“From Russia with Lev” reveals the dark consequences of Trump’s “reality show” presidency

They say Los Angeles is the place you go if you want to be somebody, New York is the place you go if you are somebody, and Miami is the place you go if you want to be somebody else. It's always been a sunny place for shady characters. (And there's always a Florida connection: Watergate, 9/11, Ted Bundy, OJ Simpson.)

Lev Parnas, the Ukrainian-American businessman who worked closely with Rudy Giuliani to dig up incriminating material on Joe Biden before the 2020 election, who served time in prison on charges including campaign finance and wire fraud, and who later testified about a series of attempts by GOP leaders, including former President Donald Trump and his close allies, to spread misinformation and mislead the public, is the consummate “Florida Man.”

He is a provocative star of our new documentary “From Russia with Lev,” which premiered on Saturday at the “MSNBC Live: Democracy 2024” event in New York.

My production partner at our Miami Beach production company rakontur, Alfred Spellman, (half-jokes) that people who are released from prison in Florida call their mothers first and then call us to make a documentary about them. But in this case, we caught Parnas on his way. To Prison. As Florida men, Parnas and I followed each other on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Before his federal criminal trial in 2021, I snuck into his direct messages to arrange a lunch date in South Beach.

I learned that Parnas was familiar with our work and, fortunately, was a fan of it, so he agreed to tell us his story.

Parnas was born in Soviet Ukraine. His family fled when he was four, eventually settling in Brooklyn, New York's Brighton Beach neighborhood, also known as “Little Odessa.” According to him, he became an errand boy for local mobsters, rose through the ranks of some of Wall Street's shadiest brokerage houses, and when his friends were arrested, he was forced to flee again: this time to South Florida. There he helped run “mafia-run” penny-stock boiler rooms, three of which were suspended for fraud. Then there were illegal poker games in Beverly Hills, seven children with four women, a stack of unpaid bills, a series of lawsuits against him, and defrauded investors in various ventures, such as a movie he proposed that would star Jack Nicholson and a Florida company with the most Floridian name ever, Fraud Guarantee.

How Parnas, of all people, got involved with the most powerful men in the world, was recruited by the “Mayor of America” ​​for “shadow diplomacy,” allegedly blackmailed two consecutive Ukrainian presidents, and helped impeach Trump (the first time) is as compelling as it is “ridiculous,” to quote a description by Parnas' third wife, Svetlana, who collaborated on our documentary.

Lev Parnas' story is like Tom Clancy's if Jack Ryan was played by Jackie Mason.

We were well aware of the Parnas scandal in the latter half of 2019, but our first exposure to Lev: The Character was through Rachel Maddow's sensational interview on MSNBC in January 2020. We never imagined that the inspiration she gave us then would lead to us producing her first documentary four years later. Parnas was clearly broken in that interview, but you could still see the mischief in his eyes and the chutzpah in his voice that got him into that mess.

A man without a country – having betrayed both countries. Hated by the left for being one of Trump's “plumbers” and reviled by the right for betraying Trump. We have a list of potential “pop documentaries,” as we call our style of nonfiction storytelling, and we knew we wanted to meet this guy someday.

Parnas' story fits perfectly into our typical subgenre of “Florida flirtation with international implications,” and Parnas himself is an archetype of racétur: the sympathetic villain. He's a charismatic narrator and the ultimate hustler. A man who, like the protagonists of many of our pop documentaries, like “Cocaine Cowboys,” “The U,” and “Dawg Fight,” pursued the American dream by any means necessary. But the project quickly evolved into a two-person project. When we met Parnas' long-suffering wife, Svetlana, we realized she was the heart, soul, and conscience of the story. It's a crazy geopolitical caper with plenty of humor and a surprising amount of emotion. The stakes couldn't be higher, and the personalities couldn't be bigger.

Following “537 Votes” (2020) and “God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty” (2022), “From Russia With Lev” is the third installment in our trilogy of semi-annual election-year documentaries. This one seeks to explain the eccentricities and irreverence of the Trump era, and it’s the first to introduce you to his administration: Hanukkah parties at the White House, paranoid intrigues in private dining rooms at the Trump International Hotel — the Mos Eisley Cantina of Trumpworld — and the reality-show foreign policy of a reality-show president.