The deceased was no mere exile. A Latvian-born U.S. citizen, Rapoport moved again to the U.S. in 2012 after making a fortune in Moscow however working afoul of the Russian authorities. Settling in Washington, he rubbed elbows with mover and shakers, dwelling in a Kalorama manse that his household later offered for $5.5 million in 2016, when it grew to become the house of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. By then, Rapoport had relocated once more, establishing store in Kyiv, the place he grew to become a frequent contact of U.S. media.
Within the eyes of Rapoport’s political allies, the historical past of premature deaths of Kremlin critics makes the police’s preliminary no-foul-play conclusion appear naive. “He was a well known critic of Putin within the West and had been an efficient critic,” Browder says. “He was additionally an open supporter of [the jailed opposition leader] Alexei Navalny. And he had all these connections within the elite of Washington, D.C. The fast response of the Washington, D.C. police, I believe, is a untimely and unhelpful conclusion.”
“Nothing provides up,” says David Satter, a longtime Moscow correspondent in Soviet and post-Soviet occasions who in 2013 grew to become the primary U.S. reporter booted from Russia for the reason that Chilly Conflict. Satter, now a frequent Wall Avenue Journal contributor and the writer of a number of books about Putin’s Russia, had stayed with Rapoport in Kyiv. “This is the reason it must be investigated. However every part we do know could be very, very unusual.”
Rapoport’s dying has been the topic of main protection abroad, however is oddly off the radar in Washington, the place there was little main media consideration. It’s a wierd and presumably telling omission from our midterm-absorbed metropolis’s water-cooler dialog: Various high-profile figures are implying {that a} international authorities might have killed an American citizen within the capital of america. Even when their conjectures are overblown, it should be information.
The suspicions, Browder says, started when the information of Rapoport’s dying first broke on the Telegram channel of a former editor of Russian Tattler, through a convoluted story that claimed Rapoport’s canine was let unfastened with a suicide observe and money connected to him. As a result of intelligence providers usually put out data by means of gossip websites, the situation raised antennae. “How the hell did she [the ex-Tattler editor] study Dan’s alleged suicide?” asks Vlad Burlutsky, a Russian expat who met Rapoport by means of his work supporting Navalny.
In a Russian media interview, Rapoport’s spouse denied the story concerning the observe — and the suicide, saying her husband had been planning and that she anticipated to be in Washington to see him. (The police report additionally makes no point out of a observe or a canine.)
“I’ve talked a number of occasions to Alyona, his widow, and he or she says she is completely sure that it’s not a suicide,” says shut pal Ilya Ponomarev, the one member of the Russian Duma to vote in opposition to the annexation of Crimea and now a strident Putin critic additionally dwelling in Kyiv.
Ponomarev says he’s much less sure. However he fears a repeat of what occurred in 2015, when Putin’s former media czar died in odd circumstances in Washington and, in his view, U.S. authorities soft-pedaled the investigation. “I’d not be shocked that it will be the identical factor, that individuals don’t wish to cope with some loopy Russians,” he says. (Alyona Rapoport didn’t reply to my messages, and has solely been quoted in a single Russian media story since confirming his dying on Fb.)
The case for suspicion includes some extra fundamental sensible questions: What was up with the wad of money? Why would Rapoport have been planning for the subsequent few days? Why was he carrying a hat?
However primarily the suspicion has to do with Russia. “There’s an previous saying that anybody can commit a homicide nevertheless it takes brains to commit a suicide,” says Satter. “The model of suicide is for the irrelevant individuals who will merely settle for it and transfer on with out elevating questions.”
Born in the us, Rapoport got here along with his dad and mom to the U.S. at age 11, settling in Texas. After graduating from school, he moved to Russia within the wild post-Soviet days, settling in Moscow after a stint in Siberia. He made his fortune there as a stockbroker, ultimately opening Soho Rooms, one of many metropolis’s high nightspots. However in 2012, he introduced that he was leaving Russia, declaring on Fb that life there had turn into “insufferable and disgusting.”
In Washington, Rapoport and his Russian-born spouse settled into the unique Kalorama neighborhood, enrolling a baby at Maret, a high native non-public college. Acquaintances right here describe a frenetic, intense persona, somebody with ups and downs. He dabbled within the eating business right here, too, says Winston Bao Lord, a tech entrepreneur whose investments are largely within the hospitality house. He met Rapoport, who on the time had some cash invested in an Alexandria restaurant, to pitch an concept that by no means panned out. Lord says Rapoport was a jocular social presence. “He was a giant partier once I knew him,” Lord says. “He was a assured man that felt very strongly about his views.”
Rapoport appeared often within the media with Kremlin-critical posts. In 2018, the open-source investigative platform Bellingcat reported that Rapoport was behind the Fb web page of David Jewberg, presupposed to be a senior Pentagon analyst. The completely made-up Lieutenant Colonel Jewberg was continuously quoted in Russian and Ukrainian media (and by a few of Rapoport’s Washington pals) as an actual U.S. protection insider. Principally in Russian, the posts have been important of the Obama administration’s insufficiently aggressive stances towards Russia and Fb’s alleged pro-Russia bias.
“Dan is probably going essentially the most clever particular person I’ve ever met,” says Yuri Somov, who struck up a friendship with Rapoport in Washington. “And I’ve met individuals like Kissinger and Greenspan. I’m an expert interpreter. He was extremely intense and really a lot bigger than life, however in a great way.” Somov describes himself as apolitical, however says his pal was totally different: “He was a romantic. He believed issues may very well be modified and he believed he may very well be part of these modifications.”
Washington, Somov says, was most likely not Rapoport’s pure milieu. In 2016, after divorcing, he left city, transferring to Kyiv, the place the tumultuous scene might need represented a possibility for somebody whose first expertise was in crisis-racked post-Soviet Moscow. His ex-wife and youngsters stayed right here. “He was too totally different from the world of U.S. enterprise,” Somov says. “He most likely felt nearer to dwelling in Ukraine than within the U.S.”
Somov, who says he’s been devastated by Rapoport’s dying, is amongst those that thinks the suicide story is totally believable.
“Not each unexplained dying in Russia is the KGB or the GRU bumping somebody off,” says Fiona Hill, the previous senior Russia specialist on the White Home, who met Rapoport by means of Somov.
Rapoport had remarried in Kyiv to a Ukrainian virologist; they’d began a brand new household. After the struggle started, Rapoport relocated his spouse and little one to Denmark however stayed in Ukraine — after which got here to Washington this summer season, delivery his canine as properly. Lacking them, pals say, left him distraught.
“He was having to start out over once more for the third time in 10 years,” Somov says. “We didn’t meet up, which I’ll remorse for the remainder of my life as a result of he most likely wanted me. When he requested me, ‘lunch tomorrow?’ after not seeing one another for a number of years, I ought to have learn between the traces. I should have requested him one thing, however I keep in mind the reply, which continues to be in my telephone: ‘It has been a really tough three months.’ From him, significantly, that’s saying lots. Greater than notable, it was extraordinary. Regardless of how issues labored, he stored up appearances.”
Ponomarev additionally says Rapoport didn’t appear nice after they barbecued in Washington throughout a go to this summer season. He mentioned Rapoport had lower manner again on consuming after his second marriage, however was consuming closely after they met up. “It was very clear he was depressed that he was not along with his household,” he says. Nonetheless, it didn’t appear determined. “I can not exclude that it was a suicide, however basically nothing pointed on this course once we met. If I’d really feel like one thing like this might occur, I’d speak to him extra.”
However for plenty of individuals in Rapoport’s anxious political circles, it’s arduous to place inventory in coincidences. “He was planning for the longer term. He had plans for the subsequent week and the week after,” says Jason Jay Good, a Kyiv-based American political guide who says he spoke weekly with Rapoport over the previous half-decade. “It’s not one thing somebody who was planning on leaping off a constructing would do.”
And there’s historical past to make Russian skeptics suspicious of Washington authorities’ investigative chops. In 2015, Mikhail Lesin, a former media aide to the Russian president, died in Washington’s Dupont Circle Lodge. Initially reported as a coronary heart assault, the medical expert later decided that he had died of blunt drive trauma. However the report was later amended to say that the dying had been an accident, the accidents sustained presumably from falling off a mattress after he returned to his resort room extraordinarily drunk. Prosecutors closed the case. “That was outrageous,” Ponomarev says.
Nearer to Rapoport — however farther from politics — his accomplice in Soho Rooms died in an obvious suicide after his personal fall from a constructing, in Moscow in 2017. One Rapoport pal speculated that foul play may very well be business-related reasonably than political, although Satter says the 2 aren’t so simply separated. “Even when it was simply enterprise pursuits, that doesn’t imply the Russian intelligence service wasn’t concerned,” he says. “They usually use these disputes.”
The Russian embassy didn’t reply to a request for remark by deadline.
The FBI says it doesn’t remark about whether or not it’s investigating alongside the locals. And the medical expert’s report, alas, is probably not right here to clear issues up anytime quickly: All “unnatural” deaths, even open-and-shut suicides, get despatched for a report. They will take as much as 90 days.
Within the meantime, individuals who discover the dying fishy — in addition to individuals who merely discover it heartbreaking — can most likely see proof in Rapoport’s closing Fb submit, three days earlier than his dying. It was a photograph of Marlon Brando’s Apocalypse Now character, accompanied by the character’s haunting final phrases: “The horror, the horror.”
