Media.

Something strange is going on.

Another member of the Russian elite has been found dead.

Reports suggests that he fell out of a window poisoned with mushrooms.

He died of heart failure, died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

How comesy are they?

Dozens of Russian oligachs, politically motivated millionaires have died in the space for three years, most of them in suspicious circumstances.

Many have hidden links to the Kremlin.

This is sad Oligach Season two, an ongoing investigation into these recently dead Russian power brokers.

Sad Oligach is created by me jake Hanrahan and my Ukrainian colleague Sergey Slipchenkov.

This is a H eleven Studio and Coolso Media production.

September twenty fifth, twenty twenty five.

The region of Krishnodor Kray sits on the shores of the Black Sea in the south of Russia.

It's the North Caucus region where men of fought tooth and nail throughout history, bloodshed for the mountains and the soil.

It's here in a village called navarozdesk Venskaya.

The municipal lawmaker Vitali Kapustin is waiting.

He's a local politician for United Russia Putin's party.

He's pulled up.

To the side of the road near a forest, tall oak trees, dense foliage.

Kapustin is forty three years old.

He won't see forty four.

He exits the car with a cable in hand, likely a wound metal tyrope.

He attaches one end of it to the car itself, a large suv.

It's the end of the summer.

There's a cool breeze and the leaves are starting to change.

An otherwise peaceful final scene with a disintegrating hairline and a somewhat bloated face.

Kapussedin looks older than he is.

He could be late forties, maybe even fifties.

He's broad, though, and otherwise in decent shape.

Not exactly athletic, but he's no slob.

This is handy because he heads a little way into the forested area begins to.

Climb a large tree.

Some of them in this area are one hundred feet tall.

With the other end of the car cable in hand, coapussed in, climbs up and up, so high, in fact, that if he falls from this height he'll break his legs.

It still, copussed In manages climb, locking his feet into the bend between.

Branch and tree trunk.

He grips hold of the oak and manages to pull himself up with no external equipment, all whilst carrying a thick cable that he's careful not to snack.

From this vantage point, he can see the forest sprawling out to the more built up areas of novarodest Venskaya.

Perhaps he wants one last look at the region he governs from up high to this point, many meters up in the tree that Kapustin wraps the car cable around a branch and forms a makeshift noose.

He attaches one end to the tree, pulls the other over his head, and braces himself one last look at the trees.

Then he jumps.

The cable snaps to Kapustin's neck is choked.

His body hangs dangling from a tree.

His life slowly eeks away into the nether as he dies asphyxiation.

Another depressed politician in Russia.

This is the strange series of events of Kapustin's suicide, if we're to believe the official narrative offered up by the Russian State.

If you think it sounds a bit suspicious that a man would climb high up into a tree to hang himself with a car cable, wait till you hear what an eyewitness has to say about Kapustin's body.

A news agency close to the area reported what eyewitnesses told their reporters people who are at the scene.

They saw Kapustin's body hanging from a tree.

They said, quote, his hands were tied behind his back.

You can't just climb those trees like that.

Another said, I saw how high it was.

As far as I could tell, his hands seemed to be bound behind him.

A person couldn't climb up there easily.

The trees are very tall.

So somehow Capusstin climbed high up into a hard tree to scale with a long cable that was already attached to his suv, hanged himself, all with his hands tied behind his back.

No, no, no, no no.

The police deemed this at first and already open and shut case.

They concluded it was a suicide.

They said that the death is quote not criminal.

To reiterate, they've claimed, quote no suspicion of criminal involvement.

Now unless pushed in was the next Houdini.

I think it is highly unlikely that the police have got this one right.

How does a man climb up a tree with his hands tied behind his back?

In general, it will be hard enough if they were tied at the front, let alone with a long cable in his hand.

Now, the cable itself is interesting to me.

Reports suggests that it was quote anchored to the suv.

If that's why, my assumption is that it's some kind of undercar tow cable.

Right.

So I looked up all the car dealerships in the local area.

This took a minute, as there are almost four hundred of them.

Almost all of them sell SUVs like the one could pushed him drave to his grim end.

Across all of the dealerships, as is the norm in Russia, generally, they sell mostly Chinese cuts, Chiri, Giely, Haval or Moda.

Oh and of course they all sell the Russian make ladder, the famous Soviet Iraka produced by state owned Autovas.

Side note, I absolutely love ladders.

I once saw an old ladder truck with snow chains on the tires in the mountains of Armenia.

An incredibly good looking machine.

I don't know what the engines are like, but it looked great anyway.

If we look at the sales of these three hundred and fifty plus car dealerships, it seems the majority of SUVs sold across all of them is the Chinese Haval Jollian that's the most popular.

It's a pretty standard suv all in all, a petrol one point five leads to turbo seven speed, dual clutch three and forty eliter boot or trunk.

If you're American, front will drive you get the idea.

In Russia they cost around two million roubles.

That's around twenty five thousand dollars US.

Not a problem for kapusting.

So why do I give a fuck about the car?

Well, I want to know if any of these come with a tow cable for obvious reasons copussed in hanged metal cable car nearby anchored you get it.

I did some digging and I couldn't find a single Haval Jollian in the region that has the cable as standard, even the ones that are built in Russia, which do sometimes have different specifications.

The kresnaldor Kryer region of Russia is actually a pretty mild one.

If we're talking about the weather, even in winter, you wouldn't need a tow cable, perhaps as much as you might need one in Siberia, for example, we're pulling cars out of the thick snow is needed often.

In fact, I had a look and none of the top selling SUVs in the area come with the tow cable.

So by now you might be thinking, Jake, why do you have a heart on for the tow cable.

Well, considering Kapustin's bizarre death, it adds another strange element to all of this without one.

To me at least, there's a very little information on this one.

So I've been digging like a mole, as has Sergei Slipchenko, my partner on this project, as well as Victor Mihaiel who's helping us with research.

Sergi found a video from the scene of the death.

It's only ten seconds long and it's filmed by a passerby whilst driving, but it's something.

It's actually the first real glimpse we've got of a murder scene or unusual death scene from any case in the whole of season two of sad Oligarch so far.

Okay, all right, now it's time for a quick ad break.

All right, enough for that, Now back.

To the show.

If you listen to the previous episode, number six, you will have heard me in surgery talking about how difficult this season has been.

Very little information is out there.

There are next to note breadcrumbs to follow, and almost nobody is talking.

So of course we were surprised that there was actually a video for this one.

As vague as it is now, the video there's maybe three full seconds on the footage that actually shows the full scene.

It's shot from a distance whilst moving, and the video quality is potato tier.

But we do see something.

It's a bright day, blue sky, no clouds.

We see the side road next to the forested area.

It's a bit hard to tell, but next to the trees there are around nine to ten vehicles parked up on the side road, a mix of SUVs, saloons, trucks, and what looks like an ambulance.

Strangely, none of the cars look like actual police carts, no sirens on the roof, no checkered luminous livery on the sides.

The vehicles are a mix of all black or all white.

There's one white suv turned in a different direction to the others.

It's facing the trees.

At first glance, it looks like it could be a haval Jollian, but on closer inspection, to me at least, it looks like it could be a Ladder Neva, another popular four x four urban suv.

There's speculation online that this white suv was Capustin's cat.

We don't know, though it's mostly assumption.

What we do know is that the ladder Neva doesn't come with a tow cable attached either.

A look at the driver's handbook shows that the vehicle does, however, come with front and rear toelux.

If the suv in the video is a Ladder Neva and that was Kapustin's car, it makes a bit more sense.

But who brought the tow cable and why did they kill Kapustin.

If this project is anything to go by, it quite possibly had something to do with Kapustin's connection to Putin's United Russia and Kapustin's previous businesses.

Let's talk to sergery.

So before we go into Kapustin's venture into politics, maybe let's talk a little bit about his business.

I understand it was quite weird, right, like not exactly conventional.

He did construction, and then he ended up with a snail farm.

Like, maybe let's start at the beginning.

What happened with this guy his business ventures?

Ah?

Yeah, So it's kind of interesting that in a sense, there's not that much information.

About his youth.

It's like he grew up, he went to high school, he went to university, got an engineering degree.

Have you noticed how many of these guys went to university for engineering and ended up doing something completely different.

It's almost like, I don't know, is it like just a standard thing to do out there in Russia.

Yeah, it's pretty common.

There's a lot of like polytechnic universities I see.

I see from the Soviet Union days, right, a lot of universities were very focused on like engineering, and you know across everything agriculture like tractors, tanks, everything.

So it's pretty common.

Yeah.

Right, So he does the engineering degree and then it's kind of a black hole, right, Like there's not much there.

Yeah, it's kind of been focused trying to look at it's kind of the more boring, kind of quieter details, right, And I don't really see any kind of you know, him starting anywhere or maybe getting like some kind of first job.

The first thing I see is that he created a construction company, Kuban Spitztroyer, So it's for the region of Kuban where he is.

And yeah, it says that like the company is doing pretty well.

I mean, like, I don't know there's the thing I can really find when he started it or how long it's been around, but several articles said that in twenty twenty four, so kind of like the last reported revenue from the company was like one billion rubles.

Apparently he got quite a lot of contracts with the state to build infrastructure and buildings.

So I imagine roads, et cetera, some roads, some buildings for the state.

I guess that's the thing.

They don't really specify.

They just kind of say contracts.

Right, That's where he's kind of as far as I can see.

I mean, again, we do not know fuck all about these guy, which is quite interesting because of all the cases of season two, there's kind of more about his death than any of the others in this sense that we got an eyewitness quote, I think at least two eyewitness quotes saying what the fuck lake is?

His hands were bound.

There's no way he could have climbed up in that tree.

We've got the video that you.

Found where the person's driving past and they kind of very briefly filmed the scene, and then we've got an official police statement saying there's nothing criminal involved.

So in a way, there's like more about the.

Murder or suicide, but there's very little about his life, whereas I feel like it's usually the other way around.

It's a weird one.

But as far as I can see, the construction business and then the contracts with the government is kind of his first major interaction with you know, working with the state as it were.

That's the thing.

He became a deputy in twenty nineteen.

They don't really specify when he got the state contracts, but the point is he is making a lot of money from these state contracts right again, infrastructure, various buildings, and that sounds like that's his kind of first and like main job.

The other things you mentioned sound like a bit more of like maybe like a side hustle kind of thing, or like a passion project.

Especially with the snail farm.

It sounds like he has a couple of it says like stores selling tobacco and food.

I think they're referring to like convenience stores basically.

Again, the construction company sounds like his kind of main endeavor and like his biggest money maker again, like one billion in revenue it says in twenty twenty four, so it sounds like he's doing pretty well.

Again, he's a deputy, so he also has that going on.

As you mentioned, the snail farm was pretty recent.

It sounds like maybe in the last.

Year or two.

He's kind of working on this for some reason.

He's very passionate.

Like one article went into detail how he has two types of snails, like one from Africa one from Europe.

He like apparently took time kind of learning from farmers in Russia and like some other areas.

So it sounds pretty kind of devoted to the whole snail thing.

His other project was looking to develop like agritourism, so kind of opening farms, petting farms.

You know, you come like feed some animals, maybe write them if that's the thing.

And I guess he was kind of trying to like open multiple businesses.

He's a bit of an entrepreneur.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's kind of he has like his hand on a lot of things, but even for the snail farm, he got five million rubles, which isn't a whole lot, but I mean even that they're considering like a snail farm for context, like it's not very common to kind of pretty weird for Eastern Europe.

So this guy I had this idea, right, like you know, snail farm.

As far as we know, it was fairly successful.

Right it doesn't.

I've not seen any kind of indication that it totally failed.

I think it was Again, it's I think it was a twenty twenty two that he got funding for it, So it sounds like he's kind of like was in the process of making it work.

Yeah, I didn't see that it was you know, booming, nor did I see that it failed.

I think he was just kind of in the process of like setting it up.

Same thing with his like agriturism idea of like opening petting zoos and having like farm tours.

It kind of sounds like these were things he was working on.

It sounds like the construction company is quite like established, and same with his stores, and then the other things were more like like projects he was starting.

So how did he end up in politics?

Yeah, That's the thing.

I don't really see much before that.

I just like, in twenty nineteen, he became a deputy and that's it.

I was trying to find like his kind of rise or if he did anything before that.

I think you've seen like a lot of these folks will join like a local committee or some kind of council, you know, something more kind of lower level.

But this guy, I'm not really seeing much of that.

It sounds like he kind of had the construction company, then he just became a deputy.

Really don't see anything where he's he Like, it kind of seems like this whole deputy thing is his first step into politics.

I mean it's not uncommon.

It's not like unseen, you know, not everybody starts off in like some kind of smaller government and then moves up.

Something he decided to do and it worked.

I mean, becoming a deputy definitely has its financial benefits.

I'm sure a lot of these contracts work after he became a deputy.

You know, if if he's making one billion rubles in twenty twenty four, sounds like he has enough contracts to go around to kind of pay that much.

It could have been could have been a business decision as much as it was some kind of passion to be a politician.

That was my thought.

I thought, like, probably business decisions.

So I've got the notere.

It says he was elected to the public office in the village of Otra Denskoya in twenty nineteen.

Came in as a municipal deputy for the t t Choresque district in twenty twenty three, So essentially he kind of came in as like a council member.

Is that is that right?

Like he was elected to the council as such in the area.

Okay, all right, now it's time for a quick outbreak, all right, not for that.

Now back to the shore.

In Russia, how it works is like you can be a part of United Russia, like Putin's party can be at different levels, but kind of support the party and be part of that party.

The tekhotskis it sounds like that's where he grew up and spent most of his life.

I don't really see him doing much outside of this, of this Kuban area.

From what I can see, he's done everything there, Like all his businesses are set up there, all his stores are within that region.

It's it's kind of like his hometown and he doesn't really go out of there much.

Yeah, I read it.

It said he was like really well known in the area and he tried a district commission on agriculture and land management, utilities, transport, communications, public communities.

Basically his businesses.

He's a bit of an entrepreneur.

From what I'm getting, right, it seems like his fingers in many different pies.

To me, it seems like, yeah, this is a bit of a hustler.

He's a bit of an entrepreneur.

You know, the Snell Farm.

I ready, his mother has the Snell Farm.

Now it's uncertain if she had one before or if she took it over or whatever.

It's just in her name maybe who knows.

But basically it's the thing I'm getting is, I feel like he was a bit of an entrepreneur and he's saw by getting involved with politics, specifically Putin's party.

Obviously you're not going to try and go into another party that's kind of opposing him to move your business empire.

It feels like he looked at Putin's party, he ran for it.

He's well known in the area, seems pretty well liked.

From what I've found, and basically that would have allowed him, I think, to really build up his business.

Even if we look here, he was the chair of the District Commission on Agriculture and Land Management.

We've seen time and time again guys that get involved in this politically tend to make money, but they also tend to come a cropper.

Like this is not an unusual pattern for us, right.

Yeah, like you said, you know, he's getting into politics, he's overseeing stuff that he's kind of already working on, right, Like you said, agriculture, he's looking to develop essentially businesses, right Like he's it doesn't really talk about like these are his businesses kind of that he just almost like working on.

The idea of agritourism.

But like he's on the agricultural board.

He has all these different companies that are, if not you know, straight up and agricultural, it's just kind of adjacent to it.

And yeah, like I think they see it as like, you know, I can make some like kind of like a make an easy path to make his businesses work, to kind of fund his businesses and profit from it in that way.

And yeah, it's pretty common.

You know, you're in charge of the funding.

You're in charge of what the policies are, so you just kind of do as you please, and you're an entrepreneur.

On the side.

It is that simple, So why not.

Yeah, it's really weird this guy.

From what we've seen obviously what's available, there's just nothing that indicates, Ah, that might be what happened, as in, there's no clear sign of corruption.

Not to say it wasn't happening, It very much could have been.

He was, you know, as soon as he gets involved with politics.

It's only a couple years really later, and he's dead.

To me, this is one of the weirdest ones possible.

Like his hands were allegedly bounds.

And I say allegedly because you know it's an eyewitness statement.

Who knows.

But I really think there's a lot of merit in that.

If you're in Russia and someone dies in a weird way like this, it's very easy to just shut your mouth.

The fact that someone was like Noah, I saw that his hands were bound.

He was way too high up in the tree.

To some degree, you're taking a little bit of a risk really putting that out there.

I'm not saying that the government is going to come for everybody and kick down the door immediately.

You know, Russia is bad enough, but it's not North Korea.

But it seems to me like someone wouldn't put themselves out there to say that in the media direct lead to from what I've got two different news agencies now locally, it doesn't feel to me like they would just say that for no reason.

You know, Yeah, I think I think part of it is what you said, like he was liked, he was kind of well known, like for his parents are apparently well known, if not in the entire like Coupon region, definitely in the Tikhotski district.

I think you saw that they kind of adopted thirty eight I think it was thirty eight teenagers.

Big foster parents.

Yeah, like foster parents.

Yeah, it sounds like over like their lifetime kind of thing, like they've they kind of constantly always adopted to care of these teenagers.

And then apparently Capustin was like involved in that, helping with it when he grew up.

So I can imagine you know a lot of people in the in the at least the district, you know, knew them and knew of them positively.

That could have played a part in it right, if you kind of don't care or don't like the person you don't care to kind of, you know, put your head out there and, like you said, kind of say something.

You know.

I think what said you just is a great point.

It's unlikely someone would potentially put their neck on the line by giving the hanged with bound hand statement if they didn't really see it.

It's even more unlikely they would do this.

If Kapustin was truly hated.

In the area.

There could well be some secret deviancies were yet to discover, but generally, so far, it seems as if Kapustin was pretty straightforward.

He made money businesses, side hustles, politics, nothing that unusual all things considered.

What is unusual, though, is the police statement after Kapustin's body was found remember as he hanged from a high branch in a big tree, hands bound, neck attached to a cable attached to an suv.

The cops said there was no suspicion of criminal involvement.

Later, when the eyewitness statement was released in local media, they changed their tune and said they're still investigating.

We've looked far and wide, and there's been absolutely no follow up since Kapustin's corpse was found dangling.

No indication locally that they're investigating anything.

As I trooled through the Krasnodor cry police communications and associated documents, I learned a bit about them.

They've been very vocal in recent years about their anti corruption efforts under closer scrutiny, though those efforts seem to be completely useless if they existed at all.

When it comes to police bribery, Krasnodor Kry is the second worst region in the whole of Russia.

They trailed closely behind Moscow.

The cops in Kapustin's region are on the take big time.

Actually, it seems like the whole region is giving and taking bribes is a normal occurrence.

Municipal workers, local politicians, business owners, customs officers, even traffic cops have been involved in bribery and Krasnodor Kry it's a big problem there.

There is absolutely no way that Kapustin didn't know about this.

In fact, it seems to have gotten worse in the region since he started up in local politics.

Now get this, The stats that this is all based on are calculated only from people who got care.

These are prosecution.

Stats that means it's just the tip of the iceberg.

It's not just bribery thot.

Corrupt officers are also reported as having protected large scale smuggling schemes in the area, go in as far as to block their own transport police from properly inspecting cargo, ensuring smuggling goes smoothie.

Of course they get a fat kickback.

It's not just money that oils the palms of the police in Krasnodor Krydle, it's also blood.

They assert their power through torture.

Human Riots Group Caucasian Not describes a pattern of police brutality in the region.

They say, quote the situation with torture of detainees in Krasnodor territory stands out from many other Russian regions.

In other words, it's one of the worst.

There are dozens of cases where people in custodies say that they were beaten by the police to force false confessions.

There is statement of people having their teeth punched out by officers, being electric shocked in one case where a man was allegedly sodomized with a crowbat.

As you can probably imagine, these police act with total impunity.

They are almost never brought to justice.

Earlier this year, the website rue criminal dot info investigated the Krasnodata Police.

Rue Criminal publishers leaked dossier's and reports of organized crime and corruption within the Russian elite.

Their investigation describes a quote power mafia inside the Krasnodarta Criminal Investigation Department.

According to their sources, there exists a parallel power structure in the police, built up by a senior officer.

It completely sidelines the formal chain of command and acts as a criminal enterprise.

Notably, it's said that for.

Around fifteen million rubles one hundred and eighty five thousand dollars US, corrupt investig gators in this syndicate will either open or close a criminal case for business rivals.

Essentially, one businessman can go to these corrupt police officers give them fifteen million rubles in exchange for the police launching an investigation into a business rival with their aims of shutting it down.

They set up surveillance and plant fake evidence if needs be, and everything gets shut down.

Remember, Kapustin was a businessman, an entrepreneur with his fingers in many different pies.

He was also a municipal politician in the area.

With all this in mind, is it possible he had dealings with what is basically a regional police deep state.

If he did, perhaps.

Something went wrong and he was made an example of by these Bandit costs.

Considering the insane level of corruption within the Kreisno Dark Police, their documented use of extreme violence, and their rapid claims of no criminal involvement in his death, I think is not too crazy to say that maybe the police killed Baitali Pustin.

You've been listening to sad Oliga season two, produced by H eleven Studios for call Zone Media.

Writing, editing, producing, concept and recording by myself Jake Hanrahan.

Research and reporting by Sergei Slichenko, Me and Victim Mihail.

Executive reducing by Sophie Lichtman.

Music by Sam Black, artwork by George Zutpaul, sound mixed by Splicing Block.

See my other projects at Hanrahan dot tv.

Get me on social media at Jake Underscore Hanrahan.

That's h A N R A h A n