← What Is Happening Here | Canadaland Investigates
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- [00:00]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
What if I told you that right now millions of people are living with a debilitating condition that's so misunderstood, many of them don't even know that they have it. That condition is Obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath, the chief clinical officer of NOCD, and in the 25 years I've been treating OCD, I've met so many people who are suffering from the condition in silence, unaware of just what it was. OCD can create overwhelming anxiety and fear around what you value most, make you question your identity, beliefs and morals, and drive you to perform mentally and physically draining compulsions or rituals. Over my career, I've seen just how devastating OCD can be when it's left untreated. But help is available. That's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Our licensed therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention therapy, a specialized treatment proven to be incredibly effective for OCD. So visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15 minute call with our team. That's n o c d com.
- [01:00]
Paige
This is Paige, the co host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. You can get Chinese food at any time of night, but it's not just for food. I order from CVS all the time. I'm always ordering from the grocery store. If a friend stops over, I have to order champagne. I also have this thing that whenever I travel, if I'm ever in a hotel room, I never feel like I'm missing something because I'll just Uber eats it. The amount of times I've had to uber eats hair items like hairspray, deodorant, you name it, I've ordered it. On Ubereats, you can get grocery alcohol everyday essentials in addition to restaurants and food you love. So in other words, get almost anything with Ubereats or order now for alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
- [02:03]
Leora Schertzer
My name is Leora Schertzer. I'm an alumnus of Candleland's Audio Journalism Fellowship program. I, before going to the fellowship was doing a journalism diploma at Concordia. I'd been a long time fan of Canadaland and that's kind of what inspired me to get into journalism actually in the first place. Genuinely, you'd be hard pressed to find as nice a team as you would at Candleland. The people working at Candleland are super solid, very patient, very accommodating, made me feel so comfortable and at home and answered all of my big and small and stupid questions, which is not a thing in this industry. I also totally appreciated that culture of people going down rabbit holes of obscure news stories that often get missed. Being in that environment where people are excited about what's happening in the world and talking about it, I honestly just grew a lot from the like work environment of Candleland. Since the fall I've been working as a full time print reporter for the Montreal Gazette, which honestly is pretty rare these days and I don't think would have been possible without the help of the Canadaland Fellowship. To support the Fellowship and other fabulous initiatives that Canadaland does, go to canadaland.com join.
- [03:27]
Slava Pastuk
Meet slava so my original name was Yaroslava Pastakov, but that's way too long so I shortened it to Slava Pastakov and then I shortened that to Slava Pastuk and then I shortened that.
- [03:38]
Kasia Mihailovic
To Slava p. Slava is 29 years old, tall, broadcast, broad shouldered, thinning hair. He's got a regular amount of tattoos for a hipster, so a lot. When I meet him he's wearing board shorts and a T shirt. Just regular around the house clothes. He lives in Brampton, a suburb of Toronto and doesn't get out much. He spends a lot of time in the basement playing video games and watching old crime movies. He says he's teaching himself Morse code. This is his mom and stepdad's house. When I come over, I meet his mom and her huge Rottweiler that you're going to hear from.
- [04:16]
Slava Pastuk
I think my mail is here.
- [04:19]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava moved back home in 2019. Not because he wanted to, he had to. He's under house arrest.
- [04:28]
Slava Pastuk
I think the official charges I'm in for conspiracy to import commercial quantities of cocaine into Australia, 40kg.
- [04:39]
Kasia Mihailovic
When I talk to him, Sav is getting ready to plead guilty to this crime and go to prison for years. He doesn't know for how long exactly, but he's pretty sure the authorities don't plan to go easy on him.
- [04:52]
Slava Pastuk
From what I understand, they're not looking for cooperation from me. They kind of have their mindset and from what I've kind of put together, I think there's been a lot of public pressure on them to do something about this. So I think they're going to come down hard.
- [05:07]
Kasia Mihailovic
Public pressure because this crime was news in Australia. The US And Canada. And while five young people sat in prison in Australia for years for actually smuggling the drugs, a person who put them up to it was walking free.
- [05:21]
Slava Pastuk
I don't think that they're going to be happy with anything but the book being thrown at that person.
- [05:28]
Kasia Mihailovic
This is not a whodunit mystery or a story about an innocent man falsely accused. Saiva's guilty. He told me so. But there's something else he wants you to know.
- [05:40]
Slava Pastuk
There are no villains in this story. There's no winners, but there's no villains.
- [05:46]
Kasia Mihailovic
Pretty much nobody else involved with the story agrees with that.
- [05:49]
Leora Schertzer
He knew everything that he was doing was wrong, but he was just. He knew that he wasn't getting caught, you know, and he was gaming the system to its maximum potential. And now he just doesn't know what to do because it's like the whole thing collapsed.
- [06:02]
Slava Pastuk
This guy is a pathological liar. He's lied to all these kids, he's lied to you, and he's going to continue lying to paint a picture that suits his case.
- [06:13]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava objects to the way he's been portrayed in the media and how his co conspirators have talked about him at their trials. They were all just trying to make some money, and so was he. And none of this would have happened, he says, if it weren't for his job.
- [06:26]
Slava Pastuk
Unfortunately, a lot of people thought it was really cool. A lot of people were making comparisons between me and Pusha T, where me and other rappers that are heavily in the drug game.
- [06:36]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava's not a rapper. He was a website editor and a music journalist. Slava worked for Vice, the global youth culture media brand. Last winter, Slava got in touch with us here at Canadaland, wanting to go on the record about his crimes. Despite the news coverage, Slavic Slava had never given an interview to any other reporter. By going on the Record here, against the advice of his lawyer, Slava is worried that he's exposing himself to new charges and extra years of possible prison time. In multiple interviews, Slava admits to way more than what he's been convicted of in court. So I want to know why he did it all, but I also want to know why he's decided to take Tell me about it. I do know why I'm talking to him. It's because I've been interested in Vice for a long time. As a teenager in Toronto in the 2000s, I'd always stop in at the clothing stores along Queen street to see if the new free issue of Vice magazine was in yet. I'd laugh or get mad at the fashion do's and don'ts. And I also saw graphic photos of bodies blown apart in Iraq. To me, it all felt taboo, raw and cool. I'd be lying if I said VICE didn't influence my decision to become a journalist. And I'm definitely not the only one. In the last decade of journalism, Vice has been one of the few newsrooms that was growing while others were either getting slashed or going under entirely. Vice was ubiquitous to anyone trying to make their way in the industry. My ex worked for Vice. A lot of my friends have worked there. And when I lived in New York, like a lot of journalists, I was asked to interview for a job as a reporter for Vice News Tonight, their daily TV show. I didn't get the job. And so when in 2017, news broke that one of its editors here in Toronto had used his position to prey on young journalists, interns, and others hoping to be in the orbit of Vice, I followed along, wrapped. And now I find myself here on a chilly spring day in 2019, sitting across from Slava in his mom's bungalow. I'm Kasia Mihailovic, and this is Cool Mules.
- [09:09]
Leora Schertzer
Well, I asked him, I said, what's in the suitcase? Like, he wouldn't tell me.
- [09:12]
Kasia Mihailovic
He has declined to comment.
- [09:13]
Slava Pastuk
He's declined to discuss Sissany's, declined to.
- [09:15]
Kasia Mihailovic
Rebut any of the allegations that we told him in great excruciating detail. This basically sounded like a multi level.
- [09:22]
Jesse Brown
Marketing scheme, but for drug trafficking.
- [09:26]
Slava Pastuk
I'm sure on this podcast he denies everything, but of course he is also a convicted criminal. Let's just be honest. If you're dealing with a Mexican cartel, you're never really safe, are you? You can say I'm a bad person, but you can't say I'm a liar.
- [09:48]
Kasia Mihailovic
If you want to understand Slava's crimes, how a music editor became an international drug runner, you first need to understand Slava. In Slava's mom's basement, there are pictures on the wall of him as a cute, chubby kid. One is of Slava at a Disney park, and he's beaming in the water beside a dolphin. Slava came to Canada from Ukraine when he was four years old, staying for a while in Toronto before moving around a lot with his mom.
- [10:20]
Slava Pastuk
When we first moved to Canada, my mom and I stayed at the Ukrainian Mission. Then from there we moved to, like, I think I counted it once. And we lived at. We've had 17 addresses.
- [10:30]
Kasia Mihailovic
They mostly lived in the suburbs or cities near Toronto. Like Scarborough, Aurora and then Barry for his high school years.
- [10:37]
Slava Pastuk
What was I like in high school? I definitely wasn't the most popular guy.
- [10:40]
Kasia Mihailovic
One book that really helped him overcome being socially awkward was the Game by Neil Strauss.
- [10:46]
Slava Pastuk
So I was 16, 17, I was working in the coolest place in Barry, which was a Starbucks. And the Starbucks was connected to a. Chapters picked up the game and it literally changed my life. Not in like a creepy way, but just like how to talk to women and how to get a conversation going when you're not sure what to say.
- [11:02]
Kasia Mihailovic
The Game is by a New York Times music journalist who set out to report on the world of pickup artists and then quickly became one himself. Pickup artists use a playbook of lies and manipulation to have sex with women, treating all interactions with other humans as simply transactional. Slava went to university but never graduated. He moved just north of Toronto and got a job. At first, writing about music was just a hobby.
- [11:29]
Slava Pastuk
I started off in a marketing role in Toronto with a lot of free time, so I would write about concerts and review shows.
- [11:36]
Kasia Mihailovic
He also self published an ebook in 2011. It's called Bros and Hoes in Prose. Weirdly, it's dedicated to his mom.
- [11:47]
Slava Pastuk
That led to me being noticed by a blog out in la, an independent music blog, which led to me being noticed by the editor of the Vice music vertical at the time. And I started writing just freelance for them.
- [11:59]
Kasia Mihailovic
The first article Slava wrote for Vice was published in January 2013. The headline was how to make money off Rap without really rapping. Sub headline. It's easy. You just have to sort of be a con artist. It's pretty obviously a joke, but one of the options it lists is becoming a music journalist. And that's what Slava did.
- [12:23]
Slava Pastuk
A lot of the people at Vice were just kind of hired because they were easy to be around. So I really just lucked into it. Like, I'm not sure if the fact that I look like what I look like or I am who I am had anything to do with it. Probably did. I mean, I mean, I kind of look like everyone else who worked at Vice. I'm a white bearded guy, you know.
- [12:41]
Kasia Mihailovic
That helps pretty much anywhere.
- [12:44]
Slava Pastuk
Most of what I was writing as a freelancer was like, this sucks, or this musician is overrated. And that's what led to me getting noticed by them.
- [12:55]
Kasia Mihailovic
It took just a year for Slava to go from writing his first freelance article in 2013 to getting a full time job as top editor of Noisy Canada, Vice's music site. It's Hard to overstate just how important the Vice job was to Slava. He made it the focus of his life soon, moving from the suburbs to. To a downtown West End apartment just around the corner from Vice's office. Being the music editor at a media company that people call the Hipster Bible is a pretty influential job in certain circles. Slavo got to decide which musicians got written about, what shows got covered, and whose albums got reviewed.
- [13:38]
Slava Pastuk
I have any bar that I can go to downtown. People are constantly inviting me to events. Like, I feel like prettiest girl at the prom, you know, Yeah, I can skip a line. I just go up to the front and tell the bouncer, I'm work for Vice. I'm writing about the band inside. Doesn't have to be true, but yeah, it's really a golden ticket to the city. It was like looking back on it, it was exhausting. Once you tell someone that not only you work for Vice, but that you work for the music portion of Vice, their entire demeanor towards you changes. And it goes from them talking about themselves to talking about this band that they know or their friend who's a musician or their buddy that owns a studio or. And they start, they go into sales mode with you. Now they want something from you. So yeah, it was an interesting lifestyle for sure.
- [14:22]
Kasia Mihailovic
When Slava started at Vice, the Toronto office was small, even though the company was 19 years old.
- [14:29]
Slava Pastuk
When I started working there, I think I was one of 12 people. They had their social team, they had their sales team, and they had just one person in editorial. I think I was 23 at the time, so I wasn't really thinking about my long term future.
- [14:44]
Kasia Mihailovic
Instead, Slava was enjoying himself at clubs and hip hop shows, then bringing the party back to his apartment or starting it at the Vice office. In Slava's eyes, even the bathrooms at Vice's next office subtly encouraged his hard drug use.
- [15:01]
Slava Pastuk
All the bathrooms had white tiles and private stall doors, you know, so it kind of implies that those are used for what they're used for. So if you wanted to go into the bathroom and do a bump of coke, it wasn't encouraged, but it wasn't necessarily something that would be frowned upon. See, I feel like stuff like that would get me in trouble. Like, yeah, I've done drugs with people who worked at Vice before. Yeah, but I mean, yeah, that's normal co worker stuff.
- [15:29]
Kasia Mihailovic
For the record, Vice has said that this is not normal co worker stuff. In a statement to the newspaper the National Post, when all of this broke, they said that Quote, any allegations that Vice Canada somehow fosters a culture of illicit substance use in the office is plainly false. Our employee handbook contains a zero tolerance policy for such activity. We asked them more questions about this, but they didn't respond. According to Slava, the drug use that became normal for him at Vice was, was not the norm for him until he took that job.
- [16:05]
Slava Pastuk
I'm not like a drug user. It was the lifestyle that I was embedded in, but that was just as a result of working at Vice. Like, you know, the only time I really did cocaine regularly was when I was working at Vice. You do some MDMA and then you're on mdma, so you do some coke and then you can't get to sleep, so you do Xanax. And it's really just like a stairway of escalation, Escalation of drug use to cope with the last drug you took.
- [16:33]
Kasia Mihailovic
Tyneira Yelland worked with Slava at Vice at the time.
- [16:37]
Leora Schertzer
As people might guess from the reputation.
- [16:40]
Kasia Mihailovic
That Vice has, there are people who.
- [16:42]
Leora Schertzer
Work there who sometimes indulge in illicit substances. And he and I were both, had.
- [16:50]
Jesse Brown
Both done that like knowingly together.
- [16:54]
Kasia Mihailovic
This wasn't directly sanctioned or encouraged by management, of course, but alcohol was. Vice soon had an open bar for its workers right in the office. It was one of the perks that kept employees happy, even if many of them were making very little money.
- [17:11]
Slava Pastuk
Yeah, but that's the thing is like, you don't get paid very much. So for my initial gig when I started working there, I was getting paid $17,000 for a six month contract.
- [17:20]
Kasia Mihailovic
Vice was known for paying people really poorly, even as it became a multi billion dollar international media giant. After Slava's contract ran out, his job just kept going. With no contract in place, he was never put on staff. He just went paycheck to paycheck with no real job security. So he got a side gig to pay the bills, not a part time job in retail. That would be embarrassing.
- [17:47]
Slava Pastuk
You need another source of income. And people look down on people who have a job at Zumie's or people who have a job at Zara or Aldo or something like that. Right. Like, I know rappers who are nobodies that refuse to take the subway because they think it's bad for their image.
- [18:00]
Kasia Mihailovic
But an illicit side hustle was okay.
- [18:04]
Slava Pastuk
Yeah, I was selling weed on Grindr like I was selling weed on Grindr to make some extra money.
- [18:09]
Kasia Mihailovic
Grindr is a hookup app for gay men, but it's also used to sell drugs sometimes. And that was just one of his extracurricular activities. The other was the semi secret marketing scheme he says he ran with his work buddy from Vice, Ali Taki Lalji. Ali would later be charged as Slava's co accused in the cocaine smuggling conspiracy. Unlike Slava, Ali maintains his innocence. None of the charges or allegations against him have been proven in court. Slava says they moonlit as influencer marketers, which meant doing things like asking a local rapper if he'd be willing to take a selfie while wearing a certain brand of sneakers in exchange for $600. In any newsroom I've worked in, doing something like that would be considered a huge conflict of interest for an editor, easily a fireable offense. But Slava didn't think Vice would care. He felt that implicit in Vice's lousy pay was permission for employees to to find a side hustle or two.
- [19:11]
Slava Pastuk
It's like you're going to be brought in on a shitty salary, but it's up to you to make the most of it. So that type of culture happens a lot because it's encouraged by the people that bring you on. And it's like we're going to pay you nothing. But Bob's your oyster or the world's your oyster.
- [19:29]
Jesse Brown
This episode is brought to you by Fizz Mobile. You know those emails you send to your future self to open up like 10 years later? I got one of those the other day. It was not a pleasant surprise. Not gonna lie. But there is a world where Past you can actually give Future you a useful, tangible and practical gift. Data Fizz, a mobile carrier based out of Montreal that you can get in Alberta, bc, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec, has got this sick data rollover feature. So if Past you doesn't use all of your data, Future you gets a bump. How about five extra gigs from one month ago? You Fizz has got a ton of other sick features. No fixed term contracts, no price hikes, and their sick loyalty program. Visit Fizz CA to learn more about Fizz Mobile and its long list of added value features. That's Fizz CA and activate a first plan using the referral code CAN25 to get $25 off and 10 gigabytes of free data.
- [20:33]
Unknown
Greetings my fellow Americans. I'm just joking. I'm not an American. I'm the editor and publisher of Canada Land. My name is Jesse Brown and I don't even know if we're friends anymore. I'm told that we're in some sort of a war, a trade war with Americans. But you just listened to one of our podcasts, to the Copernic Affair. Thank you for listening to our stuff. I'm going to try to do something very difficult here. I'm going to try to convince Americans to support a Canadian podcast company during a trade war. And I think I'm gonna do that. I think I'm gonna accomplish that. If you listen to this message, I think you're gonna wanna support Canadaland. Who are we even? We are the first podcast company in Canada. We've been doing this for 12 years. And we do investigations, long form, deep dive journalistic investigations like the one you're listening to now. This story of Hassan Diab, this story, the Kopernik Affair. Dana and Alex pitched it to a bunch of American podcast companies and international podcast companies. But the industry is not looking for deep dive investigations right now. They are expensive, they are difficult, and they were turned down by people who loved the story but didn't have the budgets for it. Canadaland supported them for this 18 month investigation. We've been doing it again and again. This is how we made our reputation. We began over a decade ago by doing what you would call a MeToo investigation of a very famous sexual predator here in Canada, a guy named Jean Ghomeshi. We did that story before, years before the MeToo movement happened. We did that here. And we're threatened with a lawsuit for it. We've been threatened with lawsuits again and again and again. Jordan Peterson threatened us with a lawsuit. Hollywood director Bryan Singer threatened us with a lawsuit. I have been surveyed by people who we reported on. My family has been under surveillance. A Republican combat PR firm was enlisted to discredit us. And nevertheless we persist. And we have never been successfully sued for libel or defamation because we care about getting it right. And we take these risks to bring you stories that nobody else is looking at. We take on really big stories and we take on really big and powerful people. And the only way we are able to do that is because our listeners support us. But we have never asked American listeners to support us before because we're called Canadaland. And the idea that Americans would support a Canadian podcast company, to a lot of people, I've been told it's just a joke. They won't do it. I don't think that's true. Our stories are not just for Canadians. The majority of people who listen to the Kopernick affairs are American. We are going to be publishing more investigations on this feed on Canadaland Investigates. And by becoming a supporter, you are funding those investigations. And we will give you all the things we'll give you ad free podcasts, and you'll get to hear it before everybody else. And you'll get bonus content. You'll actually be paying for Dana and Alex to keep reporting on what happens next to Hassan Diab, because this story is not over. It's $3.99 a month. We want it to be like a coffee to support Canadaland. We want it to be like, set it and forget it. You're never gonna regret the price of a coffee to fund this scrappy team of like, 15 journalists who want nothing but to tell you an amazing story that would otherwise never be told. I will level with you. It is just a surprise to us that you're even here. We're Canada Land. We never thought we'd have 100,000 regular American listeners. We are so proud to have you. But we need you to support us the same way we ask our Canadian listeners to support us. And unlike the Canadian listeners, we don't really make much ad money off of our American listeners because we sell mostly Canadian ads. We kind of need this to work. So to get the ball rolling, we have a special offer for the first hundred American listeners to come to canadaland.com investigates and sign up for a year's worth of support. And there's a big discount on that as well.
- [24:52]
Kasia Mihailovic
We'll.
- [24:53]
Unknown
We will ship to you, to your home in America, tariffs be damned. A free Canadaland T shirt. Wear it proudly and defiantly. And by the way, though we give our supporters every perk we can imagine, our podcasts are free. We do not pay all this content. So what you're really paying for when you support us is you're paying for everybody else to get this stuff. And that's how journalism has impacted, because it has reach. We're hoping that just some of you will Support us for $3.99 a month at canadaland.com investigates. Please go do it right now. And thank you.
- [25:35]
The old adage goes, it isn't what you say, it's how you say it. Because to truly make an impact, you need to set an example. You need to take the lead. You need to adapt to whatever comes your way. And when you're that driven, you drive an equally determined vehicle. The Range Rover Sport. Blending power, poise and performance, it was designed to make an impact. With a dynamic drive, refined comfort, and innovations like cabin air purification and active noise cancellation, the Range Rover Sport is built to be as uncompromising as you. Explore. Range Rover Sport@range rover.com USSport what if.
- [26:12]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
I told you that right now millions of people are living with a debilitating condition that that's so misunderstood, many of them don't even know that they have it. That condition is obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath, the chief clinical officer of NOCD. And in the 25 years I've been treating OCD, I've met so many people who are suffering from the condition in silence, unaware of just what it was. OCD can create overwhelming anxiety and fear around what you value most, make you question your identity, beliefs and morals, and drive you to perform mentally and physically draining compulsions or rituals. Over my career, I've seen just how devastating OCD can be when it's left untreated. But help is available. That's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Our licensed therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention therapy, a specialized treatment proven to be incredibly effective for OCD. So visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15 minute call with our team. That's nocd.com.
- [27:24]
Kasia Mihailovic
Bob's your oyster. It's not the worst motto to describe the haze of ambition and optimism that was floating around the city at the time. By 2014, Toronto was becoming known internationally for its cultural capital. It was actually getting kind of cool and it had a lot to do with a guy you may have heard of. I want to thank everybody from the.
- [27:45]
Slava Pastuk
City for coming out tonight.
- [27:47]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
Vice News tonight.
- [27:49]
Unknown
A while back, Drake popularized calling Toronto the 6 after the 416 area code.
- [27:54]
Slava Pastuk
So Drake, Drake is something that I can take ownership of and say, no one else talk about this. This is my beat. This is my guy. Anytime you write about Drake, you're going to do amazingly on the site. And the goal is always to do very well on the site and have your name be at the top of chartbeat. Charpy, for people who don't know, is a way for you to monitor the metrics of a site in real time. So if you put out a story and it features Drake, it's going to do well.
- [28:17]
Kasia Mihailovic
To Slava and to everyone at Vice Canada, doing well meant making content that got noticed by Vice hq. In New York before Drake, it was hard to get noticed covering hip hop in Toronto. Other cities covered by noisy were the priority, some even getting their own TV shows.
- [28:33]
Slava Pastuk
The big flagship for my vertical was noisy Atlanta, noisy Chicago. We want to do noisy Toronto, but.
- [28:40]
Kasia Mihailovic
Toronto isn't Atlanta or Chicago. Slava says the tropes that Bice showcased from those cities weren't going to work here.
- [28:48]
Slava Pastuk
One of the striking images that's always associated with a noisy Atlanta or noisy Chicago was young black kids pointing guns at the camera.
- [28:57]
Leora Schertzer
Hi, it's Thomas. Welcome to Atlanta, drug trafficking hub for the east coast and the home of trap music.
- [29:04]
Kasia Mihailovic
What do you got?
- [29:04]
Slava Pastuk
What is that? I can't see it.
- [29:06]
Kasia Mihailovic
Oh, 40 on the 45.
- [29:11]
Slava Pastuk
And we knew for a fact that we couldn't get that in Toronto. So there were things like that that I would get discouraged by because I still want to do a noisy Toronto show. But we can't because we don't have these tropes that are widely accepted but not highly publicized as being popular Vice tropes.
- [29:33]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava suddenly found new hope to break into TV when Vice Canada announced a two year, $100 million partnership with Rogers, an old school telecom company struggling to connect with young audiences.
- [29:46]
Slava Pastuk
There's this murmur of we're going to be doing a lot more video. No one really knows for why, but they brought us into the meeting room and they said, you know, we got this Rogers money coming in. This is something we've been looking to do for a really long time. This is going to be the pilot for something they' to do across all of the Vice territories. So Canada was essentially going to be the guinea pig. And they said we need to produce 10 to 100 times the amount of video we're producing now. So if anyone has any TV show ideas, let them know. We're going to create Canadian focused content that we will use exclusively on our mobile phones. In addition, we will also create a new TV channel for Vice.
- [30:27]
Kasia Mihailovic
Suddenly it felt like anybody in the office could come up with a TV show and anybody in the office could host one. And if it took off, who knows? Vice was simultaneously working with hbo. The sky was the limit, so why not slaba?
- [30:42]
Slava Pastuk
So hosting was always something I liked doing. I hosted a few daily Vice Live hits, actually. Hi, I'm Slava Pask, the editor of Noisy Canada, and I'm going to be counting down my most and least favorite things of 2015 for you. So absolutely, I feel like I was entitled to host something because you have to remember, I was also part of this original 12 that started off the company who was here for the pre Roger stuff. And now people are getting brought in who are leapfrogging me.
- [31:09]
Kasia Mihailovic
Vice built a newer, bigger office a block over in Liberty Village. A freshly constructed community of condos and big box stores right beside Older, grittier Parkdale. And with the new office came new coworkers and a different work culture.
- [31:26]
Slava Pastuk
And that's the other thing is, as the Rogers money is coming in and we're making all these hires, we really don't know how to act or how to behave anymore. I mean, the one example I used, but there was a person, really cool guy, I forget his name, but he was essentially just, like, helping out around the office, putting together chairs. And he went, he smoked weed on his break. And they found out he smoked weed on his break, and they fired him on the spot. And I'm like, I thought this was Vice.
- [31:50]
Kasia Mihailovic
The flip side to all the hope and optimism that came with the windfall was a sense of fear. Slava was worried that as Vice Canada took off, he might get left behind.
- [32:00]
Slava Pastuk
The shelf life for a music journalist, no matter how good you are, is very short. You're constantly worried about, like, am I going to get. Like, people are getting fired for no reason. Am I going to get fired? Do I need to keep going above and beyond who's not getting fired? Let me see what they're doing. Okay, this person's doing X, Y and Z. Maybe I should do something more along those lines to maintain job security.
- [32:21]
Kasia Mihailovic
The things that were cool at Vice before were maybe not so cool anymore.
- [32:26]
Slava Pastuk
We're trying to grow up is kind of the theme. It's like, I know that we're Vice, but we're trying to grow up and we're trying to be better than our frat boy past. That was kind of the overall vibe that Ryan gave me.
- [32:37]
Kasia Mihailovic
That's Ryan Archibald, Vice Canada's president and managing director at the time. Slava says Ryan tried to warn him about the changing values of Vice even before the Rogers deal. After a particularly messy summer night, Vice was co sponsoring a huge concert with the skate shoe company Vans held on the Toronto Islands, about 15 minutes away by ferry. The polluted waterway between downtown and the islands is an industrial shipping zone and not a short distance. Slava jumped in.
- [33:12]
Slava Pastuk
I got too drunk during the Pusha T concert, and I tried to swim home from the island. And as a result of swimming home, I got picked up in a police boat. Then the police boat brought me back to the shore, and I took a cab home. I didn't get arrested or anything, but I tweeted that I got arrested at the north by Northeast Vice party. And then he had to talk to me about deleting that tweet and, like, watching my level of intake at parties.
- [33:34]
Kasia Mihailovic
Instead, he doubled down and did something that would eventually get himself arrested for real. That's next.
- [33:47]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
What if I told you that right now millions of people are living with a debilitating condition that's so misunderstood, many of them don't even know that they have it. That condition is obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. I'm Dr. Patrick McGrath, the chief clinical officer of NOCD, and in the 25 years I've been treating OCD, I've met so many people who are suffering from the condition in silence, unaware of just what it was. OCD can create overwhelming anxiety and fear around what you value most, make you question your identity, beliefs and morals, and drive you to perform mentally and physically draining compulsions or rituals. Over my career, I've seen just how devastating OCD can be when it's left untreated. But help is available. That's where NOCD comes in. NOCD is the world's largest virtual therapy provider for obsessive compulsive disorder. Our licensed therapists are trained in exposure and response prevention therapy, a specialized treatment proven to be incredibly effective for OCD. So visit nocd.com to schedule a free 15 minute call with our team. That's nocd.com the old adage goes, it.
- [34:49]
Unknown
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- [35:29]
Kasia Mihailovic
If Slava was worried that he wasn't taken seriously by the new crop of ambitious journal minimalism focused people brought in to help Vice mature its brand. Well, he was right.
- [35:41]
Slava Pastuk
Oh, I don't know. He's just a bit of a. How do I put this more directly? He's a bit of an idiot.
- [35:49]
Kasia Mihailovic
One of his Vice colleagues at the time, reporter Justin Ling, remembers Slava's reputation around the office.
- [35:55]
Slava Pastuk
But like, he was funny, he was charming, he was the music guy. He wasn't never the smartest guy in the room, but you mean he was a bit of a goon.
- [36:03]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava remembers being called a goon by his colleagues. He says that when his boss introduced him to the celebrity filmmaker Spike Jonze, he Called Slava the office goon. You can tell that memory still stings, even though he acknowledges he deserves some of the names he's been called.
- [36:22]
Slava Pastuk
People I met in Toronto, that I met from working at Vice may not have liked me because, you know, I was kind of an asshole.
- [36:30]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slavin didn't like that, but he thought, wasn't this whole organization founded by self proclaimed assholes doing great gonzo journalism?
- [36:38]
Slava Pastuk
Like when I grew up watching Vice, the people that I remembered were people who had these watershed shows. People who went to Liberia to buy guns or went to go lick this frog in the Amazon jungle that got you all hallucinated. Welcome to Bogota, Colombia. We're here chasing after the most dangerous drug in the world, Burundanga. So I wanted to have a marquee show that was mine.
- [37:01]
Kasia Mihailovic
If Slava had an ally and a role model at work, he felt it was Ben McCoo. Yes, Ben was a trained journalist doing serious reporting on national security, but he was also a bearded, tattooed guy from old Vice. He'd started at Vice as an intern, but Ben was successfully finding a place for himself in the new regime. Saeva liked his stories.
- [37:22]
Slava Pastuk
Ben, to his credit, was the only person who was doing stuff like that because he was talking to ISIS and he was doing all these other national security stories that were interesting. So Ben and I got hired at the same time.
- [37:35]
Kasia Mihailovic
Ben scored a coup of a story when he made contact with a young Canadian kid who had run off to Syria in Iraq to fight with isis. The story was both a wild, extreme old Vice story and a newsy, serious new Vice story. It cemented Ben's place in the company and he ended up getting his own show called Cyber War.
- [37:58]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
I've seen firsthand the forces taking aim on mainstream culture, helping fuel the political rivalry that's engulfing the nation. I can't help but wonder what the cultural landscape will look like if the trolls keep winning.
- [38:12]
Kasia Mihailovic
If there was a strategy to see staying relevant. Ben had figured it out. One day after the Rogers money started flowing, Slava says he took a walk with Ben.
- [38:22]
Slava Pastuk
Ben and I went to go get lunch at a cafe that was kind of close to the Liberty Village location. And while we're walking, Ben was kind of talking about how we're doing too many things now that aren't from our soul of what Vice is like. I was saying, it's not what we came up on. He asked me, he goes, is it possible for you to get a gun so that we can see where guns come from and kind of Track their import into Canada so we can do a story on that. I mean, that was the implication. He asked me, can you get a gun? He also asked me to do if I can get some other stuff, but I couldn't get a gun. So I went, no, I don't know how to do that. But I did ask a few people if it was possible to do that. And they all told me never to text him again, because if you text someone, can you get me a gun? As a journalist? So he was really thinking about those three things when trying to see if I could get someone. Like, do you know anyone who runs guns? Do you know anyone who pimps girls? So I think he asked me because I was the only person he could really ask who he knew wouldn't freak out at the notion of being able to go get a gun, I guess.
- [39:27]
Kasia Mihailovic
We asked Ben McCoo about this conversation, and he declined to go on the record about it. We have no evidence that McCoo ever asked Slava to do anything illegal.
- [39:37]
Slava Pastuk
Finding out how guns get into Canada is definitely something that Vice would be interested in. I could understand why he would ask me that question. And I do agree. Maybe we don't have to do so much of this, like, new Vice stuff where it's like, feminism and I masturbated with a robot, and I interviewed the robot about it.
- [39:56]
Kasia Mihailovic
That sounds like it's a joke, but I think he's referring to an actual Vice story here.
- [40:02]
Slava Pastuk
I made it my mission to experience.
- [40:04]
Unknown
The first male doll because, you know, gender equality.
- [40:09]
Slava Pastuk
And maybe it's more like core vice. Drugs, guns, sex.
- [40:14]
Kasia Mihailovic
If you believe Slava, the idea of getting his own core vice values story stuck with him. And that's just the kind of story, says Slava, that soon fell into his lap.
- [40:29]
Slava Pastuk
The person I mentioned to you before, the person who worked at Vice from the very start, who worked in sales, Ali, he knows a lot of people. Ali broke up with his girlfriend around May 2015, and he just had a lot more free time. And I'm always down to hang out, so we started hanging out a lot more. One of the people that Ali knew was a big musclehead guy in Toronto who we'll call Trey.
- [40:53]
Kasia Mihailovic
Slava can call him Trey, but I don't have to because I know that his name is Michael Ford, a name he legally changed from Michael Hindler in 2015 in Nova Scotia. Perhaps this was to get away from his past. Michael was convicted of having sex with a 13 year old in 2009 when he was 18. By the mid 2010s. Mike had moved to Toronto and was another bearded guy with tattoos. He liked hitting the gym and showing his body off on Instagram. Again, Slava will call him Trey.
- [41:27]
Slava Pastuk
He was a socialite. So Trey was out and about all the time. Fairly popular guy. He was just a guy that wanted. He wanted some of that Vice clout, you know. He ended up actually applying for a job at Vice. He wants to be featured in Vice. Whenever I mentioned Vice video was being shot, he'd be like, oh, can I be in that video? Trey wants. So, Trey, there's a good anecdote I could tell you. See, it's a. It's a pretty revealing anecdote, so I don't know if I should say it. He essentially made a fake dating profile on a gay hookup app to get his Instagram followers up. He's not gay.
- [42:14]
Kasia Mihailovic
Mike helped Slava pursue his first big lead on a possible breakthrough Vice story. Slava had caught wind of a rumor that a newly buff Drake had been using steroids, and Slava sensed a fantastic scoop. According to Slava, Mike knew a guy who sold steroids. Maybe he could help. I asked Michael Ford for his side of this, by the way. I sent him questions through his Instagram by email and called him. He never answered any of my questions. So Slava says he reached out to Mike's steroid source. Mike's steroid source is another person who Slava does not want to implicate. He calls this person Tweedledee.
- [42:57]
Slava Pastuk
The way I originally reached out to Tweedledee was because I was writing a story on is Drake doing steroids or not? Trey put me in contact with Tweedledee because I knew that Trey did steroids. He's like, I'll put you in touch with my steroids guy. He's a doctor. He knows a bunch of stuff about how this whole thing works. I approached him originally to be like, hey, do you think Drake's doing steroids? Blah, blah, blah.
- [43:16]
Kasia Mihailovic
Tweedledee says Slava never heard anything about Drake doing steroids. And let me be clear. Slava wasn't able to find anything to substantiate that rumor at all. As far as he was able to determine, it just wasn't a thing.
- [43:30]
Slava Pastuk
So the first contact I had with Tweedledee was, hey, I'm a journalist writing a story about drugs. They were steroids at the time.
- [43:37]
Kasia Mihailovic
But there was another thing. While hanging out at Slava's apartment, Slava says Mike told him that Tweedledee had a different drug business, one that he ran with A partner who Slava will call, as you may have guessed, Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
- [43:54]
Slava Pastuk
These guys are just as yoked up as Trey is muscle bound. One guy is Asian, one guy is African. Both of them are Canadians. These guys are just the most interesting people I've ever met. And they were running drugs through Brazil, Thailand. He mentioned all these exotic locations. I go, you know, this would be a really interesting story. Like, I want to figure out how this works.
- [44:15]
Kasia Mihailovic
So there it was, an interesting story.
- [44:20]
Slava Pastuk
I thought, this sounds cool. This sounds like buy a ticket to a huge Vice show. I thought that it was a really interesting story, and I thought that I should take advantage of this somehow. I thought it was cool. Oh, fuck. My career would have been set. I would have been where Ben is now. I would have been in New York, probably still working for them, working on ideating larger concepts that probably never really get made. But I get to stay busy and I get to stay working at an office that has a bar in it.
- [44:52]
Kasia Mihailovic
And that's the reason why Slava says he jumped at the chance to get involved in an international drug smuggling ring. It was for the story. He thought that trafficking drugs to Australia would be a good move for his media career. But things did not work out that way. Slava isn't at Vice's New York headquarters ideating larger concepts over free drinks at the office. This bar. He's speaking to us in his mom's bungalow in Brampton, waiting to go to prison. Others are still in prison too, half a world away. What happens next involves a dj, two models, an aspiring music manager, a secret recording, Instagram, millions of dollars of high purity cocaine, and allegedly a Mexican drug cartel. In other words, it's just the kind of story you might expect to read about in Vice, but you never did. And some people involved have told me to ignore Slava's claim that he got into all of this as a journalist chasing content for Vice. They say that this is just his excuse, his justification for taking advantage of young people he had influence over and. And ruining their lives. And there might be truth to that, but the whole truth, as you'll soon hear, is a lot more complicated.
- [46:17]
Slava Pastuk
Well, I want to be very clear. I'm not blaming Vice, however. Yeah, I mean, I didn't pursue this. I wouldn't have pursued this had I worked in other media companies, but I would never worked in another media company.
- [46:31]
Kasia Mihailovic
Since we first interviewed Slava, his story keeps changing, but he's steadfast on this point that getting involved with smuggling cocaine to Australia was going to be his ticket to Vice stardom. He's so consistent on this that sometimes I do believe that he thinks it's true. From the start, Vice's model was you could pay people almost nothing, or actually nothing, to immerse themselves in the most extreme parts of the world and report back, to, expose and exploit every detail of their own lives. And even as the company has grown and professionalized and even matured, much of that foundational culture has remained. I can't help but agree with Slava that he wouldn't have fit in at any other mainstream journalism outlet the way he fit in at Vice. As one of Slava's colleagues put it.
- [47:26]
Leora Schertzer
To us, they pay you in coolness, you know, and you stay there because of coolness. You start being worried about how that currency might leave you.
- [47:36]
Kasia Mihailovic
That's next time Cool Mules is hosted and reported by me, Kasia Mihailovic and is written and produced by me and Jesse Brown. Research from Jonathan Goldsby. Kevin Sexton is our managing editor. Music by Nathan Burley Sound design and mix by Chandra Bulakan the next episode of Cool Mules is available right now. Go have a listen. After that, a new episode will be released each week. Or you can listen to our entire six episode series right now ad free and support our journalism for $5 a month. Just click the link in the show notes or visit Coolmules ca join and the whole show will be on your phone or computer in minutes.
- [48:38]
Paige
This is Paige, the co host of Giggly Squad. I use Uber Eats for everything and I feel like people forget that you can truly order anything, especially living in New York City. It's why I love it. You can get Chinese food at any time of night, but it's not just for food. I order from CVS all the time. I'm always ordering from the grocery store. If a friend stops over I have to order champagne. I also have this thing that whenever I travel, if I'm ever in a hotel room, I never feel like I'm missing something because I'll just Uber Eats it. The amount of times I've had to uber eats hair items like hairspray, deodorant, you name it, I've ordered it. On Uber Eats, you can get grocery alcohol everyday essentials in addition to restaurants and food you love. So in other words, get almost anything. With Uber Eats. Order now for alcohol you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region. See app for details.
- [49:38]
Unknown
Wait, you're not a Hotels.com member. So you're choosing to pay full price? Did you not hear the song?
- [49:48]
Kasia Mihailovic
How could you not be a member and save up to 20%? That's less than 50%. But it's more than zero percent.
- [49:57]
Jesse Brown
You're welcome.
- [50:00]
Unknown
See, the math is mathing. Save up to 20% on hundreds of.
- [50:04]
Kasia Mihailovic
Thousands of hotels with hotels.
- [50:06]
Dr. Patrick McGrath
Com.