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Jan. 26, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:23:12
Edition 285 - Elizabeth Greenwood & Alexander Nekrassov

Elizabeth Greenwood on why people fake their own death. Also ex-Kremlin Insider AlexanderNekrassov...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much if you've emailed or sent a donation recently.
From the bottom of my heart, if you have donated to the show, I'm very, very grateful to you.
Very few people who listen to the show actually do donate, but if you have over this last period, thank you very, very much.
It is very, very important being able to keep this going because you know that my existence and I won't harp on about it is very much on a shoestring.
So thank you.
If you want to get in touch with me by email, I'm going to be doing some shout-outs in a moment or two, then email me through the website theunexplained.tv, designed and devised by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
When you do get in touch, can you try and keep the email reasonably short?
And can you tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show?
You know, a lot of people who are driving trucks or going jogging or commuting in Chicago or Washington, D.C. or London Town or Brisbane, Australia, whatever you're doing, tell me how you use this show.
It's always good to know.
Okay.
Two great guests on this show, both from my radio show recently.
One of them, Alexandra Nekrasov.
Now, Alexander is a former Kremlin insider and still a commentator on everything Russian.
Amazing man who came into the studio to talk about Donald Trump, Mr. Putin, and just about everything else to do with Russia.
So it's not the kind of stuff that we normally do, but I think you're going to find him fascinating.
So we'll have a bit of him.
And before him, Elizabeth Greenwood, somebody who's done some remarkable research on the people who fake their own deaths and why it almost never works.
So we'll be hearing from her in just a moment.
Let's do those shout-outs now.
Dave in Washington, D.C., about Colonel Chuck Holt, the deputy base commander at Rendlesham Forest, RAF Bentwaters, the last edition.
Dave says, good on you for keeping the interview going.
He seemed combative and defensive.
Okay.
George in Victoria, BC, Canada, fascinating interview with Chuck Holt.
I found him entirely credible, says George.
His suggestion that a higher power is in control of the events surrounding this case, clearly a reference to aliens, says George, sent chills down my spine.
Steve in America says, great episode with Chuck Holt.
Thought you did an excellent job.
Not pushing him too far for answers.
It was obvious he had had some bad interviewers in the past.
I think he probably had, and I think he was maybe a little reluctant to enter into any sort of interview context simply because some of the things that had been perpetrated in the past makes him cautious, and that I understand.
Stephen in Whitstable, Kent, UK says, well done on a difficult interview with Colonel Holt.
I've heard him on numerous shows and he's not very forthcoming.
You handled his one-word answers great and kept the interview moving forward.
I just think he was a little cautious for reasons that I understand because he's had some difficult interviews and perhaps some people who haven't handled the interviews as well as they might.
John in Renfrewshire, Scotland says, I want to tell you how much I enjoy your show.
I wasn't sure about Charles Holt.
I would have thought that as deputy base commander, he might have said something about the drugs used on those who witnessed the incident before condemning them.
The jury's out, I suppose, but I tend to lean towards the version given by Larry Warren and others.
Okay, well, there are many different views.
I think there are at least two and probably many more factions with views on the events at Rendlesham Forest.
And, you know, we're not going to get into that right now, but I understand what you're saying.
Carmen says she's a massive fan, says I've contacted you before as part of your listener database.
I deliver car parts in the English Lake District.
Lovely part of the world if you've never been there.
It's lakes and hills and plenty of greenery.
She says, I've listened to most of your podcasts and many others within the genre, but adore yours above all the others because they don't have you at the controls.
That's very kind, Carmen.
Thank you.
Dava here.
Thank you for your email, Dave.
I think you're a new name to the show, so thank you very much for getting in touch.
Greatly enjoyed the previous edition to Chuck Holt, which was Dr. Calvy Parisetti and Near Death Experiences, etc.
Dave says I've not heard of him before, but your questions and his answers were great.
Thank you.
Rob Jeffs, nice to hear from you.
Wanted to mention that Dr. Calvy Parisetti came across as a very good interview.
Thank you, Rob.
Who else has been in touch?
Gonna have to race a bit now.
Mary Jo in Nova Scotia.
Mary Joe, nice to hear from you.
Danny Foxwell, suggesting somebody who was on the radio show years ago.
Maurice Cottrell, good call, got to get him back.
Chelsea in Canada says, love your show.
Don't change a thing.
It was good to hear.
Ole Damagard.
John, thank you very much.
Says, I love the show.
All very well done.
Informative and interesting.
And I think that's about all we can do right now.
Otherwise, this edition is going to be about two hours long and my webmaster, Adam, is not going to be pleased.
So thank you for getting in touch.
If I haven't mentioned you, do know that I see and read all of the emails.
And like I say, when you get in touch via the website, theunexplained.tv, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
Okay, guest number two on the show is Alexander Nekrasov, Kremlin Insider.
Guest number one, though, the fascinating Elizabeth Greenwood, who's written about how people sometimes try to fake their own death.
Now, look, let's be honest with each other tonight.
Have you ever got to a situation where maybe the bills are coming in or maybe you're sick and tired of your job and the boss is giving you jip every day and you just think, I've had it with this.
How can I get out of the situation that I'm in?
Might it be possible for me to fake my own death?
Do what we used to call when I was a boy a Reggie Perrin.
Leave all my clothes on the beach, swim out into the sea and then tiptoe out further up the beach, still alive, still okay, but people thinking that you've drowned.
There are people who really do this.
And there is somebody who's done some research on death faking.
Her name is Elizabeth Greenwood.
She's written about it.
Let me tell you, before we get her on from the U.S., a little bit about her.
This is from her biography.
Elizabeth Greenwood teaches at Columbia University, and like many other young professionals, she has an insurmountable amount of student loan debt.
With the overwhelming feeling that she would never escape her debt, she desperately longed for a new start.
There was no going back on what she'd done to accumulate her debt, but perhaps she could skip ahead.
She began to investigate what it would take to fake your own death in the 21st century.
Greenwood was shocked to find a robust infrastructure of death fraud all at her fingertips.
Eager to know more about the strange subculture, she decided to go through with faking her own death and writes about it in her new book, Playing Dead, A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud.
She meets some interesting characters along the way and realizes that a new start might not be as easy and appealing as it sounds.
Now, before we start talking about this with Elizabeth Greenwood, just to say that, of course, we are not advocating this.
We are merely discussing it.
In case you think that we are suggesting that people do something fraudulent, no, we ain't.
And having said that, late in the night in the United Kingdom, let's cross to the US.
And Elizabeth Greenwood online to talk radio the unexplained Howard Hughes.
How are you, Elizabeth?
I'm great.
How are you, Howard?
I'm good.
Now, there's a bit of biography there that I got off your website.
It leaves a few unanswered questions.
So talk to me about you first off.
Sure.
Well, I loved your disclaimer about not advocating for people to take their debts, nor do I. The book I wrote, Playing Dead, is not exactly a how-to manual, but along the way in interviewing experts in the field of life insurance fraud, people who bill themselves as quote-unquote privacy consultants who help people disappear, and along with interviews.
Sorry, I was pretty amazing.
And along with interviewing some who've done it themselves, I did pick up a few tips along the way.
As a journalistic experiment, I wanted to see how far I could get in the process myself.
So I did go to the Philippines and obtain my own death certificate along with a police report detailing the grisly car accident where I met my fate in July of 2013.
I didn't exactly fake my own death, though.
I never filed it.
I never had any intention of filing it.
I just wanted to see what it would be like to kind of hold those documents in my hands.
And it was really something else.
Okay, well, I want to ask you lots of questions about that.
But the first question I've got to ask you before any of this and before we get into any of the case studies and a whole sconge of other things that we need to ask, what is it about you that wanted to do this or wanted to research this and even contemplated doing it?
So like you said, like many Americans, I do have quite a bit of student loan debt that, you know, it was really at that time of my life shaping and informing a lot of the decisions I was making on a day-to-day basis about how I was handling my finances and just feeling very overwhelmed with this figure that was growing every single month with interest despite monthly payments.
So I was having a conversation with a friend and I was bemoaning my plight and what am I going to do?
How am I ever going to get out of this?
And I said, you know what?
I think I need to just find a country with a nice beach and a rickety government, no extradition policy, and just slip through the cracks.
And my friend Matt responded very offhandedly, oh, or you could fake your own death.
And I was like, that's a great idea.
I just thought there was something so kind of macabre and darkly comedic about that idea.
Death is, you know, one of the hardest and fast facts of our lives.
So just the idea that you could kind of outsmart it just was very intriguing to me and kind of hilarious in a lot of ways.
So I began my initial investigation just, you know, doing what most of us do in the 21st century, just Googling fake your own death and seeing what came up.
And a lot of very funny, to me, kind of listicles, these shoddy kind of how-tos came up, you know, on sites like WikiHow that were very crude, you know, kind of like, decide if you really want to do this first.
I was like, yeah, that's a great idea.
But we have to say, and, you know, just to put the caveat in here, that what we're talking about is fraud.
Absolutely.
It is fraud.
Well, it's actually an interesting question because faking your death in and of itself is not a crime in the sense that there's no law on the books called faking your death.
But the consequences of faking your death, in other words, escaping your responsibilities, that is a crime.
Many of the ancillary crimes associated with death fraud are very much a crime.
So, for example, if you are leaving in your wake a great deal of debt behind, then, right, that's a crime.
If you are going to assume someone else's identity, that's identity theft, identity fraud.
If you are trying to claim a life insurance policy, then that's life insurance fraud.
There's this very narrow slice of territory you can occupy where, say, you weren't actually indebted and you had this suitcase full of cash that you were going to live on and never take on another identity, which a few people I came across managed to do for several decades.
Those aren't crimes.
If you're staging an accident where, say, you know, you make it seem as if you plunged into a reservoir and the state deploys resources like search and rescue to look for you and look for your body, there have been cases where those people have had to actually pay back the state the cost of their.
I mean, we have an offense over here called wasting police time.
I'm sure that that would definitely fall under that.
Indeed, indeed it would.
Yes.
Okay.
So people, real people, and we will talk in a little while once we've got the preliminaries out the way.
Real people in real life circumstances actually not only contemplate it like you did, but do it.
Yeah, I think that, as you mentioned at the top of the show, that it, I think we've all fantasized about leaving our lives behind.
And you don't have to be in any kind of real turmoil to have that fantasy.
It's just, you know, the kind of mundane day-to-day grind.
I think we've all been on the commute to work and thinking about, oh, what would it be like to just never go into work again?
but for most people, it's a fantasy, isn't it?
For most people, it is a fantasy.
And I actually interviewed several psychiatrists and psychologists who told me that they hear many of their clients having this fantasy and that there's really nothing antisocial about fantasizing that way.
However, to take the leap into making loved ones, family, you know, the government think that you're dead, that does really cross the line into the antisocial for sure.
Right.
We had a man in this country.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him called Lord Lucan.
Oh, of course.
Yes, Lord Lucan is in my book.
Lord Lucky Lucan.
Okay.
Now, you know, he was the most celebrated case probably in this country.
I mean, he disappeared.
He's now been officially declared dead in order that certain formalities can be, you know, fulfilled with his family and stuff.
But he was somebody who may well have faked his own death.
Nobody really knows.
He disappeared.
That's right.
Yeah.
I'll tell you, I mean, this is probably just anecdotal, but in my research, looking at the different cases of people who fake their deaths, I did find a high incidence of them coming from the UK.
I don't really know what the reason or motivation is behind that, but there was a kind of disproportionate, at least from what I could see, at least cases that get reported of people faking their own deaths from the UK.
Well, it's a little country.
Maybe it's more difficult just to do what you know.
If you live in a great big country, you could probably just close the door on your shack and disappear and go away and nobody bothers much.
They won't ask any questions.
Now, in this country, of course, there are authorities and you'll have a job and neighbors and all the rest of it.
Maybe it's just because there are more things that you would have to get away from in this country.
I don't know.
I'm just speculating.
Perhaps.
No, that seems like a good reason to do it.
One of the people that I interviewed in the book, who's pretty synonymous with pseudocide in the UK, is John Darwin.
And one of the funniest aspects of his story is, you know, many of your listeners, I'm sure, know, is that he actually stayed in Seton Caroo, his hometown, off and on for a few years, living in the adjacent house next door.
He took on this very elaborate disguise.
And from what he told me, he would actually pass on the street his neighbors and family members.
And according to him, they were none the wiser.
So maybe hiding in plain sight is actually a benefit.
Yeah, you're talking about a very famous, celebrated case here.
Somebody for a good long period actually did it and got away with it.
But of course, inevitably, you may think that you got away with it.
But in his case, like I presume most of the cases, something happens to find you out.
Well, I spent a sorry, I mean, weird echo in my headphones.
It's okay.
It's a quirk of our system here at Talk Radio.
This happens at about a quarter past every time we do one of these things.
Don't worry about it, Elizabeth.
It's not at your end.
What we'll do is we'll take a quick commercial break.
We'll come right back, and I promise you, your line will be clear.
We're talking about the people who fake their own death.
We are not recommending that you do this because, for one, it's not legal, but fascinating nonetheless.
With Elizabeth Greenwood in the US, who's written a book and done a lot of research about this.
We're talking about those people who try and fake their own deaths.
Now, we have to say, crime does not pay, and those people who do these things usually get caught in the end.
Case in point we were talking about with Elizabeth Greenwood, our guest in the U.S. who's researched all of this, Elizabeth, was the case of John Darwin.
Now, I can't believe this was 14 years ago.
But this was a guy, wasn't he?
66 years of age in this country.
It was an insurance scam.
And I think a lot of lights are going on in people's heads now when they remember that this guy faked his own death.
He took a canoe to the seaside and the canoe was found later and he wasn't.
And everybody thought he died, but he hadn't.
He's still there.
Yes, correct.
That's a great thumbnail.
That's absolutely right.
So I had occasion to spend about a week with John after he'd been released from prison the first time.
He later went back.
Some of your listeners might remember, for violating his probation for leaving the country to go to the Ukraine to meet some ladies who he'd been corresponding with.
Well, I now see from the Daily Mail newspaper here, and I hadn't seen this.
This was in November last year.
That's right.
He now lives in the Philippines with his son.
Yeah, it's kind of full circle with my book because that's where I got my death certificate.
So all roads lead back to the Philippines when it comes to death fraud.
But yeah, John's case was really extraordinary because he did manage to get away with it for so long.
So like you said, with the help of his wife, he colluded in faking his death because he had gotten into some pretty deep real estate debt.
So he set out one day in this canoe in your local parlance, stuffed with a few changes of clothes, some candy bars, some cash, made it seem as if he had drowned.
His wife Anne picked him up from the beach.
She drove him to the train station where he then took a train to the western coast and camped out for several months, growing very gaunt, growing this long beard and donning this elaborate disguise.
And she came and retrieved him where he then lived in this adjacent Victorian home.
They were renting out the rooms as a bedset in the second half of the house.
So he came back under the name Carl Fennec.
And he was just kind of the helpful handyman.
He was always helping out around the house.
And then at night, he would go back and, you know, to his Maridel bed and stay with his wife.
While he was presumed dead, he managed to get an authentic UK passport.
And he did it, you know, not through any kind of like trolling the docks and obtaining fraudulent documents.
Everything was legit.
He just, you know, managed to accrue all the necessary Documentation and identification to get this passport.
And with it, he traveled to over a dozen countries.
He spent some time in New York.
He spent some time all over.
And he famously, with Anne, bought property in Panama.
They bought a townhouse in Panama City.
Yes, no, it's all coming back.
Yeah, sorry.
Carry on.
And he bought some jungle out in the countryside.
Now, the part of the story that I don't think a lot of people know, and what he told me, is he never got caught.
He actually turned himself in.
He had two adult sons who were under the impression that their father was dead this entire nearly seven years.
Yeah, extraordinary case.
Even his own sons were not aware of what was going on.
That's right.
That's right.
So in his telling, this plan was all kind of temporary.
He wanted to release the equity he had in the home so that he could pay back the bank, et cetera, et cetera.
So he decided, along with Anne, that the time had come, he had to go face the music.
So he turned himself into a police station in Piccadilly Circus, claiming that he had been shopping in Harrods with his wife, but he couldn't find her.
And oops, he has amnesia and can't account for any events prior to the year 2000.
So you can imagine how that unraveled.
So he ended up doing three years and three months in prison, and his wife did slightly more because she pleaded not guilty.
But isn't it true that somebody saw a photograph of them online?
Yes.
And that was the thing that was their undoing.
It was kind of the final nail in the coffin.
So after he was back, a neighbor just started searching around, Googling John and Panama after some of this came out.
And that is when that infamous photograph was found.
But he was already back in the UK at that time.
God, I mean, what a story.
And the audacity of it, I think, is the thing that gets you.
I'm very impressed that you got to talk with him.
Yeah, me too.
I think that he's been notoriously, you know, and for understandable reasons, a bit shy of the press.
But it was really interesting to walk around with him to Seton Carew, to see the house and to really have him lay out, okay, well, here's where we kept the canoe and here's what I put in it and go around to all the different places, his old haunts.
And it was a great experience for me to get to see that part of the UK, which I'd never visited.
I'm not going to lie, I could understand about every third word people said.
It's a fabulous coast, though, isn't it?
And the sea goes on for miles there.
Yes, it's beautiful.
Sorry, enough of the travelogue.
But, you know, you talked to the guy.
You know, I can think right now half a million questions in my head that I would want to ask him.
I think the thing that I would want to ask him, and I'm sure that you did, what on earth made you think that you could get away with it?
Yeah, yeah, we did talk about that quite a bit.
I think that, like, John, you know, and he's not the only person I spoke to who'd faked his death under similar circumstances.
I mean, usually when people actually go through with this plan, they're in a very fight-or-flight response.
They're not thinking rationally.
So they're desperate.
So they're very desperate.
And he was desperate.
The way he laid it out was that, you know, because he also had renters in some of the properties he owned and the banks were ready to repossess these houses, that, you know, not only would he and his family be screwed, but all of his tenants would be homeless.
You know, whether that is true or not, it's hard to say, but that's, you know, the kind of pressure that he felt.
It's hard to know.
I suppose for a man who can weave a web of lies that complicated and that tangled, even when you get to talk to him after this has all ended and he's paid his debt to society and all the rest of it, I guess going through your mind must always be, is we have a phrase in the UK, porky pies.
It rhymes with lies.
Feel free to use it if you want to.
In the States, we should take that one to a list.
I love it, yes.
But you can never be sure whether a person like that would be telling you porky pies.
You can never be sure.
And what I was more interested in this book is the way in which these people understand the narrative themselves and the way they tell it.
That to me and the kind of mythology they create around themselves is a lot more interesting in some ways because think about it.
He faked his death.
He did it successfully to a certain extent.
And now he has to come back.
And not only are you still the same schlub, you're the schlub who's now, you know, ridiculed the world over for doing this.
So what do you do?
And in John's case, I think that he really clung on to the kind of like heroism of the story, you know, that this is how I did it.
And I did get away with it for all of this time.
And, you know, when I would ask him about the, you know, emotional collateral damage of lying to his sons, he, you know, had some pretty tidy compartmentalization and rationalizations for that.
Right, that's what it's all about, isn't it?
People who do bad, it's like people who have affairs.
They quite frequently compartmentalize to rationalize and justify what they're doing.
Very similar.
That's right.
But, you know, I will say after spending time with John, you know, I don't think what he did was great.
And I think that he agrees with that.
But I don't think that he's a horrible person.
Did you like him?
You know, he's a character.
He's a real character.
I'm a writer, so I'm drawn to characters for sure.
I did find him very compelling and very, you know, deeply psychologically complex, the way that he's had to kind of manipulate the story to fit this life that he's had to come back to.
So I found him very fascinating.
Right.
Okay.
Oh, boy.
And did you get any sense of, what's that word they use in courtrooms here, remorse?
I did.
I think that he is remorseful, of course, for, you know, hurting the children and all these things.
But I think that there is, and John's not the only person I saw this in, I think that there is a certain kind of defiance as well to say, hey, look, I tried to take control over my life.
You know, some of the laws that were facing me, I felt the penalties that he was up against to him seemed very draconian and unjust.
And he, you know, kind of took a stand, like in this folksy hero kind of way.
So I did also get a bit of that.
I mean, look, without wanting to sound like the police here, but if I'd been interviewing him, I guess I would have said, well, you're clearly a very intelligent and artful man.
If you are so intelligent and artful that you can put together a tissue like this, then you could have probably talked to all of the people that you were having issues and difficulties with and probably dug yourself out of whatever situation you might have been in.
Yeah, so that reminds me of one of the comments that another person in my book made, this man named Steve Rombaum, who is kind of a real-life Indiana Jones character.
So he is a high-profile private investigator and he contracts for life insurance companies.
And whenever a fishy claim comes in that just looks very suspicious and is usually over the million dollar threshold, he's the guy that gets on a plane and goes out to the far-flung villages and he has dug up empty coffins filled with rocks at times.
And one of the things that he told me that I thought was very prescient was that, you know, a lot of these fraudsters he catches, and he catches almost all of them.
What he says to them is, you know, if you had just dedicated the same amount of time and effort into your job and to your family and to doing the right thing, then you probably could have been very successful.
And I think that's true to a certain extent, but it's just not the personality type.
It's not the profile of the person who's going to fake his own death.
So while that might be true for most of us, for most lay people, it is a really kind of special person.
It's going to go through it.
And the basic tenets of, you know, hard work and all of these great middle-class values just kind of don't apply.
Okay, so it's our mindset.
It is, like you say, it's a personality type and it wouldn't even occur to them.
I think it is.
I mean, a lot of the people that I interviewed kind of followed a similar profile in that they were usually middle-aged men with families who were strivers.
They were not satisfied with the job they had done.
They were usually trying to get into some kind of get-rich quick scheme, some kind of Ponzi scheme.
And, you know, once you're looking down the barrel of, you know, like someone I interviewed for the book here in the States, a guy named Sam Israel, who is a hedge fund manager and famously built his clients out of half a billion dollars of money.
You know, once you've kind of gone that far, these plans take on the kind of magical thinking.
And one thing that struck me is that they do possess their own kind of internal logic.
If you're willing to squint and go along with it a little bit, say, oh, okay, so you actually faked your death because you needed to get this money right away so you could pay back your debtors.
So that's what they say, isn't it?
That one lie leads to another.
How do you say that?
It's almost like being a bank robber, I suppose.
If you robbed one bank, a bank robber would say, well, you know, if I go and rob another one, I'm going to get the same amount of time in prison, so I might as well do another one.
We're not saying that that is a good logic.
Of course, it isn't.
It's a twisted logic, but that's the way their minds work.
I think that's right, indeed.
Now, just in case you've just tuned into this, and our regulator will be delighted that I'm saying this, but I would have said it anyway.
We're not giving you a guide how to do this, and we are not advocating that you do, because as the case of John Darwin proves, and many others, that you'll get caught, it's just a question of when, in most cases, yeah?
Here, here.
That's exactly right.
And the people who, you know, that's kind of the paradox about studying this subject, is that the people who successfully fake their deaths are presumed dead.
So we don't even know about them.
We only kind of have these famous John Darwin, Sam Israel type cases to go off of as the counterfactual.
And from what I saw is that there was a lot of disappointment, a lot of hurt in many prison sentences.
And of course, at the end of the day, it is quite likely that you have...
It's another thing to, as in the case of John Darwin, we come back to this man.
We're still talking about him.
It's another thing to mislead your own sons.
That is something that it must be very.
How does he square himself?
And how do the sons, I wonder, square themselves with what occurred?
You know, all these years later now, how does he feel about that?
And how do they?
Well, when I spoke with him again, this was a few years ago now.
He was really working on repairing his relationships with them to, you know, varying degrees of success.
But in the book, I actually have an entire chapter on family members, usually children, of people who fake their deaths.
And this is some children have actually colluded with a parent to fake a death and collect, and they were named the beneficiary, so they were aware that the parent wasn't dead.
But there's also people who've gone their entire lives thinking that their mother or father was deceased when in fact they were very much alive.
And one of the stories that has always stuck with me so much is of a woman called Lisa Busin.
And she was in her mid-30s when she had just moved into her first real adult apartment.
And she very prominently displayed a photograph, the only artifact she had of her father, which was of this Corvette that he was very well known for in Los Angeles.
So she put this photograph up.
A friend was over for dinner and she said, hey, do you ever think about your dad?
Do you know much about him?
She said, no, he died when I was, you know, only one or two years old.
So I never knew him.
I don't think about him much.
Something in that conversation that night really piqued her curiosity.
So she decided to Google Michael Busin Corvette.
And up came this interview from a website for Andy Warhol stars because he had had a very small part in a Warhol film called San Diego Surf.
And it was talking to Michael about his experience doing this film.
And she's scrolling through, scrolling through.
And she goes down, looks at the date.
And the date was from the early 2000s.
And she said, what the heck?
That's got to be just when they cited the article.
This can't be real.
It couldn't possibly be still alive.
That's right.
So she reached out to the web administrator and he said, nope, that was the date.
We spoke to him then.
So she was just, oh my gosh, what do you do with that information?
So she started poking around a bit more and then she stumbled upon his real obituary and he had died just a few months prior.
So she spent over 30 years thinking her dad had died and her mom died just a few years later.
So she had this very crystallized identity as I'm an orphan.
I'm making my way in the world by myself when all along her dad was actually alive.
God.
Yeah.
God.
Pretty intense story.
And, you know, so speaking to someone like that, you know, it was really incredible just to hear how she made sense of this knowledge.
She made sense of it, but was she, when you spoke to her, was she angry still?
There is a part of her that was still angry.
Lisa is an extraordinary woman and very successful and very staunch and determined.
And she's actually written a beautiful essay about this experience that I encourage your reader, your listeners to check out.
So I think there is a part of her that is deeply hurt.
But, you know, from what she's been able to gather about Michael's backstory, he was, you know, kind of a real shyster.
He was involved in drug trafficking and wasn't the greatest guy.
So a part of her, it sounds like, feels as if she was somehow possibly protected.
But it's really amazing to think about that this such a fundamental fact of your whole life could actually be totally false.
I spoke to, like I said, other children who had colluded with a parent to commit fraud.
And, you know, some of those people I interviewed from jail.
And to me, they seemed like the most adversely affected, even though they had that piece of knowledge all along.
So the shape and scope of this really varied case to case.
You have a great flowchart in the book.
And the flowchart, I'm just holding it up for my producer here.
I wish we could put this online, but is it on your website by any chance?
This flowchart?
It should be.
I don't think it's on my website.
It's a shame.
You need to put it there.
Anyway, it's in the book.
The flowchart has at the top, should you fake your own death and collect the life insurance, which of course is illegal and cannot be advocated by anybody in any way, lest anybody says anything about that.
We have to keep putting that caveat in there.
This is illegal activity and you will surely be caught.
But the list of the number of questions in this flowchart leading one to the other, can you leave your current life behind?
That's the starting point.
Can you really?
Then you get to, are you capable of never seeing your family and friends again?
Are you in good health?
You don't require any special medications or treatments because, you know, you're going to find it hard to get them.
Have you ever tried to resolve the problems in every other way?
Have you considered murder?
Do you have a guilty conscience?
Very important.
Will you blab to somebody?
Now, there's a key point.
Because it's one thing to do it, I would have thought, but it's a whole other thing to get five years down the track, be living in Guatemala in a shack and go into a bar and want to unburden yourself.
Yes, absolutely.
And again, the type of person to fake his Ode, I say his because from my research, it was very disproportionately a male phenomenon.
But just before we get to the Guatemala and the shack bit then, why is it a male phenomenon?
So that's a great question.
And it's one that I've puzzled through many times.
I think that women do feel much more of a sense of duty to their families, especially if you have children, in terms of, you know, when you fake your death, you have to abandon, you have to cut all ties.
Your kids usually can't come with you.
I think that's part of it.
I think that, as I mentioned earlier, the type of person who gets into these kind of get-rich quick schemes, who is kind of, you know, living outside the law and committing like lots of white-collar crimes, usually financial crimes, that typically also tends to be a man.
Or, you know, conversely, I think that women also might do it just as much as men and just don't get caught.
They might be better at it than men, perhaps because of this, you know, commitment to not blabbing.
So that's my theory.
I mean, among the other questions in the flowchart are, are you willing to risk imprisonment and disgrace?
That's a pretty big one, isn't it?
That's the kicker.
That's the kicker, indeed.
But you know what's interesting?
Of all the questions I went through, and I made this flowchart with the help of that investigator, Steve Rombaum, who has looked at just dozens and dozens of these cases.
We went through all of these questions together, everything you'd have to consider.
And it's actually the first question that you mentioned.
Can you leave your life behind?
Can you cut all ties?
Most people cannot.
The reason why most people who fake their deaths end up getting caught isn't because of the reasons you would assume, which is, you know, oh gosh, there's just so much technology now.
Their image gets captured on CCTV and, you know, the jig is up.
It's actually because they still want to maintain contact with their families.
And if you fake your death and if you're leaving behind, you know, a great deal of debt and You're awake, you know, people, FBI, police, they're going to be watching your family.
So, if you think that you can do this and, you know, call your mom once a year on her birthday, there are actually people who are going to be watching your mom on her birthday to see if you're going to make that call.
And that'll be a key mistake that some of these people make, won't they?
They will think.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, let's bring it back to John Darwin, but they will probably start to think.
Not only will they get a little complacent probably as time passes, but they'll start to think, well, it's been a long time now.
I've got away with it and nobody's going to be watching.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
And, you know, years and years pass.
Again, it kind of depends on the troubles and the hot water that you're leaving behind.
If you're just a kind of average everyday Joe Schmo, it's a bit easier, which, you know, I think is why John Darwin actually managed to get away with it for as long as he did.
He did find himself in some pretty steep real estate debt and credit card debt.
But again, he wasn't like a Wall Street hedge funder like Sam Israel, whose debts were much higher.
And the people from whom he had, you know, stolen money were very much waiting for its return.
It wasn't kind of a faceless corporation.
And, you know, a big corporation, you owe money to it.
They've got time.
You may not have as much time as you can.
They've got resources.
That's right.
As Steve, that life insurance fraud investigator says, he says, I can make a million mistakes and it won't matter, but you cannot make a single mistake because that's what I'll get you tripped up.
And that's how I'll find you.
Wow.
We've got a couple of minutes to go before we have to roll out some commercials.
Otherwise, I'll be in trouble.
So I want to ask you this very, very important question.
Something that's impressed me enormously about you.
How have you got to talk to all of these people?
How have you got them to open up to you?
I'm just so effusive and charming, I guess.
I can hear it.
But, you know, it's, you know, there are some hardened journalists who would pay very good money to get the ins to these people that you got.
Yeah, you know, I don't have any special tricks.
I mean, I just wrote John a letter and I included my information in it and he reached out to me.
And, you know, I always tell people, I'm going to ask you everything.
And you don't have to tell me anything.
You just tell me what you feel comfortable with.
And again, I think that the type of person, again, who fakes his own death, who, you know, lives this real kind of, lives out this fantasy, this adventure that many of us could never even dream of, I think they are pretty eager to tell their stories and to regale people.
So I think that's part of it.
The book I'm working on now on a different subject, I'm having a much harder time.
So maybe it was just the subject matter that lent itself to such openness.
Now, you may have noticed I have a funny name, and it's funnier in America than it is here.
Howard Hughes is my real name.
Which, of course, is there for the younger generation like my producer, Emma.
Howard Hughes was a famous, eccentric, multi-billionaire.
He was also a very accomplished man in films and business and a million other ways, aviation.
But he was eccentric.
And he died in 1976, having been a recluse for years.
And there are people who still say that Howard Hughes faked his own death.
He had doubles, and he actually set the whole thing up.
What do you think?
I'm not too sure about Howard Hughes.
With Howard Hughes, I never found anything really very substantive to suggest that he did fake his death.
The kind of pop culture death hoaxes I examine in my book are the main one is Michael Jackson, and there is a whole kind of fringe group of Michael Jackson fans who call themselves the Believers.
Well, I believe he's working in a pizza hut.
Oh, exactly.
Sure, he's in a pizza hut.
He's on Marlon Brando's private island.
There's many a theory.
There's always Elvis, of course, as well.
Yeah, the Michael Jackson one to me was the most interesting because it was one of the more recent ones, and there's a lot of vibrancy in that movement.
A lot of people who are very vocal online and sometimes in real life about espousing the fact that he is not dead and he will be coming back any day now.
So I was really fascinated with that conspiracy theory.
Elizabeth Greenwood, you are a gift of a guest.
You are the gift that keeps on giving.
It's Mutual Appreciation Society.
Stay right there.
Elizabeth Greenwood, we've got some loose ends to tie up about these people who fake their own deaths.
And it is some, one of the reviews of the book calls it darkly comic.
It is because some of these things you have to laugh at.
And we have to say once again that we don't advocate this.
And the inevitability is that you will get caught.
However, in our last, how long have we got?
We've got about seven or eight minutes here.
You give some tips to people about this if you're thinking about doing this.
And one of them is don't stage a drowning.
Why?
Yes, that's right.
So I think when most of us as lay people are thinking about the kind of challenges faking one who's facing one who's considering faking their deaths, you have this problem of what do you do about the body?
You're going to need to hold on to your own body in the next life.
So we all think, okay, well, what's a possible accident where body might not turn up?
Oh, a drowning.
And we all think we're Jason born.
Well, that will automatically raise red flags with law enforcement.
Nine times out of ten, even in drownings out far at sea, a body will materialize, you know, usually within a few days.
So especially if you have been facing marital trouble, financial trouble, any kind of turmoil in your personal life, a drowning is going to look pretty fishy.
So drownings are not the way to go, despite the conventional wisdom.
Thanks for the tip.
Don't get greedy.
Don't get greedy is another one.
Yeah, if you're thinking about committing life insurance fraud, which again, not a great idea, you're most likely going to get caught.
Don't get too greedy.
You want to, most people that Steve Rombaum investigates are one of the reasons why their claims look very suspicious is because They take out policies that far exceed their net worth.
So, you know, you're a secretary and you've taken out $2 million on your life.
It just doesn't make sense.
If you do stay more modest, though, within, you know, the low six figures, it's not always worth it to a life insurance company to send an investigator like Steve, who they're paying thousands of dollars a day to go look into your death.
So stay parsimonious in your policy.
But we have to say again that something else will find you out, even if that doesn't.
Don't Google yourself.
Yes, don't Google yourself.
So this comes from a great case, Patrick McDermott, who was Olivia Newton-John's ex-boyfriend.
And a few years back, he had declared personal bankruptcy and he was being held in contempt of court for failure to pay child support.
So he had a lot of money that he was out of.
So like many great Jason-born geniuses, he decided to charter a fishing boat in Mexico and tragically topple over.
Well, people didn't believe this.
So a group of investigators from the TV show in America, Dateline NBC, were hired to track him down.
So what they did was they set up a kind of dummy decoy website to the effect of findpatrickmcdermott.com.
And they were asking for tips if you've seen, you know, know anything about his whereabouts.
And they were monitoring the web traffic very closely and to who was logging on and from where to this address.
And they noticed a cluster of centralized IP addresses, all coming from Puerto Vallarta.
So they went and followed the trail of breadcrumbs and lo and behold, there was Mr. McDermott logging onto this site to see if he could kind of stay ahead of his pursuers.
So he was holed up in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, thinking that he was getting away with it.
That's right.
Dear me.
And what about Olivia Newton-John?
Was she still hopelessly devoted to?
I think she made the call already that he was very much her ex at that point, but I'm sure she got a good chuckle.
Yeah, I'm sure.
He's definitely not the one that she wants.
Sorry, there's another Olivia.
Sorry, bad, bad jokes late at night.
Bad jokes, bad jokes.
One of the other tips is wear a disguise.
So that's a great tip that I got straight from the horse's mouth from John Darwin.
Well, we're back to him again.
Okay.
Yeah.
So I was asking him how, oh, we were actually, I remember having this conversation very vividly in the cafeteria of an ADZA.
We don't have those in the States, so that was very exciting.
And I tried mushy peas for the first time.
That was also just delightful.
You can't beat those.
They're fantastic.
Great.
So I was asking him, I was like, what are your tips that you would give someone?
And he told me that one of the reasons why he feels he was able to really hide in plain sight for as long as he did is he had such an elaborate disguise.
He changed the entire way he carried himself walking.
He grew a long beard.
He wore a hat and he never used to wear a hat.
He wore dark glasses all the time.
So he kind of looked almost like a vagrant, except he managed to keep his hygiene tip-top so he was never, you know, kicked out of places.
But he really insisted on the disguise, that that was very vital.
And what about cosmetic surgery?
I'm not talking about him, but what about cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery?
Oh, that's a good idea.
I think that one of the challenges that might pose is, first of all, paying for it.
How are you going to pay for it?
And again, that's the identity question.
How are you going to check yourself into a hospital under whose identity and what?
But I mean, if you had the resources, I think, and you really wanted to stay gone, or you really wanted to just be a more fabulous version of yourself in your second life, might really behoove you.
Okay.
And the answer to most of those questions you posed is the Philippines from what you said at the beginning of this, because that's where you, for some bizarre reason, that's where the fake documentation is available.
Well, it's available in many places, especially countries where they have a pretty robust culture of fraud.
So that's not just the Philippines.
I don't want to single them out.
I had a great time in the Philippines, so I have nothing but love for them over there.
I ended up going to the Philippines because this is a place that I had heard come up time and time again, where many people, Americans specifically, go to fake their deaths.
And I had heard stories, rumors of black market morgues where industrious businessmen will pick up dead derelicts, homeless people, and keep them on ice.
God, but you know, the authorities, if you know about it, the authorities will be wise to this too.
Well, the authorities are sometimes in on it.
No, no, no, no, no.
Yeah.
I just heard about the Philippines from all those, you know, legends, so I knew I wanted to check it out.
And I was very lucky to be able to obtain my death certificate there with the help of two local guys on the ground named Snookie and Bong.
We had a great time just waiting all day for their fixer to procure the documents.
Just we've only got a minute or so.
Why didn't you go through with it then?
If it was all available to you, when you considered doing this, what was it about you that made you say no, Cartier?
Well, if I actually went through with it, my mom would actually kill me.
Like, I'd be dead right now.
So I knew I couldn't do that to my family.
That's the main reason.
And, you know, by the time I obtained these documents, I had now met John Darwin.
I'd met Sam Israel.
I'd talked to lots and lots of people who had in some way been affected by pseudocide.
And I saw that it really was not as glamorous and footloose and fancy-free as I had initially fantasized about.
I really saw the downside Of it, and it just wasn't appealing in the same way anymore.
I really saw the hurt and ugliness behind it.
And we love that word pseudocide that you've generated for this.
I have to say, it's been a fascinating and compelling hour.
We have to say, at the back end of this, as we've been saying all the way through, we've been talking about activity which is immoral, illegal.
It won't necessarily make you fat, but it will make you disrespected, and you won't be able to look yourself in the mirror at the end of it.
And now, there are four reasons, and there are probably 44 more on top of that why you should not do this.
Elizabeth Greenwood, thank you very much.
You've got five seconds.
Do you have a website so people can look?
Yes, my website is lizgreenwood.com, and the name of the book is Playing Dead, A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud.
Excellent research from Elizabeth Greenwood.
Well worth checking out.
Her book.
Just search her online and you'll see a lot of details about her.
She's done a lot of primary research with people who actually did this or know about this phenomenon of people faking their own demise.
And it more than often than not, it just simply not working out for them for a whole mess of reasons that those people who do those things can't necessarily see at the time they make their plans and execute them.
So thank you to her.
Let's get on now, Alexandra Nikrasov from my radio show this last weekend.
He is a former Kremlin insider, advisor to Boris Yeltsin, so was very much there as the Soviet Union became the Russia we know today.
And I had to ask him when I got him in the studio about the dynamic between the new president, just inaugurated Donald J. Trump in the U.S., and Mr. Putin.
Let's get to the good stuff now, Alexander.
We've heard about the emergence of Vladimir Putin, the fact that he is still a little Soviet, but a victim of, from what you say, a victim of himself, really, because he knows no other way.
You know, that's him.
Yeah, it's a bit of a tragedy in a sense, but he's trying to change.
He is trying to change.
Now, Donald Trump, in a news conference before the inauguration, was asked about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, which is going to be crucial in so many ways.
You know, the relations between Russia and the United Kingdom and America under Obama were not brilliant.
They were not good, and they were going even further down.
Putting it mildly, yeah.
Putting it mildly.
Now, Trump said, I don't know whether we're going to be friends, but a lot of people are suggesting they might be.
In fact, a lot of people have suggested that the Kremlin had a hand in what transpired and shocked a lot of commentators who thought that Hillary Clinton was going to be the president.
What do you make of all of that?
How will they get on?
And how do you believe Trump got to where he is?
Did he have a little help from the Kremlin?
Two questions in one, really.
Well, first of all, I must tell you that there's no way that Trump won because of Kremlin's intervention.
I can accept that probably some hackers from Russia might have tried to do something.
But nobody can convince me that because these emails were leaked, that sort of secured Trump's victory.
Trump played his cards very well.
Now, I was devising an election campaign for Yeltsin.
So I was watching how Hillary and Trump were playing, you know, their campaigns.
Hillary misjudged everything.
I was absolutely astonished how silly her advisors were to suggest that sort of approach, you know, sort of too conventional, too boring, too establishment-like, right?
Trump won because he simply chose the right strategy and he played this role of an outsider, a maverick, who can sometimes say things which are completely unacceptable, well, in inverted commas, by the establishment, right?
So he outplayed them.
Even if there were no leaks of those emails, I suspect she would have still lost.
All right, so we're saying that we don't think the Kremlin had a hand in it, but they wouldn't have been...
I'm sure that Mr. Belmer, But I'm sure he wouldn't have been that unhappy at the downfall of Hillary.
Well, you'd be surprised, Howard, to learn that in Moscow, there were a lot of people who thought they could deal with Hillary in the same way as with Trump.
Because they were saying that they knew her, that she was from her past politics, they knew what to expect of her.
With Trump, they said he was unpredictable.
Who knows what, because he changed his mind a lot.
So, you know, one thing he says one day, then he might change.
And it's still, by the way, Kremlin is now very cautious.
They suddenly started talking in a cautious way about Trump.
Oh, we'll see what's going to happen.
Yes, I was watching for the reaction because I watch a lot of international television, listen to a lot of international radio, and I was expecting, and it didn't transpire, it didn't happen, I was expecting the Kremlin to welcome Trump with open arms and very loudly, and this they did not do.
Well, they, first of all, of course, didn't want to cause him more problems, I suspect, because already he was accused of being practically a useful idiot, Putin's useful idiot.
Then, of course, when this whole so-called report came out now, you know, about his supposed adventures in Moscow, let's call them that way.
I can tell you, this report was rubbish.
90%.
And I read it.
The guy was based in Moscow in 1991, 92, 93.
He was still claiming to have good connections in Moscow.
Now, he basically listed all the rumors that circulated in Moscow about a lot of people.
I can tell you, if I go back to Moscow and compile a report on the rumors about Cameron, Tony Blair, Obama, and bring it here and show it to you, You would think, aha, so this one is probably working for the Russians.
This one has a strange habits and so on.
So you're saying that anybody, it's a village there.
Moscow is a village.
Yes.
And rumors, many rumors spread.
Yes, it's a rumor mill.
You can pick up the most extraordinary rumors there about all world leaders, Merkel and so on.
Okay, but the interesting thing is that the rumors about all the other people stay within Moscow.
This one crossed the Atlantic.
How come?
Very simple.
The guy prepared that report in the spring of last year.
He never had any inclination to think that Trump will win, right?
So he made that report, earned his 130 grand, as I've heard, for that report, and it lay there somewhere.
Nobody paid attention to it.
Then suddenly, out of the blue, comes the victory of Trump, right?
So suddenly, those Democrats and Republicans who hated him think, aha.
So now we can use this report.
To the horror of that former MI5, MI6 agent, because he never really wanted it to see the light of day.
He knew perfectly well his whole fantasy will be blown apart.
And it was eventually blown apart.
So when the CIA and FBI decided to really, you know, make it look as if it's an important report and it should be looked at, everybody was very surprised and puzzled by this because this report is, it reads like a bad thriller.
All right, so what we would call it over here is tittle-tattle.
Yes, it's tittle-tattle.
It's just picked up some rumors and put it into the report and so on.
Okay, now we know that Donald Trump, he's already facing a lot of flack and demonstrations, and there will undoubtedly be, you don't have to be a Philadelphia lawyer or a very clever person, which is good news for me, to work out there are going to be people who will very quickly try and bring Donald Trump down.
Do you believe that the Kremlin, Mr. Putin, who it sounds to me has similarities to Mr. Trump, they sound, I mean, they're both larger-than-life characters, that's for sure.
They both don't care much what people think of them, that's pretty much for sure, too.
So if certain individuals and organizations start to make life really hard for Donald Trump, which will start, I suspect, very soon, do you think that the Kremlin will stand by and watch, or will they try and somehow give events a push?
Well, first of all, I don't...
They're watching what's going to happen.
I don't think that Trump will be too vulnerable because, let's face it, the army is on his side.
And that is probably the most crucial thing of all.
The intelligence services, we are now witnessing that he is getting friendly with them.
So, you know, in America, it's a bit different.
I don't think the press in America is that too powerful to bring down a president.
You know, it's not like Nixon when he went down.
I remember I was in America, by the way, when he was, well, temporarily, he was impeached.
I personally think, you might laugh at this, I personally think it was a made-up scandal.
It was first a work of fiction and then a proper scandal because there was no proper scandal.
There was nothing in the scandal, Watergate.
There was nothing in it.
I think that would be news to Woodward and Bernstein, the record.
Oh, they made it up.
They simply made it up.
I think nothing.
Honestly, honestly, they entrapped him, basically.
We won't go into this now, but I'm just...
But let's get back to the dynamic between Donald J. Trump and Mr. Putin.
There will come a point where the two of them will meet.
We know that Theresa May is going to be the first foreign leader to meet him.
But there will come a point when these two have to meet, wherever it is, whether they decide to go to Iceland or somewhere neutral to meet, whatever.
How do you think that meeting will go?
Which one?
The first one?
The first one between, no, the first one between Putin and Trump?
Well, I briefly will say about Theresa May first meeting, because it is quite important.
I think Britain has an excellent chance of improving its relations with America, doing a free trade deal with America, and basically while having this free deal with America, Europe will suddenly become in a completely different situation.
Because a free deal with America puts Britain not in the heart of Europe, it makes it the most powerful country in Europe.
Are you saying that the rest of the European Union will suddenly find themselves out in the cold?
Well, they would find themselves in a begging situation, to be honest with you.
And I think Theresa May's meeting next Friday is crucial.
And I hope, I really hope she finds common ground and stop all this hinting that she will give him a peace of mind about women's rights and so on and so on.
And Russia, no, honestly.
No, no, but honestly, this will be damaging to Britain.
She really, really needs to think very carefully what she's going to do.
So you're saying that your advice to her would be to go there and do more listening than talking?
That as well.
And I think she should just say to him, we support you, we are with you, let's work together, let's do business.
Putin will be keen to do the same.
Because, let's face it, under Obama, it was a disastrous, disastrous situation.
Obama made the crucial mistake of meddling in Ukraine.
That was the red line.
He crossed it, and that is why there was no hope at all.
So after that, Putin and Trump have a really great chance To develop their relations now.
So, Putin is waiting anxiously because he needs to solve one problem very soon or he might be in trouble.
He needs to sort out Ukraine.
Because Ukraine, you know, all this Syria wars and bombings and terrorism and so on, is a sideshow for Russia.
For Russians, Ukraine is part of Russia, mentally.
Are you saying that what Putin is doing in Syria is you said a smoke cigarette?
No, no, I'm talking through the eyes of the Russians.
Okay, through the eyes of the is to deflect.
Not deflect.
He is sort of there are reasons for Russians being present in Syria and so on.
But the main issue is Ukraine.
And the Russians expect of him to solve Ukraine.
And Trump is showing signs that he's prepared to help, that he's prepared to cooperate on Ukraine.
And what would a solution to Ukraine be?
What solution could there be?
Well, the solution can be the following.
I have met a few oligarchs on both sides who are interested in this crisis being resolved.
And there is an interesting plan being developed now that Russia pays Ukraine for Crimea.
So you basically, you know, we've taken part of your land, but here's 200, 300 billion dollars.
It depends.
They have to negotiate, of course.
Now, if Trump puts pressure on the Kiev government, that plan might work.
So Crimea stays with Russia.
The eastern part needs to be obviously resolved.
The fighting, I mean, there's a civil war there.
But once Crimea is out of the equation, you know, it's settled, done, then it will be easier to resolve all other issues.
Now, what Trump wants back in return for that, he would ask, he promised his nation that he will combat terrorism.
I don't really know how he will do it immediately because he sort of sounded as if he's going to do it tomorrow.
But Russia is crucial for him in this aspect, because fighting terrorism, ISIS.
And with Russia's help, he can do that.
So Trump promised yesterday, well, he promised the day before at the inauguration, that he was going to expunge, remove what he called Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.
Islamist is what I think he meant, but Islamist terrorism from the face of the earth.
You think that Russia will help him to achieve it?
I think there will be a sort of a deal.
You know, you help us with Ukraine, we help you with the terrorism, because Russia is crucial for this battle.
So we're heading to an era of, I don't know, does Glasnost fit here, but you think that we're heading for an era of log rolling, of deals, of accommodations.
Well, I think that's the way to do politics, to be honest.
You know, there's no point in saying, well, we won't talk to you.
For example, when Trump said, I want better relations with Russia, it does make sense for two nuclear superpowers to be friends.
And Putin is even though Putin comes from a Soviet background where, you know, the leader's word is law and the state is all-powerful.
Even so, you think that coming from that background, he's a man who's going to want to do deals?
I think that Putin, from his first days in the Kremlin, he thought that he could do deals with the West, he could be friends with the West.
And I think he was quite upset and the whole of the Kremlin with him that the West turned its back on him.
Because he really tried hard, you know, to help.
And I remember when 9-11 happened, he was the first leader of the world to call Bush and say, you know, we're with you.
If you need any help, we will help.
Now, this is an important gesture, you know, at that time, at a dangerous time.
And Russians, by the way, helped the Americans.
Not many people know this, with the Afghan war.
They did help a lot.
So he was ready to help.
And suddenly the West says, no, turn its back, we don't want to know you.
And all these scandals started and, well, sanctions and so on.
So I think there's a potential for this to develop.
The problem is, and here I can tell from my own experience, the people who shape the world politics are not leaders of the world.
They are those special advisors, aides to the presidents, prime ministers who give advice.
If it's bad advice, then they suffer.
The countries suffer.
Leaders, they listen to advice because they build this whole policy of theirs on advice of the people with them.
Unfortunately, what I found when I worked with other governments and Russia and so on is that there are yes men and women advisors because they are career politicians, sort of.
And they say yes, wonderful, Prime Minister, or wonderful, Mr. President.
Well, with two powerful men like Trump and Putin, that's bad news, isn't it?
Well, what I'm saying is that the advisors is picking good advisors is a very, very important thing.
I just want to, before we get back to the politics and all the other stuff, you know, this show is also about UFOs and aliens and conspiracy theories and all those other things that I get into so often.
You know, I'm a journalist and somebody who studied politics, so what we're talking about now fascinates me.
Russians, it seems to me, are fascinated by UFOs and all those sorts of things.
And those things make the mainstream press perhaps a little more than they do here.
Would you agree with that?
That's the problem.
Yes, that's true.
That's correct.
And Russians have always been fascinated by these sort of things.
But not only Russians.
I mean, let's face it, all people, Americans, are absolutely obsessed with all these stories and the supernatural.
And I think Hollywood develops them even further, this interest.
Do you think that, you know, let's ask this.
In America, they Say that every time there's a change of president, the new president gets told what's at Area 51 and the fact that we are being visited regularly by aliens and all the rest of it.
They get a full briefing, then they say no more about it.
Do you believe the same thing happens in Russia?
Well, I do know that there are certain events in the history in Russia, during Soviet times, which are events which are unexplained still.
So they are definitely being reported to the president.
The president gets a lot of information, or any leader gets a lot of information from all sorts of sources, and that is why it makes the job again I come back to the advisors, because the advisors need to understand and need to decide which information he needs to know and which information he doesn't know.
For example, I'll give you an example.
When I worked in TASP's press agency, the Soviet press agency, my job was to get information from all over the world about the Politburo members, their families, and what is happening and so on.
So I would sit there and I would decide this will not go to the General Secretary because he will get upset.
It's about his daughter, you know, doing all sorts of strange things.
This I will not give to the chairman of the KGB because his agency is being basically described as a collection of thugs and so on and killers and so on.
So there you are.
have already information which I personally for two and a half years I corrected and edited.
So I was...
Well, we were sitting in different locations.
But what I'm saying to you is that the leaders, they need those people around them to filter this information because they will go mad.
All right, look, there are people that I've spoken to who claim that there are, just as there are claims in America, you know, that they have captured alien craft and the country's been visited, the same thing happens in Russia as far as I've been told.
Now, it may well be completely wrong, but I've heard people say that.
If that knowledge is known and if there are files full of information, which I suspect there are somewhere buried in some agency in Moscow.
Oh, KGB archives.
KGB archives, definitely.
Would Putin have been made aware of these things?
Is he in on this, do we think?
Well, we have come again to the same point.
Depends on the advisors.
That these advisors might decide that it's too upsetting for the president to know.
Honestly, they decide what they know.
It's quite a strange situation that you think, oh, all those world leaders, they're so powerful, they know everything.
Well, they sort of know everything to an extent.
To an extent, yes.
That is the mystery of this political power, supreme powers, and so on.
And the problem is that no single person, whether he's a genius or not, cannot cope with such a huge information flow.
That is why he is being protected, simply that he doesn't go mad.
There are gatekeepers.
There is a theory that I've heard, and again, it may be complete nonsense, but it's put around by a lot of people in the so-called UFO ufology community, that Russia and America both know that we're being visited and that we are not alone in the universe.
And they have cooperated to keep things as they are.
In other words, the information's not out there.
People talk about it, but it's not public knowledge.
And that Russia and America are cooperating, but they both know that there is something much bigger than the dynamic between them.
That actually we're pygmies compared with what else is going on.
Do you think that's all garbage?
Well, I'll be honest with you.
I personally, I might disappoint you now, Howard, but I personally think there is no life out there.
Simply because we would have had proof about it.
And you know where...
How are the people saying we have had proof?
We would have had proof in books like the Bible, because it says everything.
It tells us everything.
I'm not saying to you that we must believe everything that's said in the Bible, but there would have been signs of a super intelligence from somewhere else.
There would have been hints given to us in all these special books.
So it is only my opinion.
But if you say, have there been some events, unexplained events, happening in the world and in Russia and the Soviet Union?
Soviet Union is huge, by the way, the territory.
Of course there are.
Of course there are.
They're happening all the time.
Presidents are informed about some, but probably don't know much about most of them, and so on, for reasons I've already explained to you, because they would just go mad, all of them.
That is why they have to be Let me ask you this.
Over the Christmas holiday, I watched a fascinating documentary about the construction of the huge sarcophagus on top of Chernobyl, the reactor right there.
And we're being told by engineers and people who know and are paid to know that because of the expenditure of a huge gargantuan amount of money, that site is going to be made safe.
Have we been told the truth about Chernobyl?
Is it becoming under control now?
Is it going to be safe?
I mean, there's even talk that some companies may buy land in the former contaminated zone and actually start to do things with it.
Not move people in, but actually put solar panels in there and generate electricity there.
Do you think that we've been told the truth about the state of that site now and what happened?
Well, I do know that we have been lied about Chernobyl a lot during the Soviet time.
I think that Chernobyl basically Tarnished Gorbachev's reputation forever.
I think he was very upset with me when I said here on television that he waited for 10 days before telling the Soviet people what has happened.
He then went on television and said there are some people in London who are saying that I didn't inform when I was saying that I addressed the nation two days after the explosion, which is a lie, by the way.
But after that, a lot of things have been hidden from people.
For example, we still don't know how many people were influenced by that, how many people died because of that.
I myself created a charity, well, not created, but I worked with it called I Want to Live for children who suffered from the Chernobyl disaster.
And I must say that Paul McCartney was the first.
And then Margaret Thatcher helped me raise a lot of money, like 200 million or something.
Margaret Thatcher helped you, you knew Margaret Thatcher?
Yeah, when she was Prime Minister, she helped me.
She actually agreed practically at once to help me.
She gave an excellent interview in a newspaper with an absolutely astronomical circulation of about, what, 13 million per issue.
And she gave an interview and she said that, please help those children.
They are suffering because the adults were idiots.
And then McCartney helped, he gave an interview, a brilliant one as well.
He said that children should not pay for the mistakes of adults.
And enormous amounts of money came in.
And I was then told of some facts.
And I can tell you, they were horrific.
I mean, the numbers of children with leukemia, you know, being born with...
I think we don't know.
I think it was hidden.
I think we don't know a lot of mutations which happened in the animal world.
There are very strange creatures out there.
You know that it's like a desert at the moment.
Nobody is allowed that.
I absolutely, I don't think that anything can happen there when you say, you know, doing something like energy.
I don't think it will be allowed.
It will be all very poisoned.
And I don't really think it will happen.
But I agree with you.
They were lying to us.
The Soviets were lying to us.
I was in Moscow on the day of the explosion and a friend of mine from a foreign embassy said because they had geeks.
And they said, you stay at home.
Don't go out.
The radiation level in Moscow was so high.
So the Geiger counters were reading a high-end.
They were away.
They were in Moscow in embassies.
And these bastards were keeping quiet.
The KGB said nothing.
Gorbachev said nothing.
The Central Committee said nothing.
What they did was horrendous.
Criminal.
Okay, now we've only got two and a half minutes or so, so I just want to get to one question that came in by text, anonymous text a year.
Anonymous.
Question.
No name, Sam.
Please give your name when you text.
Does Russia feel really threatened by Western expansion, or is this a cover for domestic insecurity?
Interesting question.
Domestic insecurity.
I don't know how insecure Putin feels, not very unsecured.
Well, I would like to quickly answer that.
I would like to say this.
When people say that Russia tried to expand and take over Syria and build a base there and so on, Russia is a nuclear superpower.
It is not worried about some base being set up somewhere by NATO or Americans.
It has enough nukes to destroy everyone.
So there is no sense of insecurity, domestic insecurity or otherwise.
The problem is that NATO is basically teasing Russia, you know, with this surrounding it along its borders.
And I say again, Ukraine, NATO should never be in Ukraine, because that is a recipe for an international disaster.
And my thanks to Alexander Nekrasov, former Kremlin insider, for coming in at midnight on my radio show to talk about some fascinating stuff.
I know it's not mainstream unexplained material, but you know, every so often we've got to mix it up and do something different, I think.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
If you can make a donation to it, then I'd be very grateful.
If you want to send me an email, go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed and created by Adam at Creative Hotspot.
Thank you, Adam, for your hard work.
More great guests in the pipeline here on The Unexplained.
So until next we meet.
Here on this show, same place, same time, as they say.
They used to say on Batman, didn't they?
And please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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