three months to a year.”

“
Three months to a year?
That’s way too long. Is there some way to make them go faster?”

“No. In my experience the Swiss authorities can take a long time. They’ll get to it when they get to it.”