Just after 8 a.m., on December 12, 2022, two FBI agents pulled their car through wrought-iron gates into a circular driveway in a leafy neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut, the ultra-wealthy New York City suburb that's home to Wall Street tycoons as well as foreign elite. After knocking, they were ushered into a $7 million, 14,000-square-foot mansion belonging to a man who used to be one of the most powerful figures in Russia: Vladimir Gusinsky.

Gusinsky, now 72, was not there. But his wife, Elena Konstantinou, was. She was confused and surprised to see the agents, she recalled.

During the visit -- one of three -- they questioned Konstantinou and house employees about Gusinsky's relationship with Charles McGonigal, a retired FBI agent who had socialized with Gusinsky and dined at his house on at least two occasions. They asked about Sergei Shestakov, a former diplomat and business associate of McGonigal's who had worked for Gusinsky. They asked about the Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. They asked about Mikhail Lesin, the former Russian press minister who was found dead in a Washington, D.C. hotel in November 2015 with a broken neck.

The agents later took computers and electronic devices belonging to Gusinsky. They also discussed the abrupt revocation of Gusinsky's U.S. visa -- a visa waiver, technically -- the previous year.

About five weeks after the FBI visit, on January 21, 2023, McGonigal was arrested by federal agents at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, charged with trying to help Deripaska evade U.S. sanctions. Shestakov was arrested on the same charges at his Connecticut home.

The following day, according to Konstantinou and other associates, Gusinsky left the United States, headed for Israel. Since then, he has returned to the United States a handful of times on a different passport, mostly to attend court proceedings in Connecticut in his acrimonious divorce from Konstantinou, his wife of three decades.

News of the FBI visits, which have not been reported before, comes at an already fraught time for U.S-Russian relations.

Going back since before the 2016 presidential election, U.S. authorities have warned of increased foreign influence operations, and the FBI has for some years visibly stepped up counterintelligence and surveillance, particularly for Russians.

The FBI revelations also coincide with a swirl of events surrounding Gusinsky, once a billionaire businessman whose media empire shaped Russia's political world in the 1990s -- until he was arrested, forced to sell his company, and ordered to leave the country.

In recent years, Gusinsky has been tangled in a thicket of lawsuits and other legal actions involving as many as a dozen people or companies in at least three countries.

Hundreds of pages of financial affidavits, court records, and e-mail correspondence reviewed by RFE/RL, along with interviews with associates and former friends, tell the story of a businessman juggling debts and lawsuits, trying to keep his businesses solvent, while also burning bridges with longtime acquaintances and former partners.

As of right now, there is no indication Gusinsky himself is under criminal investigation. McGonigal, the FBI agent, has pleaded guilty to sanctions evasion and money laundering, and has been sentenced to four years in prison. Shestakov is set to go on trial on related charges next month.

It is clear, however, that Gusinsky has drawn U.S. law enforcement scrutiny -- not to mention the scathing ire of past associates.

Mikhail Borshchevsky, who headed a Gusinsky-owned satellite TV company called Inter TV for two decades, has accused Gusinsky in court papers of reneging on a promise to pay him $500,000, along with debts to other employees, from the proceeds of selling a posh London apartment.

"He's a crook. He's a liar. He's extremely dishonest," he said as he recalled Gusinsky's brief early career in Soviet theater production. "He is a drama director, and because of that he changes his face, his language, his behavior, and he knows how to attract people, but you should not trust him."

Rise And Fall Of An Oligarch

In the chaotic years that followed the 1990 Soviet collapse, Gusinsky turned a consultancy and banking group into a media empire called Media-Most that included Russia's first private TV channel. NTV was known for critical coverage of the First Chechen War, broadcasting damning reports on the Russian military, rights abuses, and embarrassing President Boris Yeltsin.

In 1996, Gusinsky joined other wealthy businessmen known as oligarchs and threw his weight behind Yeltsin's sputtering reelection campaign; NTV's president served as a top campaign aide. Ultimately, Yeltsin's victory gave Gusinsky new clout in the latter years of Yelstin's presidency. It also put him on a collision course with the man who would succeed Yeltsin: Vladimir Putin.

In June 2000, just two months after Putin won outright election to succeed Yeltsin, Gusinsky was jailed on fraud charges that he and his supporters said were nakedly political. Two months later, he agreed to a deal selling NTV and his Media-Most group to the state-run gas giant Gazprom for $300 million, plus acquisition of company debt.

He also agreed to leave Russia for good. The man who presented him with the offer on the Kremlin's behalf was Lesin.

In the years following, from homes in Spain, Tel Aviv, and London, as well as Greenwich, Gusinsky hatched another business plan: developing TV shows for Russian audiences. It was wildly successful, with the company, called New Media Distribution, selling hundreds of hours of programming to Russian channels and later to a Ukrainian entertainment channel that Gusinsky co-founded. Its library grew to thousands of titles of television shows and movies.

In 2014, business took a turn for the worse. Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea, drawing a raft of Western sanctions on Russian businesses, politicians, and oligarchs. Ukrainian channels stopped buying the TV series. Gusinsky himself was not sanctioned, but the sanctions made things difficult for cash flows.

There was another hit that same year: Lesin, who was no longer Kremlin press minister but retained an executive position at Gazprom Media, renegotiated Gusinsky's contracts for the TV series, complaining, according to people knowledgeable about the discussions, that the shows were too expensive.

By the end of 2014, Lesin was pushed out of his job with Gazprom, under unclear circumstances.

Lesin was found dead in a Washington, D.C. hotel room on November 5, 2015. The official U.S. investigation said he suffered blunt-force injuries to his head and other parts of his body "which were induced by falls" along with "acute ethanol intoxication."

The official autopsy, obtained exclusively by RFE/RL, found that the hyoid bone in his neck was broken, raising questions about the official explanation.

By late 2018, Gusinsky's finances were in a dire state, something he alluded to in a court deposition that was given as part of a legal fight involving a second Greenwich house that Gusinsky currently owns.

The convoluted fight, which is ongoing, centers around Gusinsky's efforts to evict a longtime friend and former business partner, Vladimir Lenskiy. Asked by a lawyer when his finances became problematic, Gusinsky responded in broken English: "Mostly the end of '18, I'm already very unhappy, and mostly '19."

Evading Sanctions

A different visit to Gusinsky's home more than four years before the FBI arrived suggests one explanation for U.S. law enforcement interest.

In late April 2018, another car pulled into the same driveway carrying Tatyana Dyachenko, Yeltsin's younger daughter, and her husband, Valentin Yumashev.

Gusinsky knew the two from the 1990s, when he used NTV to reinvigorate Yeltsin's election campaign.

Over a three-hour lunch featuring Russian hors d'oeuvres and red wine -- Gusinsky had steak, Dyachenko had fish -- conversation touched on several subjects, Konstantinou recalled, including the issue of U.S. sanctions imposed on Deripaska just a few weeks earlier. Those sanctions severely restricted Deripaska's ability to access his assets in the West.

At the time Deripaska, a billionaire metals magnate who had had troubles with U.S. law enforcement and deep ties to Republican operatives, was in the throes of separating from Yumashev's daughter, Polina.

Yumashev and Dyachenko -- who had a fear of dogs and asked that the bull terrier Freya be removed from the room, Konstantinou recalled -- were interested whether Gusinsky could help get some of those sanctions lifted so that Polina might receive settlement money from her soon-to-be ex-husband.

Contacted by RFE/RL via the Yeltsin Center, a library dedicated to the former president, Dyachenko and Yumashev declined comment.

It's unclear whether Gusinsky did anything to help Dyachenko and Yumashev. But the timing of the later FBI visit and the subsequent arrests of McGonigal and Shestakov for conspiring to help Deripaska raise questions about a connection -- or whether the FBI was simply looking to Gusinsky for information about McGonigal and Shestakov.

In a written response to three dozen questions submitted by RFE/RL, Gusinsky confirmed the luncheon meeting but denied the subject of Deripaska's sanctions was discussed.

"We reminisced about the past and discussed plans for the future," he told RFE/RL.

To date, Gusinsky has never been charged or officially named as a suspect by law enforcement. But he did have long-standing personal and professional connections to both McGonigal and Shestakov.

According to Konstantinou, Gusinsky frequently boasted that he had excellent ties in Washington, D.C. and in particular with the FBI. Some of that stemmed from Gusinsky hiring the services of veteran Washington communications company APCO in the 1990s to make inroads in U.S. political circles. He was a regular attendee at the National Prayer Breakfast, the annual powerhouse event for lawmakers, lobbyists, and people trying to cultivate ties in the U.S. capital.

At some point much later, he met McGonigal, who served as the FBI's top counterintelligence agent in the bureau's New York office, investigating Russian espionage -- and oligarchs -- before his retirement in 2018. Gusinsky frequently dropped McGonigal's name in conversation, and McGonigal dined at Gusinsky's house on at least two occasions.

Gusinsky was introduced to McGonigal by Shestakov, who worked for Media-Most in the late 1990s and later for Gusinsky's U.S.-based Russian-language channel, RTVi.

A naturalized U.S. citizen who previously worked for the Soviet and Russian foreign ministries, Shestakov retired to the New York area in 1993. He worked as an authorized interpreter for U.S. federal courts in the 2010s.

Among some Russian-speaking circles, Shestakov was known as a fixer, a trouble-shooter, and a charmer. During Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when much of the New York area was reeling from power outages, Shestakov helped Gusinsky find a company to deliver gas to power the Greenwich mansion's external generator. Shestakov attended all his birthday parties at the Greenwich house, Gusinsky told RFE/RL.

According to documents filed in a Connecticut lawsuit, Shestakov was issued an American Express corporate credit card by Gusinsky's company in 2017. Over the next two years, he racked up tens of thousands of dollars in charges, including thousands for tickets to New Jersey Devils ice hockey games.

On March 1 and March 5, 2019, Shestakov used the card to make two payments totaling more than $58,000 to a company owned by Gusinsky's eldest son. It was unclear what the payments were for; Gusinsky said he did not remember.

Sometime in 2019, meanwhile, according to U.S. court filings, Shestakov and McGonigal began working to ease U.S. sanctions on Deripaska, introducing a top Deripaska aide named Yevgeny Fokin to a U.S. law firm as part of the effort.

During their questioning in 2022, Konstantinou said, the FBI agents, who were from the bureau's Newark, New Jersey, field office, showed her a photograph of McGonigal. "It's not about you," she said they told her. But the exact nature of the agents' interest in her husband was unclear.

The agents also discussed the March 2021 revocation of Gusinsky's U.S. visa -- technically a visa waiver under a program known as ESTA -- something Gusinsky was shocked to learn only as he tried to board a flight from Israel to the United States.

Gusinsky said he was never notified about the reason for his visa being revoked.

In their indictments, U.S. prosecutors accused McGonigal and Shestakov of trying to help Deripaska circumvent U.S. sanctions. U.S. authorities also said McGonigal was hired to dig up negative information on a rival oligarch.

McGonigal pleaded guilty in September 2023 to hiding his work on behalf of Deripaska from the FBI. That December, he was sentenced to four years in prison.

Shestakov, who has denied the charges, meanwhile, is scheduled to go on trial next month, in February, in Manhattan federal court, though defense lawyers are sparring with prosecutors about access to classified documents.

They're also fighting over the deposition of Fokin, who also worked for Gusinsky in the 1990s before becoming a top adviser at Deripaska's holding company En+. On January 6, a U.S. judge ordered that deposition to go forward -- tentatively set to take place in Dubai -- though it was unclear when that would happen.

Fokin was put under FBI surveillance beginning in July 2019, according to court records, and his electronic devices seized and searched as he entered the United States in August 2021. His U.S. visa was revoked the following year at the behest of the FBI, which alleged he was a Russian intelligence agent.

In court papers, U.S. prosecutors have alleged Fokin was an "unindicted co-conspirator" to Shestakov and McGonigal.

As of this writing, U.S. sanctions on Deripaska remain in place. Sanctions on En+ and the aluminum giant Rusal it owned were lifted in January 2019, after Deripaska relinquished some control over En+.

En+ did not respond to multiple e-mails seeking comment. Gusinsky said he did not recall meeting Fokin in the United States or elsewhere, but he said it was possible.

Contacted by RFE/RL, the FBI's national press office declined to comment. A press officer for the bureau's Newark office did not respond to voicemails seeking comment.

A defense lawyer for Shestakov did not respond to e-mails from RFE/RL seeking comment. McGonigal's defense lawyer, Seth DuCharme, said his client was not available to speak.

Debts And Disputes

The full scope of Gusinsky's financial problems is unclear. But affidavits, court records, and interviews with associates suggest his debts are substantial and complicated, with as many as a dozen lawsuits and related legal actions either ongoing or recently resolved.

Konstantin Kagalovsky, a former lawyer for the now-defunct Yukos oil company, partnered with Gusinsky in setting up the Ukrainian entertainment channel in 2008, called TVi.

The two ended up in a protracted legal fight over control of the channel and the fees it paid to broadcast the TV serials produced by Gusinsky's production company. A New York state court ruled Kagalovsky wrongfully took control of the channel from Gusinsky. The channel was later taken over by government insiders in 2013 and stripped of its broadcast license three years later.

Gusinsky's financial condition worsened after Lesin renegotiated the Russian TV contracts for Gusinsky's serials in 2014, Kagalovsky said.

"When we worked together, it was clear that he was never [a] good businessman," he said. "Gusinsky was a partner, but he was a bullshit partner."

Among the legal fights Gusinsky has been tangled in:

• A Luxembourg bank owned by another oligarch, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, won a lawsuit in British court in 2022 against Gusinsky and his lawyers over a $10 million debt Gusinsky defaulted on. In August 2024, a London court stated Gusinsky had been avoiding payment of the judgment using a "sufficiently dishonest or underhand[ed] scheme."
• A Russian-born, London-based real estate agent sued Gusinsky in U.S. and British courts, accusing him of failing to repay more than $230,000, including interest, that he had borrowed; at least two checks Gusinsky wrote to her bounced. The case was initially thrown out on a technicality, but is now under appeal.
• A Connecticut bank sued Gusinsky, accusing him of defaulting on a $4.3 million mortgage on the second Greenwich house he bought from Lenskiy, while allowing Lenskiy and his wife to continue living there. Gusinsky later sought to evict Lenskiy, who in turn sought to secretly buy out the defaulted mortgage. The case is ongoing.
• Aleksandr Zheleznyak, a Russian banker who fled to the United States in 2015 amid accusations of fraud, claimed Gusinsky's son Ilya owes him more than $500,000; money he alleged ended up being transferred to Gusinsky himself. The case is ongoing.
• A former senior broadcast engineer successfully sued Gusinsky for more than $125,000 in back wages, then won a court order attaching a lien to a Connecticut home owned by Gusinsky's son. The fight over the lien is ongoing.
• A Florida boat yard sued Gusinsky for more than $400,000 in unpaid maintenance and storage fees on a 142-foot, $8.4 million luxury motor yacht with "wood-paneled interiors, five marble bathrooms (each with capacious soaking tubs), stainless-steel appliances, a lavish dining room…and an opulent main deck." The yacht's captain and crew later joined the lawsuit claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. The case is pending.
• A Connecticut office building landlord won a judgment against Gusinsky for $143,000 in unpaid rent.
• Financial services giant American Express sued Gusinsky for hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid credit card debts he and his associates incurred. Gusinsky bounced multiple checks in making payments. The debts were ultimately resolved.