Friends of Putin Critic Found Dead in D.C. Spurn Suicide Theory

Ten days after the sudden death of an outspoken Kremlin critic in Washington, D.C., was deemed a “suicide” in the press, friends of Dan Rapoport fear there are nefarious forces at play to make sure the truth stays buried.

Rapoport, 52, was found dead in front of a lavish apartment building on the evening of Aug. 14 by police officers said to be responding to reports of a “jumper,” according to a preliminary police report. Though the report notes he fell to his death in the early evening hours, they said there were no known witnesses, despite the building’s location in a bustling area right across from a popular hotel.

Eerily, he died in the exact same manner as his former business partner, Sergei Tkachenko, who plunged to his death from a Moscow apartment building in 2017.

The Metro D.C. Police Department has stressed that a “death investigation” is still underway and referred inquiries to the medical examiner’s office, where an autopsy is currently pending. The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not respond to a request for comment on when the results are expected.

But the police department’s quick declaration that they “do not suspect foul play” has set off alarm bells among those who knew Rapoport.

To immediately declare “no foul play” is “clearly wrong given all the other facts surrounding” Rapoport and his death, Bill Browder, a political activist and financier long targeted by Moscow, told The Daily Beast. “The circumstances of his death are highly suspicious... Why would a person who’s committing suicide keep $2,600 in their pocket as they jump out of a building?” he said, referring to the list of belongings police said had been found on Rapoport after his death.

That list also included a hat, a cellphone, a Florida driver’s license, and several other small items.

“Who puts a hat on before jumping out a window?,” said Igor Shoifot, who told The Daily Beast he’d known Rapoport for 10 years and corresponded with him “almost daily” over the past year and a half.

The moments leading up to Rapoport’s death remain a mystery, and staffers at the building where it happened have been ordered to keep their mouths shut about the whole affair, according to a building concierge who spoke to The Daily Beast last Thursday.

They declined to say if they had given security footage to the police. A resident later told The Daily Beast that he believed the front desk was told by a higher power not to address the matter if asked by renters. Referring to the front desk, he said they “can’t talk about it.”

An email reviewed by The Daily Beast shows that the building management firm Equity Residential sent an email to residents the morning after Rapoport’s death calling the incident “tragic” and stressing that it was under investigation by police. “We are not certain of all of the details at this time,” the email read.

Adding to the mystery, the first details of Rapoport’s death came not from the American press, but from a Russian reporter based in Los Angeles, Yunia Pugacheva, who posted on Telegram that the Latvia-born American businessman had “released his dog into a park with money and a suicide note” before taking his own life.

The story quickly blew up in Russian media, with tributes pouring out for a man whose name was once tightly linked to the nightclub scene in Moscow, where he co-founded the famous Soho Rooms in 2007.

For friends of Rapoport who knew him more recently, and his wife, something just doesn’t add up.

“I’m no Sherlock Holmes, none of us is. I wouldn’t say I can say with 100 percent certainty that he was murdered, who knows, but it just does not sound likely at all [that he would’ve taken his own life],” Shoifot told The Daily Beast, adding, “I know very few people who loved life as much as he did.”

“He just started a great job, he just got paid for it, so he had the money, he just moved to a town that he totally loved, he loved D.C., … his family was about to join up with him,” he said, describing Rapoport as “very funny and sort of ridiculous, yet very smart, very deep.”

“I don’t think Dan killed himself. I know the guy, he would never do it,” Kyiv-based lawyer Alex Frishberg told The Daily Beast.

Rapoport’s wife, Alyona, firmly shot down Pugcheva’s claims in comments to Russian media, saying there’d been “no note, no suicide” and none of the other scandalous developments Pugacheva had written of, such as a supposed break-up and trip to London.

Alyona Rapoport could not immediately be reached for comment for this story. Pugacheva did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Beast.

Frishberg said he’d spoken to Rapoport recently, and he had clearly been making plans for his return to Kyiv, where he was an outspoken supporter of Ukraine and a staunch critic of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

“‘I’m coming back at the end of August, beginning of September,’” he recalled Rapoport saying after evacuating his wife and child from Kyiv to keep them safe following Russia’s full-scale invasion on Feb. 24.

“He was a very adamant fighter, overtly and covertly, against Putin’s regime,” Frishberg said, noting that Rapoport’s death shared too many parallels with other mysterious deaths abroad of those who fell out with the Kremlin.

“Dan’s death will never be uncovered... it will be the same as” Mikhail Lesin, he said, referring to the bizarre death of the Russian media exec found dead in a D.C. hotel room in 2015 shortly after the U.S. Justice Department was urged to investigate him for money-laundering. The official version of Lesin’s death, after a year-long investigation, was that he’d gotten so drunk he fell down multiple times and suffered lethal blunt-force injuries to his head.

Frishberg noted that police had immediately declared “no signs of foul play” in Lesin’s death, just as they did with Rapoport. “The pattern in America repeats itself,” he said.

Browder shared Frishberg’s concerns, noting that suspicious deaths of Russian figures both in the U.S. and U.K. have often not been met with enough scrutiny, perhaps because the people investigating them “are totally desensitized to, or not sensitized to, the violence of the Putin regime, so they just assume it’s not suspicious until they find out it is.”

A spokesperson for the FBI said they could not “confirm or deny” if federal prosecutors intended to, or had been asked, to assist D.C. police in their probe.

Rapoport, after moving to Russia as privatizations gripped the country in the “wild” 1990s, became well-known in Russian financial circles in the early 2000s and reportedly represented a number of tycoons before leaving the country in 2012, when Putin returned to the presidency. He openly threw his support behind Alexei Navalny, the now-imprisoned anti-corruption campaigner who at that time was seen as a contender to oust Putin from the Kremlin.

“He left because he was openly supporting Putin’s enemies,” Frishberg said, claiming Rapoport had been “kicked out” and never went back because he’d been told, “‘If you come back we’re going to kill you.’”

The Daily Beast could not independently confirm whether Rapoport had ever received such threats. Just hours before leaving Russia that June, he posted on Facebook that “it's sad to leave Russia, but for thoughtful people, living here has become unbearable and disgusting.”

And in the years since his departure from Russia, Rapoport made clear there was no love lost there, throwing all his support behind Ukraine and reportedly helping to fundraise for the fight against Russia. After relocating to Kyiv in 2016, he “had a good life” with his wife until Russia’s full-scale invasion, Frishberg said.

“Throughout the war, Dan was always helping… His heart was always huge, he was always helping,” he said.

Rapoport openly posted on Facebook about speaking to U.S. authorities about the war, though it was not clear in what capacity or what kind of information he could have provided.

“Guess who wants to hear my humble opinion about the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” he wrote in mid-April, alongside a selfie in front of the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw.

Browder said he had no idea if Rapoport could have been gearing up to provide any valuable information to U.S. authorities, but he noted it was possible given that “the U.S. Department of Justice has been contacting many former Moscow residents as part of their Klepto Capture task force looking for oligarch assets.”

But Shoifot said he found it hard to imagine that Rapoport had been “privy to some secrets” that could have been valuable to authorities in the U.S., as he had been “out of the loop” on Russia for years. Instead, he said, Rapoport may have unwittingly made himself a target for “some kind of stupid idiots of the same ilk that perpetrated the attempt to kill the Skripals” and Alexei Navalny by “making it very public” that he was apparently speaking with U.S. representatives about Ukraine.

“I don’t believe that a person with such a fierce love for life, such endless self-irony and optimism, could have committed suicide,” Shoifot said, “especially in such a savage way as throwing himself out a window.”