John, Jessica and the “Bad Wolf”

Michela Ag Iaccarino

For some years the fur of what has been called the “bad wolf” has been tricolor: red, white and blue, like the flag of the Russian Federation.

John Mark Dougan replies from Siberia while transporting a small boat to Moscow by car: “it’s a kind of canoe for an acquaintance of mine: an oligarch.” If you ask who the tycoon is, he replies: “he is neither famous nor known, except in his sector.” Dougan says he loves what he has under his eyes at the moment: Vladivostock, which he will leave soon. The former American policeman speaks calmly from Russia, the country that granted him asylum when he escaped from the United States, escaping an arrest warrant and the handcuffs of FBI agents.

Dougan’s Story

Dougan’s fate has been bizarre and filled with an insane amount of out-of-the-ordinary details, which he swears to be all true. As for his own story, Dougan says of himself that he was born almost 50 years ago in Delaware and was raised “like a cowboy”, but, at the same time, he informs me that he is the son of an airplane pilot who until 1984 transported drugs to South America.

After poor grades in school, he joins the Marine at age 20. After four years, he leaves the corps and sits in front of a computer screen, becoming a computer programmer. Then in 2002 he puts on a uniform again and enlists as a sheriff’s officer in Palm Beach County, Florida. After seven years, in 2009, he decides to denounce some of his colleagues for fraud, abuse of power, violence against members of ethnic minorities arresting people on false charges. Dougan talks about it with his boss: Sheriff Ric Bradshaw – who doesn’t move a finger against them – then starts talking about it with Palm Beach Post journalists.

Dougan leaves the police and becomes a full-time administrator of Pbsotalk, a site where – anonymously – the county police could report without consequences colleagues involved in controversies, racism, corruption, cover-ups and scandals. When Dougan begins to collect sensitive information and secret documents from colleagues, he does so on August 24, 2015 under the pseudonym of “Bad Wolf”. He thus becomes the digital safe deposit box of photos and videos demonstrating excessive power and abuse by departmental officers, but he also becomes the owner of a mine of secrets. Among the policemen who decide to entrust him with files and information, there is Joe Recarey, the detective who will prosecute more than others all the crimes committed by the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Dougan says he met Detective Recarey in 2010: “I took those files, but I never looked at them. He knew that I would not give information, he trusted me, he trusted my silence and like other policemen, he entrusted them to me. On the Epstein case, all the journalists who approached me to interview me did not understand one thing: I was not part of the team that investigated the billionaire, it was Joseph Recarey, a policeman of the Palm Beach police, an agency that often collaborated with ours.”

Sheriff Bradshaw’s office where Dougan was employed, did not investigate Epstein, but was sometimes in charge of his surveillance, and, says Dougan, if you want to facilitate someone and allow them to violate house arrest, – to which the American tycoon who abused dozens of girls was sentenced at the time – you do it by choosing men who, at the right time, will look the other way.

Dougan’s Problems in Florida Intensify

While Dougan is still in America, sensitive information and audio records are leaked in which Florida cops admit of violating the law. The recordings begin to appear on the web and in the local press. American secret agencies blame an alleged non-existent Russian hacker for violating sensitive data. It was false says Dougan: “there wasn’t a Russian hacker, there wasn’t even a hacker”.

One thing Dougan forgets to mention on the phone, but the Daily Beast doesn’t forget to write, is that Dougan used a voice modulator to sound like a woman and flirt with the sheriff on the phone, in exchange for compromising information. He introduced himself as Jessica, a girl from New York. For the newspaper Dougan is not a digital prodigy, but only an expert on “camouflage and lies”.

Dougan’s Escape to Russia

The secret services begin to keep Dougan under observation when they identify him as the “bad wolf”. When 45 FBI agents break into his home to seize hard drives and computers, he begins a daring three-week escape: he takes trains and buses, even small planes, and wears blonde wigs. From Canada he reaches Russia which gives him asylum.

Dougan swears he did all this on his own and to a precise question, repeated three times, he replies for three times the same answer: “they checked my story, they granted asylum, I have no interaction with Russian officers, I don’t know anyone in the Russian government. “.

Dougan, for his meeting with Recarey, will end up in many international headlines when he briefly enters the sights of the British crown and MI6, London’s intelligence service. The Times newspaper speculated that Dougan could have provided the Kremlin men with documents on Prince Andrew’s sexual abuse, a file that the detective Recarey involved in the investigation of the tycoon could have provided the cop.

Dougan: Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself

MI6 has not come to any other conclusions, at least, it has not made them public. For Dougan it is obvious that Epstein did not commit suicide: “I believe that the American secret services were aware of his blackmails against influential men, politicians, members of the elite. Instead of stopping it, I believe they started using it for their own purposes. There’s no other reason Epstein wasn’t arrested earlier. I am not a conspiratorial fool, I just believe that the billionaire has committed enormous crimes, but the intelligence is covering more serious ones ”.

On the rest, Dougan has always been vague: interviewed by many reporters, he said that those documents – including those of detective Recarey – are in a two-byte digital safe of which he has made hidden copies, which remain very far from him and encrypted: “As far as I know the files on Epstein are on the server, they were entrusted to me by Recarey, but I didn’t look at them, I was just the repository of my colleagues’ stories”.

Recarey cannot deny or confirm: he died suddenly at the age of 50 “after a short illness”, the department said. If you ask what was in the files, Dougan replies: “I don’t know, I didn’t watch them.” If you ask again: “Did you receive them and have you ever looked at them?”, he answers: “Correct. Like those who work in the bank do not know the contents of the safety deposit boxes. I was a safe not only for him, but for many policemen ”.

Barred from America

“Bad wolf” in Russia, from a digital alias, has become a profession and the title of a book that has sold many copies especially in America, in which Dougan can no longer set foot. In the land of stars and stripes he left behind, he risks a sentence that would keep him, more or less, almost a century in prison: his estimate is 95 years for illegal wire-taping of law enforcement agencies, a federal crime .

He keeps repeating that his new home, Russia, is beautiful: “I love nature and people, there are very few things I don’t like here”.

How much love Dougan has for Russia is repeated in his videos that sometimes end up on TV. Honored as a “computer genius” and a truth fighter by the government-supported channel RT, Dougan is the protagonist of a popular documentary that many have seen in the Russian Federation.

His version of the story he tells it in a hoarse voice many times, to anyone who asks to repeat it, perhaps out of the love he still has for the American First Amendment. It’s unclear who the villain in the story is, and you never remember that sometimes everyone is.

The Epstein case remains fulls of shadows, Sheriff Bradshaw remains in his post, tips keep coming at Pbso.