Lev Parnas walked up to Joseph McBride outside the federal detention center in downtown Miami last Thursday, introduced himself as a man close to Trump world, and let the lawyer talk.
McBride talked. And what he said on Parnas’s camera confirmed the reporting Narativ published on July 19: before US Marshals put Andrew and Tristan Tate in handcuffs outside the James L. Knight Center, the brothers spent their week in Washington as guests of Paolo Zampolli — the president’s special envoy, the man who got Melania Trump her first US modeling visa and introduced her to Donald Trump.
McBride volunteered it. “Usually when they come from overseas, they come directly to Florida to meet with myself and Thomas Maniotis,” he said. “But in this instance, they went to DC first to meet with elected members of Congress, meet with friends and to attend many parties.” He kept going. “The last party that they were at, that Paolo hosted, was so exceptional, was so successful that they were holding court.” Everybody wanted a selfie. Then, in his own words: “They leave and they get arrested.”
Narativ put that week on video a month ago. The Tates’ own attorney has now put it on the record.
Parnas then said a name: Semion Mogilevich.
McBride did not ask who that was. He answered instead: “The closest relationship that Andrew and Tristan have with anybody in Romania is the judge and the prosecutor in that case. Any of that other stuff is just talk. It’s just hearsay. It’s just nonsense.”
The missing question is the story, Parnas told Zev. Watch the interrogations on the true-crime shows, he said — the husband who is told his wife has died and never asks how.
Mogilevich is not an obscure name. The FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list in October 2009 and removed him in December 2015, not because the case closed but because he lives somewhere the United States cannot reach him. The Bureau says he lives freely in Moscow. In a State Department cable published in 2010, the Ukrainian gas billionaire Dmytro Firtash told the American ambassador in Kyiv that he had needed, and received, permission from Mogilevich to set up his businesses. Firtash denies they were ever partners.
The second confrontation went the same way. Justin Waller — Andrew Tate’s business partner, the founder of a Louisiana steel construction firm, the public face of Tate’s online school — answered everything Parnas asked. He talked about the war, about NATO, about the Epstein files, about the president being boxed in. “You’ve got the midterms coming up,” Waller said. “I don’t think there’s much Trump can do.”
Then Parnas asked about Paolo Zampolli. “No, no, sorry.” Waller walked away.
That is the pattern Zev drew out across the hour: the two men closest to the Tates’ defense will discuss the President of the United States on camera, and go silent at the name of his envoy.
The rally they had come for drew about thirty people. Miami New Times counted them against online claims of thousands. Myron Gaines brought a bullhorn he never needed.
None of this began last week. In February 2025, Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell raised the Tate brothers with Romania’s foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu — first by phone, then in person at the Munich Security Conference — according to the Financial Times. Hurezeanu confirmed the conversation and denied any pressure. Romania lifted the brothers’ travel ban on February 27 and they flew to Florida. The charges were never dropped.
They are fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where Andrew Tate faces seven counts of rape and nineteen charges relating to indecent images of a child, and Tristan Tate faces rape, sexual assault and trafficking counts. Magistrate Judge Lauren Louis postponed their detention hearing to August 27. Britain has until mid-September to hand its evidence to the State Department.
McBride said the part that explains the panic. “Trump doesn’t win the election without the manosphere,” he told Parnas. And: “You don’t betray your battlefield generals.”
The lawyer is not afraid of the judge. He is afraid of a phone call that isn’t coming.
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