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Exploring the 14 mysterious deaths in the UK with alleged connections to Russia over two decades.
Investigative reporter Heidi Blake gets a tip about the suspicious death of multi-millionaire Scot Young; together with her team, she untangles a paper trail that connects Scot to the notorious Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.
Investigative reporter Heidi Blake gets a tip about the suspicious death of multi-millionaire Scot Young; together with her team, she untangles a paper trail that connects Scot to the notorious Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky.
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00:00I think there are two powerful corrupting forces often at play in the stories we tell.
00:22And those are money and the allure of vast riches.
00:30And the other is the intoxicating quality of power.
00:39These things drive people to cross boundaries and to forget themselves and to do things that perhaps they, in their natural selves, wouldn't necessarily have wanted to do.
00:50I'm often asked as an investigative journalist whether I get scared doing this kind of work.
00:59And my honest answer has always been no.
01:06I have to say that that changed working on this story.
01:14A murder investigation being launched into the death of another Russian on British soil.
01:21He told his uncle a fortnight before he died, if anything happens to me in the next two weeks, it won't be an accident.
01:39London is levitating on the sea of gold.
01:41He told his uncle a fortnight before he died, if anything happens to me in the next two weeks, it won't be an accident.
01:51If you deal with somebody who has a very suspicious track record, someday it will come back to haunt you.
01:56I don't know you.
02:19It will come back to haunt you.
02:39In 2014, BuzzFeed approached me about setting up an investigations team in London.
02:44I knew BuzzFeed for its lists and quizzes and cat-related content.
02:49I was like, aren't you guys the cat people?
02:54But I'd worked at a couple of newspapers with declining circulations
02:59and BuzzFeed really seemed like a great opportunity to do something new and innovative,
03:05and so it felt like a no-brainer.
03:07Very shortly after I arrived in the newsroom, my first week in the job,
03:11I got a call come through for me on the switchboard.
03:15And it was from somebody who didn't want to identify herself,
03:18but she asked me to come and meet her at an address in a smart part of London.
03:23And so I went to this apartment.
03:26My interest was piqued.
03:27And kind of climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and the door swung open,
03:31and it was Michelle Young,
03:33who I knew from one of the longest-ever divorce cases in British legal history.
03:40Her husband was Scott Young,
03:42the multimillionaire super fixer for some of the world's richest men.
03:47This is a man who had a supposed total net worth of about 400 million pounds.
03:54But when it came to the divorce case,
03:56his whole fortune had apparently gone up in a puff of smoke,
04:00and he had claimed to be penniless.
04:02Five, 20 million pounds to grow.
04:05Would you be happy?
04:06Yes or no?
04:08I will get cracking on a couple of things, do you?
04:12I'm tired of a wife in a very long marriage.
04:15Okay, why don't you see 25?
04:16It's a nice round-up, okay?
04:17Well, no, no, I don't want 25.
04:19It's about 30 million.
04:20Is it a fucking deal?
04:21Or do you not want to do a deal?
04:23How can you ask for any more than that?
04:25After billions of pounds being hidden,
04:27and I've got the evidence.
04:28Okay, do the round-up,
04:29the sweet fuck all.
04:30Go get Michelle.
04:32On that basis, it's a waste of time.
04:34Never threaten me again.
04:38He was ordered to pay about 20 million pounds to Michelle.
04:44And the money never materialized, got never paid up.
04:47And then, around a year later...
05:00Bankrupt property tycoon Scott Young has died
05:13after reportedly falling onto railings
05:15outside a luxury flat in central London.
05:18Police say Young's death is not being treated as suspicious.
05:21Testing, Jane Bradley. I'm at Michelle's house. Testing.
05:33Heidi first mentioned Scott Young's name to me
05:36pretty much as soon as I got the Buzzfeed job.
05:39So, we went to do the big interview with her,
05:42where I was the camera and filmed the interview.
05:45Yes, I'm ready.
05:46Jade, it's your job to make this look good.
05:52Pretty much from 12, I was just always nosy.
05:54I was curious.
05:55I loved writing.
05:56I loved asking questions.
05:58So, for a really long time, I'd known I wanted to be a journalist.
06:04So, when this story came through, I thought,
06:08wow, this will be a really kind of interesting, murky story
06:12to look into.
06:15What do you want to say about how you believe he died?
06:21I'm just very, very honest.
06:23The fact, I don't believe it was he committed suicide.
06:28I don't believe he fell.
06:32I believe he was murdered.
06:54Michelle believed that whoever had killed him
06:56was hiding his money from her,
06:58and she wanted me to investigate
07:00and get to the bottom of who had killed him
07:02and where the money had gone.
07:03Just after 5pm on the 8th of December in 2014,
07:07Scott Young fell from that fourth-floor window
07:10and was impaled on these railings here.
07:13The impact killed him instantly.
07:16His death was this quite extraordinary,
07:18grisly fall from his penthouse window.
07:21I was intrigued by how he had come to meet such an untimely end
07:27and what the secrets of the story really were.
07:30So, you want me to start looking up, then look down,
07:32or start looking at you, then look up, then look down?
07:33Start looking down.
07:34Start looking down.
07:35OK.
07:36I've never believed he committed suicide.
07:42I was just shocked.
07:44Shocked.
07:46Traumatized.
07:48Just before Scott's death, he was in the show Ladies of London.
08:02This is my scene.
08:04With his current girlfriend, Noel Reno.
08:07Please.
08:10You're not going to carry me in?
08:12I will carry you in.
08:13Scott was obviously very good at acting.
08:16I wouldn't say an A-class actor, I'd say a B-class actor.
08:20We're both in the Sunday Times app.
08:23Yeah.
08:24Yeah.
08:25I remember that.
08:26She was in the fashion section.
08:27I was in the crime section.
08:28Things haven't changed, but...
08:29Match made in tabloid heaven.
08:30Yeah, yeah.
08:31Absolutely.
08:32I mean, it was quite clear he was still living a very luxurious lifestyle.
08:36Scott, how are you?
08:37Tell me about the new plane.
08:38Enjoying it.
08:39Yeah, we're feeling settled there.
08:40We got in.
08:41We love the area.
08:42We're happy for now.
08:43That's great.
08:44When Scott had been found dead, after everything that had happened, I was just utterly shocked.
08:59Michelle had this very large amount of documentation and digital evidence in relation to Scott Young,
09:05much of which had come out during the disclosure process of her divorce battle with Scott over eight years.
09:11We ended up with 250 boxes of documents.
09:14And so we were going to be able to really thoroughly investigate what happened to Scott Young.
09:20The first question was, how are we going to get our heads around this volume of material?
09:25That was where Richard Holmes came into the picture.
09:30When I found out that BuzzFeed was putting money into investigative journalism, I wanted to be part of that.
09:37I first reached out to Heidi, I think, on Twitter, and then followed up with an email.
09:44And I don't think she initially responded to that email.
09:47He'd been bugging me on Twitter for months, saying that he really wanted a job with us.
09:52I took it upon myself to send her about three emails a month for about three months until she finally got back to me.
10:01I was like, hang on, we have this very eager young potential helper and we have an enormous quantity of information.
10:09So we hired Richard and told him his mission was to scan every single one of those documents by hand.
10:17And Richard was more than game for the task.
10:26There's 250 plus boxes here and they want me to scan them all.
10:30Heidi said, if you could get that done in a month, that would be great.
10:34He'd been having to tear the staples out of each of these documents with his bare hands.
10:38Shocking.
10:40When we started looking into all this unseen evidence and then the bigger picture really became apparent.
10:52It kind of became a focus for the whole team, which was really rare, but that was kind of how important a story Heidi felt it was.
11:00So my background in journalism, I did a lot of what they call data journalism.
11:08It was kind of the geeky stuff. Do you know what I mean? That was, that was kind of my, my flex.
11:13The abridged answer as to why I wanted to be an investigative reporter is like, you know, you just want to fuck shit up.
11:21And we spent months on end just looking at documents about Scott's life and you build up a picture of who this person is, you know.
11:33To be honest, you know, I kind of came to admire him because it is like the rags to riches tale.
11:41So he's born in a tenement in Dundee. This is not like a guy who's born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
11:46Grows up. He gets in club promoting.
11:51He was very charming. Lots of charisma. He was extremely funny.
11:56I kind of couldn't get rid of him. He was kind of there.
11:59And, you know, after a couple of dates, he said, I'm going to marry you and you're going to have my babies.
12:04And at the time I just thought, yeah, sure.
12:07But I did marry him. We had two beautiful daughters living a very happy family life.
12:13And the rest was history.
12:16How and when did you first meet Scott Young?
12:19Well, he pulled up at a brand new red Ferrari and he climbed the curb.
12:26So it stood out like a sore thumb.
12:28I never saw him in the same car ever.
12:33Ferraris, Porsches, Bentley's, everything.
12:38And his wife did say he had a car for every day of the week.
12:41I think he had a new car for every day of the year.
12:43When I met him, it seemed everybody knew him and he knew everybody else, you know.
12:48He was a character. He was definitely a character.
12:50I think he wanted to be the richest man on the planet.
12:53Very impressive. Nice guy. Shook his hand. Great.
12:56And, you know, we're good friends from then onwards.
12:59We had lunch together five days of the week.
13:01He was always up to something. He was always doing deals all over the place.
13:04He had a lot of very good high-tech start-up companies.
13:08That was where he'd already made a majority of his fortune.
13:13From there, he bought some magnificent houses.
13:16He had a vast, vast array of property.
13:20But, you know, he worked very long hours.
13:23So, you know, he was at home when he could be.
13:30At the same time, Scott had become the fixer
13:34if you wanted to hide a dubious trail of money.
13:38He got involved with, like, one of Britain's biggest crime families.
13:41The Addams Family.
13:44One of London's and the country's longest established organised crime gangs.
13:50Scott became particularly close to one of the bosses of that family.
13:54He was helping them legitimise their ill-gotten earnings.
13:57I had no idea the people that he'd been involved with over many years.
14:02There are stories of Scott going to nightclubs
14:07and spending £50,000 on coke
14:11and spraying champagne across the crowd.
14:17Flying on private jets and holidaying on yachts.
14:21He was talking about ordering a yacht, a helicopter,
14:25and we was looking at substantial houses.
14:34Scott had been playing away from home for a long time.
14:37He had a whole series of different girlfriends
14:40living his own life separate and apart from his family.
14:48This was the kind of lifestyle he'd led.
14:50It was one of just kind of breathtaking luxury,
14:53but also an increasing cloud of danger.
14:56I am Kave Musavi. I am a human rights lawyer.
15:09I'm an international arbitrator.
15:11And I like to think we do well by the law and by justice.
15:16In 1996, I saw this beautiful house and we fell in love with it.
15:20It had a tremendous history.
15:22One of the extensions was my office
15:25and that's where I was working on that fateful Sunday
15:28when Scott Young turned up.
15:36He was driving past and he'd seen the house
15:39and his wife and he had decided there and then
15:42that they wanted to buy this house.
15:45He was the usual Scotts.
15:47I have a plane to catch and I've got Concorde at 6 o'clock.
15:50I mean, hurry, make up your mind right now.
15:55And then the penny dropped.
15:56He wanted to buy this house, cash.
15:59I said, Scott, I can't do that.
16:01I cannot take millions of pounds in cash.
16:05He said, I'll help you set up an account in Switzerland
16:08and I will deposit the cash and it'll be bank in secrecy.
16:12I said, Scott, you know, we're here on a short journey
16:15and I really want to try and make it to that without too many problems.
16:20But, I mean, there are rules here.
16:22We managed eventually to overcome those problems.
16:25He was able to organize a banking arrangement
16:28and so the house was sold.
16:32And the last I heard was that he was impaled on the railings in London.
16:36But when you look at the unsavory activities that we now know Scott was involved in,
16:44the old adage, if you sleep with dogs,
16:47don't expect not to catch fleas.
16:50Scott's two daughters, Sasha and Scarlett,
17:04didn't learn of their father's death until some days after the event.
17:09And they couldn't quite believe that he had died.
17:13They knew that he had checked himself into a secure psychiatric unit days before
17:16and wasn't yet due to have left.
17:18So they believed him still to be safely there.
17:23Scott struggled for years with substance abuse.
17:28People were worried about his mental wellbeing.
17:31Well, it started, you know, early on in our relationship
17:35and he had this really bad temper.
17:39And for no reason, he would just throw things, be quite violent.
17:44And, you know, it was actually shocking to actually see, you know, someone for no reason would just basically turn into a psychopath.
17:57This happens a lot, very powerful people, they have this very domineering side.
18:07But, you know, I fell in love with him, you know, and, um, you take the good with the bad.
18:16And, um...
18:17Before he died.
18:18Basically, he'd had an episode.
18:23He'd come in for cocaine-induced psychosis.
18:26This was something that should tail off.
18:28And afterwards, he should have been okay.
18:31When he died, Scott had actually come from the psychiatric hospital that day
18:36and checked himself out and come back to the flat,
18:40where Noel Reno was just about to have the locks changed on the flat
18:44because they had recently broken up.
18:47Noel Reno was the last one to see him alive.
18:51Apparently, they was having an argument.
18:54And she asked him to leave the apartment, and he wouldn't.
18:59And she said she went off to have a coffee.
19:03The story then goes that Scott called Noel and told her that he was going to jump out of the window.
19:09Within 15 minutes of her leaving, he was found dead.
19:18She told the police that she believed he killed himself.
19:21And it was her testimony that Scott told her he was going to jump.
19:25That really swung the police, you know, into making this determination
19:30that he definitely committed suicide.
19:33What's kind of left out of that story is that Scott had told his friends
19:37that he believed that there were hit squads out to get him.
19:41He feared he was going to be poisoned.
19:43He believed that his life was in danger.
19:45He'd asked for police protection.
19:48Scott became very mentally unstable.
19:52There were issues that he was having,
19:54and it was trying to look at those and take those into account,
19:58but also look at the external threat that there was to Scott.
20:01Scott had a pattern of when he felt he was under threat,
20:08checking himself into psychiatric hospitals.
20:10There were several occasions where he specifically told his daughters he'd done that
20:14because he was frightened, and he felt it was a safe place
20:17to avoid people he felt were coming to kill him.
20:19He got admitted showing all kinds of signs of mania and, you know, florid delusions.
20:28And then as soon as the threat had passed,
20:29suddenly he was magically better again and ready to discharge himself.
20:34He thought there was people following him.
20:37If anyone comes and sat next to us, he said they're following him,
20:39and I used to think it was all nonsense,
20:41but I found out later in life that it wasn't nonsense.
20:43They were following him.
20:46And the last time he admitted himself to psychiatric hospital,
20:49he was frightened.
20:50He believed people were after him.
20:52He told people that he was going to be lying low in there for a few days.
20:57When I was told that he was dead, the whole thing did not add up.
21:02I knew there was something seriously wrong,
21:08because there's no way Scott would have jumped out of that window.
21:14He was absolutely petrified of heights.
21:19What happened to Scott's laptops?
21:22What happened to all his mobile phones?
21:26There are so many things about Scott's death
21:28that point to suspicious circumstances.
21:32The police went in.
21:33They didn't dust for fingerprints.
21:34They took a few photos of the scene.
21:37They performed very little forensic investigation.
21:44We are left with burning questions
21:46about whether his death was in fact a suicide.
21:58We had such a plethora of information.
22:06You got insight into his emails, into his phone records,
22:10you know, into his transactional data,
22:11and I really started to develop a sense for who this guy was.
22:16It was clearly a man who wasn't this ultra-wealthy individual
22:21who was very stable and standing on a huge amount of wealth.
22:23He was clearly someone who was, you know,
22:25frantically taking money from wherever he could
22:27just to pay off people that he'd previously loaned off.
22:32It became clear that there were people
22:34who he was trying to escape from.
22:39The moment the penny really dropped
22:41was when I read an email that he sent,
22:44and he said,
22:46Don't call the house phone.
22:48We've had murders.
22:49You can see this flurry of text messages and emails
22:53to people saying,
22:55I'll get you your money.
22:56And as I read on more and more
22:58and found more information about Scott
23:00and what he was doing,
23:02the same name started to show up multiple times,
23:06and that was Boris Berezovsky.
23:09Boris Berezovsky is known fairly widely in Russia
23:23as the godfather of the oligarchs.
23:25How are you?
23:26Good morning.
23:28Today worse than yesterday,
23:30but better than tomorrow.
23:32He's part of that group of super rich Russian businessmen
23:39who made their spoils after the fall of communism
23:42in the kind of smash-and-grab era
23:44that came as Russia moved into its new capitalist economy.
23:51But there's another side of Boris Berezovsky
23:53which is extremely seedy and unpalatable.
23:57And he was linked to dangerous people.
23:59When we found out about Scott Young's connections
24:02with Boris Berezovsky,
24:05we knew that anyone who was known
24:08to be connected with Berezovsky was in danger.
24:16Scott was, you know, he was very secretive.
24:20And I think the fact he was having affairs
24:23and he didn't want, you know,
24:25even though, you know, he said he loved me,
24:28he was leading a double life.
24:33He didn't want me to know exactly
24:36where the money was and what he was doing.
24:40We got invited to dinner
24:43and when we arrived,
24:45there was Boris Berezovsky.
24:48And that was when I first realised
24:49Scott had any involvement with Russians.
24:55Boris travelled with his wife of that time
24:58in one car
24:59and then another car full of secret service bodyguards.
25:04Because there had already been attempts on his life.
25:07When there was such a tragedy,
25:13because it was really
25:15in 10 centimeters from me
25:16before me,
25:17it broke my head.
25:19And this can't make me
25:22seriously think about what you're doing.
25:24I said to Scott,
25:25be very careful,
25:26mixing with the Russians.
25:27These are dangerous people.
25:28You're risking your life.
25:29You're risking your life.
25:30You're risking your life.
26:00You're Norwegians right here,
26:01and you're tocco.
26:06I should think about this.
26:08We lost some bed every community
26:11in the New York City,
26:13it was a very nice place to write.
26:16And then,
26:18I'mعد you back?
26:19How commanders,
26:22are心 practitioners,
26:25we're risking nine lonely
26:27Transcription by CastingWords
26:57CastingWords
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