Fool Me Twice: A 'Russian Spy' and a South Dakotan Operative Fall in Love I Part 2

Campside Media. Paul Erickson was a Republican political operative, a publicist, a one-time film producer, an entrepreneur, and a con man. And he'd been traipsing around the country, jumping from one opportunity to the next, looking for any co-tale he could ride all the way to the top. Through all his adventures, he was always a bachelor, never getting pinned down in a boring, long-term relationship. But that was about to change, because he'd finally met someone that he thought could fit into the bigger picture of his life. And now they'd moved in together in an apartment building in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. That's Shirley Halene, who lived in the same building. He had some good ways of getting to know people. Erickson stood out and not just for his relatively young age. Whenever I'd have company, he'd come over with brownies and different things, and he was always telling me these big stories. Other tenants also took note of his much younger girlfriend. I got to know his girlfriend quite well, because she would come here several weekends, and I'd see her down in the exercise room. Maria Butina, the Russian gun rights activist. She was always sort of following him, but they were together all the time. Well, I ask a lot of questions. People are always gossiping about everybody. We were all wondering here what their relationship was, people in the apartment. Shirley's conclusion? I think he was using her, and she was using him. From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Infamous. I'm Vanessa at Gregorriatus. This is episode two of a three-part story. Fool me twice. So the story Paul Glatter is telling you about this strange guy from South Dakota is about to get a lot stranger. And by that, I mean stranger than Erickson's Fritz Buster's skit, or his stint as media advisor for John Bobbitt, the guy whose wife cut off his penis. Because now he was running around the country with Maria Butina, a red-headed Russian who said she just loved guns. She even gave a speech on gun rights at the University of South Dakota. She and Paul also hit the NRA National Convention in Indianapolis. They went to the Freedom Fest in Las Vegas. And here, Maria got to ask a question of Donald Trump. My question will be involved in politics. If you would be elected as a president, what would be a foreign politics especially? Even in the relationships with my country. Do you want to continue the politics of sanctions that are damaging of both economy or you have any other ideas? I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin. Okay? And I mean, when we have the strength. I don't think he'd need the sanctions. I think that we would get along very, very well. To be clear, there's no evidence that this conversation was set up or anything like that. But here's another thing. Maria wasn't just Erickson's girlfriend or a gun rights activist. She had some even stranger things going on. On one hand, she enrolled in graduate school at American University. And on the other hand, she was also close to an important Russian politician and a Putin ally, Alexander Torshin. So here, I'm going to bring in Paul Glatter's co- reporter and another narrator, Mary Kudohi. So in 2011, there was a right to bear arms meeting. And that's where Maria met Torshin. He was close with Putin. He was even nicknamed the godfather for his alleged connections to organize crime. According to Politico, the year before he met Maria, Torshin helped orchestrate a spy swap between the US and Russia. The FBI arrested 10 undercover Russian spies. And Russia wanted them back. I know, it sounds like an episode of the Americans, right? Now Erickson had some serious anti-Soviet bona fides as we talked about last episode. Burning the Russian flag, allegedly dropping supplies to the Muja Hadin in Afghanistan back in the 1980s. Still, Maria's ties to Torshin made her a conduit to Russian administrations. And American companies would be eager for a way into such a big economy. I was curious about all of Paul's political maneuvering during this time, and I wanted to learn more. So I called a woman named Susan Holden. I think Paul always was seduced by power. Susan Holden is an investor who went to Yale with Erickson. She met Maria when Erickson brought her to a meeting at Susan's office. And so Maria, with her connections with the Russian RA, gave Paul a sense that he could be a big shot by trying to leverage her connections in Russia. You know, Torshin was a pretty big connection. He was going to leverage that to make his own standing in the Republican Party in the US more important. So Maria and Erickson set about cultivating friends in high places. A real hustler's tail, complete with charm and calculated generosity, each using the other for their own purposes. Maria, using Erickson's Republican connections to foster Russian-American relations and to help finance her studies at American University. Erickson, using Maria's good looks and gun cred to gain access to another rung of Republican politics. They made a splash at Ritzy events around D.C. They swept into Trump's inauguration ball, Maria, in a glittering green evening gown. Erickson dressed in a bow tie in Red Satin Kumbraban. They were just a power couple. Or were they? A young Russian woman running around in high-level circles is going to perk up some ears. And it wasn't long before there was a really big turning point involving the US government. That's after the break. Warning. This podcast contains juicy tales of a super dysfunctional family. Maria's betraying brothers, friends becoming enemies, and a mother trying her best to keep everything from falling apart. No, this isn't a reality TV rewatch. I'm Dan Jones, your host, and this is one of my all-time favourite true stories. Join me on a trip to the Middle Ages to meet history's most dangerous dynasty, the Plant Adgenates. This season, the plots are thicker, the ambitions greater, and the betrayals are even more devious in the epic saga of the family that shaped our world. From something else in Sony Music Entertainment, this is history. A dynasty to die for. Season 2. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to 8thness from campsite media. So Paul and Maria were enjoying America. But you can't run around town with a possible Russian spy without eventually raising some eyebrows. I mean, by this point, the Steele dossier had leaked. The Mueller investigation had started, and President Trump's national security adviser, Michael Flynn, had been caught lying to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador. People in Washington were paying very close attention to the Russians orbiting Trump. And Maria Bettina was hard to miss. She certainly could have played the part of the Russian honeypot. She was young, pretty, sophisticated. Like in the movie Red Sparrow, where Jennifer Lawrence plays a Russian spy using sex to uncover state secrets. Every human being is a puzzle of need. You must become the missing piece, and they will tell you anything. For now, Maria was in some serious trouble on the political front. What she'd actually done to help the Russians was unclear, but she was drawing suspicion. The Senate Judiciary Committee asked the Trump team about its communications with Maria, Torshen, and Ericsson. One word got around that the FBI was investigating whether Torshen had illegally funneled money to the NRA to help Trump win the presidency. I've had an article in The Daily Beast that kind of suggested a Russian intelligence connection. Bob Driscoll is a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who would eventually represent Bettina. You heard from him in the last episode. I was struck that she was very smart. I mean, she was clearly interested in America beyond a typical kind of study abroad student. I mean, I view was, look, Maria, I don't know what your story is. I don't particularly care if the best thing for you is to graduate in May from America and then hop the next air of flight back to Moscow. I'm totally fine with that. Maria was called into the Senate Intelligence Committee, where she was grilled for eight hours behind closed doors on Russian meddling in the election. Nine days after the questioning, Bob Driscoll got another call. I'm driving to work. And I call for Maria. I remember this, the Russian accident in the car. I was told, I'm blue, too. She said, Bob, I hate to bother you. And I said, I know, Bob, Maria, what's up? She said, there are 10 FBI agents at my front door. And I said, okay, make sure they have a warrant and tell me lawyers on the way. She hung up. Bob got to work trying to figure out what was going on. He touched base with Robert Mueller's office, who was carrying out an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Maybe Maria was mistakenly mixed up in that. I just thought it was kind of an administrative snafu. So I called and I left a message from a contact there and I said, hey, what the fuck? Why you sending in the door kickers to get Maria's stuff? I just gave Senate intel. You got 8,000 documents on the thumb drive. I can give you the same thumb drive. You don't need to arrest your apartment and go to get the same stuff. And then they called me back and were like, not us. And I said, what do you mean not you? And I said, not us. We're not whoever is searching, not us. It's coming from another part of law enforcement. Bob went to Maria's apartment, a neatly kept red brick building. So I showed up, found the lead FBI agent at the scene, is there going through Maria's stuff? And he was FBI counter-intel. So that obviously told me something. After intelligence, as in the division of the FBI that investigates spies, they were going to arrest her and put her in prison. And they had not one, but two, search warrants. One out of District of DC and one out of the District of South Dakota. So I was like, what the hell? And that is when I kind of hauled Maria out to the hallway to talk to her, I said, oh, I had his apartment circuit. And at that point, I said, well, what's that about? And she said, well, that was business stuff. It didn't seem to have anything to do with this and that she didn't know much about his business affairs. So Bob gets in touch with the FBI agent who executed the search warrant on Erickson. So when I finally got to hold the South Dakota people, the South Dakota FBI agent was a chat of Kathy that was helpful when you're a defense lawyer. As he basically said, I got no problem with your girl. We executed that search warrant because we think Paul's a bad guy in terms of fraud. We got a fraud case against him. The FBI was after Erickson for reasons that had nothing to do with Maria. More after the break. For the last 60 years, one TV program has kept us coming back for more. Three contestants, 61 clues, a lot of brain power and money on the line. On the new podcast, This is Jeopardy! The story of America's favorite quiz show. We're taking you behind the scenes of the game that made it cool to be smart. Hosted by me, Buzzy Cohen, find and listen to episodes now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Infamous from Campside Media. So Maria was being sort of unmasked as a Russian spy or at least that was the story. But Paul Erickson himself seemed like the government was alleging he might be doing some cons too. I hadn't kept up much with Paul in the last decade. Even though there were some rumblings in South Dakota about him not being fully on the up and up, I was surprised to hear about all of this. So I started calling around to see what else I could find out. One of the many people I spoke to was Susan Holden. Erickson's classmate at Yale. And of course in hindsight, the bat as a lie was just one little tiny lie of the giant world of lies. I do not think he is capable of telling the truth. You have to also remember that Paul traveled to very unusual places, Russia, Afghanistan. He was always very mysterious. Though they hadn't been close in college, the two became good friends later in life. As I knew myself, Erickson was kind of an intriguing guy to know. All of us who were his friends assumed he was working for the government. Because he also didn't have a job. I was absolutely convinced he worked for the CIA or the NSA all those years. Erickson told her he was raising money to purchase land in the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, which was experiencing a boom. An influx of oil workers and a shortage of housing meant there was an opportunity to build new developments. It didn't feel like I was investing in a business, in which case I would have a deck and financials. I then went on a trip with my 80 year old mother to get my mother to see all 50 states. And I told Paul that I was going to South Dakota and of course North Dakota as part of this. Susan wanted to see her investment in person. Paul decided to meet up there and showed up in person and drove my 80 year old mother around the Dakotas for four days talking about how wonderful this investment was. He took us to a real estate development in Williston, North Dakota, where my mother took a picture of us. Paul and I with his arms around me, making the big thumbs up indicating that this was where my money was. Except it wasn't. The FBI lawyer told me he never owned a single stick of real estate in that town. Obviously the only reason he came along on this road trip was to keep me from getting to Williston on my own and going to some office somewhere and saying, Hi, I'm Susan Holden. I'm one of the Paul Ericks and investors. Can you give me a tour of our development? But man, a lot of effort. He took my mother to mass. I used to say to him sometimes, gosh Paul, I hope you're not the Bernie Madoff of the Bakken. Ha ha ha. That joke would end up being uncomfortably close to the truth. Because Erickson had actually taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from investors to develop housing that never even existed. And as Mary and I called around, we found more people who claimed to have problems with Erickson. I had an office in the same building where he had an office. He was across a hall for me. Loretta was an insurance agent. At one point, she was even Erickson's insurance agent for that car with the vanity license plate. So when he asked her to invest in a North Dakota housing development, she was game and maybe even a little vulnerable. My husband passed away in 2011 and it was after that. So yeah, caught me a point times in the walk down. She invested upwards of $50,000 in two rounds. But I will say I did, that was one of the more fortunate ones. I did get payments. Like any good Ponzi scheme, he used money coming in from one investor to pay off another. And even though she eventually got some of her money back, Loretta's gut told her something was off. I was not surprised when the FBI came in and hugging on my door at all. FBI special agent Matt Miller was assigned to Erickson's case. Washington Field Office called us with just a simple inquiry about Maria, butina, and said, you know, we have an address that she has used in South Dakota. It's also associated with a guy named Paul Erickson. Can you see is she living there? But then when we started to look at Paul and try to figure out who he was, things didn't make sense in the way they normally do. Matt started digging. We had complaints involving him taking money from a godmother and from his mother and from his sister and from classmates at Yale, from a childhood friend, from a person who cut his hair. And he really developed very intense emotional attachments. A typical con man will take as much as he can from someone and then disappear out of their life never to be heard from again. Right? In fact, that's usually one of the hallmarks. They keep calling and they can't get a hold of the person. But in Paul's case, he, and for all I know, continues to this day to send birthday cards to people from whom he's taken money. This is something he did with me. Even though Erickson never took any money from me, I would get a birthday email each year. It really made me feel warm toward him. Agent Miller says he traced Erickson's first scam back to the late 1990s. Back then, Erickson was giving out a business card that said he was head of Compass Care. So Compass Care was a business that purported to design, build and operate assisted living centers. He had a minister who was also a victim but an employee who was going out trying to market this to different communities. It was mostly the common pitch where we'll turn double on your money or whatever. Erickson conned dozens of investors with this pitch. One guy invested $25,000 and was told it would grow to $800,000. He would also sometimes use the same victims for multiple schemes. They'd say, well geez, you know, I know things are really not working out in this Compass Care. But I have this new project. And how about if we roll some of your money over into that and I think we can make all your money back and then some. In 2010, Erickson got in touch with an old friend from South Dakota who had developed a wheelchair that was compatible with regular toilets and avoided the indignity of having someone lift you in and out of your wheelchair when he needed to use the bathroom. It was kind of a brilliant idea. But he was having trouble with the business aspect of it. That's where Erickson stepped in. Paul offered to help and this was a patented invention. Paul was supposed to go out and try to get a larger company to buy the patent and then actually take it into production. And he really failed at that. So Paul then sort of adopted the idea as his own and began then selling investments in the company to people. Sometimes telling him that his company was producing wheelchairs other times telling them something closer to the truth which was that he was trying to sell the patent to a larger company to get it produced and then people would invest in it. This supposed business was called investing with dignity. Yeah, I know. Pretty undignified. Over the course of 22 years, Erickson defrauded at least 76 people and the evidence was overwhelming. As I learned more, I thought the case was definitely closed and that Erickson would spend several years in prison. But all is not fair in love and war, especially when the president can overturn the courts. Next time on Infamous, our final episode on Paul Erickson. Predicted for her presence in America was not to be a red sparrow. The fraud scheme lasted for so long. They'd never had a presidential pardon. Infamous is a production of campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment. It's created, executive produced and hosted by Gabriel Sherman and me, Vanessa Gregorriatus. Shoshish Malavitz is our managing producer and editor, Gary Graham, Grace Heerman and Lily Houston Smith are our associate producers. This episode was written by Natalie Robomond, Paul Glatter and Mary Kudahy and edited by me and Rajiv Gola. Fact checking by Marilah Gish. Sound design by David Debarro and recording by Ewan Lai Trimuet. This episode is based on public records and court records. See you next week. ♪ ♪