The Hotel of Secrets and the Soulmate of Ghislaine Maxwell

There is a precise moment when the story of Umar Dzhabrailov stops being the story of a Chechen-Russian oligarch with a murky past and becomes something harder to frame. And it is when his name, which few people outside Russia knew, appears in the Epstein Files. But just as people were beginning to talk about him, on March 2, 2026, around three in the morning, Dzhabrailov is found with a gunshot wound to the head in the luxury residential complex Vesper Tverskaya, on 1st Tverskaya-Yamskaya Street, in Moscow.

He would die in hospital shortly afterward, after more than thirty minutes of resuscitation attempts, having initially been admitted as an unidentified person. It would be his bodyguards who later identified him. The Russian authorities would close the case as a suicide. His daughter Alvina, a model based in Munich, posted a video on Instagram claiming her father did not kill himself: "He was silenced because of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein and Trump."

Today we return to one of the longest-running topics in this newsletter: everything that very few people are reporting about the Epstein case. At the bottom of this issue, you'll find a selection of our previous coverage on this story.

This issue is written by Sacha and edited by Luigi.

The hotel that united two worlds

Umar Dzhabrailov was born on June 28, 1958, in Grozny, in the Soviet Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. His father had been deported to Kazakhstan in 1944 during the Stalinist Chechen deportations, but had later returned to Chechnya. From Grozny, Dzhabrailov moved to Moscow, where he quickly built a career: he first served in the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces, then graduated with honors in 1985 from MGIMO, the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, the breeding ground of the Russian diplomatic elite. He spoke English, German, and Italian.

In 1992, Dzhabrailov founded Danako, a company trading petroleum products. The turning point came in 1993, when the mayor of Moscow took control of the Soviet stake in one of the city's most important hotels, the Radisson Slavyanskaya, and installed Dzhabrailov as his representative. In the early 1990s, the Radisson Slavyanskaya was the symbol of a post-Soviet Moscow opening up to the West. It was a 50-million-dollar hotel, owned by the City of Moscow but also by a company belonging to American entrepreneur Paul Tatum. When Dzhabrailov took control of the hotel, Tatum began to be pushed out.

In 1995, the American businessman was physically expelled from the hotel by armed guards, and on Valentine's Day of that same year, one of Tatum's bodyguards was stabbed and received a note: "Tell Paul it's time to go home." Tatum responded with full-page advertisements in Moscow newspapers, calling Dzhabrailov a mafioso and warning that he could be killed at any moment. The FBI and Interpol had classified Dzhabrailov as a member of Chechen organized crime.

The following year, on November 3, 1996, at five in the afternoon, Paul Tatum was struck by eleven Kalashnikov bullets to the head and neck in a pedestrian underpass near the Kievskaya metro station, three hundred meters from the hotel. He usually wore a bulletproof vest, but that day he did not. His bodyguards did not intervene. The killer dropped the weapon and fled.

The murder was never solved. The NSA classified documents on Tatum's death as "Top Secret." Dzhabrailov was banned from the United States. After Tatum's death, he and the Moscow government took undisputed control of the hotel, and Dzhabrailov even blocked a planned memorial ceremony for the victim.

The Radisson Slavyanskaya was no ordinary hotel. It had been built on an unfinished Intourist construction site, which, according to intelligence historians and KGB defectors, systematically functioned as a cover for the secret services. Its facilities had been surveillance environments by design, with bugged rooms, staff filing reports on foreign guests, and management selected by the apparatus. The hotel that Tatum and Dzhabrailov were fighting over with armed guards and newspaper advertisements had been built, structurally, as an intelligence-gathering tool on whoever stayed there.

And among those who stayed there were American presidents. Bill Clinton stopped at the Radisson Slavyanskaya during at least two Moscow summits, in 1994 and 1995, together with Vice President Gore and Secretary of State Christopher. The NBC and Reuters newsrooms operated from its floors. Moscow's most sophisticated satellite communications ran through its servers. On August 19, 1991, during the attempted coup against Gorbachev, it was Tatum himself who provided Yeltsin with the only satellite link to Washington, through the Radisson's technical infrastructure. No declassified document confirms the presence of hidden microphones in that particular building. But anyone familiar with Russian intelligence doctrine knows that a fifty-percent state-owned hotel, built on Intourist foundations and frequented by American presidents and international news directors, was not left without eyes and ears.

Despite that suspicious death, in 2004 Dzhabrailov was elected senator of the Russian Federation, representing the Chechen Republic in the Federation Council, and became a member of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe. In 2000, he had also attempted to run for president against Putin, but received 0.08% of the vote.

The emails with Maxwell and Epstein's visit to Moscow

In the Epstein Files, Dzhabrailov's name appears in an email exchange from May 2001 between Dzhabrailov and Ghislaine Maxwell: "Dear Ghislaine, I'm back from London, planing 2 B in Moscow. Really want 2 C U, but I need 2 know exactly when U arive, cause I want 2 take care of U and arrange welcoming things."

Ghislaine Maxwell replied the following day: "Umar Sorry that we did not come last week. Got side tracked and ended up in France. However we Jeffrey Tom and I are coming next week arriving Fri. Will you be around and can we get together?". Maxwell confirms her intention to bring Epstein to Moscow as Dzhabrailov's guest. Dzhabrailov's phone number was already in Epstein's address book. The files also contain a photograph of Dzhabrailov shirtless, which he himself would identify as taken "around 1990 during karate training."

Following Maxwell's conviction in 2021-2022, Dzhabrailov had made public statements that today carry a certain weight: "I knew Epstein. He was introduced to me by Ghislaine Maxwell, a soulmate. But I could never have imagined that they were partners, that she was involved in finding those girls. I am sorry that Ghislaine, the most fascinating woman, received a life sentence."

The expression "soulmate" is not used loosely. Dzhabrailov moved within a social network that included Naomi Campbell (with whom he had a relationship beginning in 1995), Sean "Diddy" Combs (photographed together at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008), and through these circles he overlapped with the network of Russian oligarchs in contact with Epstein: Mikhail Prokhorov, Vladislav Doronin, and Oleg Deripaska.

A death without a note

What surrounds the recent death of Dzhabrailov is highly complex. In 2020 he had already attempted to take his own life and was admitted to the Sklifosovsky Institute (the same hospital where he would die in 2026) with knife wounds to his forearm. In August 2017, under the influence of cocaine, he had fired several shots at the ceiling of a room at the Moscow Four Seasons. He had been convicted of hooliganism, fined, expelled from the United Russia party, and progressively marginalized from public life.

At the time of his death, the Telegram channel SHOT reported that his bank accounts had been frozen by the tax authorities on February 20, roughly ten days earlier, over a debt of 40,000 rubles — a few hundred dollars — while his companies had accumulated tax debts exceeding 190 million rubles. The channel Mash reported that Dzhabrailov had sent a message to his bodyguards announcing his intention to take his own life.

And yet beside the body lay an "awarded" 9mm Luger, a different weapon from the Yarygin pistol that had been confiscated from him in 2017. The specialist outlet Caucasian Knot noted that no representative of the Chechen leadership attended the funeral, a significant circumstance: Dzhabrailov belonged to the Benoi clan, the same as Ramzan Kadyrov, and in Chechen tradition attending the funeral of a fellow clan member is an obligation.

Despite all of this, the Russian authorities quickly closed the case as a suicide. Western media immediately noted the connection to Epstein, frequently placing the word "suicide" in quotation marks. No official statement came from the Kremlin, the Federation Council, or from Kadyrov.

The death of Umar Dzhabrailov adds to a long list of deaths linked to Epstein that, with every new name, becomes increasingly difficult to dismiss as mere coincidence. He too, like so many others in Jeffrey Epstein's circle departs — including the pedophile financier himself — taking many secrets with him. In this case, above all, secrets about one of the undisputed protagonists of this entire affair: the woman he himself called his soulmate.

Until the next Debrief,

Luigi & Sacha

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