Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  Howard and his associates were calling, emailing. These moves were rote formula. And on the recipient’s side, too, there was a playbook: respond, curry favor with Howard, trade an item. The other journalist Howard targeted was engaging the Enquirer through a well-connected lawyer who could have a quiet conversation, broker an agreement, ensure that AMI kept the journalist’s name out. But the other journalist wasn’t working on ongoing reporting on the subject. I was. Acquiescing to threats from a hostile subject of reporting was exactly the response that had nearly killed the Weinstein story the year before. I did nothing, and kept reporting.

  These machinations had been the least elaborate of Howard’s efforts. He had also, several AMI employees said, deployed a subcontractor associated with Coleman-Rayner—the same infrastructure used to create secret recordings for Weinstein—to surveil Jonathan in Los Angeles. His home had been watched, his movements followed. Howard would “come in and be like, ‘We’re gonna put a tail on Ronan’s boyfriend,’” one of the employees recalled. And later: “I’ve got someone following him, we’re gonna find out where he’s going.” Howard said the employees’ assertions were false. In the end, the employees said, Jonathan’s routine had been so boring the subcontractor surveilling him had given up.

  “I’m interesting!” Jonathan said, when I told him. “I am a very interesting person! I went to an escape room!”

  By then, the walls were closing in on AMI. Several outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal, were still digging into the company’s transactions on Trump’s behalf during the election, and the revelations were spinning up law enforcement. In April 2018, FBI agents raided Cohen’s hotel and office, looking for records related to the payment to McDougal and correspondence between Cohen, Pecker, and Howard. Law enforcement bore down on Pecker and Howard. In response to my articles, they had denied everything, called the notion of catch and kill ridiculous, claimed to have had only journalistic intentions. Just a few months later, they cut a deal to avoid prosecution for a battery of potential crimes, including violations of campaign finance law, and admitted to everything. In the early days of Trump’s candidacy, they conceded, Pecker had met with Cohen and another member of the campaign. “Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided,” the nonprosecution agreement read. They’d caught, and they’d killed, and the intention had been to swing a presidential election.

  As part of its agreement with prosecutors, AMI promised to “commit no crimes whatsoever” for three years. Within the year, the Enquirer was facing questions as to whether it had breached that clause. Howard threw the full weight of the publication into chasing a story about Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, cheating on his wife. This time, Howard secured the dirty pictures he habitually sought. (Aside from Bezos’s wife and mistress, Dylan Howard appeared to have more interest in the man’s penis than any other person on the planet.) The familiar routine played out: AMI threatened to publish and pressed Bezos to cut a deal. Bezos went on the offensive. “No thank you, Mr. Pecker,” he wrote in an open letter. “Rather than capitulate to extortion and blackmail, I’ve decided to publish exactly what they sent me, despite the personal cost and embarrassment they threaten.”

  In early 2019, with federal prosecutors circling whether Howard had breached the nonprosecution agreement and AMI swimming in debt, the Enquirer and its sister outlets the Globe and the National Examiner were sold for scrap. The purchaser, James Cohen, whose father founded the Hudson News franchise, was mostly known as a collector of art and for throwing his daughter a $1 million bat mitzvah. Questions swirled as to whether Cohen was really financing the agreement himself or there were others doing so behind the scenes. The New York Post, practically exploding with schadenfreude, quoted a source familiar with AMI as saying, “It looks like the whole thing could be a big circle.”

  The walls were closing in on Howard’s ally Harvey Weinstein, too. In the months after the New York Times and New Yorker stories broke, dozens of additional women accused Weinstein of sexual harassment or violence. The number grew to thirty, then sixty, then eighty. Some, including Canosa, filed lawsuits. Law enforcement in London, Los Angeles, and New York circled. The day after the first New Yorker story broke, Sgt. Keri Thompson, a detective from the NYPD Cold Case Squad who had overseen the sting operation in the Gutierrez case years earlier, began traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard to find Lucia Evans, who’d told me that Weinstein sexually assaulted her in his office in 2004. When the detectives found Evans, they told her that if she filed a complaint, it could help put Weinstein behind bars. Evans wanted to help. But she was scared. She realized, and the detectives conceded, that playing a role in criminal proceedings would be a bruising process. Weinstein’s lawyers would play dirty. They’d throw everything they could at her. “I think everyone’s self-preservation mechanism kicks in when they make a big life decision such as this,” she said. “What is it going to mean to you? How is it going to affect your life, your family, your friends?” After months of sleepless nights, she decided to proceed with the complaint against Weinstein.

  Early on the morning of May 25, 2018, a black SUV slid up to the entrance of the NYPD’s First Precinct. As cameras flashed, Thompson and another detective, Nick DiGaudio, met Harvey Weinstein at the SUV and led him into the precinct. For the occasion of his surrender, Weinstein had been styled as a mild-mannered professor, in a black blazer and a powder-blue V-neck sweater. Under one arm, he carried a stack of books about Hollywood and Broadway. Weinstein disappeared into the building to be booked on charges of rape and a criminal sex act. When he was led out afterward, the books were gone, the hands in cuffs.

  Weinstein was accompanied by his latest attorney, Benjamin Brafman, and a private detective named Herman Weisberg. Weisberg was a former NYPD detective himself, and his firm, Sage Intelligence and Security, flaunted that expertise much as the Israelis did their former Mossad status. He’d been on the Weinstein team for a while—the previous fall, before my story broke, he’d been on the McGowan beat, arriving at one meeting with Weinstein to announce that he’d uncovered a not-yet-public police inquiry into whether she’d been caught carrying drugs. “Can we leak that?” Weinstein had said, excited. Former colleagues called Weisberg a “bloodhound.” He specialized in ferreting out and interrogating witnesses.

  For all the symbolism of the perp walk, Weinstein posted $1 million bail that day and went home. Ankle-braceleted, he was permitted to move between his homes in New York and Connecticut. In the ensuing months, the NYPD case expanded from two women to three, adding a charge of “predatory sexual assault” from Mimi Haleyi, a former production assistant who claimed Weinstein sexually assaulted her at his apartment in 2006. But Weinstein’s offensive expanded, too, its tendrils encircling those who agreed to participate in the case and those who worked on it.

  In the press and to prosecutors, Brafman raged that Weinstein had friendly messages from Haleyi, including one seeking a meeting after the alleged assault. And, after Weisberg’s labors, fruitful grounds emerged for discrediting DiGaudio, the detective. A peripheral witness in Lucia Evans’s case claimed she’d given DiGaudio new details that he then withheld from prosecutors. DiGaudio denied it—but it was all the ammunition Brafman needed. He expressed public outrage and accused law enforcement of a conspiracy against Weinstein. DiGaudio was removed from the case. Lucia Evans’s count against Weinstein was dropped. “Two things can be true,” a source in the district attorney’s office told me. “You can believe a survivor but consent to dismissal of her count because maintaining it would result in a weakening of the other counts, because of things that happened in the process.”

  Brafman attributed the move to bravura private espionage. “Whatever success I may have in the Weinstein case, Herman has played a substantial part in those accomplishments,” Br
afman said, explaining that Weisberg had helped “uncover materials” about “several of the important prosecution witnesses.”

  Soon, the myriad lawsuits were looking like they might resolve cleanly for Weinstein, too. A few months after Evans’s count was dropped, reports began to circulate that Weinstein and the Weinstein Company’s former board were considering a $44 million blanket settlement to resolve the civil claims.

  Much remained arrayed against Weinstein. Several remaining criminal counts in New York awaited trial. Authorities in Los Angeles and London continued to build cases. Several women with civil claims looked askance at the prospect of a breezy blanket settlement and publicly pledged to keep going with their lawsuits.

  As Weinstein prepared for the criminal trial, a small item about him ran in Page Six. In a photo, he leaned over the counter at Cipriani Dolci on the mezzanine level of Grand Central. His pink neck bulged out of a loose-fitting black tee. Several inches of boxers showed over sagging jeans. He looked thinner, older, more hunched than before. The item was about the group of dark-suited men huddled around Weinstein, heads bowed in focused conversation. The copy said that one was a private investigator, another a lawyer.

  However far he had fallen, there was Harvey Weinstein, with his mercenaries, plotting, planning, and bracing for fights to come. For Weinstein and others like him, the army of spies was alive and well.

  CHAPTER 53:

  AXIOM

  It was after the love child story, and summer again, when I stumbled into the first clues about Black Cube’s activities following the Weinstein job. I’d just slipped onto a hot, airless subway car when the call came in. The caller ID read “Axiom.” A moment later, I got a text. “I am trying to reach you directly and privately. It’s regarding a Fry Pan that’s Scratch Resistant. Sometimes I cook and the black coating scares me.”

  I’d recently posted a social media picture of a frying pan marketed under the label “Black Cube.” “Scratch resistant. May use false identities and shell companies to extract information,” I’d written. (“Hahaha,” Ambra Gutierrez commented drily.)

  As the subway car slipped into a tunnel, I wrote back, “Can you say more about who you are?”

  “I can say I do surveillance.” And, later, resisting my entreaties for more information: “We will need to meet discreetly and make sure we are not followed.”

  A few days after, I was threading my way through the perspiring crowds of the theater district. I’d suggested we meet at the Brazilian restaurant where I got the recording from Gutierrez. I arrived on time, asked for a table for two, sat down. The phone rang with an encrypted Signal call. “Axiom” appeared on the screen again.

  “Don’t order,” said a man’s voice.

  I looked around again. No one I could see.

  “You are wearing the messenger bag, light blue shirt, and slightly darker jeans,” he continued. He told me to leave and walk slowly.

  “Walk against traffic, please.”

  I craned my neck around.

  “Don’t look around,” he continued, a little annoyed. “I’ll be about a half a block away, so please stop for 1–1.5 minutes at the intersections. I’m going to make sure no same people show up there from here.”

  As he took me on a circuitous route through Hell’s Kitchen, I tried to check again. “Don’t look, just walk naturally. Against traffic. It’s good, keep going.” He told me to stop at a basement Peruvian restaurant that lacked cell reception. “Ask for a table in the back, all the way in the back.”

  I did as he said. Ten minutes later, a man sat down in front of me. His hair was dark and curly, and he was a little soft around the middle. He had a thick Ukrainian accent.

  “I’m a concerned party,” said Igor Ostrovskiy. He slid a phone across the table. Motioned for me to swipe through the pictures on it. There was my block, my front door, my superintendent outside. And there was the Nissan, with two men inside: Ostrovskiy, dark and chubby, and Khaykin, pale and bald, with a fierce glare.

  Ostrovskiy said that they were with a local private investigation firm licensed in New York. “But the work product, the final reports, Black Cube was putting their name on it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  While much of the work the subcontractors did was routine—tracking cheating spouses or digging for dirt in custody cases that “might not be ethical, but it’s legitimate”—their work for Black Cube was something else. Ostrovskiy told me about their efforts to track me, in person and through my phone. I thought back to the spam texts—the weather updates, and then the blitz of political surveys I got at the World Trade Center. He didn’t know if either was connected, but did say he’d gotten accurate information about my location at roughly the same time that I’d received the survey texts. “I fear,” Ostrovskiy told me, “that it may be illegal.” He took issue with the tactics used against me. And it wasn’t just me. The subcontractors were still following people for Black Cube. Ostrovskiy wanted to know why.

  He read me a list of target names, and the dates and times of the operations surveilling them. At one upscale hotel restaurant after another, the subcontractors had monitored meetings between Black Cube agents and marks who appeared to be experts in technology and cybercrime. Several had expertise in aggressive new solutions for hacking and monitoring cell phones—like the Pegasus software made by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group, which Sleeper had worried about.

  Ostrovskiy said that the limited information he possessed was “designed to be traceable back to me.” He was anxious that he was being surveilled. He’d even swept the area surrounding the restaurant before entering.

  I was also becoming watchful. I’d asked a colleague to follow a few blocks behind, then keep an eye on the restaurant. Unjin Lee, a slight Korean American woman who just cleared five feet, wasn’t much for Krav Maga, but she’d spot any tails.

  Ostrovskiy and I left separately, ten minutes apart. When I got a safe distance away, Lee called. A man had appeared to follow the two of us, lagging behind as we entered, and lingering by the entrance for more than an hour.

  Nothing is certain, it turns out, except death and taxes and investigation by the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors there had begun to circle Black Cube after my story about the spy agency in late 2017, launching an investigation out of their Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit. It didn’t take long before the prosecutors, who were looking at Harvey Weinstein and AMI, too, were hoping to meet with me, not as a reporter but as a witness.

  The calls and messages from the Southern District started coming in the days following the McDougal story in February 2018 and didn’t let up in the months that followed. The inquiries came from the Southern District prosecutors themselves and from intermediaries, including Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney there. They came to me and to Bertoni, The New Yorker’s lawyer.

  A law school classmate working in law enforcement had been sending messages, too, asking to catch up. Not long after Ostrovskiy and I first met, I made my way through the heat to dinner at a small restaurant near the World Trade Center.

  I was sitting at the bar, sweaty and dowdily suited, when his voice sounded. “Hi, there.”

  I looked up from my phone. A row of perfect teeth flashed. He was symmetrical to a catalogue-model standard. Even his name was an actor name, a pretend name, the name of the most trustworthy doctor in a 1950s suburb.

  He slid closer. Another blinding smile. “Been a long time!”

  Me, feeling shlubby: “I’ve been busy.”

  “Can’t imagine with what.”

  He ordered us drinks, then we settled into a booth.

  It was a lovely dinner, with much “how is so-and-so?” I’d forgotten how much I’d withdrawn from my own life. Were it not for the aggressive surveillance efforts, I’d have had no social life at all.

  He’d married, he said.

  “How’s that?”

  He shrugged. “Complicated. You?”

&n
bsp; “Good. He’s great.” A beat of silence. I thought about the long, tense year with Jonathan.

  “But also complicated?” he asked.

  “Well, long-distance is hard.”

  He looked at me sympathetically. “You’re under a lot of pressure.”

  “It’s not so bad now. And you must be, too.”

  He leaned in. The warmest smile yet, no longer appropriate for catalogues, even. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know,” he said. I could feel his breath across the narrow table. “Dealing with all of this. By yourself.”

  He was adjusting a knife in front of him a little, running a finger up its silvered length.

  “Are you talking about—”

  “You should come in.”

  “Oh.”

  “Be a witness. You won’t have to reveal any sources you don’t want to.”

  I withdrew, sitting up straight. “You know you can’t guarantee that.”

  “So?” he said. “If you’re a victim, you should talk.”

  The personal interest seemed benign and separate from the professional entreaties. But the two dynamics jostled uncomfortably. As we stepped out into the night and said our goodbyes, he lingered for a moment during a parting hug. “Call me,” he said. “If you change your mind about any of it.” Then he was flashing the Crest ad smile over his shoulder, walking off into the night.