by Craig Unger
Recarey was a former detective with the Palm Beach Police Department and had been a detective on the force in 2005 when Dougan still worked there. During that period, a woman came into the station and charged that Jeffrey Epstein had paid her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter $300 to strip to her underwear and perform an “erotic massage.” This was the beginning of legal proceedings in the Epstein case, and Joe Recarey was chief detective. Dougan had had absolutely nothing to do with the case when he was with the PBSO, and he had zero interest in it—or so he said.
But Recarey was deeply committed to the investigation. According to Julie K. Brown’s reporting in the Miami Herald, in the first seven months of his investigation, he discovered twenty-one possible victims. Eventually, the probe had identified at least thirty-five underage victims, and there were more cases still being investigated. Epstein was a pedophile. There was no question about it.
As the evidence snowballed, internal pressures to drop or downgrade the investigation mounted. But according to the Miami Herald, Recarey and Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter stood fast as courageous cops who were willing to risk their careers to go after Epstein.
Then, in 2010, about five years into the Epstein case, Recarey called Dougan. The two men did not know each other well, but they had worked for the same employers and Dougan thought highly of Recarey. “He was a serious guy,” Dougan told me. “But not so serious where he couldn’t take a joke. He was really nice and down-to-earth.”
“‘I’ve got some stuff I want you to keep for me,’” Dougan says Recarey told him.
As the founder of PBSOtalk.org, Dougan often got requests like that. “I just became the guy who everybody used to give stuff to. Everybody knew that I designed the system to keep everybody absolutely confidential, and the sheriff hated it. So people would give me things like a deposition where the sheriff got caught stealing a gun from the evidence room. I was like the dumping ground for stuff.”
So, Dougan says, Recarey came over to his office on Olive Avenue in Palm Beach with a cartful of boxes. “One of the boxes was a bunch of DVDs—the blank kind that you record your own media on,” Dougan recalled. “They were labeled by date and spanned from 1994 to 2005 or so. I asked Recarey what they were, and he told me they were concerning Jeffrey Epstein, but he didn’t elaborate about the contents.”
According to Dougan, Recarey said his investigation was being sabotaged by both Epstein and his powerful allies, and he wanted to make sure he had copies in case they tried to make the originals disappear. After all, they had to know the kind of evidence Recarey had assembled.
Recarey’s fears were also reported in the Miami Herald by Julie K. Brown and David Smiley in an article noting that Epstein had hired investigators to tail both Recarey and Chief Reiter. Recarey said that he often switched vehicles in an attempt to throw Epstein’s team off. “At some point it became like a cat-and-mouse game,” he told the Herald.8 “I knew they were there, and they knew I knew they were there. I was concerned about my kids because I didn’t know if it was someone that they hired just out of prison that would hurt me or my family.”
In May 2018, shortly after his interview by the Herald, Recarey, then fifty, died after a brief illness. In the meantime, according to a report by Kevin Poulsen of the Daily Beast, Dougan’s website continued to publish dirt about Palm Beach’s finest. Some of it was true; some of it was not. There was the story of the former SWAT commander who was accused of “stealing painkillers from a dying deputy; purchase orders showing the office spent nearly $80,000 on barbecue grills; a photo of officers posing with a topless woman on a Palm Beach golf course.”
But he also published loads of disinformation and accusations about Sheriff Rick Bradshaw and other PBSO brass, including a fake pedophilia confession that appeared under the fraudulent byline of a top department official.
Meanwhile, Dougan had struck up an online relationship with a Russian woman on Facebook. It was the beginning of a virtual romance that he hoped to transform into a real one, so in February 2013 he went to Moscow for the first time. Dougan loved Moscow immediately, citing its sense of ungoverned freedom. “It was like the Wild West meets New York City,” he said.9
As for the romance, he told me he has not seen nor communicated with the woman in several years, and he declined to reveal her name.
About a week after he arrived in Moscow, Dougan posted a photo on his Facebook page of himself having lunch at the Bison Steakhouse in Moscow with an unusually intriguing companion—former Kremlin official Pavel Borodin. (The photo has since been removed.)
Up until this time, Dougan had vacillated between the worlds of a small-time huckster who created revenge-fantasy websites laced with disinformation and a legitimate whistleblower decrying racism and corruption. Whether one thought Dougan was legit or a con man, everyone could all agree on one thing: In either case, in the context of world affairs, John Mark Dougan was small-time. Insignificant. A nobody.
But the photo he posted on Facebook suggests something else entirely. Pavel Borodin is not a familiar name to Americans, but in Russia he’s a major figure. In fact, he’s so close to Vladimir Putin that one has to ask why one of the most important figures in Putin’s inner circle would waste time lunching with Dougan.
“Borodin is no small fry,” says Yuri Shvets. “This is the guy who brought Putin to Moscow, to the Kremlin.”
Dubbed “Putin’s mentor” by Time,10 Borodin had overseen the Presidential Affairs Department during the Boris Yeltsin administration in the nineties, and so was in charge of the upkeep of the Russian Federation’s assets.
And which of Russia’s assets was he overseeing? You may ask.
Actually, just about all of them.
As the New York Times reported, Borodin had oversight of Russia’s land, Russia’s farms, Russia’s dachas. Its automobiles, its aircraft, and its yachts. Russia’s hospitals, Russia’s buildings, its antiques, its art, and more. More than two hundred profit-making companies. And he had oversight of things you might overlook because they didn’t fit neatly into categories—such as a stake in a $12 billion Arctic diamond mine.
All told, Borodin was in charge of supervising some $600 billion in assets—nearly $1 trillion in 2020 dollars. “Mr. Borodin is unequivocally, far and away the Russian that people would most love to bribe,” the New York Times reported. “Forget Russia. Few people on earth have this much largesse at their fingertips.”11
And even fewer people were in such a pivotal position at the birth of the untamed gangster capitalism in Russia and were able to do something that truly marked a turning point in world history. In 1996, at a time when efforts to develop a real market economy were failing, and Russia was devolving into a Mafia state, Borodin hired Putin as his deputy and put him in a vital strategic position that allowed him to broker the new rules of a nascent kleptocracy, the relationships between the oligarchs and the Kremlin, and the rise of the Mafia state. It has been widely speculated in the Russian media that if anyone has kompromat on Putin, it would be Pavel Borodin from this period.12
And when the state prosecutor started investigating Borodin for his alleged role in a multimillion-dollar bribery and money-laundering scam, Putin, who had become FSB chief by this time, showed his great loyalty to Borodin by ousting the prosecutor, Yuri Skuratov, using secret footage that allegedly showed Skuratov cavorting with prostitutes.13
When Putin became president in 2000, he then gave Borodin the post of state secretary of the union of Russia and Belarus, a largely ceremonial position that had the highly valued perquisite of guaranteeing him legal immunity in Russia. Then, in 2002, Borodin was convicted of money laundering by a Swiss court, and the Putin administration paid $3 million bail for his release.
Immunity is a good thing to have when you have access to hundreds of billions of dollars.
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After Dougan’s lunch with Boro
din, a company called MD International Holdings put out a press release announcing that the company CEO, Mark Dougan, had traveled to Moscow “to meet with Russian Secretary of State, Pavel Borodin.” (In fact, Borodin was state secretary for the Russia Belarus Union.)
The release added that “Secretary Borodin presented Mr. Dougan with a very beautiful and very limited leather and gold book about the history of the Kremlin, as well as signing the book under his chapter in the book.” The purpose of the meeting was said “to establish cooperation in various aspects of business, including facilitating American investments into the robust Russian business environment and to engage into markets that would be considered ‘frontier’ to Russia.”
An Internet search on the Wayback Machine suggests that MD International Holdings was not really a going concern and that its site may have been constructed for the sole purpose of publicizing Dougan’s meeting with Borodin.
So what was a big fish like Borodin doing with a small fry like Dougan? According to Dougan, the meeting was perfectly innocent, and Borodin was just another Facebook friend. “I wanted to start a business in Russia, I started looking at Facebook profiles and saw that this person was sitting in front of the Russian parliament,” he told a Russian reporter.14 “I added him as a friend and started chatting with him on Facebook. I asked him to meet. When you are American, it’s easy to organize meetings with people.”
Sure. The man Vladimir Putin trusted to oversee more than $600 billion in assets was sitting around waiting for a former Palm Beach deputy to become his Facebook friend. That makes lots of sense.
When I asked Yuri Shvets what he thought of Dougan’s narrative, he laughed. “It’s like two needles meet each other in a haystack,” he said. “Pavel Borodin is searching Facebook, waiting until the guy comes from Florida to Moscow? This is what I would trust: The guy with a massive collection of video comes to Moscow, and he gets in touch with Borodin and the FSB. That is what is happening . . . [Dougan] is in the selling business.”
And as for Borodin, he is in the buying business. “Putin was a nobody until Borodin brought him to Moscow. So that means Borodin has direct contact with the Kremlin, with the FSB.”
According to Neil Barnett, Dougan presented himself as a ripe target for recruitment by the FSB, and his first trip to Moscow “would have allowed Russian intelligence to fully recruit Dougan. . . . It is likely that they presented the ‘co-operation’ as a way for them to support his campaign against PBSO, and that they slipped in requests relating to Epstein as an apparent afterthought or contextual matter.”15
When he returned to Palm Beach, Dougan moved on to other matters. He continued to have a relationship with his Russian girlfriend for a period of time during which each of them made two or three trips between Moscow and Palm Beach. At the same time, he says, Joe Recarey continued to give him more documents from the Epstein investigation through 2015.
Meanwhile, Dougan also escalated his war with the local powers that be. It became increasingly sophisticated. Over the next three years, he played email pranks on politicians, disseminated fake news, and created a website to show how to keep the FBI from accessing a computer.16 “He became adept at creating fake news sites to propagate false stories,” said Barnett. “He also apparently worked out how to reverse engineer access to confidential data, which he then released in order to cause maximum damage. It appears that he benefited from the assistance of more sophisticated people.”17
But in his book about his adventures, BadVolf, Dougan insists that he is not an asset of the Russian government, nor has it tried to recruit him. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Dougan also asserted that he has not shared any materials with the Russian government and that he does not intend to blackmail anyone with his information.18
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By March 2016, however, Dougan’s massive doxing rampage had apparently gone too far. Early in the morning of March 14, 2016, Dougan woke up and fed breakfast to his two kids as they prepared for school. As Dougan himself describes it in BadVolf, at the front door, he noticed a black Ford FX2 pickup truck idling in front of his house. The pickup had black-tinted windows, which are illegal in Florida and suggested to him that the truck was an undercover vehicle.19
Dougan went back indoors, put on a shirt, and went outside to see what they were doing. The truck’s doors opened. FBI agents wearing tactical vests burst out. Agents started coming out of the bushes, behind buildings—everywhere.
Within moments, Dougan was cuffed and on the ground. One agent immediately grabbed Dougan’s cell phone and passed it to another, “presumably because they knew my phone was encrypted and had to act fast to ensure they could suck all the data out of it before it locked.”20
Before long, the FBI began wheeling in machinery, which Dougan surmised had “portable batteries and an inverter that would enable the FBI to keep the computer running while they unplugged it. That way, they could extrapolate the encryption key at a later date.”21
One of the agents asked, “Who are your Russian friends? You should tell us because it’s going to be a lot easier if you tell us what we want to know.”22
They seized his passport and put him on the no-fly list, so no commercial air travel or private travel outside the country was possible. The raid, he said, was “the most significant ‘holy shit’ moment of my life.”23
As for the so-called Epstein videos, what about them? According to Dougan, when the FBI seized his computers in 2016, they got everything Recarey had given him.
If Dougan’s videos were the real deal, that meant that the FBI had possession of Jeffrey Epstein’s prized kompromat, and with it, the secrets of the most powerful men in the world.
When the FBI finally left and had not arrested him, Dougan knew his troubles weren’t over. So nine days later, on March 23, 2016, he went down to Islamorada Key in South Florida, about 150 miles south of Palm Beach, and rented an eighteen-foot boat from Bud N’ Mary’s Marina. He intended not to return the boat but instead to embark on a spectacularly dangerous three-hundred-mile trip to Cuba on the “barely-buoyant shitbox,” as he referred to it.24
Before he took off, however, Dougan noticed a handful of FBI agents at the marina on his tail. Dougan immediately realized that meant even if he were able to survive the stormy seas, the FBI would have Homeland Security or the Coast Guard on him in no time.
That meant it was on to plan B. Now that he realized he was still under such intense surveillance, Dougan deactivated all his mobile devices, including a burner phone he had bought.25
In BadVolf, Dougan’s account of what happened next as he escaped from the United States is brief, but it is full of holes. “A few days after I left the marina,” he writes, “I donned a blond wig on my bald head and a pair of light prescription glasses, evading capture by the FBI and fleeing the United States. After renting a small plane and faking a medical emergency to slip into Canada, I made my way to Toronto. I flew Turkish Airlines to Moscow, where I became the 4th American in history to obtain political asylum in Russia.”26 (Before Dougan, Edward Snowden had been the most recent.)
He arrived in Russia on April 6 or 7, he told me, and applied for asylum a few days later. “It took a few days for me to get my head on straight and apply for asylum.”
According to Barnett, Dougan’s departure from the United States bore all the hallmarks of “a professional exfiltration plan put together by an intelligence service. First, Dougan got a car with no documented connection to him and drove it to the Canadian border. He then chartered a light aircraft to overfly Canada. During the flight he claimed he was having a heart attack, and then ran off when the pilot made an emergency landing. From Toronto, he bought a ticket to Istanbul, and from Istanbul bought a new ticket to Moscow.”
And why Moscow? “There are very few governments around the world that the US won’t mess with, and that the US can’t somehow strong-arm into returnin
g a political dissident,” he told a Russian reporter.27 “Russia happens to be one of them. And I can’t think of another government that’s more powerful that would protect me.”
And indeed, on arrival, Dougan was granted temporary asylum in Russia, which was later changed to permanent status.28
When I talked to him, he added a rhetorical question: “Where else am I going to go that my country can’t extradite me back? You’ve got North Korea. You’ve got Africa. China. Forget it. I like this country very much.”
And what about the kompromat?
In confiscating Dougan’s computers, the FBI and the PBSO now presumably had copies of the Epstein videos that Dougan says Recarey had brought to him for safekeeping.
Dougan told me he had paid scant attention to the files Recarey had left with him, and on the rare occasion when he opened a video file, all he saw was footage of an empty room with coverage from an old-fashioned low-resolution closed-circuit TV camera. “You have to remember, in those days, CCTV was poor quality and some of the earlier files had the telltale signs that they were burned to the disks from VHS tapes.”29
When I asked if I could see any of the files, he demurred and said he was not going to broadcast child pornography over the Internet.
Because the taped sessions regularly began with the camera surveying an empty room, Dougan says, he never saw any activity and assumed they were ordinary surveillance videos. Nevertheless, he told me that he knew the files were about Epstein, so he made an extra set—which would have made him an extraordinarily valuable asset to the Russians.
“If Dougan really has these videotapes, they would be priceless,” said Yuri Shvets. “Hundreds of videotapes with famous people in the United States with underage girls. It’s hard-core kompromat.”
Because of their value, Dougan claims he took extraordinary precautions. “The FBI and other intelligence agencies may be surprised to have discovered that I kept an off-site backup that was sent to me in 2017, after I was safely established in Russia.”30
