THE CRUEELLEST HOAX?
Salisbury in lockdown AGAIN. Police and hospital staff scrambled . . . for a Russian escort and her conman British husband who claimed they’d been poisoned like the Skripals. But was it all a despicable scam to secure her visa?
OF COURSE, alarm bells sounded when Alex King and his Russian-born wife, Anna Shapiro, became violently ill at an Italian restaurant in Salisbury last Sunday. After all, this was the city in which, just six months earlier, former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia had been found slumped unconscious on a bench after dining in another Italian restaurant just a few hundred yards away.
Then, in July, local woman Dawn Sturgess died after being exposed to the nerve agent Novichok — the same substance used by Russian agents to try to assassinate the Skripals — after it was found discarded in a perfume bottle in a local park.
Faced with the possibility that Salisbury was once again under attack, Wiltshire police braced themselves for the worst. Areas were promptly cordoned off, the city was placed in lockdown and emergency crews wearing protective clothing searched the restaurant.
The couple were rushed to Salisbury District Hospital, while panicked residents prepared themselves for yet another onslaught of global scrutiny and bad publicity for the city.
Yesterday, however, alarm bells were ringing for a different reason after grave doubts emerged about the couple’s story, which had caused such distress and chaos.
She, for a start, is reportedly a high-class escort and former professional ‘honeytrap’, while King, her husband of just one month who was released from hospital on Tuesday afternoon, is a troubled hoaxer who once duped Prince Charles. He counted a fraudster as his best friend and is awaiting trial for intent to supply drugs.
Yet after leaving hospital on Monday, Shapiro, 30, further fanned the flames of an international conspiracy when she described how she had found King, 42, foaming at the mouth in the restaurant toilet after eating his sea bass. She placed the blame squarely on the Russian Government.
The daughter of a Russian military official who became an Israeli citizen against her father’s wishes in 2006, Shapiro claimed she and her husband — who, she said, had been put in an induced coma in hospital — had been fleeing their London home after receiving a string of death threats.
‘I was targeted by Putin’s henchmen,’ the part- time model and company director declared unequivocally in a redtop newspaper, alongside a scantily clad picture of herself, and suggestions the couple had been poisoned by strychnine. ‘They want me dead as I oppose Putin and have turned my back on my country. Russia is capable of anything.’
That much, we know, is true. Yet Shapiro’s audacious claims fast began to appear as puffed up as the dough in the Fiorentina pizza she enjoyed before falling ill.
The Sun newspaper, which published her interview, swiftly took down their original story on their website ‘ for legal reasons’; the police have now declared the incident ‘nonsuspicious’ and the couple, it is emerging, have a background every bit as colourful as the history of the cathedral city where Shapiro claimed they were targeted.
So what really happened to this tawdry couple? And what possible motive could they have for claiming they have been poisoned?
There was no sign of either of them outside the ground-floor flat they share in a large mansion block in Central London yesterday, but one person who knows the couple spoke to the Mail and claimed that both their recent marriage and the accusations of poisoning were Shapiro’s idea. TALKING on condition of anonymity, he claimed her British visa is about to expire and suggested she believes embroiling herself in a police investigation against the Russians would let her stay in this country. ‘Anna created this story because she needed a visa to stay in Britain,’ he claims.
‘She married Alex to get a visa. They got married at a register office. Alex is a nice guy. He’s a silly man and a fool and she’s a control freak. It’s a bad relationship, him and her. She controls Alex.’
It’s an extraordinary claim — but then nothing about this story is particularly normal.
Shapiro claimed she had to strip naked and shower in hospital before undergoing tests, and that after discharging herself the day after the incident she was taken to a local hotel and placed under 24-hour police protection.
‘I’m sure the Russians think I’m a British spy. I know lots of rich businessmen in Central London and, because I have the accent, people make assumptions about me,’ she claimed, adding that her father, who she says was a general in the Russian army, is so ‘appalled’ by her denunciation of her native country that: ‘Someone purporting to be my father is behind a series of death threats I have had on various social media accounts and email addresses. They have frightened me.’
So much so that she and King were staying at a £55-a-night farmhouse bed and breakfast in Landford, 11 miles outside Salisbury, last weekend, apparently en route to starting a new life on the South Coast.
The farmhouse owner, she claimed, recommended they dine in Prezzo that evening. ‘I laughed and said: “I hope we don’t get poisoned,”’ she said in her interview. ‘ The owner smiled and said: “Everywhere is safe now.” ’
It could, of course, have been a coincidence that Shapiro ended up just yards from the scene of this year’s most intriguing international crime. Yet the blonde, who arrived in London in 2008 before studying for three years at Westminster Law School, does have a habit of gravitating towards the centre of attention.
On social media Shapiro — whose real name is Chana but whose Twitter and Instagram accounts are under yet another name — has posted myriad swimsuit pictures of herself, taut bronzed limbs draped over yachts, long hair flowing on yet another beach.
She reportedly used to be a ‘honeytrap’, seducing men for Israeli spy agency Mossad as a teenager, claiming: ‘I spied on my own friends and even used my looks to seduce men. I was too young to know that what I was doing was wrong.’ Now, she is reported to have said: ‘I work as a model and an escort.’
Said to charge £4,000 a night for her services, she allegedly entertains wealthy clientele at her marital home.
‘She goes with people who are rich and famous,’ said the friend, who described King as ‘weak’ and afraid of his ‘selfish’ wife: ‘He sees all the people coming in and out (of the flat). It’s very sad.’
Of course, an aptitude for attention doesn’t negate her version of events, even if it has proved handy in propelling her onto the front pages. Yet her husband, whom she met shortly after she arrived in Britain in 2008 but only married last month, does have a history of hoaxing.
Born Alex Ainley to an Irish businessman father, Shaun, Alex King, 42, discovered as a teenager that he was not Shaun’s biological son, but the offspring of German aristocrat Baron Freddie von Nida, with whom his mother had a fling.
The discovery seemingly left him gripped by self-doubt. He adopted the surname King, so as not to side with either his stepfather or genetic father, and used his newfound connections to assert an aristocratic identity, establishing a friendship with Edward Davenport, 52, an infamous playboy conman known as ‘Fast Eddie’ on account of his louche lifestyle. Davenport was given an eight-year jail sentence in 2011 for a £4.5m fraud.
Having made his name in the Eighties organising ‘ Gatecrasher Balls’ — raucous par-
ties for wealthy teenagers — Davenport bought a lavish £14m, 24-bedroom home in Portland Place, London, which he invited King to share (and which was, incidentally, used as a location for the film The King’s Speech).
King looked up to his older contact, who told the Mail yesterday they enjoyed a ‘great’ friendship when Alex was ‘fresh-faced’.
Perhaps that is why, in 2006, King accepted a £100,000 dare to infiltrate the cast line-up at the royal film premiere of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and shake hands with Prince Charles. ‘Eddie was a guest and bet me £100,000 I couldn’t gatecrash my way in,’ he recalled shortly afterwards.
‘I said not only would I get in — but I would also shake hands with both Charles and Camilla.’ And he did. ‘I just said whatever came into my head. I was talking gibberjabber,’ says King.
Whether desperate for money, attention or Davenport’s approval is unclear, but his innocuous prank belied a darker personality.
King’s mother Christine described her son as being ‘ bitter and angry’ about being abandoned by his biological father, who later despaired of his acknowledged offspring. ‘I am not proud to have a son who behaves like this,’ said Baron von Nida shortly after the hoax. ‘He races around after this Eddie Davenport fellow, trying to emulate him. He wants an easy life and easy money and he hankers after the champagne lifestyle.’
The same year, King was exposed by a newspaper as ‘an ambassador of perversion’ after telling undercover reporters, who had come to Portland Place on the pretence of renting the property for a porn film, that Eastern European girls who stripped naked for them were available for sex at £500 a day. He told reporters the girls had answered adverts in Russianlanguage newspapers. It is not known how he met Shapiro, although, given both of their professions, one might hazard a guess.
Davenport, meanwhile, moved into a penthouse opposite London’s Ritz Hotel and went into the sex party industry. ‘I want to do what I love — organise great parties, meet beautiful women, celebrities and fun people. Everyone doing what they enjoy — having sex,’ he boasted in 2016.
Yesterday, Davenport told the Mail his friendship with King deteriorated in 2010 after King and Shapiro became an item.
By the sounds of it, he was put out when King’s allegiances switched from one dominant personality to another.
‘He used to pretend to me that he hadn’t really fallen for her but obviously he had. I think he totally fell for her,’ he says. ‘I think Alex has gone a bit mad. I think they’re both mad. We never fell out but stopped seeing each other. I’ve absolutely no idea where they are now.’
Yet he, too, suspects Shapiro elaborated the poisoning story in the hope that becoming part of a police investigation would stop her having to leave Britain: ‘People want visas to stay in the country, which is why people go and get married and claim people are trying to assassinate them.’
King, meanwhile, is charged with 12 counts of possession with intent to supply class A, B and C drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, and is on bail until his trial next year. Given his impending trial, one might have expected him to keep a low profile. And whether King was aware of the interview his wife gave is, as yet, unknown.
ASPoKESMAN for the Sun newspaper — which would not comment on why their story was taken offline or whether Shapiro was paid for her story — said: ‘Given recent tragic events in Salisbury, the reporting of an event requiring the evacuation of bars and restaurants by police officers in bio-hazard suits, and that requires tests for the presence of Novichok, is of obvious public interest.
‘Like any newspaper, we were keen to talk to those at the centre of the fast-moving incident and in this case chose to give Ms Shapiro the opportunity to share with the public her version of events. We notified Wiltshire Police of Ms Shapiro’s claims well in advance of publication and their statement at the time, which confirmed that this episode was being treated as a serious incident, was included.’
Kremlin officials dismissed Shapiro’s claims as absurd, while a spokesperson for Wiltshire police told the Mail both had been interviewed and their inquiries were ‘ongoing’. No arrests have been made, although one line of inquiry, inevitably, will be that the whole incident was a hoax.