But Lysenko appeared to be getting nervous. In early September, he emailed Karamyan, the board member tasked with overseeing the deception and asked for the details of the clinic.
“Hello!” Lysenko wrote, according to the investigators’ translated version. Could Karamyan send a few photos of the clinic, he asked, just so he knew what it looked like?
Three weeks later Lysenko, accompanied by Karamyan, drove to the address on the clinic’s website, only to find there was no facility at the address. The building that once stood there, investigators later confirmed, had been demolished in 2017, months before Lysenko claimed he had been treated in it.
“The conclusions of the investigation were that the SD Clinic did not exist,” the report said. (The clinic’s website was also fake; investigators later confirmed it was populated with photographs of at least two unrelated buildings.) The investigators also concluded that the medical explanation for Lysenko’s initial whereabouts failure — an attack of appendicitis — “was false and supported by fabricated documents.” The timeline for his second whereabouts failure, the car accident, didn’t add up, either.
With his story falling apart, and now facing an additional charge of tampering with evidence, Lysenko told his American lawyer, Paul Greene, about the effort to deceive investigators. Greene, according to the documents, advised Lysenko to tell the A.I.U. the truth about the conspiracy or he would withdraw from his case.
Lysenko refused, the report said, and Greene ended their relationship. Greene, citing attorney client privilege, declined to comment on his work with Lysenko.
In April 2019, during an interview with the A.I.U., Lysenko — now represented by a Russian lawyer who had once represented the Russian track federation — tried to stick to his story. Eventually, though, as investigators picked holes in account, Lysenko broke.
