22 THENEWYORKER,JANUARY18, 2021
and Marathi, and attended a makeshift
preschool with an instructor who taught
in English. “I was the only white kid in
the entire town,” Lesh recalled.
“We were the only white family in a
thirty-mile radius,” his mother said.
Not long before Lesh’s sixth birth-
day, the onset of the first Iraq War and
a fear of retribution from the locals,
many of whom were Muslim, spurred
the family, now with an infant daugh-
ter, to flee India for Madison, Wiscon-
sin. The parents got teaching jobs. “We
were fucking broke,” Lesh said. “Food
stamps, hand-me-downs.” Lesh, blue-
eyed and blond-haired, spoke English
with an Indian accent. He was an out-
cast, a weird kid with weird parents, and
he struggled to find friends.
“My plan was to do really well and
become a business consultant, like my
mother’s brother, who was forty and
fucking hot doctor chicks,” Lesh said.
“He was the first person I knew who
had a cell phone. I never wanted to be
a broke artist like my parents. But in
middle school I stopped caring. I was a
little hooligan.” He was expelled in eighth
grade for calling in a bomb threat, and
in high school became known as Bomb
Threat Boy. The guys he skied with, at
a scrappy local hill called Tyrol Basin,
called him the Criminal. By now, he and
a gang of friends were stealing cars and
motorcycles and boosting liquor from
distribution warehouses. He was in and
out of jail. At one point, he appeared as
a plaintiff on the syndicated court-TV
program “Judge Mathis,” trying to get
a girl who had thrown a glass bottle at
his new car to reimburse the cost of re-
pairs. “He’s cynical,” the girl told the
judge. “He’s a little jerk.” The judge ruled
in Lesh’s favor. By senior year, he was
living in a house with friends, dealing
pot, and skiing competitively. For a time,
out on probation, he wore an ankle brace-
let, which on one occasion he cut off in
order to enter a ski competition out of
state. He got third place, and two weeks
back in jail. Somehow, he managed to
graduate from high school, and then
began vagabonding around the West,
racking up minor felonies for reckless
motorcycling, and halfheartedly attend-
ing community college. Eventually, he
ditched school and focussed on skiing.
After Lesh graduated from high
school, his mother moved back to India.
“He was impossible,” she said, of his
teen-age years. “Every day was a night-
mare for me.” She now lives in Turkey.L
esh had suggested that he fly me in
his plane somewhere for dinner—
over the mountains to Crested Butte,
perhaps, or down to Colorado Springs.
Single engine, small cockpit, Front
Range updrafts, a pilot with a penchant
for foolishness: I had misgivings.
For one, there was the time when he
crashed a new plane into the waters off
Half Moon Bay, California. He had taken
to the air with a friend, with a plan to
be photographed flying over the Golden
Gate Bridge. Another friend trailed in
a second small plane, to get the shot.
Lesh’s engine conked out, and he skipped
into the Pacific, four miles off the coast.
He filmed the whole ordeal, while his
friend sent out a Mayday call. They
treaded water for forty-five minutes,
waiting for the Coast Guard to arrive.
Lesh’s poise under duress, his Virtika
sweatshirt, and his history of atten-
tion-seeking soon led people to suspect
that the whole thing was staged.
“How fucking dumb do you have to
be to think I did that on purpose?” he
told me. “Maybe I would’ve crashed my
old airplane, which I was trying to sell
and was overinsured, and not my new
plane, which was underinsured.”
Lesh’s first brush with infamy had
come five years before, when he released
a series of vulgar videos, under the Vir-
tika flag. The first, called “Last Friday,”
chronicled a supposed day in the life of
David Lesh. To the strains of Gucci
Mane and Master P, he wakes up in
bed with two naked women, chugs a
bottle of booze, sparks a blunt, and then,
sporting a grill over his teeth, flies his
friends in his plane to the mountains
to skid around on icy roads, shoot out
road signs with handguns, pull stunts
on skis and snowmobiles, then fly home
for a rager at a night club. Naughty
white boys playing tough: the video
went viral and caused a stir. Among
other things, it got Lesh and his friends
fired from their jobs as coaches of the
free-skiing team at the University of
Colorado Boulder. A few weeks later,
Lesh put out a mocking non-apology
video, a twist on LeBron James’s “I am
not a role model” ad (which was itself
inspired by Charles Barkley’s 1993 Nikespot of the same name). One sequence
depicts twin naked Leshes having sex
with each other. In another, he asks,
“Should I tell you I’m an asshole?” and
then shoots himself in the head. This
wasn’t the kind of stuff you usually got
from outdoor-athlete-adventurer ex-
emplars on Instagram. This wasn’t “Pro-
tect Our Winters.”
A series of “Friday” videos ensued,
each more incendiary than the last. Some
of the sequences are obviously fantasti-
cal, some not. Lesh and his friends im-
personate naked homeless men asleep
in a dumpster, shoot heroin, vomit on
one another, pour milk on naked breasts,
abandon (and then blow up) a private
jet full of women in bikinis, chop down
trees and set them afire—and then toss
tanks of fuel in the blaze and shoot those
with machine guns. They also keep ski-
ing, snowmobiling, and piling in and
out of Lesh’s Beechcraft.
All this was another argument against
signing on as his co-pilot. Sealing my
decision was what I heard at his arraign-
ment, via conference call, on the morn-
ing of October 30th—another instance
of exhibiting what one might call ques-
tionable judgment, this time in the stiff
and often merciless wind shear of the
federal justice system. I dialled in and
listened on mute.
The judge initiated the proceedings
by dropping the arrest warrant, mainly
on the ground that it wasn’t worth put-
ting federal marshals at risk, during a
pandemic, for such a petty offense. The
prosecutor argued that the defendant
needed a tighter leash: “David Lesh has
made it abundantly clear he has little
regard for court orders, whether those
be orders to behave himself on public
land or appear in court on time.” He said
that he’d received twenty-two letters ex-
pressing “appall” at Lesh’s antics. (“Only
twenty-two?” Lesh said to himself.)
By now, Lesh had told Laiche, the
lawyer who was essentially firing him as
a client, about the Photoshopping of the
Maroon Lake photo. Laiche had wor-
ried that bringing this up in court would
complicate Lesh’s defense and possibly
open him up to other charges. (“I like
the shit out of the guy,” Laiche told me.
“We had fun. I wish the best for him.”
He also said that people had been call-
ing his office and making threats. “There
was some crazy fucking lady from Texas: