They called him "Putin's cook." Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former prison inmate, has risen to become one of the Russian president's closest and most powerful associates.
His loyalty has been rewarded with enormous state contracts, including feeding and supplying Russia's military and their families and, most recently, funding the Wagner Group — his private mercenary army that has played an outsize role in Russia's blood-soaked invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin's friendship with Putin goes back more than 25 years. After spending a decade behind bars in the 1990s for a series of armed robberies, he opened a picturesque, waterside restaurant in St. Petersburg, the Old Customs House, that became a favorite of Putin, then the city's deputy mayor.
As president, Putin continued to visit the restaurant, hosting foreign dignitaries including President George W. Bush and Prince Charles, with lavish banquets, closely supervised in the background by the unsmiling and unobtrusive Prigozhin.
By the time Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year, Prigozhin had become one of the wealthiest and most influential people in Russia. His mercenaries, sent to save Syria's President Bashar Assad, earned a ruthless reputation for brutalizing civilians during that nation's civil war without leaving any Kremlin "fingerprints."
Now, with Russia's army suffering embarrassing setbacks in Ukraine, Putin again turned to his friend for help. Prigozhin mobilized 50,000 mercenaries, many of them recruited from prisons, to wage a take-no-prisoners campaign to accomplish what the Kremlin's generals seemed unable to.
But Prigozhin's power and his increasingly brazen criticism of the Russian establishment has made him many enemies in the Kremlin. Some officials worry he is preparing to launch a coup to oust Putin, who is rumored to be suffering from cancer.
In recent weeks, Prigozhin has attacked supposed "traitors in the elite who holiday abroad and dream of Russia losing the war." There are many in Putin's administration who want to "fall on their knees before Uncle Sam," Prigozhin claimed in January.
People from the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB, are furious about him and see him as a threat to the constitutional order, a source told Britain's Guardian newspaper.
"He has this big military group not controlled by the state, and after the war they will want their rewards, including political rewards."