Tonight we published Chapter 9 of The Greatest Heist, Book 2 — “The Windfall” — and sat down with two people who helped build the picture: Lev Parnas, who did business with Cantor Fitzgerald in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer, who has spent months in the Epstein files alongside us.
The chapter reveals that Howard Lutnick’s Cantor Fitzgerald appears to have been operating as a Russian front — a primary dealer with direct access to the Federal Reserve that two separate FBI whistleblowers, four months apart, linked to Russian money laundering.
Read the full chapter:
Lev took us back to the 1990s, when the Russian mob was flooding into Wall Street through unregulated pink sheet stocks and penny stocks. The Italian mob got there first, but the Russians took it a step further — they had real money to invest, and they understood the system. Pump and dump, boiler rooms, shell companies. The schemes were identical at every level. What Jordan Belfort did with penny stocks, the same network did with sovereign wealth funds and toxic mortgage securities. As Lev put it: it doesn’t matter if it’s a pink sheet stock or a New York Stock Exchange stock — the scheme is the same, the information is the same, the way it’s done is the same. Just different levels.
This Deep Dive is for paid subscribers. Read more below.
