The 234 Apartment

By Sabra Ayres August, 3, 2017 Ksenia Belayeva and Igor Zaitsev sit at their kitchen inside an apartment they are sharing in St. Petersburg, Russia. (Vasiliy Kolotilov / For The Times) By the time Marina Maslova was born in the six- room communal apartment at 65 Bolshoi Prospect, an entire generation had lived there and come of age since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Maslova still lives in the room where she was born 61 years ago , and she remembers the dozens of families that have walked down its twisting, dark hallways and lived in its crowded rooms during her life. It was here that the guests at her wedding party in the 1970s moved the furniture aside to make room to dance in the 345-square-foot room she shared with her new husband, her parents and her grandmother. And it was here, in a small room just off the kitchen, where a 16-year-old boy hanged himself with his belt in the early 1960s after his parents, with whom he shared the cupboard-size space, disappeared. Both the...

Johnson Chrome was a notorious big spender with a taste for bottle service , bespoke suits and $10,000 shoes. The source of his wealth? A sophisticated identity theft scheme that may have conned Torontonians out of millions. The untold story of the city’s most wanted fraudster Photographs: All portraits via Facebook; background by iStock T he fraudster who called himself Johnson Chrome liked to sit on a bench at the intersection of Hazelton and Yorkville, smoking a Montecristo Edmundo robusto and talking about fashion, cars and cigars to anyone who’d listen. He was charming and handsome, with a neatly trimmed beard , a shaved head and perfect teeth. The perch placed him at the centre of the rarefied universe he’d come to inhabit. His condo, in the former Four Seasons hotel, was steps to the west, and he parked his black Jaguar at the Hazelton Hotel opposite . His gym, the sleek Equinox, was a minute’s walk northwest; his preferred cigar shop , La Casa del Habano , was to the sout...