It was the day of the biker rally, the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 2016, when thousands of motorcyclists descend in a cacophonous blitz on Washington, DC, for the annual Rolling Thunder rally. Soon-to-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wearing a blazer sans tie but with a red MAGA hat firmly ensconced on his head, worked the crowd around the Lincoln Memorial. “Look at all these bikers,” he said. “Do we love the bikers? Yes. We love the bikers.”

Looking around, though, it was not quite enough bikers for him. “I thought this would be like Dr. Martin Luther King, where the people would be lined up from here all the way to the Washington Monument,” he said, disappointed at the turnout for his gathering.

His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, spent the morning working the Sunday shows, downplaying concerns about the Trump campaign’s turmoil, dismissing rumors of infighting with his rival Paul Manafort (their relationship was “fantastic,” he told Fox News’ Chris Wallace), and expressing confidence about how the small campaign staff was all they needed to defeat Hillary Clinton (“This is media hype,” he said).

Amid the bustle of the capital and the general tumult of the campaign, there may not have been a person in Washington who noticed the American holding up a sign outside the White House, just blocks away from Trump’s glad-handing at the Rolling Thunder rally. “Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss” it read. The unnamed American who held up the sign, posing for a picture, didn’t really know why he’d been hired for such a strange task.

The people who had hired him online to stand in front of the White House had simply told him they wanted the picture for “a leader here and our boss…our funder.”

Whoever the people who ordered the photo were, they got it held up in public in time for June 1.

It was a small detail, seemingly insignificant in the capital city, almost impossible to place in the grand scheme of a billion-dollar presidential election. Except for one thing, a fact that—more than a year later—would stand out to the investigators working with Special Counsel Robert Mueller: On June 1, 2016, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin turned 55 years old.

Prigozhin was hardly a household name in the United States—until last Friday, at least—but to investigators and intelligence officers, he was a key figure in the overlapping circles of oligarchs, spooks, and organized crime figures who run Russia under Vladimir Putin. You can only imagine that when he saw a photograph of the sign held aloft by an American, he smiled.

Because in the midst of an effort to influence and to disrupt American democracy, an effort that spanned four years, cost millions of dollars, and employed hundreds of Russians, the team at the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg had arranged a joke, a present, and a tribute for the Kremlin oligarch who was making it all possible.

In the days since Bob Mueller’s 37-page indictment of 13 Russians and three companies involved in sowing political discord in the midst of the 2016 US presidential election, much of the media focus has been on the Internet Research Agency, the so-called troll factory responsible for running a network of phony social media identities and paid political advertisements aimed at undermining Hillary Clinton and building up Donald Trump.

A closer read of the indictment, though, tells an even more interesting story—a story of how a restaurateur whom Vladimir Putin made wealthy repaid the favor by unleashing an army of trolls to promote #MAGA, bash Trump opponents, organize political rallies, suppress the votes of Clinton supporters, and hire Americans to dress up like Clinton in prison.

Becoming Putin’s Cook

According to Mueller’s investigation, the IRA was overseen by two Prigozhin-controlled companies—Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering. While Concord Catering was—until last Friday at least—a name all-but unknown in the United States, it’s a corporate entity almost as infamous as major Russian conglomerates like Gazprom to those who track the epidemic of corruption unleashed by Putin.