‘I Was Taken Hostage’: How an American Metal Rocker Landed in Russian Prison

O
ne minute, Travis Leake was trying to decide which movie he and his fiancée should watch in his rented apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. The next, he was lying face down on the floor in a small pool of his own blood.

On that early June afternoon in 2023, Leake heard a pounding on the door of his unit in a three-story building on a tree-lined street. Ever since he’d moved from the United States to Russia six years earlier, Leake had toggled between teaching English to locals and attempting to get his fledgling grunge-metal band off the ground. In videos and photos on social media, Leake, now in his early fifties, had the aura of an elder-statesman goth punk. The pandemic had shut down any hope of his band’s live shows, and a book he’d planned to co-write about Anthony Bourdain (on whose show he had appeared) had fallen through. But he felt so at home in Russia that he didn’t think of leaving, even after the events of the previous year.

Leake found himself facing four masked, uniformed Russian tactical cops brandishing assault weapons; police detectives followed behind. According to one account, police said they were acting on a tip about “drugs and money.” As Leake tells it, he raised his hands in surrender, but the police pushed him to the ground and handcuffed him so roughly his wrists soon began to bleed. He was then kicked in the chest as cops taunted him and dragged him across the floor. He remembers watching as his fiancée, a Russian native, was subjected to an intrusive body-cavity search. The cops also seized his cellphone and tore apart his home of two years, wrecking his recording setup in the process.

Leake says the couple had been talking about starting a bath-bomb company, and a pile of those ingredients, including baking soda and citric acid, was on display. He says the cops slapped him, trying to get him to admit the soap components were drug paraphernalia. Leake remembers sensing a plastic baggie being placed on his head and feeling it fall off. All along, the police filmed the raid.

Back in Bakersfield, California, where her son had spent most of his childhood, his mother, Glenda Garcia, learned from a reporter that her son, whom she hadn’t seen in person since 2017, had been arrested on suspicion of drug trafficking. As a statement from the Russian government read, “The Khamovniki District Court of Moscow took a preventive measure against an American citizen.” Leake was finally receiving the recognition he’d long craved, but not remotely in the way he’d once dreamed.

Americans Imprisoned Abroad

By last account, dozens of Americans are being detained in countries around the world. Under Joe Biden’s administration, more than 75 were brought back to the States from China, Russia, Iran, and other countries. In Russia, WNBA star Brittney Griner was released in a prisoner swap in 2022, followed last year by the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich. But in Russia alone, at least 10 more Americans (and many from other countries) remain, some officially deemed by their governments to be wrongfully detained, and others (like Leake) not.

When Interfax, the Russian news agency, announced his arrest, Leake was described as, among other things, a musician and former U.S. paratrooper. Most in the American music world had never heard of him, and some of the information, such as his military record, was overstated. But the real focus was on the charges leveled against Leake: that he and a former girlfriend were essentially a two-person drug-trafficking ring attempting to sell mephedrone (a stimulant akin to a combo of cocaine and speed) in Russia. In July, more than a year after his arrest, Leake was sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony, his co-defendant to eight.

Leake’s arrest and detainment made international headlines for a few days, but unlike other Americans who were designated by the U.S. to be wrongfully detained, his story quickly faded from public view. Last year, under Biden, the U.S. State Department would not comment on Leake’s situation to Rolling Stone, only offering a general statement that the department has “no higher priority than the safety and security of U.S. citizens abroad.”

Starting last fall, I began reaching out to Leake’s family and friends, both here and in Russia, to understand how a California computer geek found himself fronting a Russian rock band and then getting arrested on drug charges. The investigation eventually led to Leake himself — who, by way of handwritten letters sent to his mother, agreed to answer my questions, largely on the record.

The two responses I’ve received to date, adding up to nearly a dozen pages, are composed in clear, concise if tiny handwriting (partly, according to his mother, to lessen the per-page charges for such correspondence). In them, Leake lays out his story and maintains his innocence, insisting that the drugs in his home were planted and that he was targeted by the government. “I don’t expect, nor require, anyone to merely take my word for any of this,” he wrote in December. “The evidence is clear and consistent. I was taken hostage and the [government] buried exculpatory evidence with intent.”

The change in administration from Biden to Donald Trump has given Leake — and his family and those working on his behalf to free him — a degree of hope. On March 9, Trump continued “U.S. Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Day,” first declared in 2023, announcing that his administration “is proudly taking decisive action to bring Americans back home where they belong” and rattl­ing off the names of 13 Americans “held captive” who are now released from Russia, Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Belarus. Whether Leake will eventually join that list remains unknown, and he and some people who knew him wonder if his arrest and imprisonment — presuming he is innocent — were connected to the Ukraine invasion, Russian-American relations, his political beliefs, his part-time job as a rock musician, or even his appearance on that Bourdain TV episode more than a decade ago.

In his letters, Leake acknowledges the risks of communicating to the outside world, but he feels he needs to tell his side of the story. As he writes on one page, “Before I was killed, I had a simple, joyous, and truthfully almost-magical and long-sought-for life.… I was happy. Wasn’t rich or famous, but trying. Found my place in this fucked up world.” But in a follow-up, he adds, “I am in hell. A burning, bleak, creeping, obscene, solitary, seemingly endless, obscured, bottomless pit of free fall through Satan’s asshole.”

For Leake, Russia was a place where he finally fit in, a place where he found a community that allowed him to redefine himself — only to see it all fall away in an instant. “Travis was naive,” says computer tech Michael Kammer, who knew Leake as a teen and reconnected with him in Russia. “He thought that if you played by the rules, nothing bad would happen. I told him no, that if somebody is out to get you and they have power, they can get you.”

A Latchkey Kid

In the mid-Eighties, a teenage Leake would drop by Kammer’s computer store in a strip mall in Bakersfield. With his shaggy dark hair, he looked to Kammer like he could have been a mop-topped member of the Goonies cast. Leake was always asking questions about computers, and Kammer noticed he often carried around an instruction book on complex C computer programming. “I thought, ‘What the heck is a 17-year-old kid doing with C language?’” Kammer says. “It was above my head. It really impressed me.”

Leake also struck Kammer as “kind of a dour, sad kid,” and suspected his family life was complicated, although Leake never discussed it. Michael Travis Leake was born in Norwalk, California, in 1971. He and his family — his father, Curtis, and mother, Garcia — were then living in Orange County. The family soon moved north of Los Angeles. When Leake was nine, his parents broke up, making him a latchkey kid like many in Generation X. “It was really rough on him,” Garcia admits. Years later, Leake would write a song called “Dude, You’re Not My Dad,” which he called “a hilarious and ultimately meaningful song” about children of divorce.

After graduating from West High School in Bakersfield in 1989, Leake signed up for service, training as a refrigeration technician at an Air Force base in Texas. “He was just searching for something to do,” Garcia says. Leake writes in one of his letters that he fell into a “severe depression” after transferring to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, attempted suicide, and was honorably discharged. Around this time, he also began insisting to friends and family that he be known as Travis, not Michael. “He said there was too many Michaels in the world,” Garcia says.

In his early twenties, Leake moved to Texas, where he took a job at a car dealership and looked, says his friend Monnie Hightower, a little “nerdy” in his preppy clothes. But he eventually made his way back to California. For a few years in the mid-2000s, he was married to a Ukrainian who his mother thinks he met online. When Leake was laid off from his job at a Toyota dealership around the time of the 2008 financial crash, he asked if he could move back in with his mom and her new husband near Sacramento. Garcia told her son he could as long as he got a new job or went back to school. He opted for the latter, earning degrees at American River College and California State University in Sacramento.

“I DON’T EXPECT ANYONE TO MERELY TAKE MY WORD FOR THIS. THE EVIDENCE IS CLEAR.”

At American River, Leake’s new girlfriend, a Ukrainian American woman, called him one evening to gush over a new band she’d heard — Slot, roaring Russian rap-metalheads with male and female lead singers, like a merger of Evanescence and Linkin Park. A product of the Eighties and Nineties, Leake had grown up immersed in everything from Billy Joel and Garth Brooks to Depeche Mode, what he describes to me as “music with interesting thoughtful lyrics.” But he was largely drawn to what he calls “the heavier side of mainstream rock”: “I’m a Nineties guy. I love grunge, all of it.”

Leake says he “fell in love” with Slot’s music. Curious as to what they were saying in their songs, he translated them and posted lyric videos online, including for “Voodoo Doll” (“I am a voodoo doll/There will be no crying/I am a voodoo doll/I will not forget anything”). “After subtitling a few videos for YouTube, the band reached out,” he writes. “They wanted to make an [international] album. Of course, I agreed.” On May 25, 2010, Leake made his fateful first trip to the country whose music scene would prove his destiny and his possible ruin.

Russian Music Scene

By the time Leake landed in Russia, the country’s music scene had been transformed. According to Dmitry Spirin, singer of the pivotal Russian punk band Tarakany! (“Cockroaches!”), a community once home to very few clubs and only one record label was suddenly thriving. The Russian music world now encompassed recording studios, more labels, bands from punk to metal to alternative, and clubs like Ikra (where Gogol Bordello, fronted by Ukrainian-born Eugene Hütz, made its Russian debut), the 1,500-seat Tochka, and a cluster of smaller, more subterranean venues. And in that scene — a world of smoking, drinking, ready-to-rock Russian music-heads — Spirin took note of a new addition from overseas. “I knew that there was some American hanging out with our colleagues from the scene,” he says. “Just a friend of the musicians, or a guy who does something for them.”

Leake lived something of a dual life, teaching English to employees of Russian corporations as well as private students. (According to his mother, he bartered for dental work by teaching English to a dentist’s daughter.) And after meeting the members of Slot (who did not respond to requests for comment), he ingratiated himself into the Russian rock world, going to clubs and helping local bands write English-language lyrics so they could potentially cross over in America. “He, of course, said everything that all my American friends, since the mid-Nineties, have said about life in Moscow,” Spirin says. “Fun, lots of hot girls for whom you are ‘Mister American,’ cheap booze, the opportunity to hang out with alternative stars and even be useful to them.… I don’t think at his age you have a chance to live that kind of life in Burbank.”

Serving as executive producer and lyric translator, Leake helped Slot with their first English-language album, Break the Code, in 2011. “With Travis, it’s the only way we found to make our CD into English as we want it,” lead singer Darya Ravdina told metal website Sonic Cathedral in 2011. “Maybe the most important thing is that we have relied on him to make sure that the way we sing is appropriate for the Western world.” Leake also connected with Louna, a band that blended punk, indie, metal, and anti-religious, anti-government lyrics, and he helped Spirin’s band translate its lyrics into English.

By then, Russia’s slide into autocracy was apparent, despite Vladimir Putin briefly stepping aside from the presidency, and according to the U.S. Department of State, “There were [in 2010] numerous reports of governmental and societal human rights problems and abuses during the year.” But for Leake, the country offered a welcome mat. “I loved my work, and my life here,” he writes. “I’ve never anywhere felt so necessary and fulfilled.” Says Spirin: “He loved Russia very much. I always joked that he was a bigger Russian patriot than all of us, his Russian friends.… It was already clear to all of us that we were living under a new Stalin, who sooner or later would start killing oppositionists and start a war. Travis did not want to hear about it.”

Eventually returning to the U.S., Leake started his own indie label, Red Decade Records, in Bakersfield. Red Decade’s sole release was Louna’s Behind a Mask, which included versions of the band’s older songs, but with newly recorded English-sung lyrics translated by Leake. With Leake serving as tour manager and driver, Louna embarked on their first American tour, in 2013. When the shows brought them to California, they crashed at the Leake’s mother house, and she stayed up all night doing the band’s laundry.

That same year, Louna (who declined to comment) were scheduled to be included in an MTV Europe show, Rebel Music, about anti-authoritarian bands. When the band was cut from the show for unexplained reasons, Leake was contacted by Bourdain’s team, who were about to film an episode of the chef’s travel-and-food series, Parts Unknown, in Russia. The Russian punk band Pussy Riot had canceled due to a scheduling conflict, and Bourdain now wanted to interview Louna instead.

As Leake writes to me in one of his letters, “That interview became, ultimately, a defining moment in my life,” and perhaps not in the best way.

“Travis thought if you played by the rules, nothing bad would happen.”

Staying for Good

In early 2014, Leake and Louna guitarist Ruben Kazarian found themselves at a table in Moscow’s 16 Tons club. There, Leake’s makeover was on full display. The short-haired young professional of the Eighties and Nineties had given way to a 42-year-old with a head shaved on both sides, earrings, and a pierced eyebrow. He, Kazarian, and Bourdain took a seat at a table, and according to Zamir Gotta, who was a recurring guest on Bourdain’s series and a close friend, Leake seemed to revel in the attention.

In his earpiece, Bourdain heard some technical interference, and Leake half-joked that the KGB was likely “blocking your signal,” adding, “I’m sure that they are, believe it or not. I’m quite sure you’ve had someone on your tail the entire time you’ve been here.” As customers drank around them, talk turned to Louna’s exclusion from the MTV show, which Leake blamed on the Russian government. “This was a documentary series about musicians standing up and risking their lives in some cases, to stand up against government abuse of power, government corruption,” he tells Bourdain in the episode. “And yet, a foreign government was able to editorially control what American viewers see on their TV screens. That to me is a scandal of epic proportions.”

When that episode of Parts Unknown aired on CNN in May 2014, Leake’s mother watched anxiously at home. “That was nerve-racking for me,” Garcia says. “I was afraid he’d say something that would have got him arrested immediately. It concerns a mother, you know. But he said he’d be fine.”

Not long after the Bourdain show, though, Leake sensed something changing around him. “Things started feeling odd in Russia for me as the months progressed [in] 2014,” he writes. “I attributed it to the CNN interview. Maybe it was just paranoia. I’ll never know.” Partly because of that feeling, he returned to California later that year, taking jobs as a substitute teacher and working as an extra in TV and movies. In 2015, he also returned to school, enrolling at California State University in Los Angeles and earning his master’s in early 2017. But he wasn’t happy with his life or the politics in his native country. A second marriage ended as abruptly as his first had. And on social media, he became critical of Barack Obama (“the Head Idiot in Charge,” as he called him) and posted selfies with conservatives Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich.

As he wrote on his socials in 2016, Leake resisted categorization: “I consider myself an objectivist. I’m neither conservative nor liberal, nor in-between, nor at some extreme edge of anything connected.… Stop reading headlines, and actually invest time in your own mental, spiritual, and psychological development and do your own research from primary sources that don’t have three letters attached to them anywhere. This means, no more Fox, no more CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR, etc.”

Before long, Leake began formulating a plan to return to Russia. To save money while he was back in college, he lived for a time in his Honda Accord, parking near the school’s library for free Wi-Fi and showering in a nearby gym. “I had just gotten divorced for the second time, I felt completely isolated from the world, and the politics of my own country were such as to make me feel like I had no hope of ever finding anything worthwhile in life,” he told Russian writer Vladimir Erkovich for the book Cockroaches! With an Exclamation Mark at the End. “I had actually planned to spend that summer in Moscow … and then return to the U.S.A.” He added that he would “commit suicide by jumping from the top of the English-department building at Cal State Los Angeles.” It’s unclear if he was joking about that part of his plan.

Returning to Russia that summer of 2016 proved to Leake that he felt more at home there than in the U.S.

“When I was back in Moscow, I realized just how missed I was, and how much I missed working in music,” he writes in one of his letters. He continued his translation work with Spirin’s band and was eventually offered the chance to sing lead on one of its songs, “Who You Were Yesterday.” (“Looking back, those lyrics seem prophetic now,” he writes to me.) After the summer, Leake came back to America determined to return to Moscow — to relocate for good.

In January 2017, his mother and her husband drove Leake to LAX for another flight to Russia. “I thought he was crazy to move to Russia,” Garcia says. “But he’s an adult. You can’t live their life for them.”

‘Please Don’t Panic’

Gotta, Bourdain’s colleague, couldn’t help but marvel at the sight. It was September 2019, and onstage at the cramped Live Stars club in Moscow was a very different Leake from the one he’d met five years earlier. In a black pullover, his hair blond and straggly, a bulkier Leake was now a metal badass and the frontman of his own band, Lovi Noch (“Seize the Night”). Although the band’s industrial grunge wasn’t Gotta’s favorite, he called Leake “an impressive singer.”

Leake and Gotta began working on a book about Gotta’s time with Bourdain, who died in 2018. The collaboration eventually ended when the two disagreed on an approach for the book. But working with Tarakany! made Leake realize how much he wanted a band of his own. Leake recruited local, experienced musicians and formed Lovi Noch as a showcase for his singing and writing.

“FUN, HOT GIRLS, CHEAP BOOZE … YOU DON’T HAVE A CHANCE TO LIVE THAT KIND OF LIFE IN BURBANK.”

“There are many Russian musicians who sing in English, and there are also many fans of Western rock who expect a guy from America to sing in English,” says Spirin. “But Travis came up with the idea to do everything the other way around: He apparently decided to become the first American to become famous on the Russian rock scene by performing his own songs in Russian.” Leake’s former girlfriend Karen Stallings remembers him saying, “It was a lot easier to break your band [in Russia] than it is here.” While he resumed teaching, Leake began sitting in with other Russian bands at clubs.

Thanks to social media, Leake also reconnected with a few old friends, including Kam­mer, his computer-store buddy from Bakersfield. Kammer had no idea Leake was now in Russia, and in their video calls, Kam­mer took note of his friend’s apartment, with its small kitchenette and an area set up as a makeshift recording studio. Leake sent Kammer audio files he made, including the songs “Path of Wreckage” and “Who Is Nigh Yet” — rap-metal pounders that sound like a Putin-era version of Twenty One Pilots. Leake’s gravelly voice and delivery were also front and center in the band’s video for “Mama, Goodbye.”

Every so often, Kammer would ask Leake if he was concerned about living under a Russian regime, and Leake didn’t seem especially worried. “He saw beauty in the way the people overcome it,” Kammer says. “There’s the overall oppressiveness, but the average, day-to-day people were great. He said, ‘It’s not as oppressive as you think, as long as you know where the lines are.’”

In late 2021, Leake also got back in touch with Monnie Hightower from his time in Texas. She asked him how he felt about the situation with Putin, and he told her he had to be careful what he said. “‘They’re always listening’ — that’s what he said,” Hightower recalls. “But he went on to say, ‘This place is beautiful. I love it here.’”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 did nothing to stop Leake’s plans. “I tried to convince him to leave Moscow,” Spirin says. “I told him it was unsafe for him as a foreigner/American, since I was sure Putin would put them all in jail sooner or later. Not only because they were citizens of ‘potential enemy countries,’ but to form a so-called exchange fund. He just laughed, said how good he was in Moscow, and even joked, ‘Thank you for leaving us your women.’”

But in an April 2022 Facebook post, Leake let on that life in Russia could be unnerving. He wrote: “I have taken necessary precautions and have 5 different individuals who I have asked to check in with me weekly with specific instructions on who to contact and ‘next steps’ if they are unable to reach me.… No one has paid me a visit or tried to intimidate me. I have received no odd phone calls or untoward messages. In fact, I have had almost universally positive encouragement for my decision to remain here in Russia from people of all backgrounds.”

Leake added that he would otherwise keep his opinions to himself and hope for a swift end to the war with Ukraine. He ended with, “Please don’t panic, everybody.”

The Face on the News

The first the world at large saw of Leake came soon after his arrest in June 2023, when Russian media released a video filmed at a detention center in Moscow. Asked if he would confess, he answered, “I am not admitting to any guilt. And I do not believe that I have done what I have been accused because I don’t know what I’ve been accused of.”

If you believe the Russian court documents, here is what happened: During the first six months of 2023, Leake conspired with another defendant, 22-year-old Veronika Grabanchuk, to sell mephedrone. The two (who supposedly met at the Coyote Ugly chain in Moscow, where she worked as a waitress) allegedly placed the drugs (“illegally acquired” from an unnamed source, according to court papers) in locations throughout Moscow, including an elevator and a steam radiator; the alleged buyers would then be texted of the whereabouts of the drugs. Leake was accused of also having in his apartment some of that drug and MDMA pills (or at least one), which he allegedly intended to sell, plus, according to the prosecution, ziplock bags, electronic scales, a “glass tube,” and other items that could be associated with drugs.

“I THOUGHT HE WAS CRAZY TO MOVE TO RUSSIA. BUT HE’S AN ADULT. YOU CAN’T LIVE THEIR LIFE FOR THEM.”

As those same documents assert, Leake had “no legal source of income” and was charged with the “illegal sale of narcotic drugs for the purpose of illegal enrichment.” Included in his more than 650-page file for the case were photographs of the drug bundles and their alleged locations.

If you believe Leake’s version of events, here is what happened. The bagged drugs in Leake’s home were, he says, placed there by cops eager to arrest an American and further their careers, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had inflamed relations between Russia and the United States.

Soon after his arrest, Leake did sign a confession — but, he claims, under duress, and after being beaten and having his fiancée threatened with jail. (According to Leake’s current lawyer, Leake “didn’t deny” that a strip of mephedrone found in the apartment belonged to him, but said that an MDMA pill there did not.) Both Leake and his legal team claim that photos of his sex toys released to the public were meant to further humiliate him and that a government statement incorrectly reported that Leake had been a U.S. paratrooper. “The national media here paraded me for the whole world,” Leake writes. “Said I was a drug lord … said I was a former Army paratrooper who fought in Desert Storm. All lies.”

In his response, the first of two Russian lawyers hired by Leake’s family argued that the arrest was “the result of human mistakes on the one hand, and human dirty tricks on the other.” The lawyer argued in court that the fact that Leake allowed the police into his apartment without disposing of any of the supposed drugs signaled his innocence: “Ultimately, he could have stayed in the apartment until the police broke down the door, but this did not happen. He could flush the drugs down the toilet, throw them out the window, anything. He didn’t do it.” (According to court papers, the Khamovniki District Court of Moscow said it had found “no violations of the law of criminal procedures.”)

When Leake’s friends heard the news, they tried to square their memories of him with the alleged drug lord the Russian government was depicting. “I have never seen him on drugs, never heard from anyone that he uses drugs, much less deals, and on a large scale,” Spirin says. “Travis always seemed sober and purposeful.” During what he calls “hours of conversations,” Kammer maintains that there was “nothing about anything unethical or illegal that ever came up.… He said, ‘Look, I’m a guest of the Russian Federation.’ He knew full well that if he did anything , the repercussions would be very bad.”

Since Russian authorities thought both he and Grabanchuk could destroy evidence and “pressure witnesses,” both were detained, initially for two months. That turned into almost a year. Leake was sent to Butyrka Prison, a notorious facility in the center of Moscow that serves as a pretrial detention center. He told his mother that at least once he was punched in the throat because he was American, then placed in solitary confinement. “These are inhuman conditions,” says Spirin (who says he left Russia for Argentina in 2021 after being branded a dissident). “I can’t imagine what it’s like for a guy who is used to a completely different life, who doesn’t understand the internal rules of the informal structure of life in a Russian prison. It’s terrifying.”

According to court documents, Grabanchuk pleaded guilty, but Leake did not. A trial took place in late 2023. Leake claims in his letters that his testimony was “horribly and materially altered” and “the court denied me access to everything that could be used to support my innocence: forensics, photos, bank records, drug evidence, hospital records, prison records, witnesses.…” (Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other inside sources did not respond to requests for comment.)

Last July 18, Leake, noticeably thinner and sporting short dark hair, appeared in a Russian courtroom and was sentenced to a penal colony outside of Moscow. By then, his case had come to the attention of Jonathan Franks, a U.S.-based publicist and crisis-management consultant who works with families of American hostages. One of Franks’ first steps was to write to then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken, requesting that Leake be designated “wrongfully detained” and released; Franks also feels Leake’s treatment is not in accordance with the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act (which aims to help wrongfully held Americans abroad). Franks described Leake’s trial as “a sham from start to finish” that was filled with “flawed/inadmissible evidence and testimony.” (In legal documents, the court maintained that it “considers the investigating authorities presented sufficient evidence indicating the validity of his suspicion of involvement in the crime.”)

Franks sent the packet to the State Department, receiving an acknowledgment but not a substantive response, although Leake’s mother says the department told her it would visit her son in prison every few months to check on his condition. The documents sent to Blinken also included a letter from Leake to Biden: “I am no one special,” it read in part. “I am not a famous athlete, or a war hero, or a rich businessman. I am a citizen caught up in a geopolitical chess match not of my making.” Neither he nor Franks heard back.

Over the past year, The Wall Street Journal’s Gershkovich and Radio Free Europe journalist Alsu Kurmasheva were both set free from Russia as part of a prisoner-exchange program with the U.S. “I watched their plane taxiing on live TV,” Leake writes. “Watched it from my prison cell, drenched in tears. I have never — could never — feel more abandoned and alone than I did at that moment.… To be clear, I am happy for them. For their families.… What of the rest of us? Our families?”

Marc Fogel, the American schoolteacher released by Russia in February, was arrested in 2021 for traveling with medically prescribed weed (and was deemed wrongfully detained by the Biden administration). The more serious charges against Leake, drug trafficking, may be a complicating factor in terms of his release. Some close to Leake also wonder if his vocation and even metal-dude air have made American officials (especially in the previous administration) presume he is guilty as charged. “They read something like, ‘The guy’s a heavy-metal musician, and he had an Ecstasy tablet in the house,’’ a source close to Leake said last fall, before the election. “And then they just assume the rest.”

Leake’s family and friends have continually raised questions about the charges against him. Was Russia in search of Americans who could be exchanged for their own imprisoned citizens abroad, especially during the tense post-Ukraine-invasion period? Was Leake’s arrest blowback for his comments to Bourdain more than a decade ago? “He kind of regretted a few things that he said,” says Kammer, “because he heard a couple of people didn’t really like some things he said.”

But while much of the world looks at the newly friendly rapport between America and Russia with skepticism, Leake and his team see it as reason for optimism. In prison, Leake counted the hours to Trump’s inauguration and handwrote a letter to Trump that Franks is attempting to get into the hands of the new administration. “I appreciate, Mr. President, that you are now busy trying to fix a broken America,” Leake’s letter began, before calling his situation “yet another example of the collateral damage that resulted from the incompetence of the previous administration.”

To date, the Trump administration has not responded to Leake’s situation, at least publicly, and the State Department is still declining to elaborate on why he was not declared wrongfully detained, like many others held overseas. But Franks senses a change from the Biden team, and for the better. “It has been refreshing dealing with the incoming administration,” states Franks, who says he has made unnamed Trump administration officials aware of Leake, “because they are much more willing and open to new ideas, unusual ideas, than the previous administration.”

Following the verdict, Leake’s legal team filed appeals. His current Russian lawyer questions some of the procedures in the trial, such as the judge refusing to include bank records of alleged transactions between Leake and Grabanchuk that would, the lawyer asserts, prove Leake’s innocence. On April 10, Russian American Ksenia Karelina, who was serving a 12-year sentence in Russia for donating just over $50 to a pro-Ukraine charity, was released after more than a year in jail, swapped for a Russian German citizen imprisoned in the U.S. for crimes including money laundering and wire fraud. But at Leake’s hearing that day, his appeal was denied.

While his lawyer planned yet another appeal, Leake spent his days in a crammed cell with a cellmate, two bunk beds, a sink, a mini fridge, and a toilet without a door, according to a drawing he sent to his mother. “Unlike most people, I can tell you the last time I saw the sky without three sets of bars blurring my vision,” he writes in late February. “The last time I held someone’s hand. Had a hug. The only physical contact I know anymore is either the dehumanization of a twice-daily pat-down, being attacked, or slapping my own face in a desperate attempt to wake up from this.… The man that my family knew, Travis Leake, died in this place long ago.”

He pored over the details of the arrest and trial, questioning what he sees as inconsistencies in court papers. In his letters, he says he was not allowed a phone or computer access, nor a Bible. Except for the times his mother was able to send food and supplies to him by way of a contact in Siberia, his diet consisted largely of what he calls “raw, defrosted, and ungutted fish” and stale bread. He says he has lost 45 pounds, now resembles, in his words, a Holocaust victim, and fears his eyesight is failing him over lack of sunlight. At the end of April, he was moved — starting what could be a monthlong journey to a penal colony.

“I always dreamed of being a musician,” he writes. “So when I got my chance to be in music here, I took it. Now that has become a nightmare that never ends. I will die here if I’m not brought home. Soon.”