KILLED - Episode 2: The Town

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

The Aspen Times buries reporting on a mysterious, Soviet-born billionaire. Featuring Rick Carroll and Roger Marolt.To submit your KILLED story, visit www.KILLEDStories.com.

No one person can kill a story. In order for a magazine or a newspaper to withhold reporting from its deserving public, an accord of sorts must be reached by several individuals, and all of them are afraid of something. A wealthy developer with a pristine chain of celebrity-loved luxury hotels, fears his reputation is on the line. A new publisher, reporting to a new owner, fears ruffling feathers just months into the job. And a veteran reporter, fears losing the newsrooms he's called home for 25 years.

They may not have the same reasons, but together they decide on a shared fate. And in this case, a prize kill doesn't just bury the story. It buries a 140-year-old institution. From Justin Harmon and audio chuck, this is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life. Season 2, Episode 2, The Town. This is one of the world's great skiing complexes. Four major skieries lie within 14 miles of the best known ski town in America. I'm talking about a little place called Aspen.

I'm talking about a little place called Aspen. Ah, Aspen. A place where the beer flows like wine. A place where during the year, a tight knit crew of approximately 7,000 locals live in unspoiled splendor. A place where Hunter S. Thompson once saw himself as the obvious choice for Sheriff of this generous, grass-oriented community. Where for years, the town's oldest and most prominent paper, The Aspen Times, was nestled inside a royal purple Victorian, just blocks from the base of Gandalfa dotted Aspen Mountain. My name is Rick Carroll. I'm managing editor of the Aspen Times.

My area of coverage typically is business, civil courts, local politics, investigative reporting. Rick Carroll moved to Aspen 25 years ago, after falling in love with the mountains during a brief childhood stint in North Carolina. You'll notice the twang. I grew up in North Carolina in Louisiana, but I moved to Aspen from Dallas where I was working at the Dallas Business Journal, and that's where I cut my teeth on investigative reporting and the power of public records. teeth on investigative reporting and the power of public records. I was only really planning to stay in Aspen for one or two years and get more experience, but life happens and I

liked living here and here we are 25 years later. Rake is a journalist if I've ever met one. Scrappy, scrupulous, and always prepared with a chief of notes to back up his claims. And he's never had a hard time sniffing out scoops in a town with so many contradictions. During the high seasons, it behaves like a city much larger than one with a year-round population of 7,000 residents. It's always been Uber rich, but since the pandemic, he started seeing just a complete shift in town. It felt like it used to be the 1% of the 1% and now it's the 1% of the 1% of the 1%.

There's plenty to write about in this town with the people who live here full-time, part-time, the visitors, the amount of money that comes here, the celebrity appeal. The people in this town, you know, they're news junkies, they really do care about a lot of things that happen here with our government and city council meetings and so on. Aspenites, they like to stay informed. After all, it's Colorado's last remaining two newspaper town. And raking the times, they do real journalism. They whistle blow, they belly ache.

They like to get up and everyone's shit. Wrote about Charlie Sheen when he wielded a knife on Brooke Mueller. Charlie Sheen spent the better part of Christmas day in a Colorado jail cell. I wrote a series of articles a few years ago that led to a major shakeup at the Aspen School District. I actually solved a bank robbery case for the local police department.

I think what gets my hackles up is when people aren't being honest or transparent during my course of reporting. When people are outright lying or misleading you and if someone's not playing straight, then it's our job to figure out what the truth is. In 25 years, Rick has worked at only two places. The Aspen Daily News for a decade, and then its rival, the Aspen Times. And back when Rick started at the Times, well, it was a groovy little place. It had a purple facade in between the legendary hotel Jerome on Main Street and the equal legendary Carl's Pharmacy. There are two levels on it it or actually three. You know, you could hear the wood crack when you walked on the floors or up the stairs and we were tucked away in our cave on the upper floor

there. You had little nooks and crannies and it was a bus lane little newsroom. But in January of 2022, his beloved newspaper was officially sold to West Virginia-based Ogden newspapers, in an acquisition that included 53 other daily papers across the country. It was a mighty blow to the times, which had long since been tossed from the Purple Ram Shackle, and was now situated in an office building called the Motherload. It's almost like working in a law firm or bank or that's how it felt the first few days with cubicles and everything. One thing Ogden didn't acquire, the ten or so newspaper-owned subsidized housing units that permitted journalists to live in Aspen on a newsperson salary.

But Rick kept his head down, happily reporting to his editor, David Krause. And one day in early March, while mining local public records for noteworthy transactions like he always did, Rick saw something interesting, quite interesting. On a Friday afternoon, around three or four o'clock, I was looking up the transactions and there was one that jumped off the page and it was for 76 million plus for a piece of land.

Not just any piece of land. This small piece of land and the people of Aspen have history. This one acre of land was presented to Aspen voters in March 2019. Jeff Gorsuch, cousin of Neil Gorsuch, along with two other locals wanted to build a Gorsuch house there. Gorsuch House. Pitched as half commercial enterprise, a boutique hotel with 320,000 square feet of commercial space, half-restoration

project. We believe the Gorsa Chal's plays a major role in the revitalization of the West Side of the Mountain, which is perfect because this is where Schieng and Aspen began 60 years ago. The group promised to replace Lift 1A, the successor to the historical chairlift that serviced the 1950 World Alpine Championships, the ski event that helped make Aspen famous. The Aspen City Council had approved this, the citizens formed a referendum because they didn't like the decision.

And it went to voters. During the campaign, Jeff Gorsuch, one of the faces of this knocked on people's doors, appeared in debates. They were running on the Gorsuch name. A relative of Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, is making a name for himself, an Aspen. Jeff Gorsuch, he's a cousin. This was going to be the Gorsuch House.

And they really ran a hell of a campaign and in campaign hard in the edged out of victory by 26 votes. Aspen Mountain received the go ahead to start work on a new chairlift. The brand new lift was in 2019 in the summer of 2021 Norway Island led by Jeff Gorsuch acquired that piece of property for $10 million from the Aspen skiing company. But now, months later, the same $10 million property was selling for over $76 million to an unknown entity named Aspen City Holdings. Who? So I looked up Aspen City Holdings on the state secretary of corporations

It didn't really tell me much. It just told me the formation day said it was registered as a foreign entity because it originally registered in Delaware But on the warranty deed there there was an address, which was in Miami. So, Google the address, and then that led to the OCO group. The OCO group is to develop or build some mon hotels and so on. You know, a man resorts. Those gloriously hushed and prohibitively expensive retreats all around the world. If you look at the formal aspects of the building in terms of the sculptural nature, it's very fluid, it's very good. We're going to build my ring that's there so you can keep your boards on this cycle, luxury living. And the Aman Resorts are run by a mysterious, Soviet-born man named Vladislav Daronin.

We building a product which not exists on the market. A handsome, cleft chin billionaire in a button-down, who once dated Naomi Campbell, and then literally built her a $140 million spaceship house in a Russian forest after an architect sketched it on the back of a napkin. So welcome to my home! To get anything done in Aspen it takes a lot of work and money. The land was worth more. It had entitlements where they can build a hotel and did that elevate the price and make it worth $75 million? I can't say, but it was worth a lot more than $10 million when Daroni bought it. I know what you're thinking. Good investment,

right? Like, that's business folks. But when I reached out to Daroni's team because I was asking what's the plans for the property, what's he going to do? His publicists said they were not aware of the sale. They later got back and said he has no comment at this time. So the next day, the story ran and it reported that he was the founder of Capital Group Development. A Moscow-based business and management advice company. And his publicists reached out to me the next day and said he didn't do business in Russia anymore and that should be removed. Remember, this was March 2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine.

Russian-born celebrities were condemning the war left and right, and Biden was literally threatening to seize stateside oligarchs' mansions and their megayots. Russian oligarchs, these are bad guys. We're gonna seize their yachts, their luxury homes, and other ill-begotten gates. They were asking us to take this letter down or remove oligarch from this article. Of course, that pink my curiosity, because they were pretty adamant that those connections be removed. Rick made the changes as requested.

He removed any mention of Darronin's connection to real estate in Moscow. But he also kept digging. And soon, while poking around in the public court files in an unrelated Miami civil suit, he uncovered something confusing. If Daronin stopped doing business in Russia back in 2013, then why did he still own one-third of Moscow-based capital group development? Rick sent Daronin's PR a series of questions via email. Within days, Daronin filed a lawsuit.

A day or two later, the company that owns the Aspen Times, were sued for libel by Daronin. The same day I let them know that this lawsuit was filed, I'd also filed my story about how he actually does have ties in Russia. And this is when it got really messy. The very next day, Daronin made another bold transfer. And there was Rick tracking his every move. One day after Mr. Daronin sued us, emphatically stating that he has not had

any Russian business involvement since 2013 or 14, he transferred one-third ownership in capital group development to his mother. I felt that this would clear us. We would debunk this entire libel lawsuit that claim that we were weaponizing his Russian connection into something greater. Rick felt vindicated, but the higher ups had Ogden, the people who own the Aspen Times. They somehow still didn't care. Healthy skepticism and heavy scrutiny are entirely warranted on all of this and questioning. Did you do a follow-up call?

Did you check this? But my story didn't get any of that. It was just like, we don't want it. This is a witch hunt. There wasn't even a response filed to Doronin's lawsuit. That never got that far. I was told that we're not going to run this story because there's no point in aggravating Mr. Daronin and any coverage about Daronin's affairs in Russia had no bearing on what he wants to do at Aspen Mountain. And my response was I don't think either one of these areas of coverage is mutually exclusive, but readers do want to know who this person is.

We had certified information showing he transferred this ownership and we couldn't even write about the lawsuit itself. It felt like sort of me taking a picture of Doron and Poutin together having tea that they weren't going to run anything about this. These decisions were coming from the newly minted publisher. A former freelance contributor named Allison Patio. As well as corporate. In their words, they did not want to go to battle with a multi-millionaire or billionaire. They thought he would just keep bleeding us and bleeding us. They just wanted it to go away. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

After nearly two months of closed-door discussions, real estate developer Vladislav Daronin and the Aspen Times settled out of court. The libel suit was withdrawn and all parties signed a non-disclosure agreement. Though some elements of the arrangement were communicated to the staff. They reached a resolution that included removing some letters online, fixing a column.

Another story I wrote that headline got removed to say something about how Doronin has luxury hotelier connections, which is one of the most vanilla headlines in newspaper history. Another part of this settlement was that Duron and his people need to be contacted by us at least 48 hours in advance before we write anything about him. For me, I felt like we crossed the Rubicon and the company did not have our back. I felt like to use a play on a legal term.

They viewed everything in the light most favorable to Vladislav Daronin. Representatives for Oco Group and Ogden Communications did not respond to Kild's list of queries about the nature of this agreement. Then Rick found himself in an awkward spot, a mid-tension with the new owners and health issues. Rick's editor, David Kraus resigned. After much convincing, long-time arts and culture editor Andrew

Travers agreed to take the top role, with one important caveat. He wanted assurances from the company that he would have absolute editorial independence. The lawsuit settled on May 31st. His start date was scheduled to be June 20th. But a lot can change in 20 days. Enter columnist Roger Merolt. Roger Merolt, he is written a column for the Aspen time to roughly 15 years. He's part of the Old Aspen family that's been here for generations. His column can be irreverent, philosophical, a lot of it's about skiing, a lot of it's about just how Aspen's changing. He can be a fly in the appointment for a lot of people.

I like to say that I make my living as a CPA, I make my enemies as a newspaper columnist. That's Roger. Roger was unaware that we were being sued for libel. And so Roger wrote a column about who is this new owner? He didn't even identify her own. And he just said, we wanna know who this guy is because this is a Seriously a hot piece of property here that voters decided on and we don't know who this guy is

I was just pretty much calling him out for being rude for not not coming forward and letting us know a little bit more about him and His intentions with the property so I submitted the column and it didn't run and that was a little surprising. The first thing I thought was maybe I had forgot to send it in. Actually, he wrote two columns and both were killed just like Rick stories. Roger at the time said, okay, I understand. It's fine. But then he started to think more like, I don't know if I agree with what's going on here. So Roger sent me an email the first week of June and it had the email string about his column getting killed and he thought that the email would give readers some

insight on how this all went down. It was a pretty ballsy idea. Roger wanted to show with receipts just how Ogden tried to censor its own employees. He thought readers should actually see the email traffic. I just thought that it was an interesting and concise way to let the readers know exactly what happened and it flowed pretty well and it portrayed a newsroom drama that I thought people would enjoy. Rick didn't know what to think. I was like, you know, I'm going to just give this to Andrew. I am too close to this.

I'm too pissed off. Just let's see what Andrew does. What he wanted to do was like, okay, I'll run this threat of emails with the two columns that were spiked. I did say, you sure we want to be doing this. I mean, these are internal company emails and we know how Ogden has responded to this already. And his reply to me was, no, it's the right thing to do. We got to get it out. And it was like, okay, let's see where the chips fall. On June 10, 2022, three months after Rick started digging into Vladislav Daronit and 10 days before his official start date, Aspen Times editor-to-be Andrew Travers published an exposé on his own newspaper. He included emails of staffers, bashing Ogden, and its editorial decisions. And we have an editorial meeting that same day. It's on a Friday. It's 11 a.m. and we haven't got

any static about what Andrew has done. And Andrew's feeling good. Like, okay, we can maybe start creating our own path here about Daron and just come clean as much as we can with the Aspen readers about what's happening. Roger felt good about it too. You got to work that day and my email box was full and people were just really interested in that. And I thought, man, this is great. This is great for the paper. This is what they want. Because mind you before this, the daily news had finally got wind that we were being sued

and wrote a story about it. And then the Denver Post had already written about the libel suit. And it was just a drip, drip, drip. It was building up more people were hearing what was happening here. And then Allison went to Andrew and said that Scott Stanford was coming into town and he wanted to meet both Andrew and me. Scott Stanford, the group publisher for Ogden Communications, aka their bosses boss.

And I remember Andrew saying, I thought you had my back on this in Allison's cell. Well, you didn't tell me we were going to print the emails. We spoke with Patelo and she says she was aware of the general concept of this kind of unusual column. In an interview with Aspen Public Radio, Betio would later call this moment a quote, communication breakdown. She said, I was not aware of the extent of emails that we're going to be included.

So Scott Stanford appears and is probably about a 90 minute drive from where he came from and he met with Andrew for, I don't know, two to five minutes. And I see Andrew leave and I said, what's going on? He said, I just got fired and my jaw dropped. I was next and Scott met with me and talked about how trust was a major issue here and he had to let Andrew go because he couldn't trust him because of the internal emails that were run. This was a three-hour conversation and several times you let me know that my check would be

arriving the next day and that would be my check through the end of my employment because I was going to get fired too. During the course of the conversation though, Scott Stanford decided that he wasn't going to fire me because if I had left, I don't know how they would have put out a paper or found content to put in the paper because we were sucked to dry by then. Our editor was gone, our editor to be was gone. The incoming editor of the Aspen Times was fired last week, shortly after he had accepted,

but not yet started, the top job in the newsroom. And here I was, the interim editor, and a role I really felt awkward in. You know, there was survivors guilt there, of course. But I had nowhere to really go. It would have been great if we could have marched out of the newsroom together, but I had nowhere to really go. It would have been great if we called, could have marched out of the newsroom together, but we are actually working folks in Aspen who have to support ourselves and our family. I wasn't going to fall on a sword for columns that Roger wrote. This is nothing against

Rogers' work or anything like this, but I felt that I had a much more important story brewing here about Mr. Doran's connections to Russia. When asked about Andrew's firing, Stanford told Rival Publication the Aspen Daily News, quote, I'm not going to talk about internal personnel matters. I just can't. He continued, what I want to focus on is covering the community

and what's happening in Aspen and the surrounding area. The same day that Rick says he was nearly fired, his publisher called with one last request. What Andrew had posted was still online. Alison didn't know how to take it down. So she asked me to do it. This was just a matter of me pushing a button basically. But I didn't want to do it.

If I had not done it, then I probably would have been fired. And so I did it. And when I had the newsroom staff over that Sunday night, I have to be transparent here. I was like, yeah, I took this down. I was instructed to. I feel like there's blood on my hands. This is Killed, the podcast that brings dead stories back to life.

Rick Carroll had narrowly escaped getting fired. In a matter of months, the newsroom he had called home for over a decade was in shambles. Rick wasn't in great shape either. I was just drained from all of it. Just drained from the newsroom fallout, what felt like the company gaslighting me, telling me this wasn't a story, the lawsuit, how we were perceived by the public in running a newspaper every day that people are coming to to test. 18 local politicians after Andrew's termination said that they were going to be boycotting the Aspen Times and some of them said they wouldn't even be giving any interviews to reporters. We've been a really strong newspaper year earlier and it all just crumbled. And I was near my wits in by that time.

Somehow rake in the paper soldiered on. We had brought a new editor on board finally. Solid guy named Don Rogers. The third editor in as many months, but who's counting? And so anyway, the weekend after dawn's first week, I just had a difficult time and close to a nervous breakdown. And my good wife said, you need to take days off no matter what. I was like, I know, just take next Wednesday through Sunday off and just recharge and gather yourself. And I was like, yeah, you're right. I do need to do that. And I let Don in my publisher know that I was going to have to take that next Wednesday through Sunday off for mental health. And they said, okay, that Monday David Kross reached out to me and let me know that the New York Times

was working on a story. The whispers about the billionaire Bigfooting a small town had made its way all the way to the Grey Lady. The New York Times was on to Rick's story, and now a reporter was actually boots on the ground in Aspen. I told Don the New York Times is working on a story about Doronan's business connections to Russia. I don't know when the story's coming out, but it's coming out soon.

And I'm going to use my days off to work on this story. And we be available to read it this weekend, because we've got to get this sucker out. And the New York Times reporter reached out to me and we actually had a good conversation on my deck actually, the same place where I said there's blood on my hands. He had said that it was probably going to be running that next weekend. And so this story really had to get moving. For the first time in months, Rick actually saw the light at the end of the tunnel,

and he wasn't leaving anything to chance. I was finally writing this story again, and I got it by a first amendment lawyer too, for him to read. He gave it some line edits, First Amendment lawyer, too, for him to read. He gave it some line edits. And then I got it to Don that Sunday, and then he had to convince the company that this story needs to run, because otherwise, one of the world's most influential newspapers is gonna make us look like we're censoring another story about his ownership in capital group development. Our reputation was

enchambled by them and I think that the company finally realized that their strategy of just digging their feet in and not running these stories about Daronin wasn't working and this story could save a little face and so Don fought really hard to get that story in. And also the company attorney did too in West Virginia. After we went through the grinder by that Monday night around 9 o'clock, it finally got published. And my understanding was the New York Times had to recast their story based on that.

But that's what it took to get this story out. That's what it took. On August 9, 2022, five months after he first ever heard the name Vladislav Daronin. Rick was finally able to publish his reporting about the business man's enduring Russian ties and the great lengths he took to obscure them. It's a little weird, you know, the paper wouldn't publish this story for so long or just poo-pooed on it. And now all of a sudden, we're running this story

because I pushed for it. But this story, it had to get out. And that's the most important thing, no matter what the medium is, is that the readers get this news, even though it's four months late. Of the reporting, Allison Patios had via email that quote, an earlier version of the story needed more reporting, as well as the support of an experienced editor before it was ready for print. In a competitive market, she wrote, being first is good, but being accurate is critical. In this situation, we were both.

About a week later, Andrew Travers wrote a story for the Atlantic titled, How to Kill a Newspaper. He included the anecdote about Rick admitting he had blood on his hands. The final line of his peace reads, suppression of news creates disinformation, and Ogden is the gatekeeper for communities in 18 states. If it did it here, the company could do it anywhere. Maybe it already has. I'm still researching Darounan and there's a lot of interesting stuff there, but the story destroyed the newsroom through a libel lawsuit. A man of tremendous means brought a once proud organization to its knees.

Next time on Killed. You know, I knew going against Yana Thel was sort of a big thing to do, but I also thought, well, this is history. They can easily say, you know, we've changed. Killed is an audio chuck production, created and written by Justin Harmon and edited by Alistair Sherman. You can find links to all the published stories featured on the first and second seasons of Killed

at KilledStories.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? you