Hotel Shooting Shakes Up Mystery of Fake Heiress Who Duped Trump

An abandoned charity for schoolchildren in the Dominican Republic. A mothballed housing development in small-town Quebec. A litany of companies that seem to exist in name only. An elaborate infiltration of Mar-a-Lago. A long list of lawsuits, counter-lawsuits, restraining orders, and criminal charges.

And now, a mysterious shooting linked to one of the most infamous figures in Montreal’s organized crime world.

At the middle of it all is Valeriy Tarasenko, who first gained notoriety over his links to Inna Yashchyshyn, the fake heiress who waltzed into Donald Trump’s Florida estate last year and posed in a photo with the former U.S. president in Mar-a-Lago. After news of the security breach made headlines around the world, Tarasenko turned against Yashchyshyn, his former business partner and alleged ex-lover, accusing her of being a “con artist” and spy who worked for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yashchyshyn, in turn, accused Tarasenko of being the abusive, manipulative mastermind behind the bizarre plot.

Now, Tarasenko seems to have fallen into a bewildering scandal of his own. Last Friday, the Russian-born entrepreneur was shot in the parking lot of a luxury resort in the sleepy Quebec town of Estérel, an hour north of Montreal. He survived, but suffered significant injuries. Tarasenko’s lawyer says his client knows the man who was initially charged with the shooting, a notorious figure in Montreal’s underworld.

Two sources who spoke to The Daily Beast say Tarasenko’s business activities have long been a recipe for disaster. According to multiple judgements in the Quebec court system, Tarasenko and his ex-wife, Anna Kovalenko, who remained his business partner after their apparent split, took money from a variety of sources—money that never seemed to go to the business and charitable purposes for which they were intended.

Just what was Valeriy Tarasenko up to?

Tarasenko arrived in Montreal with his only daughter in early 2007. Kovalenko, his ex-wife at the time, had arrived a year earlier and enrolled at Concordia University to study political science. Their resettlement was financed entirely by Kovalenko’s stepparents, Olga and Yury Manakhov.

A retired Soviet Navy captain, Yury Manakhov had gone on to found a Moscow-based fishing company and, according to court filings, “made a fortune.” That wealth helped him enter the bureaucratic fast lane when he began the process of immigrating to Canada around 2007.

In the years that followed, Manakhov sent his stepdaughter more than $1 million. That bought her a condo in Montreal, another in Florida, a house in the Dominican Republic, a luxury car, and an array of other expenses and gifts.

Around that time, Kovalenko remarried Tarasenko while her relationship with her stepfather soured. In court filings, Manakhov declared the newly rejoined couple “lazy.”

While Manakhov largely cut off his stepdaughter and son-in-law, the support didn’t end entirely. In 2010, he purchased six empty lots in Estérel, for around $25,000, and transferred them to Kovalenko.

From their arrival in Canada, Kovalenko and Tarasenko began registering corporations, although they never seemed to carry on much business. In 2007, they founded Bastion-M, a holding company registered to their condo in downtown Montreal. In 2010, they registered another corporation: the United Hearts of Mercy.

While the United Hearts of Mercy advertised itself as a “a registered charitable organization,” it was never registered as a charity in Canada, and 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status wasn’t granted in the United States until 2015.

The organization claimed to have done charitable work in Haiti, Ukraine, and the entire continent of Africa—at one point claiming that it was collecting funds to help rebuild the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, after a devastating fire in 2019—but there is little publicly available evidence of such expansive work. A Facebook page for the charity shows volunteers, wearing United Hearts of Mercy T-shirts, posing with schoolchildren in the Dominican Republic (where Kovalenko owned a home) and handing out takeout containers to street-involved people in Miami.

In 2011, Manakhov drew up a loan agreement with his stepdaughter, formally requesting she repay $370,000. She ignored it. The litigation would be tied up in court for years, with Manakhov moving to seize his stepdaughters’ various properties and Kovalenko going to court to prevent those moves. Manakhov told the court that his stepdaughter committed acts of “theft, signature forgery, bank fraud, automobile fire and threats.” The court would ultimately side with Manakhov, ordering the seizure and sale of two of Kovalenko’s condos and the plot of land in Estérel.

According to court filings, it was around this time that Kovalenko divorced Tarasenko once more—though sources who spoke to The Daily Beast said the pair continued to “work” together through those years.

One of the earliest directors of the United Hearts of Mercy, a fellow Russian émigré who resigned from the organization after approximately a year on the board, filed suit against Kovalenko in 2015. The former director alleged that he lent Kovalenko nearly $350,000, in cash, that was never repaid.

That money, Kovalenko said, would be used to build a housing development on the property she had been gifted by her stepfather, in Estérel. That development, as of last year, had still not broken ground.

According to the IRS, the charity took in no more than $50,000 per year between 2015 and 2020.

For all their years in Canada, it wasn’t clear what business Tarasenko and Kovalenko were actually involved in.

The sources familiar with the couple said that despite their troubled business dealings, the pair always seemed to have money. Court records show Kovalenko took out $75,000 in loans from one friend, an amount she was not asked to repay.

There was, however, one business ambition that seemed to get off the ground: an elaborate plan to kickstart a music career for their daughter, Sofiya, under the stage name “Sofiya Rothschild.” To promote her, the couple registered the company Rothschild Media Label in Florida in 2018.

And who did they name as director of the company? None other than Inna Yashchyshyn, the fake heiress who snuck into Mar-a-Lago.

Yashchyshyn’s role in the Rothschild Media Label was meant to help Sofiya become a pop star by infiltrating high society and creating buzz for Sofiya’s music career. Incredibly, the plan worked: Before long, Yashchyshyn was pictured on the golf course with Donald Trump as “Anna Rothschild.”

While Yashchyshyn’s hobnobbing may have originally been a success, her presence later raised alarms in Trump’s entourage. The infiltration of Mar-a-Lago was so seamless that Senator Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Post-Gazette he would raise the alarming lack of security during his briefings with the intelligence community.

As Yashchyshyn’s infiltration made headlines, and drew scrutiny of investigators in two countries on their business relationship with Tarasenko, the pair had a public falling out.

Images of seemingly forged passports, with Yashchyshyn’s pseudonym, were published. The OCCRP reported that the FBI was looking at evidence suggesting the United Hearts of Mercy—to which Yashcyshyn had been appointed a director—was a front for money laundering. Tarasenko accused Yashchyshyn of being a spy, without providing any evidence. The fake heiress, in turn, claimed she was the victim of a jealousy-driven “smearing” campaign by Tarasenko, alleging he was a stalker and abuser who had “forced” her into his business schemes.

When she was contacted by the New York Post, Yashchyshyn bristled at the idea that she was working for Russia. Yashchyshyn was born in Ukraine. Her brother, the Post reported, was called up to defend their country after Russia’s unprovoked invasion earlier this year.

“What boils my blood most is people even thinking I’m Russian or a Russian agent,” she told the Post. “Russian people don’t exist to me since they invaded my country and killed my family and took homes.”

In the fallout, payment processor Stripe kicked the United Hearts of Mercy off their platform for routing donations through stolen Hong Kong credit cards, per the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She appears in many of the charity’s photos.

The FBI has conducted multiple interviews regarding Yashchyshyn and the United Hearts of Mercy, while the Sûreté du Québec—the provincial police force—confirmed to the OCCRP and Post-Gazette that they are investigating the charity.

In the meantime, Sofiya’s music career hasn’t exactly taken off. While she has racked up tens of thousands of Instagram followers—posing in front of luxury cars, boarding private jets, and with Chris Brown, while never showing her face—only one of her singles has surpassed 100,000 listens on Spotify. In one poorly edited interview, Sofiya boasts, “I have my own record label, Rothschild Media Label.” The only other artist on the Rothschild label is Kualify, a hip-hop artist from Montreal.

The exact nature of Yashchyshyn’s relationship with the family is unclear. According to reporting from the OCCRP and the Post-Gazette, Yashchyshyn was originally hired by Tarasenko as a nanny, before becoming a business associate. In a messy legal dispute that played out in a Miami court, Yashchyshyn would claim that she and Tarasenko were lovers. Tarasenko denies it.

Last year, Yashchyshyn filed to obtain a restraining order against Tarasenko, alleging he had threatened her and held her hostage. Tarasenko filed to obtain his own restraining order in return, alleging that Yashchyshyn had abused his daughter.

Florida-based lawyer Steven Veinger told The Daily Beast that both Tarasenko and Kovalenko hired him last spring to litigate the case—they wanted to tell the court that Yashchyshyn was a fraudster, a scam artist, and possibly tied to organized crime. The case was ultimately settled last year.

While Yashchyshyn and Sofiya were based in Miami, one source told The Daily Beast that Kovalenko was still in Montreal, “in contact with some young guy,” who had been part of a “gang.”

On Oct. 6, a man in a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large white skull and the number 81 rang Yury Manakhov’s doorbell.

A video of the exchange, recorded by the Manakhovs’ home security system and obtained by La Press, captures the exchange.

“My name is Richard,” the man tells Manakhov, who was celebrating his 76th birthday that afternoon. “I’d just like to speak to you for a minute—by the way, happy birthday. I want to talk to you about Anna.” Met with confusion, he adds: “Anna, your stepdaughter.”

“Who are you?” Manakhov asks.

“Honestly, I’m a very good friend of hers,” he adds. The whole exchange lasts less than two minutes, with the mystery man insisting that “I’m trying to make all the charges drop.”

While it’s not quite clear what he’s referring to, La Presse revealed that the man in the skull T-shirt was, in fact, Richard Goodridge—an infamous affiliate of multiple Montreal street gangs, including the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club. The 81 on his T-shirt corresponds to the gang’s initials: H and A.

Just a day after he arrived on Manakhov’s doorstep, Tarasenko was shot. Police arrested Goodridge the following day—only to release him shortly thereafter. “The analysis of his version [of events] did not allow us to make accusations for the moment,” a spokesperson for the provincial police told The Daily Beast.

Tarasenko knew Goodridge, according to Veinger, his lawyer, and was likely at the Estérel resort to meet him that night. “He indicated he recognized the individual,” Veinger says. “He feels like he was set up.”

When Tarasenko arrived at the resort, a black car pulled up with three men inside—one opened fire and struck Tarasenko multiple times. “This was planned, this wasn’t a random thing,” Veigner says.

According to news station TVA, Tarasenko had been threatened in the past. A note scrawled in red across his SUV warned: “CLOSE MOUTH OR I KILL SOFIYA + ANA [sic].”

The Sûreté du Québec told The Daily Beast that while Goodridge has been released from custody, they have referred the record of his interrogation to prosecutors and are continuing to investigate the shooting.

Tarasenko, meanwhile, is in the process of fleeing Quebec—but not, his lawyer stresses, because he is trying to evade justice.

“He doesn’t feel safe there,” Veigner says.

But, the lawyer adds, if the cops call: “He’s willing to cooperate.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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