Politics
‘From Russia with Lev’ reveals the dark toll of Trump’s ‘reality show’ presidency
They say Los Angeles is where you go when you want to be somebody, New York is where you go when you are somebody, and Miami is where you go when you want to be somebody else. It’s always been a sunny place for shady people. (And there’s always a Florida connection: Watergate, 9/11, Ted Bundy, O.J. Simpson.)
Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian American businessman who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to attempt to dig up dirt on Joe Biden before the 2020 election, who served time in prison on charges including campaign finance and wire fraud and who went on to testify about a number of efforts by GOP leaders, including former President Donald Trump and his close allies, to spread misinformation and mislead the public, is the consummate Florida Man.
When people get released from prison in Florida, their first call is to their mother and their second call is to us to make a documentary about them.
He makes for a provocative star of our new documentary “From Russia with Lev,” which premiered at the “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024” event in New York on Saturday.
My producing partner at our Miami Beach-based production company, rakontur, Alfred Spellman, (half) jokes that when people get released from prison in Florida, their first call is to their mother and their second call is to us to make a documentary about them. But in this case, we caught Parnas on his way to prison. As fellow Florida men, Parnas and I followed each other on the platform formally known as Twitter. Before his federal criminal trial in 2021, I slid into his DMs to set up a lunch meeting in South Beach.
I learned Parnas was familiar with and, fortunately, a fan of our work, so he agreed to tell us his story.
Parnas was born in Soviet Ukraine, and his family fled when he was 4 years old and eventually settled in Brooklyn, New York’s Brighton Beach neighborhood, also known as “Little Odessa.” Per his account, he became a runner for local gangsters, graduated to some of the sketchiest Wall Street brokerage houses and, when his friends started getting arrested, was forced to flee again: this time to South Florida. There, he helped run “mobbed up” penny stock boiler rooms, three of which were suspended for fraud. Then there were illegal poker games in Beverly Hills, seven kids with four women, a pile of unpaid bills, a trail of lawsuits against him and defrauded investors in various ventures, like a movie he pitched that was supposed to star Jack Nicholson and a Florida company with the most Florida name ever, Fraud Guarantee.
How Parnas, of all people, got entangled with the most powerful men in the world, recruited by “America’s Mayor” to engage in “shadow diplomacy,” allegedly shake down two successive Ukrainian presidents and help get Trump impeached (the first time) is as riveting as it is “ridiculous,” to borrow a descriptor from Parnas’ third wife, Svetlana, who participated in our documentary.
The story of Lev Parnas is like Tom Clancy if Jack Ryan were played by Jackie Mason.
We were well aware of the scandal surrounding Parnas in the latter half of 2019, but our introduction to Lev: The Character was via Rachel Maddow’s sensational interview on BLN in January 2020. We never imagined that the inspiration she provided for us then would lead to our producing her first feature documentary four years later. Parnas was clearly broken in that interview, but you could still detect the mischief in his eye and the chutzpah in his voice that got him into this mess.
A man without a country — after he betrayed both of his. Hated by the left for being one of Trump’s “plumbers” and reviled by the right for betraying Trump. We have a running list of potential “pop docs,” which is how we refer to our style of nonfiction storytelling, and we knew we wanted to meet this guy someday.
Parnas’ tale fits flawlessly into our signature subgenre, “Florida F—ery With International Implications,” and Parnas himself is a rakontur archetype: the likable scoundrel. He’s a charismatic raconteur and the ultimate hustler. A man who, like the subjects in many of our pop docs, such as “Cocaine Cowboys,” “The U” and “Dawg Fight,” chased the American dream by any means necessary. But the project quickly evolved into a two-hander. When we met Parnas’ long-suffering spouse, Svetlana, we realized she is the heart, soul and conscience of the story. It’s a madcap geopolitical caper with a lot of humor and a surprising amount of emotion. The stakes could not be higher, and the personalities could not be bigger.
After “537 Votes” (2020) and “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty” (2022), “From Russia With Lev” is the third in our trilogy of biannual election-year docs. This one tries to explain the eccentricities and irreverence of the Trump era, and it’s the first that takes you inside his administration: Hanukkah parties at the White House, paranoid plotting in private dining rooms at Trump International Hotel — the Mos Eisley Cantina of Trumpworld — and the reality show foreign policy of a reality show president.
Billy Corben
Billy Corben is an Emmy, Peabody and Edward R. Murrow Award-winning filmmaker. A Florida native, he is a lifelong Miamian and co-founder of the Miami Beach-based production company ragontour. He has directed documentaries including “Raw Deal: A Question of Consent” (2001), the “Cocaine Cowboys” franchise, including the Netflix original “Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami” (2021), “Dawg Fight” (2015), TIFF World Premiere “Screwball” (2018), the HBO Original “537 Votes” (2020) and “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty” (2022).
Blue Light News has been crunching the numbers to see how all 48 of this year’s World Cup participants rank in several other off-field categories, which we’ll share more of over the weekend.
In today’s item, we look at whether GDP per capita has any connection to soccer performance. As you can see, the chart does show some positive correlation — note, for example, wealthy tournament contenders such as France, the Netherlands and Germany all in the upper right corner.
But it’s not a perfect indicator. By this metric, Qatar is the wealthiest country in the tournament — and it lost 6-0 to Canada on Thursday …
CANBERRA — It was disappointment from start to finish around the USA vs. Australia match in the Bush Capital, won comfortably by the American side.
Neither of Canberra’s Socceroos made the starting lineup and the local government failed to provide an outdoor watch site for the match, despite a heavy social media campaign from locals. With federal politicians out of town and back in their districts this week, the campaign lacked star power and fell on deaf ears.
That left thousands to fill inner city pubs and the University of Canberra, which were allowed special trading hours for the match, from 4.30 a.m.
Australia’s politicians — vocal in their support in the lead-up to the match — went silent quickly, after Australia’s own goal 11 minutes minutes into the game.
If the Aussies’ lackluster performance left the crowd subdued, they found energy to boo Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a notably unpopular figure in Australia, which embraced harsh Covid lockdowns and vaccines — when he appeared on the match broadcast.
While Boston and Dallas have been taken over by marauding Scotland and England fans, Washington D.C. this week welcomed a (slightly) more sedate British crowd at Duke’s Grocery, a trendy restaurant and bar in Washington’s West End neighborhood.
Call it the U.K.’s diplomatic mullet: Business in the front; party in the back.
More than a hundred England fans crowded some ten television sets inside the bar on Wednesday, invited by the U.K. embassy to mark their team’s first game of the World Cup against Croatia.
Flags for every participant hung down from the ceiling. An old British telephone box sat in the corner, chock full of cups and salt shakers. There was also a cardboard cutout of Prince William and Kate at their wedding tucked underneath a Pride flag just by the front door.
Despite a critical byelection in Makerfield on Thursday, which is set to propel Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham toward a leadership challenge to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, sport was top of mind at the party.
“That’s the best bit about it,” said Frances Sterling, head of strategic communications and public diplomacy at the British Embassy in Washington. “This afternoon, there’s been no politics.”
The event pulled in Premier League fans from many of England’s largest clubs, encompassing World Bank staffers and embassy employees, English and Americans. They drank, celebrated heartily when England scored and chanted “wanker” in unison when calls went against them on the field.
A sign just off the projection set at the center of the bar read, “Great sport brings people together.”
“You know, you get in a stand, and you watch a football game, and everybody’s a friend,” Sterling said. “Everybody is there for one thing, and you go do the highs and lows of that team, and you feel like you live it, and, for everyone in the U.K. it’s that sense of national pride that this is their game, but it’s played all over the world.”
Duke’s will have hosted three games in tandem with the U.K. embassy throughout round robin play — two for England and just one for Scotland.
Sterling said that’s because the Scottish fans have decamped to Boston, where they’re drinking the city dry.
“The U.K. consulate there is absolutely overrun,” she said. “And so we were like, you know what? Scotland is doing great in Boston, so we’ll do one, but we know they’re all there.”
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