Russian

Jul 11, 2023

The most famous ’80s movie you’ve never heard of opens with an overhead shot of the Statue of Liberty, then shifts to a close-up of Bruce Springsteen singing “Born in the U.S.A.” Soon, we see a protest in Washington, D.C., and a close-up on people wrapped in blankets, trying to sleep on the ground. From there, it moves to a bustling New York street scene, with skyscrapers and yellow taxis and pedestrians crammed shoulder to shoulder.

Finally, about six minutes in, a narrator introduces the main character, Joe Mauri. After a brief tour of his apartment, he walks around outside, showing off Manhattan landmarks like the Plaza Hotel. That’s how the whole movie proceeds—shots of New York exteriors intercut with conversational snippets from a seemingly random, middle-aged New Yorker. It’s hard to imagine that anyone would care that much. But they did, by the millions.

If you’re American, there’s a good reason you have no idea what I’m talking about—that you’ve never heard of this movie, The Man From Fifth Avenue. That’s because it aired on Soviet television, billed as a documentary about life in the United States. When the movie premiered in 1986, Mauri, the titular man from Fifth Avenue, would find himself at the center of a Cold War maelstrom. It was the beginning of an international caper that spanned decades. Or, actually, the middle. But I’ll get to that part later.

When I stumbled on Joe Mauri’s story as part of Slate’s One Year podcast, I found a forgotten mystery that kept getting deeper. Once, people on both sides of the Iron Curtain were desperate to figure out whose side Mauri was really on. It was a geopolitical storm that, for a while, followed him wherever he went. But after he caught the world’s attention, he quickly vanished from the public eye. And that mystery? It never really got solved.

How did an ordinary American become a Soviet icon? And who was the Man from Fifth Avenue, really? As I dug deeper and made new discoveries, I found a tale a whole lot wilder than I’d ever imagined—a story of foreign intrigue, forbidden romance, and a man who might just have been playing everyone all along.

In the mid-1980s, Iona Andronov was a brash, pipe-smoking Russian reporter in New York. He worked as a foreign correspondent for Literaturnaya Gazeta, the Soviet Union’s largest weekly newspaper, which still publishes today. One day in September 1985, he was out for a walk on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when he saw two women handing out flyers. “Bypassers didn’t take any,” he told me by phone from his apartment in Moscow. “But I did because, as a journalist, I was interested.” (His quotes here have been translated from his native Russian.)

Those flyers were about a man who lived nearby, on West 70th Street: Joe Mauri. They said Mauri was the victim of an enormous injustice. He had lived in the same building for 12 years, paying $98 a month for a tiny, 54-square-foot room. But now his landlady was evicting him so she could use that space as a sewing room.

“This area was being cleared of the poor,” Andronov said. “It was called gentrification.”

A bunch of American publications had already written about Mauri’s pending eviction. He said his landlady had offered him $5,000 to get out. But Mauri had refused: “This is my home,” he told a reporter.

Now he was getting kicked to the curb, and it didn’t seem as if he had anywhere to go. He was a heart-tugging symbol of the downside of the booming housing market: a longtime resident on the road to homelessness. Soon, thanks to Iona Andronov, the Soviet press would be on the case too.

Andronov was always on the lookout for this kind of story. He specialized in articles that made America look bad. He’d published claims that the CIA tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II and was “breeding killer mosquitoes” for biological warfare. Andronov’s counterparts in the American media considered him a straight-up propagandist. The Washington Post went further, reporting that U.S. intelligence “identified him as an outright KGB agent.”

Andronov told me that was a slanderous allegation. “I have never been involved in espionage,” he said. “They didn’t even try to recruit me.”

But Andronov did see himself as a combatant in an information war. And this Joe Mauri thing seemed like great ammunition—a story about American inhumanity and rampant capitalist greed. “Yes, I decided that with Joseph I could stick it to the Americans, who only trash us and don’t show an objective picture,” he told me.

Slate’s acclaimed One Year podcast is back this week! Subscribe now for incredible stories from 1955, a year when a team of 12-year-olds tried to integrate Little League, “weather girls” took the country by storm, and a peculiar conspiracy theory infected the nation’s politics.

Mauri’s address was on that flyer. Andronov was right in front of the building, a five-story brownstone. He climbed up the old wooden stairs, all the way to the top floor. “And there were four doors there,” he remembered. “I knocked on the first, then the second. No answer followed. Then I put my ear to another door and heard some noise.”

Joe Mauri opened the door. He was in his mid-50s then, broad-shouldered but scrawny in a raggedy-looking checkered shirt. “He asked what I wanted,” Andronov said. “I said that I was a Russian reporter for a popular Moscow weekly newspaper and that I was interested in his story.”

A lot of Americans would’ve turned their backs as soon as they heard “Russian reporter.” But Mauri invited him inside, and answered all his questions.

Andronov had the story: a close-up look at American cruelty. He wrote one short article for his newspaper, which got delivered to an audience of millions back in the USSR. And that probably would’ve been the end of it. But then, something unexpected happened.

“I got a call in my apartment from the Soviet diplomatic mission in New York,” Andronov said, “and I was politely told they wanted something from me.”

What they wanted was an introduction to Mauri. And this was more than just a polite request. It was a command, from the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the KGB.

Why would people at the highest levels of the Soviet government take such an interest in a guy getting evicted from his apartment? Well, in the mid-1980s the Cold War was still extremely frigid. Just consider what was showing in American movie theaters. There was Red Dawn, where some plucky high schoolers fight back against a Soviet invasion. There was also Rambo: First Blood Part II, in which Sylvester Stallone goes to war with communist baddies in the jungle. And there was Stallone again in Rocky IV, in which Rocky Balboa goes to battle against the machinelike Ivan Drago—a fight that audiences everywhere saw as a proxy for the battle between the U.S. and the USSR.

It wasn’t just Hollywood either. The U.S. government and media were constantly shining a light on Soviet dissidents getting sent off to labor camps. And the Soviets had their own cards to play.

“They would take anything that they thought could be used against the United States,” said David Satter, the author of Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, “the picture that this was a country with a few rich people and millions living in abject misery, suffering under the yoke of capitalism.”

In the mid-1980s, the Soviets focused on one particular sore spot: the American crisis of homelessness. And they had a plan. “They sent a whole group of filmmakers from Moscow,” recalled Andronov, “to make a film about how a huge number of homeless people suffer in New York.”

That film was the reason the KGB reached out to Andronov. The agency thought he had found a potential star. Joe Mauri was the perfect symbol of America’s disgrace: a literal average Joe, shoved into the streets by the invisible hand.

Andronov did as he was told, and made the connection. But it was up to Mauri to decide whether he wanted to cooperate with the filmmakers. In the fall of 1985, he made his choice: He was going to play a starring role in some Soviet propaganda.

In The Man From Fifth Avenue, Mauri wears a flat-billed cap and a dark jacket. He’s tall and gaunt; it looks as if he’s missed more than a couple of meals. His room has cracking paint on the walls, and a bare lightbulb. A lot of what he says is overdubbed in Russian, but sometimes his voice breaks through clearly, like when he points out where his chair and table used to be. “But they’re all gone now,” he says. “I put them out on the street.” (That street, by the way, wasn’t Fifth Avenue, despite the title of the movie. Mauri actually lived on the other side of Central Park.)

Mauri is a poor, unemployed man in a place swimming with abundance. This is the era of Wall Street excess and in New York, conspicuous consumption is everywhere. “The people are getting and grabbing more and more money because they became diseased,” he says. There are images of horse-drawn carriages, women in fur coats, and panhandlers begging for food. Mauri says of the city’s powers that be, “They would like the garbage trucks to pick them up, throw them in garbages, grind them up, and dump them in the city.”

In the movie, Mauri is articulate and unsparing—a spokesman for the working class, venting about the ugliness of American inequality. He’s also delivering Soviet talking points with a New York accent. It’s unclear if he’s a true believer, or if he knows how his words are going to be used. Near the end of the documentary, as he wanders around the park, he sounds more wistful than calculating. “This is a tree I’d like to put a hammock in. But I don’t know—I think it’s a little too big,” he says.

Mauri tells the Soviet camera guys that they’ve been good friends, and that he hopes to see them again. He waves goodbye when he crosses the street, as Glen Campbell’s “Where Do You Go” swells in the background.

After the picture fades, an epilogue appears on screen. It says, in Russian: “On Nov. 22, 1985, Joe Mauri was evicted from his room near Fifth Avenue in New York.”

On April 2, 1986, The Man From Fifth Avenue premiered on Soviet television during prime time. The documentary was a sensation in the USSR, and its debut got covered on American network news. “I wouldn’t like to live there. It’s a cruel city,” said one Russian woman interviewed by ABC. “In America, if you have money, you’re somebody. If you don’t, you’re nobody,” said another, to an NBC reporter.

In the United States, Mauri had been nobody. But now, in the Soviet Union, he was definitely somebody. Mauri got swamped with invitations to come and visit the USSR. So, in the summer of 1986, he made another fateful decision: He headed off to the Eastern Bloc.

Mauri’s monthlong trip was paid for by Soviet trade unions. His escort was the man who’d knocked on his door: Iona Andronov. “I was going with him to places, and of course, I advised him on what to say,” Andronov told me.

Mauri stood outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, where he brought out a petition to pause all evictions in New York. Soviet television also showed him watching The Man From Fifth Avenue for the first time. Near the end of the screening, he broke down in sobs, and Andronov put his hand on his shoulder to comfort him. Mauri said he saw a “humanitarian quality among people” that was “missing in my own society.”

Mauri’s words and the documentary itself were testaments to the USSR’s moral superiority. The Soviet government liked to brag that homelessness didn’t exist within its borders—that everyone in the entire nation had a roof over their head. That wasn’t true. When author David Satter lived in the USSR, he saw homeless people everywhere, looking for shelter around garbage dumps or hitching rides on trains. “A lot of them ended up in labor camps, but then they were released and they had nowhere to go,” Satter said. “They didn’t say anything about that on television.”

Joe Mauri was on television, and he was valuable to the Soviets because his own country had seen him as disposable. But in 1986, he became a very public figure in Moscow—and, soon, in New York.

Mauri flew back to the United States on Aug. 31, 1986. When he got there, he found himself being portrayed as a kind of penniless Benedict Arnold, selling out the stars and stripes for the hammer and sickle. The New York papers fanned out to interview his outraged neighbors. One of them, a Korean War veteran, said, “I’d like to rearrange his fanny for him.”

Journalists began to dig into every aspect of Mauri’s life. And what they turned up tantalized them.

First, they found that he wasn’t really unemployed. The New York Times said he had a job in the publication’s mailroom. But according to the head of the mailers union, he simply “didn’t want to work.” Mauri responded that he couldn’t work regularly because of chronic hepatitis.

Then, there was another claim: that Mauri had never been in danger of being homeless. The New York papers reported that he had a lease on a second apartment, a place above a Cuban restaurant on Columbus Avenue. Mauri said his estranged wife lived there alone.

The media didn’t find those explanations convincing. Time called him “The Great Pretender.” The New York Daily News branded him the “Con Man From Fifth Avenue”: “a triple-plated phony, a liar and a fraud.”

At this point, Mauri seemed as if he might just be a naïve guy who’d gotten caught up in something he didn’t understand. Or maybe that wasn’t right at all. Maybe Joe Mauri was a con artist, or even a double agent.

Mauri himself gave a different explanation. Back then, he told reporters, he’d had a secret motivation—something nobody knew that explained everything he’d done.

There was one specific line that Mauri used a lot. He said it whenever someone asked him if he was getting exploited by the Soviet Union: “I know they want to use me, but I’m using them too.”

I’m using them too. He was always upfront about that—that he had some kind of master plan. But back in 1986, no American journalist figured it out.

To solve the mystery of the man from Fifth Avenue, I’d need to go straight to the source. The only person who could give me the answers I was looking for: Joe Mauri himself.

When I started reporting this story, I didn’t know if Joe Mauri was alive or dead. Since he was in his mid-50s in 1986, that would make him ninetysomething today. No American media outlet had spoken to him in decades. And when I tried to reach him on an old New York phone number, I never got an answer.

Then, back in the spring of 2022, I tried a number associated with a relative. This time, someone actually picked up. When I asked if Mauri was around, they said they’d tell him that I’d called. So, the man from Fifth Avenue was alive. And about a week later, he called me.

Mauri told me that he was born in Connecticut. When I asked what year, he laughed: “Oh, a long time ago.”

He did eventually give me a year: 1929, which meant he was around 93 in 2022. We talked for hours over the phone. And after a few months, we met in person.

When I first saw him, in an outdoor garden in Manhattan, he was wearing a mask, but I still recognized him right away. His baseball cap looked identical to the one he wears in The Man From Fifth Avenue. When he walked over to say hello, he was in a peppy mood.

“I’m doing pretty good for my age. Right?” he said. I agreed. “My processing time is a little slower than it used to be,” he said. “I could do three things at one time, but now I labor slowly over one. What are you gonna do?”

I found Mauri incredibly sharp. And in our conversations, I asked him to walk me through what he’d been thinking in 1986—what was his motivation to play along with the Soviets, and what had he meant when he said “I’m using them too”?

It turns out there’s something important about Mauri’s past that nobody really dug into back in 1986. That trip he took to the Soviet Union, after he starred in The Man From Fifth Avenue? That wasn’t the first time he’d visited the USSR. He’d actually gone decades earlier. And that was no ordinary trip. It was quite a caper. And it all started with Joe’s muscles.

Growing up, Mauri was obsessed with getting strong. So, in the late 1940s, he drove cross-country to America’s beefcake mecca. Mauri moved into a cheap crash pad in Santa Monica, California, called Muscle House by the Sea. He competed as a bodybuilder, and dabbled in the performing arts. And in the 1950s, he got his first big break.

Mauri landed an audition for Mae West as part of the chorus line of hunks in her Las Vegas stage show. A friend told him what to expect at his tryout. Mauri remembered, “He told me, ‘When you go over there, she’s going to be in a negligee, low-cut, and she’s going to drop a handkerchief. And you have to look down at her when she bends over to pick it up, because you’re longing, looking for her, to get the job.’ And so I played the game.”

He got the gig, and a bunch more: at a burlesque club in New Orleans, in the musical Li’l Abner on Broadway, as a bit player in the Hollywood epic Cleopatra.

By the early ’60s, Mauri was living in New York, and hoping to get cast in bigger and better roles. To make that happen, he needed to become a student of his craft. “I wanted to be an actor,” he said, “and I knew they had good theater in Moscow.”

Mauri wanted to go as deep as possible, and read the leading Russian acting theorists in their original language. So he bought some Russian lessons on cassette. The more he read and heard, the more captivated he became with Russia—and the less he cared about becoming an actor. He started fantasizing about this faraway place, with its different culture and political philosophy.

Mauri dreamed of seeing Russia for himself. And he didn’t really trust the strident anti-communists at home. He considered himself a freethinker, and he wanted to evaluate the Soviet system with his own eyes. “I was curious and interested in what was going on there, because it seemed like the mentality was different but there was a lot of control,” he said. “But it was still interesting because they had that thing about togetherness; the people thought they were all in it together.”

At the time, not long after the Cuban missile crisis, it wasn’t easy for an American to go to the Soviet Union. But Mauri stumbled upon a way to get there: “I saw this ad, a cheap tour from Sputnik. And so I got that thing, and then I got a visa for a month.”

Sputnik was an official Soviet travel agency. The agency booked him a flight to Moscow in July 1964. But its tours weren’t designed to let visitors form their own opinions. Mauri and his group attended compulsory lectures on the glories of socialism. He felt bored, and antsy. So, one day, he slipped away, and took his own unauthorized tour of the city.

“They didn’t have much in the stores and all that stuff,” he remembered, “but most of the people were very friendly. They were curious because they didn’t know anything about Americans.”

While everyone else in his group stuck to Moscow, Mauri wanted to see more of the country. He got grudging permission to go to the resort town of Sochi, one of the few other places that foreigners were allowed to visit. To Mauri, it seemed like paradise. He swam and sunbathed. And on his second day at the beach, he spotted someone who would change his life: a young woman with a beautiful tan.

“Well, she was about 5 feet 2 and she was blond and blue-eyed and she was good-looking, you know,” he said. “Her name was Alla.”

Alla grew up in the countryside, but was about to move to Moscow to work as an English teacher. She took Mauri to places that tourists didn’t usually get to see. “She would show me about where they threw all the junk and the garbage, and we’d go to these places where they had nothing to sell except some potatoes and cabbage and things like that.”

His time with Alla in Sochi lasted for just a handful of days. Mauri’s monthlong visa was about to expire. It was time to go home.

But instead of catching a flight back to the U.S., he got a room in a Moscow hotel and just … stayed.

“You paid on the floor every day. You paid 3 rubles, which is very little money at that time,” he told me. “And they wondered, Who is this guy in this room all these weeks here? American? What is he doing over here?”

What he was doing was continuing his tour of Moscow. His guide was the English teacher, Alla.

“I had feelings for her,” he said. “She was very sympathetic, and she was a simple type of girl from the village and she had no pretenses.” He told me that she was direct and uncomplicated—very different, in his estimation, from the American women he knew.

Mauri’s problem was that he was in Russia illegally. His visa had expired, and the police were getting suspicious: “Then I started really learning about the police. They know everything.”

Mauri discovered that someone had come into his hotel room and searched his bag. On a Sunday night, he slipped away to meet Alla at a small house she’d rented in the countryside. “And then I had to get back to the hotel because I know they were going to catch me, and I saw that she was sleeping. And I looked at her and I said, ‘This will be the last time you’ll ever see her like this.’ ”

When he returned to the hotel the next day, there were four men in the lobby. He said they were waiting “like Doberman pinschers.”

Mauri walked out of the hotel, and those four men followed him. He played it cool for as long as he could bear it. And then, suddenly, he sprinted down the stairs into Moscow’s Metro system. “They were chasing me, and I’d go down to the bottom, hoping to catch a train before they can get it. And then I wouldn’t see a train, so I’d run up there, and they would be still coming down behind me. And this game went on for two or three hours.”

Mauri managed to get away. When he caught his breath, he went to see Alla, to tell her the police were on his tail. He also confessed to her that he’d overstayed his visa. That meant she might be in trouble too, for harboring a fugitive—maybe even a potential spy.

The police caught up to Mauri pretty quickly after that, and ordered him to leave the country. He ended up regrouping in Denmark. But he just couldn’t stay away: “I wanted to see what happened to the girl. Did they find out about her?”

A couple of months later, he sneaked back into Russia, as part of a contingent from the Danish Communist Party. When he got there, he dropped a postcard for Alla in his hotel mailbox. Mauri told her to meet him at a train station at a specific day and time.

That was a big mistake. “Just as I was coming in to see her, another train pulled in and she got off the train, and she passed me by and she said, ‘They know everything.’ ”

Mauri was placed under arrest and taken to a police station. Alla got brought in too. “And they got her and they beat her up real good. I heard her screaming in another room—screaming. But she was a very strong person.”

They got released, separately. After that, they saw each other one more time, briefly. She said that counterintelligence officers had come to her school and told her to stay away from him. The next day, Mauri was escorted to the airport by three Soviet agents. “And they gave me something to drink, and I stupidly drank it,” he said. “And then when I got on the plane, I got a terrible rash. It wasn’t to kill me, but it was to warn me: Don’t come back here again.”

Back home in New York, Mauri sent Alla letters and packages, but he never heard anything back. He decided that he didn’t want to be muscular anymore, and started losing weight. He got work packing and loading copies of the New York Times, and made a home for himself on the Upper West Side.

Decades passed, and his adventure in Russia became a fading memory. In the 1980s, he was living on West 70th Street when his landlady told him she was turning his tiny apartment into a sewing room. He was going to be evicted. And then, one day, without any warning, a man named Iona Andronov knocked on his door.

“When he said, ‘I’m a journalist from Russia,’ I knew right away,” he told me. “I would be going back to Russia.”

Listen to the full original podcast episode on The Man From Fifth Avenue below, and subscribe to One Year here.

Back in 1964, Joe Mauri had been warned never to return to the Soviet Union. But then, in the 1980s, a bunch of Soviets showed up out of nowhere and cozied up to him. They wanted Mauri to talk about his eviction, which he was happy to do. He wanted his landlady to get bad publicity. And if the Soviets used that story for anti-American propaganda? He was OK with that, so long as it got him where he needed to go and to the person he needed to see: Alla.

“She was the only friend I had over there, you know,” he said. “When I left, I knew if I ever want to get back, I have to play a certain game.”

The game Mauri was playing would take him back to the USSR to see what had become of Alla. But he wasn’t about to share that plan with anyone. He worried that the Soviet police would dig up his records and discover he’d been kicked out of the country in 1964. So, he kept quiet and bided his time, even as his scheme started to click into place.

“They gave me this tremendous tour all over Russia and real good hotels. And I even went to the best restaurants and all that,” he remembered. And he wasn’t dining out alone. The Russian journalist who’d started this whole escapade was by his side.

“A whole publicity tour was organized for him here,” Iona Andronov said. “He and I were accepted in the Kremlin by the chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet. There were pictures on the front pages in all the newspapers.”

Andronov wasn’t a passive observer. Whenever Mauri gave a speech at a factory, he was reading the Soviet journalist’s words. “He would always be there and he would tell me the line to follow,” Mauri said. “I always play the game.”

Mauri genuinely believed that the U.S. hadn’t done enough to deal with the crisis of homelessness. But he knew that some of Andronov’s lines were just propaganda: “We have no homeless in Russia. Which is nonsense. There are a lot of homeless people.”

I asked Mauri if it was selfish of him to go to the USSR and parrot those words just because he wanted to get back to Russia himself.

“Selfish. Yeah, because that’s America,” he told me. “People are self-centered and selfish—you know that.”

“So you would put yourself in that category?” I asked him.

“No, I’m not really selfish because I wasn’t in it for the money,” he said. “I didn’t care. I’m more interested in learning than making some money.”

Mauri may not have been in it for the money. But, he said, the Soviets were ponying up. “They even opened up a bank account for me,” he said. “We went one day to the bank—on Gorky Street, it was called at that time—and they took me through the back, to the back door.”

That Russian bank account wasn’t the only thing that Mauri got offered. “They had an apartment all set for me and a car and the whole routine. They were setting me up for defection, you see,” he said.

I asked him if he ever considered it. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t going to do that. But I never spelled it out, exactly, what I was up to.”

Mauri did finally reveal his plans when the tour reached Leningrad. He and Andronov went out for a walk in a public park. When the two men were alone, Mauri explained that he had an ulterior motive. There was a woman he needed to track down. He worried that he’d gotten her in trouble back in the ’60s and wanted to make sure she was OK.

“Of course, I didn’t know it. It was a surprise,” Andronov told me. “Her name was Alla Golubkova.”

Finding Alla wasn’t on Andronov’s itinerary. But he called on his connections in the Soviet government anyway. What he heard back wasn’t promising: “She is not found anywhere. What happened? Did she die? Is she hiding?”

But then, one of Andronov’s colleagues got an unexpected phone call. It was from a woman named Albina. She’d seen The Man From Fifth Avenue on Soviet television. And when a man in a flat-billed cap showed up on screen, she was stunned.

Andronov called the woman to check out her story. She said she was an English teacher and that she’d once gone by Alla. She’d changed her name to Albina because she thought it was prettier. So, Andronov said, “I tell Joseph, ‘Let’s take a cab, buy a bouquet of flowers. Let’s go.’ ”

This was the moment Mauri had been waiting for. After 22 years, they were going to be reunited.

“That woman, this Albina, I went to her house and I saw how they were living and I saw how primitive their place was, and they were really poor,” Mauri remembered.

Albina had been married and divorced. She lived with her son in a one-room apartment, the typically paltry accommodations of a Soviet schoolteacher. In 1964 she’d been so excited to start her career. In 1986 she looked beaten down. She told Mauri that she’d never received his letters—they’d likely been intercepted before they got to her. “I asked her, when did she get married?” he said. “And she told me it was maybe a year later after. And so she didn’t remember me.”

In the U.S., Joe Mauri was famous for being destitute. In the USSR, he was just famous. And Albina knew that if he stayed in Russia, the government might make him rich, giving him an apartment and a car. She could get those things, too, if he agreed to marry her. She’d suffered so much in the previous 22 years. Now she saw Mauri as a potential savior.

“We went to these special stores,” he said, “and I bought her clothes, and she was very … I could see she was very greedy, and I could see she wants me to take—she said, ‘Get the apartment. I could live in Moscow.’ ”

Back in the 1960s, Mauri had been drawn to her because she seemed different from American women. She was less materialistic, and she didn’t have a “facade.” Now he thought she was an opportunist—that she was using him. “I knew I would never stay over there and live over there. And then, at the end, she was pissed off, like, mad. Because she wasn’t going to get what she wanted. And she said, ‘You’re just a typical American.’ ”

Alla and Joe didn’t rekindle old flames. They didn’t get married. They didn’t even really like each other anymore. In August 1986, they said goodbye, and Mauri flew home to New York. Only now his fellow Americans weren’t thrilled to have him back. “Oh, yeah. Sometimes in the park, they scream at me. They remember me: ‘You communist!’ ” he recalled.

The newspaper headlines were even louder, saying the whole premise of The Man From Fifth Avenue documentary was a lie, that Mauri was just too lazy to work, and had never been at risk of becoming homeless. He says that was just more propaganda—that he was made into a villain because of Cold War politics.

“They were infantile and stupid. They lied so much. It was, like, unbelievable. They distorted so much, you know? They ganged up on me. Everybody had to get on top of it. Because, you know, they were so brainwashed. Both sides are brainwashed.”

Mauri did get evicted from his room on West 70th Street. But he didn’t become homeless: As soon as he got kicked out, he moved into a place in a city-subsidized single-room-occupancy hotel. A lot of people from the Upper West Side fought to get him that apartment. These Americans had cared about Mauri. And they’d made sure his needs were met.

Still, Mauri went back to Russia several times after 1986, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. On those trips, he’d stay with his friend Iona Andronov in Moscow. He’d get up in the morning and buy a bunch of newspapers, and spend the day strolling around. By the 1990s, he was free to go wherever he wanted.

During one of Mauri’s visits, he got word that Albina was sick. “She had gotten cancer, and they said that she’s dying. And so I went to see her before she died.”

He found her scrunched up in a chair in an oncology ward of a Moscow hospital. She died three weeks later, in October 1999.

In the early 2000s, the story of Joe and Albina began to spread in Russia. But it was told as a beautiful fairy tale: star-crossed lovers kept apart by powerful forces. It painted their reunion as tearful and passionate, if ultimately doomed.

That simpler, more romantic account came from Iona Andronov. It was published as a chapter in Andronov’s memoir, with the title “The Russian Love of Yankee Joe.” That chapter was also the inspiration for a 2004 article in Time magazine. That story was headlined “Love in the Time of Cold War.”

That version of the story is still getting told in Putin’s Russia. In 2018 a talk show on state TV did a segment about Joe and Albina. And Mauri was there, in Moscow, telling the Russian people what they wanted to hear. “I met this woman,” he said on Russian TV. “She was a teacher of English. A Russian girl. And it was love at first sight.”

“Yeah. It’s all bullshit,” he told me. “It never was no love at first sight. They wanted that story. It’s a big propaganda thing: Here’s a guy, he comes and he finds happiness in Russia. He got evicted over there. He came and he found everything that he needed.”

Mauri has spent his life on a quest for something flawless—the perfect physique, the perfect country, the perfect woman. In America, he had the freedom to do whatever he pleased, until some rich folks decided they liked his block. In the Soviet Union, he found a system that was supposed to nurture everyone but wanted to control everything he did.

And there was Alla. Maybe he could’ve loved her, in some alternate timeline. But in this world, they were too far apart.

“Well, I’ll tell you something,” he said when we met in New York. “The movies run still in my head. And it was an adventurous tale, by the way, and I learned a lot. But it’s not important anymore, because I’m an old guy. And the most important thing for me is to be able to walk and don’t fall on my head.”

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