Fans have suspected it for some time, but in Episode 7 of Season 3 of The White Lotus, we finally got confirmation that Valentin and his two Russian friends, Aleksei and Vlad, robbed the hotel.
Clues were seeded earlier in the season: Valentin suspiciously parked his motorcycle under the arm barrier and distracted Gaitok while the van carrying the robbers drove onto the White Lotus property in Episode 2. That didn’t look like a coincidence.
When attending the muay thai fight in Episode 7, Gaitok spots Valentin with his two friends and something about the trio jogs his memory. He notices that Vlad is bald and then flashes back to watching a bald man exit the drivers’ side of the getaway car. The flashback is long and accompanied by foreboding music. Gaitok is fairly certain he has identified the thieves.
Later in the episode, Laurie goes home with Aleksei, having passed up her chance with Valentin a couple episodes back, leaving Jaclyn an opening with the hunky wellness professional. After the two have sex, Aleksei pushes Laurie for $10,000 to help bring his (supposedly) sick mother to Thailand from Russia. When she says she simply does not have that cash, he suggests Venmo or PayPal. (Apparently he has not watched enough TV about sketchy deals to know those apps have pretty strict limits on individual payments to avoid this exact circumstance.)
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Aleksei’s angry girlfriend interrupts that conversation, and Laurie runs to hide in Aleksei’s closet. Inside, she sees a pile of jewelry, including the serpent choker that Chelsea was examining right before the robbery took place. The masked thief had grabbed that gold necklace along with many other expensive items.
Laurie probably doesn’t know what, exactly, was stolen from the hotel. But she can guess that a man who was just pressuring her for $10,000 probably can’t afford this jewelry. Plus, storing it all in a haphazard pile is rather suspicious. She manages to escape out his window, with just a light slapping on the head from the girlfriend.
So, now, the question heading into the season’s final episode becomes: What will Gaitok and Laurie do with this information? I can’t imagine Laurie going to the police—she is too focused on her fight with Jaclyn, and possibly too spooked by Aleksei’s request for thousands of dollars, to spend her last days of vacation finger-pointing at jewel thieves. But Mook just spent an inordinate amount of time on her first date with Gaitok telling him that violence is natural and that he ought to stand up for himself. She seems, in fact, to have gotten the ick when he said he wasn’t sure it was in his nature to fight. Gaitok, who we’ve also recently seen working on his aim at a shooting range, could try to take matters into his own hands and impress the woman he’s pining for. This seems unlikely to end well for him given how many more violent men, from the bodyguards to the thieves, are operating in is orbit.
