On a warm summer evening last year, Lev Parnas stepped aboard a private cruise around New York Harbor for a gathering of some of Rudolph W. Giuliani’s closest friends.
The passengers sipped wine and cocktails while they sailed past the Statue of Liberty, singing along as another guest, the entertainer Joe Piscopo, belted out “Theme from New York, New York.” Mr. Giuliani, a personal lawyer to President Trump, relaxed on the open deck in a bright blue polo shirt as the sun set over Lower Manhattan, a video of the event shows.
The August 2018 cruise, which was won in a charity auction, came at a pivotal moment in Mr. Giuliani’s relationship with Mr. Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman, both Soviet-born businessmen from Florida who were among the newest entrants to his circle.
Mr. Parnas had recently struck up a friendship with Mr. Giuliani while recruiting him for a business deal, but now the men were on the verge of something bigger: teaming up to unearth damaging information on Mr. Trump’s political rivals.
In the coming months, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman helped Mr. Giuliani carry out a shadow diplomacy campaign, sweeping them into a chain of events that has led to the impeachment of a president for only the third time in American history. As the impeachment began moving on Wednesday from the House to the Senate, the story of their work together was a reminder that the case against Mr. Trump is more than just a political battle in Washington. It is about the allure of presidential power, and the people who drew near to it as they sought political influence or financial gain.
The goal of the campaign, according to witnesses in the impeachment hearings and a reconstructed transcript of a call between Mr. Trump and the Ukrainian president, was for Ukraine to pursue two investigations that could benefit Mr. Trump politically. One dealt with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter; the other centered on claims that Ukrainians meddled in the 2016 election, including a debunked theory that Ukraine — and not Russia — stole Democratic emails.
Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman had chased riches from one venture to another, with no footing in government or diplomacy. But in a trajectory emblematic of the Trump era, they emerged from obscurity to play a crucial role in the pressure campaign through a tangle of transactional relationships and overlapping interests.
First, the men bought or wheedled their way into private dinners with Mr. Trump and access to his inauguration celebration, where they could find a circle of Republican donors to invest in and advise their own business endeavors.
Then, after Mr. Parnas secured Mr. Giuliani’s help for one of his business ventures in a half-million-dollar deal, Mr. Giuliani saw that they had something else to offer him: the ability to make connections in Ukraine. And so, they landed at the fulcrum of an international effort that could both aid the president and anchor their future fortunes.
Mr. Parnas, now 47, was a perennial pitchman who exuded sincerity, an aspiring entrepreneur with a history of debts and aborted businesses. He tooled around in a Ferrari and wooed new sources of capital with boasts of ties to important people.
Mr. Fruman, a 53-year-old who spoke a mix of Russian and choppy English, had more direct links to Ukraine: He invested in a sprawl of businesses there that were once worth millions of dollars — nightspots, a beach club, a dealership selling Jaguars that was part-owned by a local politician — as well as a New York-based import-export company. But in a sign that his fortunes had started to change, Mr. Fruman funded the men’s entree into Republican circles by refinancing a condominium in Sunny Isles, a South Florida enclave of Russian émigrés.
Together, they became ubiquitous in the Republican donor set, known simply as “Lev and Igor,” a duo seemingly ripped from a movie script.
This account is based on based on interviews with more than three dozen people in the United States and Ukraine and a review of photographs, credit card transactions, internal memos, and American and Ukrainian court documents and corporate filings.
While Mr. Parnas’s Instagram posts show appearances at Republican fund-raisers and Mr. Giuliani’s birthday party at Yankee Stadium, it was in private meetings at BLT Prime, the steakhouse at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, where he and Mr. Fruman became unlikely agents of the Ukrainian initiative.
Mr. Parnas did most of the talking, but Mr. Fruman’s Ukrainian ties were critical to their efforts. Two people familiar with the matter said Mr. Fruman helped arrange an initial meeting between Mr. Giuliani and a Ukrainian prosecutor who claimed to have damaging information about targets of Mr. Trump, laying part of the foundation for their mission.
“For what they did, they did a very good job,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview this week. He recalled telling an associate: “They were perfect. They did everything I wanted, and they never got involved in asking questions.”
Ultimately, none of their connections, in either Ukraine or Washington, could save them. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman were arrested in October on campaign finance charges brought by Manhattan federal prosecutors. The prosecutors are now investigating whether Mr. Giuliani engaged in illegal lobbying on behalf of Ukrainian interests.
Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman have pleaded not guilty, and Mr. Giuliani has denied wrongdoing, saying he was advocating for his client, Mr. Trump. The president has disavowed knowing Mr. Fruman or Mr. Parnas, and Mr. Parnas, feeling betrayed, has broken with Mr. Giuliani and supplied information to Congress about his work for him and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Giuliani has played down the men’s role in his efforts, saying it was limited to setting up meetings.
In court this week, a federal prosecutor in the case argued that Mr. Parnas’s bail should be revoked and he should be returned to jail, saying that he had exhibited “a pattern of misleading the government.” The prosecutor cited, in part, his financial ties to Dmitry Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon who has been charged with bribery in the United States and has been fighting extradition.
A lawyer for Mr. Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, disputed the government’s contention and cited “his vocal willingness to stand up and to tell the truth.” A judge declined to revoke Mr. Parnas’s bail.
Mr. Fruman has not spoken publicly since his arrest, and his lawyer, Todd Blanche, declined to comment. Mr. Giuliani said in the interview that his and Mr. Fruman’s legal teams entered into an agreement about two months ago allowing them to share information.
“It’s so strange how Igor became part of this scandal,” said Gennady Medvedev, who co-owned an Asian-themed restaurant in Kyiv called Buddha-Bar with Mr. Fruman and others. “If a person takes enough pictures next to famous people, he will start to believe he is an important man himself.”
A Key to Trump World
The first time Mr. Parnas spoke with Mr. Trump, he wanted to make a personal connection.
It was October 2015, and Mr. Trump was clinging to first place in the Republican presidential primary campaign. Mr. Parnas and his 16-year-old son drove from their home in Boca Raton, Fla., to the Trump National Doral Miami, a resort and golf club, for a raucous campaign rally, according to Mr. Bondy, Mr. Parnas’s lawyer.
Before the rally, Mr. Parnas shook hands with the candidate and told him about a long-ago, if tenuous, connection to the Trump family. As a young man in Brooklyn, he had sold co-op apartments built by Mr. Trump’s father, prompting the men to joke that Mr. Parnas’s son might one day work for Mr. Trump, Mr. Bondy said.
It was a brief but exhilarating encounter for someone born in Ukraine who had arrived in the United States at age 4. His family started out poor in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood: Mr. Parnas’s father died when he was 11, and his mother worked long shifts at a salon. At 15, he left school. He sold real estate before working for years as a stockbroker and eventually moving to Boca Raton in 1995.
Over nearly two decades, he created or became an officer in at least 20 companies. One was a publicly traded technology penny stock called EdgeTech International Inc.
Arty Dozortsev, a liquor distributor who knew Mr. Parnas from Brooklyn and said he lost $20,000 on EdgeTech, recalled his pulling up in a Rolls-Royce wearing diamonds and an expensive watch, “looking like he’s worth a million bucks.”
“It was kind of enticing,” Mr. Dozortsev said.
After the money from his ventures dried up, Mr. Parnas would pawn his jewelry and look for a new deal.
By 2012, he had teamed up with David Correia, a former golf pro, and they created a start-up called Fraud Guarantee, intended to offer an insurance-like product to protect investors against scams. They worked on the idea, on and off, for the next seven years, but never got it off the ground.
The pair had been sued over more than $27,000 in unpaid rent on their suite in a Boca Raton office park. Not long after that, a federal judge in New York ordered Mr. Parnas to pay $510,000 to a man who had pursued him for years over a soured movie deal.
But Mr. Parnas did not behave like a man running from debts when he heard, in September 2016, of an upcoming Trump fund-raiser near his home.
One night at Lique, a Miami restaurant and lounge where Soviet émigrés liked to gather, Mr. Parnas learned that a construction magnate, Robert W. Pereira, wanted to host a fund-raising dinner for Mr. Trump. The event would be at Le Palais Royal, the gilded mansion Mr. Pereira had modeled after the Palace of Versailles.
“I know so many wealthy people,” Mr. Parnas exclaimed, offering to recruit contributors, according to a person who heard the comment.
But the dinner coincided with the close of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, and Mr. Parnas did not bring any donors. He gave $50,000 to attend.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani were there, and Mr. Parnas met Brian Ballard, an influential Florida lobbyist who was close to Mr. Trump.
The introduction to Mr. Ballard was brief but crucial: Mr. Parnas had gained a key to Trump World.
He built a relationship with Mr. Ballard, promising to introduce him to potential international lobbying clients. Soon after the fund-raiser, Mr. Parnas flew with Mr. Pereira on his plane to watch Mr. Trump debate Hillary Clinton in Las Vegas. On Election Day, they flew together again to attend Mr. Trump’s victory celebration in Midtown Manhattan.
Mr. Ballard and Mr. Pereira have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
After Mr. Trump’s victory, Mr. Parnas advanced deeper into the president’s circle.
He spent New Year’s Eve at Mar-a-Lago, where video footage shows him standing next to Mr. Trump. When the time came for Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Parnas secured a pricey attendee package at no cost, thanks to his connections in Florida Republican fund-raising circles. The passes gave Mr. Parnas entry to a black-tie inaugural ball and, on the eve of the swearing-in, a candlelight dinner in Union Station.
Mr. Fruman, a longtime acquaintance of Mr. Parnas, joined the entourage, two people familiar with the festivities said. Mr. Parnas brought his wife and two of his sons to Washington for the hoopla. After years of living from boom to bust, he had never had such proximity to wealth and power. The possibilities were staggering.
‘Everybody Had to Impress Everybody’
For the two men, the rest of 2017 did not live up to the promise that Mr. Trump’s inauguration seemed to portend.
Mr. Fruman was going through a contentious divorce. Born in Belarus before moving to Ukraine, he emigrated to the United States in his 20s and later became a citizen. But most of his financial dealings remained in Ukraine, where he was active in the business community of Odessa, a centuries-old Black Sea port.
A promotional brochure from about a decade ago identified him as the head of a residential real estate and retail company in Ukraine, Otrada Luxury Group. Real estate records suggest the business focused on residential properties and hotels. One featured a nightclub called Mafia Rave.
Mr. Medvedev, his former partner in Buddha-Bar, said Mr. Fruman also owned luxury watch and high-end fashion shops. He gave other businessmen expensive watches as presents and mingled in post-Soviet nouveau riche circles.
“He never was a big businessman, but in the early days, everybody had to impress everybody,” Mr. Medvedev said.
Successes were mixed with failures. Mr. Fruman sold his stake in the restaurant after the global financial crisis, according to his former partner. A canned milk and baby food factory that he had co-owned and that had employed about 800 people went bankrupt in 2010.
Last year, during a divorce hearing, Mr. Fruman said his business had “become worse and worse” and he had lost an important coffee distribution contract. Mr. Fruman told the judge he had earned about $336,000 in salary from his company in each of the two previous years. His wife’s lawyer questioned whether he had disclosed all his income.
In late 2017, Mr. Fruman connected with Mr. Parnas, who was struggling after a falling-out with both Mr. Ballard and prospective business partners with whom he had explored real estate deals. Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman developed a plan to create a company that would ship liquefied natural gas to Ukraine.
To do so, they needed help from American energy executives, some of whom were big Trump donors. The men decided to make political contributions, giving them access to events filled with people who might invest and provide expertise.
In February 2018, Mr. Fruman gave $2,700 to the Trump Victory committee, and he and Mr. Parnas attended a fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago for Protect the House, a committee supporting Republican candidates in the midterm elections. They ultimately committed to donating to Protect the House and giving $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, America First Action.
But they were short of cash. So in the spring of 2018, Mr. Fruman borrowed against one of his condos to make their biggest contribution yet: $325,000 to America First Action, in the name of their newly created energy company, Global Energy Producers.
Although they didn’t fulfill all of their promised donations, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman attended some 10 Republican events.
Taking Aim at an Ambassador
In late April 2018, their expedition into Republican politics brought them to Mr. Trump directly, at a private dinner in a two-level luxury suite in his Washington hotel.
Mingling with the likes of Jack Nicklaus III, the grandson of the famous golfer, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman awaited the arrival of Mr. Trump. When the president entered the room flanked by his son Donald Trump Jr., the dozen or so guests showered them with applause, a video shows.
As they ate, the conversation veered into Ukraine.
Over a dinner of the “Presidential Cheeseburger” and wedge salad, Mr. Parnas relayed a rumor that Marie L. Yovanovitch, then the American ambassador to Ukraine, was bad-mouthing the president — an unsubstantiated claim that Ms. Yovanovitch has denied, according to two people with knowledge of the dinner.
The exchange foreshadowed the role that Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman would come to play in Mr. Trump’s Ukrainian campaign.
Less than two weeks later, Mr. Parnas met with another critic of Ms. Yovanovitch, Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, in his Washington congressional office. Mr. Parnas, who had recently met Mr. Sessions at a fund-raiser, showed him a map of a crucial pipeline related to their gas venture, a photo shows.
By the end of the meeting, though, the topic had shifted to Ms. Yovanovitch, and Mr. Parnas reiterated what he had heard, a person briefed on the meeting said. After the meeting, Mr. Sessions sent a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying that Ms. Yovanovitch had spoken disdainfully of the Trump administration, and suggesting her removal. Mr. Sessions, who lost his re-election bid last year, has previously said he wrote the letter independently of Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, after speaking to congressional colleagues.
Federal prosecutors contend in the indictment against Mr. Parnas that he was not just making small talk but sought to oust Ms. Yovanovitch “at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials,” which could be a violation of federal laws that require Americans to register with the Justice Department when lobbying for foreign political interests. The indictment did not name any Ukrainian officials.
The men have not been charged with anything related to Ms. Yovanovitch, but prosecutors have said that additional charges are likely, at least for Mr. Parnas.
When the State Department declined to act on Ms. Yovanovitch, Mr. Sessions provided Mr. Parnas with a copy of his letter, a person familiar with the exchange said. The congressman’s name was signed across the back of the envelope, and “Mr. President” appeared across the front, photos show. Mr. Sessions “has no memory of” the exchange, a person close to the former congressman said.
Mr. Parnas approached the president a few days later during an America First Action donor event at the Trump International Hotel. A photo of the event shows Mr. Trump, next to Mr. Parnas, tucking an envelope into his own breast pocket.
It is unclear whether it was the same envelope, and the White House did not respond to a request for comment.
A Mission in Ukraine
In mid-July, Mr. Parnas returned to the Trump Hotel to recruit a new ally: Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Parnas, who arranged for the introduction through a Miami lawyer who went to law school with Mr. Giuliani, hoped to enlist him as an endorser and adviser for his passion project, Fraud Guarantee. After Mr. Parnas made his pitch, the men agreed to a deal with an initial payment of $500,000.
Mr. Correia, Mr. Parnas’s partner in the venture, notified the company’s investors of the good news, proclaiming in a letter that Mr. Giuliani was “willing to put his name and reputation on the line” for Fraud Guarantee and that his company would help “open doors.”
Fraud Guarantee Hails a ‘Very Powerful Partnership’ With Giuliani
A September 2018 letter to investors in Fraud Guarantee told them about Rudolph W. Giuliani’s potential involvement in the company. (PDF, 5 pages, 0.17 MB)
By August 2018, Mr. Parnas was cruising around Manhattan on the boat ride with Mr. Giuliani and his friends. A month later, Mr. Giuliani brought him and Mr. Fruman to his yearly dinner marking the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Soon after that, Mr. Parnas named Mr. Giuliani the godfather of his newborn son.
“I happen to like him,” Mr. Giuliani said in the interview this week. “I’m not walking away from the fact that I consider them friends,” he said of the two men.
By early this year, their relationship had turned to a more pressing matter for Mr. Giuliani: Ukraine.
Mr. Giuliani credited Mr. Fruman and Mr. Parnas with arranging a meeting he had with Viktor Shokin, Ukraine’s former top prosecutor who had been ousted amid accusations, including from Mr. Biden, of overlooking corruption. Mr. Shokin could not get a visa to come to the United States, so he and Mr. Giuliani spoke over Skype.
In their Jan. 23 call, Mr. Shokin suggested he had been pushed out for investigating Hunter Biden and payments he had received as a board member of a Ukrainian gas company, according to a memo summarizing the conversation. Witnesses in the impeachment hearings disputed Mr. Shokin’s allegation.
Within days of the Skype call, Mr. Giuliani met in person with Mr. Shokin’s successor, Yuriy Lutsenko.
This meeting came about in part through Mr. Fruman’s connection to a regional Ukrainian prosecutor he knew from Odessa, according to two people with knowledge of the arrangements. The regional prosecutor had traveled with Mr. Lutsenko to New York, where they met with Mr. Giuliani, as well as Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman. In conversations over two days, Mr. Lutsenko called Mr. Giuliani’s attention to payments from the gas company to Hunter Biden.
Mr. Lutsenko and the regional prosecutor declined to comment.
Now it was time for Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman to hit the ground in Ukraine.
In February, they set off with Mr. Giuliani for Warsaw, where they met with Mr. Lutsenko, who in turn could help arrange meetings with Ukrainian officials. Mr. Giuliani said that he had dinner with Mr. Lutsenko in Warsaw, but that it was a purely social event. Afterward, Mr. Giuliani returned home, but Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman went on to Kyiv.
At one point during their travels, Mr. Giuliani agreed to serve as a lawyer for Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman. And during their trips to Ukraine, Mr. Lutsenko helped Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman make contact with powerful Ukrainians. They met with Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro O. Poroshenko. And they sipped coffee with a close aide to his successor, Volodymyr Zelensky.
But some of what happened is a matter of dispute.
Lawyers for Mr. Parnas have said their client offered a White House meeting to Mr. Poroshenko if he announced an investigation into the Bidens. A spokeswoman for Mr. Poroshenko said he “hasn’t conducted any kind of negotiations with Fruman and Parnas.”
One of Mr. Parnas’s lawyers also has said that his client told the Zelensky aide that without such an announcement, the United States would withhold financial assistance and Vice President Mike Pence would stay home from the Ukrainian inauguration. Mr. Pence ultimately did not attend, and Mr. Trump later froze nearly $400 million in military aid.
Mr. Fruman’s lawyers and Mr. Giuliani have denied that any quid pro quo was offered. Mr. Trump has denied improperly withholding aid.
After Mr. Trump’s suspension of the military aid and his July 25 call asking Mr. Zelensky to investigate the Bidens, a whistle-blower’s complaint about the president’s conduct began to shine a light on Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman.
House Democrats soon sought documents and testimony from the men. Mr. Parnas traveled to the Cape Cod home of John Dowd, a lawyer close to the president who would represent him and Mr. Fruman in the impeachment inquiry.
A few days later, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman had lunch with Mr. Giuliani in Washington. They were at Dulles International Airport that night when F.B.I. agents arrested them.
Their $325,000 contribution to America First Action, federal prosecutors in Manhattan alleged, had been made illegally in the name of Global Energy Producers, a company without any income. Mr. Correia, whose lawyer Jeffrey Marcus declined to comment, was also indicted. All have pleaded not guilty.
At the White House, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not know Mr. Parnas or Mr. Fruman. Mr. Parnas, at a detention center in Virginia, soon concluded that Mr. Trump was abandoning him.
Mr. Parnas’s last moment in Mr. Trump’s world came when Mr. Dowd and another lawyer, Kevin Downing, went to see him in jail. During their visit, Mr. Parnas grew angry in part at what he perceived as the president’s betrayal, and fired the lawyers in a tirade of expletives, according to people with knowledge of the incident.
The lawyers left, and Mr. Parnas began to consider his next move.
Reporting was contributed by Sarah Maslin Nir, Maria Varenikova, Maggie Haberman, Michael Schwirtz and Chris Cameron. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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