If the circumstances of Mikhail Lesin’s death already seem strange and suspicious to you, I guarantee things are about to get even stranger and more suspicious.
We have no explanation for this, so I’m just laying out the facts.
As you know, the Anti-Corruption Foundation had been keeping an eye on Mikhail Lesin. He was (and possibly still is — more on that below) one of the biggest and most noxious corrupt officials around. He stole everything in sight in close coordination with the rest of Putin’s mafia. He took the stolen money out of Russia and invested it in the United States. We were tracking down his real estate. I was the first to report that he could become the subject of a money-laundering investigation in the U.S.. We were compiling a dossier on him.
Then, on November 5, 2015, Mikhail Lesin died under strange circumstances. The official cause was a heart attack. At the time, many people said he hadn’t died, he had “died.” Then, on November 13, 2015, news appeared that Lesin had already been buried in Los Angeles. No details, not a single photo, nobody knew anything (even though Lesin had hundreds of friends and associates, so the funeral should have been a major one). At that point I said too that all of this looked very much like a witness protection program with a staged death.
And then, four months after Lesin’s death, U.S. authorities suddenly announced that the cause of death was not a heart attack at all, but “blunt force injuries of the head.” Today it became known that the FBI will investigate Lesin’s death (what were they doing before?).
In short, it’s all incredibly interesting and feels like a TV series. So we thought: why let our dossier on Lesin go to waste? We should publish it.
It should be said that almost all the facts we have were gathered from open sources or can be verified through open sources. Much of it has been published elsewhere before.
One document had never been published anywhere: a record of citizen Lesin crossing the U.S. border. It is quite curious and shows that he spent a great deal of time there.
This record is official; it can be obtained from the website of the United States’ largest security agency, the Department of Homeland Security. Within its structure is U.S. Customs and Border Protection — the equivalent of Russia’s border guards and customs service. They are the ones you hand your passport to when you arrive in the U.S., and they maintain the arrivals database.
Data on U.S. citizens is hidden, but information on foreigners is available; there is even a special form for it — the I-94. You can go there, enter your details, and check: all your arrivals in and departures from the United States will be listed there.
Let me stress separately: the rules for using the database explicitly say that you may check only your own records, not those of other people.
However, if right now someone — let’s call him Mr. X — decides that the public interest matters more than a minor administrative prohibition and enters Mikhail Yuryevich Lesin’s international passport details on the official U.S. border service website, he will see the following:
He will see it and be stunned. Because the border service officially tells us this: on December 15, 2015, 40 days after his death, Mikhail Yuryevich Lesin departed the United States of America.
I do not know how to explain this. I rule out a database error. We had this record while Lesin was alive and immediately after his death (or “death”). That final entry was not there then. Now it is.
Maybe it was a look-alike. A ghost. A living Lesin. A Lesin clone. Lesin’s secret brother. Maybe the U.S. border is a secret door to hell, and on the fortieth day the soul has to pass through it, passport in hand.
I don’t know.
The hard fact is this: on December 15, someone carrying Lesin’s passport went through U.S. border procedures and crossed the border without arousing suspicion either from airline staff or from security screeners. After 9/11, as you know, things are fairly strict at the border, so they really do check the details.
One could suppose that it was the body being transported out, with the passport accompanying it, and that the procedure is recorded in the database as though a living person had departed.
But then who was buried on the 13th in Los Angeles? Last night, a somewhat odd interview appeared in Kommersant (“Ъ”), with a friend of Lesin’s who claims he was at the funeral. In four months, this is the only person who has surfaced who supposedly attended it.
Neither the journalist (this is Kolesnikov — “Putin’s favorite journalist,” who fawns over him in *Kommersant* under the guise of “ironic reportage”) nor the interviewee inspires any trust. To me personally, they make the whole thing even more suspicious. Still, the “friend” says there was a funeral. Whose funeral?
Here is the full border control record:
Maybe there is a very simple explanation for all of this.
Or maybe the explanation is more complicated, something like: “he was relocated to Oklahoma under witness protection and forbidden to leave until he gave full testimony on Putin, but he got bored, got drunk, chartered a jet, and flew to the Bahamas on his own passport.”
Either way, against the backdrop of all the other oddities, this pushes the whole story of Lesin’s death fully into “like something out of a TV series” territory.
In any case, journalists should be calling the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and asking, “Why are dead people crossing your border?”
PS If the explanation does turn out to be not boring but conspiratorial (which would be cool), then apologies to whoever’s operation we just disrupted: the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, the SVR (Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service), the GRU (Russia’s military intelligence), or Mossad. But you guys have only yourselves to blame — you should have cleaned up the database.
PPS The Anti-Corruption Foundation exists only thanks to your voluntary contributions — by going here and making a donation, you will support our work.
Update:
Many people in the comments point out that there is no formal, strict exit border control in the United States. On entry — yes; on exit — no. That is a correct and fair point.
Even so, the passport is checked at least twice: at security screening and by the airline at check-in. So we can probably allow for the possibility that a Not-Lesin could leave the U.S. using Lesin’s passport after his death.
Which raises the question: why the hell would anyone do that?
Update 2:
I’ve now had the procedure for leaving the U.S. clarified for me. There is no passport control. A TSA officer checks the ID (passport) against the boarding pass. After that, the boarding pass is scanned into the Homeland Security database — the very same one our record comes from.
That suggests that someone carrying M. Lesin’s passport did in fact cross the border.
Let me repeat: this seems wild to me too, and I do not believe in conspiracies. Most likely the explanation will be simple, but for now there isn’t one.
Update 3:
This explanation has now turned up (thanks to those who found it): NOTE that the electronic I-94 may indicate a departure in the travel history if the traveler had booked a return flight (even if the return ticket is not used). My translation: note that the electronic I-94 may show a departure in the travel history if the traveler booked a return flight (even if that return ticket was not used).
That is entirely possible, and perhaps we have found the boring, simple explanation after all. However, one should keep in mind:
That “may indicate” describes a theoretical possibility, a system error, not a rule. That is why we are reading it not on the Homeland Security website, but on a website devoted to international education.
If a return ticket always worked as a “left the U.S.” marker in the database, then millions of undocumented immigrants would not bother with anything else — they would simply buy a return ticket, thereby avoiding being entered into the database of people who overstayed and never left. The same goes for the millions of people lingering in the States on expired visas.
This scenario assumes that Mikhail Lesin, a multimillionaire and lover of luxury, bought a return ticket two months in advance. I don’t know — that does not fit with everything we know about him. RBC reports that in the last several years Lesin did not fly on scheduled commercial flights. Though it is possible, I won’t argue.
Once again: this post is not proof that Lesin is alive. It is a description of yet another oddity that must be taken into account. You understand, this does not happen to many people — first he supposedly died of a heart attack, then it turns out he was beaten to death, the funeral happened but in secret, and he is one of the few whose return ticket was apparently counted in the database as a “departure.” But with Lesin, that is what happened.
Coincidences do happen, but when there are too many of them surrounding dead millionaires connected to Putin, those coincidences must be examined very carefully and very critically.
That is why we wrote this. Raising red flags like these is one of the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s jobs.