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Hello, Dateline fans. We've got a brand new true crime thriller for you featuring a multi-million dollar criminal enterprise, the FBI agents who took it on, and even a couple of Russian and American spies. I'm CNBC senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers here with a special sneak peek of my limited podcast series, The Crimes of Putin's Traitor. Take a listen and be sure to follow The Crimes of Putin's Traitor wherever you get your podcasts for full episodes right now.
This is the sound of the private jet runway at tiny Sion Airport high in the Swiss Alps. Sion is the gateway to the famed ski resort of Zermatt with its five-star hotels, luxury shopping and high-end social scene. Even in a private jet though, you can only get so close to the snow-capped mountains. Sion is still an hour's drive from the chairlifts. So the truly wealthy take a short walk across the tarmac and board helicopters to take them directly to the slopes.
And on March 21st, 2021, an up-and-coming young Russian oligarch and his wife touched down here in a chartered private jet on their way to the slopes. It's a wedding anniversary celebration. And at that moment, the oligarch is at the absolute height of his powers. He's personable. He smiles a lot. He's engaging. He's charismatic. That's how he was so successful in business. He's devoted to his family.
He's built a fabulously successful company. He's cultivated connections at the highest levels of the Russian government. And he works for the office of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. But what the oligarch doesn't know is that U.S. law enforcement has been monitoring the flight since it left Moscow. And they're planning to charge him with crimes that go to the heart of the American financial system. It's a breathless moment. You're literally holding your breath.
to see how this is going to play out. American law enforcement believes the oligarch is involved in a brazen $93 million insider trading scheme. And the victims are investors in iconic American companies, including names on the cutting edge of the U.S. economy, like Tesla, Snapchat and Roku.
at stake is the very integrity of American capital markets. We knew that somebody was up to no good, and we knew that the scale of it was pretty big because it was happening quarter after quarter in stock after stock. It's all part of the dangerous underground of the global financial system. In this podcast, we're going to take you inside the operation to track down and try to capture this Russian oligarch.
Along the way, you'll meet the FBI agents who led the investigation and the prosecutors who worked alongside them. We've spent months working to land interviews with all the key players, but the most difficult interview of them all was with a former Russian spy. We'll introduce him to you later in the series. He's a defector who now lives in the United States under an assumed name. I got his cell phone number from a very well-placed U.S. intelligence source.
And after his security team checked me out to verify I was who I said I was, we sat down with this Russian spy at a location inside the United States, which we agreed not to disclose. He's one of the very few people in the world who can give us the Russian perspective on this story.
To protect him from retribution from the Russian government, we're not going to use his name. We've replaced his voice, and someone else is reading the transcript of our conversation. It's a war right now happening between Russia and the West. Finances and banks and financial sector itself is just one of the battlefields. When I heard what he has to say, it changed everything about how I see this story. I'm Eamon Javers from CNBC, and this is The Crimes of Putin's Traitor.
The man at the center of the story is the young Russian oligarch on that private jet heading to the Swiss ski resort. His name is Vladislav Klyushin. His friends call him Vlad. Klyushin is a well-connected businessman who owns a cybersecurity firm in Moscow called M13. But the firm is a front. It's not doing what normal cybersecurity companies do. Behind the scenes, Klyushin's employees aren't always helping companies to protect their data. Sometimes they're stealing it.
They've found a sneaky way to obtain American financial information before it's public and trade in the stock market ahead of the news. And they're making a fortune by pillaging American investors on Wall Street. And Cleutian wants to make a whole lot of money.
Inside the operation, M13's computer screens are flowing with stolen stock market information. Collusion's team pours over American corporate earnings reports before the financial world can see them. At one point, they focus in on Tesla, the electric car company. M13 hackers steal Tesla's draft earnings release and, seeing the results, they buy shares in advance.
Klyushin sends a text to two of the investors in the scheme, giving them a heads up. Pay attention to shares of Tesla now and tomorrow after 1630 and on how much they go up.
After the market closes, Tesla reports its earnings. For Tesla, we're seeing a pop in the after-hour session of more than 12%. But of course, Cleuchan knows what's coming. It's a monster number, more than $6.8 billion in revenue. CEO Elon Musk tells investors on a conference call that it was an incredibly historic quarter. Wall Street is dazzled. It's much better news than traders expected, and Tesla shares soar.
In the second quarter of 2019, the M13 team steals documents showing that sneaker company Skechers is going to surprise the market with positive news. The company was going to beat earnings by about 15 cents per share. The M13 traders buy stock in Skechers, betting that the price will go up. Taking a look at Skechers.
The whole group ends up making more than a million dollars on that single trade. And they're making millions of dollars just sitting at their desks, breaking into these American companies, stealing information day after day after day, and just trading on it. It gets even better with cosmetics company Ulta Beauty.
M13's stolen documents showed the earnings were amiss. And what's worse for shareholders, the company's updated its financial guidance downward.
The M13 gang shorts the stock, betting it's going to go down. Tanking is the right word. Ulta Beauty shares down 20% on a rough second quarter report. They're right. Ulta's price plummeted by 30% when that news came out. For M13, it's great news. The gang makes almost $2 million overnight on a single trade. They gleefully text details of how much they and their investors are making.
They don't even ask why so anymore.
The money Cleuchan makes from the stolen financial information is literally piling up. He has a safe in which he stashes stacks of $100 bills, gradually filling it until at one point it holds $3 million in cash. But Cleuchan was wealthy before he turned his operation criminal.
Here's federal prosecutor Stephen Frank, who investigated the case. He was a lot like the kind of people that we prosecute for white-collar crime here in the United States every day, who don't really need to turn to white-collar crime in order to be successful because they already are successful. He was wealthy. He had a very nice house. He had very nice cars. He had a country house.
But he wanted more, like so many of our defendants do, and he found a way to get access to easy money, and he took it. FBI Special Agent David Hitchcock agrees. Vladislav Klyushin was a successful businessman before he began engaging in the insider trading. So if he's already wealthy, he's a rich guy, he lives in Moscow, why do this? I think the same way individuals here in the United States commit crime that's financially motivated, it's greed.
Straight up. That was my takeaway. Cleuchin, who was born in 1980, wasn't always rich. He grew up poor and he had to hustle to get ahead. He's the son of a single teen mother and he's never known his father. He started working at age 13 to help lift his family out of poverty. But his brainpower took him far, graduating from the Moscow Academy of Economics and Law and going on to get a master's degree in management.
By the time he opens the cybersecurity company M13, he's successful and well-loved by his employees. His team at M13 is a social group. There are birthday parties with hats, cake, and singing.
and rooftop barbecues with the gang from the office. Several M13 staff members say Klyushin helps them get access to top hospitals in Moscow when they or a family member are sick. By this time, Klyushin is also a family man. He married his second wife, Zhanna, at an exclusive country club outside Moscow, posing for pictures with his new bride, driving a convertible Porsche and embracing under a heavily laden trellis of roses. ♪
The couple produces an extensive highlight video of the wedding, featuring scenes of Cleutian jogging and swimming and his wife drinking champagne and lying on an outdoor canopy bed covered in flowers. It's all set to a blissful soundtrack.
In the video, a youthful Cleutian has brown hair combed to the side, deep brown eyes, and a dimpled chin. He's just hitting that stage of life where prosperous men start to get a little stocky, and he's got the slightest tinge of gray coming in at his temples. Between his two marriages, Cleutian is the father of five children. The company and the family are both fueled by Cleutian's spectacular success in business.
But the secret to that success is not in his technical skills. In fact, Klyushin doesn't have any specialized computer skills at all. What he does have are contacts.
He was a well-connected guy, and he was enormously successful. Klyushin knows highly placed people in the Russian intelligence and defense worlds. In June of 2020, Klyushin received the Russian Medal of Honor, with documentation signed by Vladimir Putin himself. He's also connected to the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, which is a successor to the notorious Cold War intelligence agency, the KGB. Klyushin even received an award from the FSB.
The inscription expresses sincere gratitude to you for the productive and effective collaboration in ensuring security of the Russian Federation in the information sphere. It's signed by the deputy director of the FSB. Now, we don't know exactly what Klyushin did to earn this spying award, but we do know Klyushin is a guy who's hanging around some seriously high-powered spies. At some point along the way, Klyushin makes his most important contact yet —
He connects with a young computer hacker named Ivan Ermikov, who becomes an employee of Cleuchan's firm M13. Very quickly, the two men strike up a business partnership and something of a bromance. Suddenly, business and life are good. Here's prosecutor Seth Costow.
One of the things that was curious about the case was the interrelationship between Klyushin and Ermikov. They were thick as thieves, very quickly, for two men who really didn't have much contact with each other before 2018.
Once their operation is up and running, they're in near constant contact. They go out drinking, and they sauna together naked. The FBI finds videos and pictures on their devices showing the two men at fancy dinners. In one, Ermikov is at a candlelit restaurant, holding his knife and fork dramatically over an impossibly large hunk of meat. In another, they pose with Klyushin's wife and Ermikov's girlfriend. The setting appears to be a high-end cocktail party.
Klyushin is in a tailored dress shirt and slacks with an expensive-looking watch on his left wrist. His wife is in a polka-dotted dress, a glass of wine in her right hand. Ermikov wears jeans and a sweater, and he has a proud grin on his face as his girlfriend hooks her elbow through his arm. The photo radiates confidence and elegance.
We see more casual images, too. Ermikov working on his golf swing at a driving range. And when the soccer World Cup comes to Russia, it's a point of pride for Vladimir Putin's regime and a huge global event. They're caught up in the excitement as players score goals. His first goal at a major tournament. Klyushin and his crew are all in on the games.
The images captured by the FBI show them eating, drinking, celebrating, and showing off their Russian colors with temporary tattoos of the Russian flag painted on their cheeks.
The oligarch and the hacker also share a fondness for helicopter skiing, and videos show them sweaty and exhausted but looking happy inside a chopper. The buddies shop for expensive things. Klyushin buys a luxury apartment for Ermikov and buys himself a yacht worth almost $4 million called the 7K from a shipyard in Cyprus. At one point, Klyushin sends a text to Ermikov telling him how much he enjoys being with him.
These are voice actors reading each man's texts. Klyushin. We spend a lot of time together. I feel good and calm. The fact that we can walk home together and have a beer or play golf or simply send everyone to hell, knowing that you're close. Ermikov teases Klyushin about his outburst of emotion. This truly sounds like a nice declaration of love. Like a declaration of love to a girl.
I asked prosecutor Stephen Frank about this. I mean, it sounds like a bromance. It was definitely a bromance between those two. Thank you all for listening to this preview of The Crimes of Putin's Traitor. If you want to find out what happens next, you can get the full episode right now. Follow and listen to The Crimes of Putin's Traitor wherever you get your podcasts.
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