By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 27, 2020

In response to the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes that was released today, I am releasing a chapter on the scandals, bankruptcies, and financial problems of Trump from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  These controversies surrounding the financial and business history of the Trump Organization (which even Steve Bannon has apparently described as a “criminal enterprise”) are of greater interest in light of this new New York Times report, but they should have been of far greater, sustained interest from 2015, when Trump began his candidacy for the presidency and when most of this information was already publicly available.  This research of mine was mainly conducted and published in different forms in 2016 and 2017, though some important segments came later., and the resulting material is best understood by reading my full eBook, eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment, including Trump’s deeply relevant and deeply shady business history.  For helpful and important background on some of the figures mentioned, but not fully introduced, below—including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top Russian mafia “godfather,” Semion Mogilevich, and his intricate work in Ukraine with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash (and his front-company Highrock) and now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team-felon Paul Manafort for Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, his Party of Regions and benefactor Rinat Akhmetov, and their schemes to bend Ukraine to Moscow’s will and fight pro-Western Ukrainian leader Yulia Tymoshenko; including Manafort’s work with Russian oligarch and top Putin operative Oleg Deripaska to advance Russian interests; including background on another of Putin’s top men in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk; including how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld; including interesting background on Felix Sater; including Alexander Shnaider’s ties to Russia and Ukraine, as well as those of his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein and his company Seabeco, as well as oligarch Alexander Mashkevich’s ties to all that—see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

UPDATE: Sept 29: The new New York Times second bombshell report on Trump’s finances, this one about The Apprentice TV show being a screen onto which to project Trump’s “success” amidst a reality of failure behind it, discusses a dynamic that I already noted here close to a year ago and beginning in 2016. In other words, Trump’s “success” amounted to his obtaining shady Russian-/former Soviet-linked financing, letting others take the fall in disastrous deal after disastrous deal, outlitigating anyone trying to hold him accountable, and self-promotion on The Apprentice that helped to obscure his many scandals.

Now, let’s jump into my eBook chapter and Trumpworld in the mid-2000s…

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Came to America and Trumpworld when Trump was Hurting for Cash

Around this time, key figures in these operations in Ukraine began reaching out to U.S. lobbyists and political consultants for assistance (noted in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article by none other than Glenn Simpson, who, as mentioned earlier, testified to congressional committee staff years later on Trump’s ties to Russia). Among the interactions he and a colleague catalogued:

• Semion Mogilevich himself enlisted the services of William Sessions, a Republican who was the only FBI director to be fired… at least until Trump fired James Comey for investigating Trump and his people’s ties to Russia.  Mogilevich retained Sessions’s services at least during 2007 in an unsuccessful effort to get his criminal charges cleared with the U.S. Government and his name removed from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.  The middleman for that particular effort was consultant Neil Livingstone, whose firm GlobalOptions employed many Russians and people from former Soviet republics (Livingstone eventually ran unsuccessfully in 2012 for the Republican nomination for the Montana governor’s race with Ryan Zinke—the Trump Administration’s disgraced and former Secretary of the Interior who resigned mired in scandal in December, 2018—as his running mate).  
• Furthermore, two-time Mississippi governor and major Republican operative Haley Barbour founded a consulting firm that in 2004 introduced Livingstone’s GlobalOptions to Firtash’s Highrock, which engaged GlobalOptions in at least two contracts, one of which was mysteriously referenced in a lawsuit involving an unnamed member of Ukraine’s government.  Notice here how Mogilevich and Firtash are working hand-in-hand, just a bit removed from each other: their modus operandi. 
• Beginning in 2003, Deripaska engaged 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to lobby for the visa to the U.S. he was being denied because of his organized crime ties.  Manafort worked on Dole’s presidential campaign and was working with Deripaska on Putin’s agenda when Dole’s efforts were successful, briefly getting Deripaska a visa before the FBI had it revoked shortly after.

Beyond these acts, there were plenty of interesting moves made by Russians and Russian-linked characters in the 2000s that directly involved Trump and his family.

In understanding why and how the moves below were made, it is crucial to understand that by the mid-2000s, Donald Trump had been abandoned by every major Wall Street bank as an unreliable and difficult partner.  The one exception to the Wall Street bank Trump boycott was Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump some $2 billion and in recent years has been caught in massive scandals, including two major Russian money laundering scandals.  One such scam involved Deutsche orchestrating some $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that seem to have been part of an enormous Russian money laundering scheme.  New York State and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines (the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority portion of the fine is the largest that body has ever assessed) against Deutsche at the end of January, 2017, separate from a Department of Justice investigation that has stalled under Trump but is still ongoing.  It was also revealed back in March, 2017, that Deutsche was involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money for some $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, part of a massive global Russian “Laundromat” laundering scheme with many banks involving $20-$80 billion from 2010-2014, the very years of Yanukovych’s presidency in Ukraine.  Among those involved in the scheme include Russian oligarchs and the F.S.B., with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

So, back to Trump, who was hurting for money, especially after he had to declare a bankruptcy for one of his businesses in 2004, his fifth such bankruptcy up to that point (with another still to come) and with Deutsche as one of his only sources of money.  But another other major source?  Russian and former-Soviet-republic-connected money.

Just a mere four years after the 2004 bankruptcy, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., publicly remarked that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

In other words, the 2000s were years when Donald Trump Sr. was aggressively and desperately courting Russian business and investment with few other significant options.

And that “business” and “investment” that would be done would be quite astounding: a series of spectacularly scandalous, high-profile development deals detailed below that would roughly total $1.5 billion and that would involve people, structures, and results ripe for, and attractively (perhaps best), explained by money laundering.

They would end in failure, scandal, and lawsuits.

Nearly all of these deals exploited lax regulations in the U.S., Canada, or other real estate markets.  And there are so many other crooked deals and Russians involved—over the years and continuing into his presidency, at least 3,500 lawsuits have been filed against Trump and/or his companies, by far unprecedented for any U.S. presidential nominee of a major party—that it can be overwhelming.  Just one report from Reuters noted nearly $100 million was invested by Russians (including some “politically connected” elites but not including Russian-Americans who did not purchase units using a Russian address or passport) in seven Trump properties in South Florida, and that over a third all of the units in the seven properties were owned by shell company LLCs often designed to mask their owners’ identities.  But here, we will stay focused on those players who have or will play prominent roles in our Ukraine-focused saga.

In Manhattan, Ukrainian Vasily Salygin—who would later become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was advising it—would buy an apartment in Trump World Tower, among the first to do so after the skyscraper opened in 2001. This purchase would be brokered by fellow-Ukrainian Sam Kislin, who, as mentioned before, had done business with Trump decades earlier, had become particularly close to Rudy Giuliani, and was considered part of a Mogilevich Russian mafia organization by the U.S. law enforcement officials.

The Bayrock/Sater Deals: Russian-Linked, Shady Money and Colossal Failure Become Trump’s Style

Meanwhile, Kislin’s old business partner selling Trump televisions, Tamir Sapir, can be seen as a major catalyst for some of the wildest, most scandalous series of Trumpdeals covered in this entire exploration. Living in Trump Tower, Sapir had easy access to Trump and the families of the two men became friends.  In the early 2000s, Sapir would introduce Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.  None other than our Felix Sater was then Chief Operating Officer (and eventually the dominant force) within Bayrock, the office of which was even in Trump Tower itself.  Saterdirectly partnered with Trump repeatedly throughout this period, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. around the Russian capital in 2006 (in which capacity, he let Ivanka spin around in Putin’s chair in the Russian president’s Kremlin office) and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians.  None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through, but other massively scandalous deals with Bayrock did go further in America.

One of Bayrock’s partnerships with Trump in the U.S. in Fort Lauderdale was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club.  According to a lawsuit—spearheaded by a pair of former Bayrock employees, Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who were seeking damages against Bayrock, Arif, and Sater, and assisted by the aforementioned attorneys Oberlander and later Lerner—Arif put up an initial $2 million in capital.  Then, the lawsuit alleges, Arif and Sater conned Elizabeth Thieriot—a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord—by lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club.  That lawsuit claims her investment was 12 times the value of that percentage, allowing Sater and Arif to make a 1,125% profit on her investment, and that the pair committed tax and financial fraud and defrauded Thieriot of her rightful share.  Others may have been victims, too, but after she took the pair to court in 2006, it is unclear how or if the case was resolved.  The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October, 2007.

Bayrock’s most prolific partnership with Trump, however, was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan.  The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, Arif, and Sapir.  In an arrangement specifically approved by Trump, the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater/Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million for it and three additional projects—flow from Icelandic firm FL Group. 

FL Group was later linked to the Panama Papers revelations and was widely known as a hub for the money of wealthy Russians, apparently those “in favor with Putin,” according to the Kriss v. Bayrock lawsuit.  In addition, cumulonimbus-size clouds of well-founded suspicion of involvement with big-time Russian money-laundering then surrounded the incredibly deeply interconnected Icelandic financial system of which FL Group was a key part.  Financing for these four projects was also secured from Mashkevich, formerly of Mogilevich-summit host Birshtein’s Seabeco and a major business partner with Deripaska concurrent with Deripaska’s work with Manafort on behalf of Putin.  This FL Group financing happened to come at a time both when Mogilevich and his network (including Manafort) were laundering money for the massive Ukraine scheme and Deripaska seems to have been engaged in money laundering with Manafort and Gates.

The Trump SoHo deal itself was deliberately structured to cheat authorities out of tens of millions in revenue, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, “loans” that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time.  Furthermore, some of the transactions involving the Trump SoHo were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the virtually certain purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited.  Specifically, there was investment for the purpose of alleged money laundering linked to Mashkevich—who, as noted, has his own separate history of alleged money laundering—involving the family of prominent Kazakh politician Viktor Khrapunov, once the mayor of Almaty. Sater has been helping federal authorities investigate Khrapunov’s alleged money laundering for years, but Sater himself was recently sued by a Kazakh Bank and the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, alleging he worked with Khrapunov’s son, Ilyas Khraphunov, to launder millions in part to help build a potential (an infamous) Trump Tower Moscow (to be discussed later).  A similar U.S. suit from the same parties targeting Viktor Khrapunov that had added information about Sater to its filings just recently had all its claims against Viktor dismissed because of the terms of a previous legal settlement. 

The bottom line is that, given all the general shadiness surrounding Trump, the Khrapunovs, Sater, Sapir, Arif, Mashkevich, and FL Group, there are plenty of reasons to be extremely suspicious of Trump SoHo’s various funding streams.     

In the end, the Trump SoHo project went terribly awry for Trump, who was sued for fraud along with his children Ivanka and Eric Trump, both of whom had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers.  In a 2011 settlement, Trump refunded 90% of the deposits for the building’s condos and the property went into foreclosure in 2014.  The Manhattan District Attorney’s office had even been building a serious criminal case against Ivanka and Eric for some two years, but, mere months after longtime-Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz discussed the matter with the Manhattan District Attorney—one of whose top donors before and after was Kasowitz himself—the D.A., Cyrus Vance, rather incriminatingly dropped the case in 2012, overruling his own prosecutors in the process and saving the Trump kids from serious legal trouble (Vance would also give Harvey Weinstein a free pass with a sexual groping allegation in 2015). As a denouement, in November, 2017, the Trump Organization was paid by the SoHo’s corporate owner—weary of the scandals and the negative attention brought on by Trump’s political career—to terminate their contract early, with the Trump Organization ending its management role and fully disassociating itself from the building by the end of the month.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, a second of the Trump/Bayrock projects with the FL Group financing was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  This second Trump/Bayrock project there, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and lead to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million.  The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule, and Sater and his Bayrock partners may have secretly cashed out their stakes in this project and the three FL Group–linked other projects in an arrangement made with FL Group equal to the initial $50 million “investment” loan.  Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing both Trump and Bayrock of fraud.

As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, with Trump refusing to accept any responsibility and blaming the problems on the housing bubble bursting and the Great Recession.  Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court in 2016, but most of the lawsuits against Trump and his partners resulted in undisclosed settlements.  The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for a relatively mere $115 million at a foreclosure auction.

A third deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failure that never even got a concrete start. When Trump began eyeing the Phoenix, Arizona, area’s Camelback location for a luxury residential tower back in late 2003, Trump’s team, and later Trump himself, met with the mayor, who was not impressed with Trump nor the proposal.  At a January 2005 meeting, when plans were unveiled, local residents even showed up to argue against the development. Still, by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans.  It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough petition signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approvals, but under this public pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision anyway and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise.  At that point, Trump himself abandoned the project for at leas the stated reason of not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition.

Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” as well as of stealing money from the project.  The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the federal government.  By June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to the faux $50 million “investment” by FL Group was Queens, New York, property called Waterpointe.  Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but its soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and, thus, Bayrock was fined $150,000; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe, then sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half the amount Bayrock had paid for it.

Unsurprisingly, Bayrock would later find itself facing heavy legal problems.  Emerging out of a process that began in 2008 in Delaware was a lawsuit filed with the New York State Supreme Court in May of 2013 by aforementioned former business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Kriss and Ejekam—against Bayrock, Sater, Arif, and their associates.  The plaintiffs sued for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his criminal past and what their lawsuit, moved to federal court, says was his use of Bayrock primarily as a criminal organization for criminal activities, especially alleged money laundering and fraud.  In this suit, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization are named as defendants.

The state court process removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit in a way that left unresolved their guilt, responsibility, or innocence.  The case dragged on and on, over years, but was finally settled in February, 2018, after a number of the accusations against Sater were withdrawn, but the details of the settlement have not been revealed.

Confusing?  Of course.  That likely by design.  What we do know overall is that these deals were going down at a time when Mogilevich, Manafort, Firtash, and others were involved in the Ukraine gas plot and were eager to move and allegedly launder billions of dollars out of Ukraine as part of that scheme.  Starting in late 2007, they were facing increased scrutiny from the new Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko—Yushchenko’s right-hand woman during the Orange Revolution—and her allies in the Ukrainian government.  If Sater’s father really was part of Mogilevich’s crew, as the U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari asserts without evidence, or if Sater was himself connected to Mogilevich, as Simpson with his legal counsel present asserted to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staffers and after being reminded that lying to Congress is a prosecutable federal offense that can land someone up to five years in prison, then it seems highly likely that Mogilevich would have been running Ukraine gas scam money through these Bayrock deals.  If these claims of ties between Mogilevich and Sater are unfounded, Mogilevich still has some entry points—most likely Mashkevich and FL Group, but also others—into these deals besides Trump himself that could have been on his radar, too, that should also be looked into for possible money laundering related to the giant Ukraine gas scam.

It was also clear from these deals and others that Trump and the people around him were hardly rigorous vetters, let alone eager to turn down deals coming in from people with suspicious business practices and questionable, even criminal pasts tied to organized crime or to hostile foreign governments and even those governments’ intelligence agencies.  Thus, selecting Trump as either an unwitting or willing conduit for money that needed to be moved stealthily, even laundered, was pretty much a no-brainer, especially since his playboy celebrity status made it much easier to attract additional “partners” to further distract and normalize, lending an air of respectability to these murky deals.  And in all of these details, it is those additional folks who paid the biggest prices by far.

When Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of those disastrous deals stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past.  For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship with Sater, as Trump lied repeatedly in sworn testimony about it and his ties to Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them.  And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 lists three of the Trump-named projects discussed above before all others, lists the Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), and lists Donald Trump as its first “reference” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

On top of all that, it was revealed in March of 2017 that Sater owned several shell corporations tied to Don Jr., the Trump Organization, and/or another executive with shady ties, shell companies that had sold no products, had no customers, and were ideal for money laundering.  More on Sater later… 

As for Arif, Sater’s main partner at Bayrock, he was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with, of all people, Mashkevich and apparently underage girls on board a yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part.  Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was never charged.

Trump Tower Toronto: Connecting Putin, Mogilevich, and Ukraine Even More with Donald Trump

Another scandal-ridden Trump deal would involve a major property development in Toronto. 

To understand this deal, we must go back again to Ukraine, where we left the Zaporizhstal steel mill—Ukraine’s fourth largest—in the possession of Alexander Shnaider, former Seabeco employee and son-in-law of Boris Birshtein, Seabeco’s owner and the Mogilevich-summit-host from back in 1995.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

But in 2007, Shnaider and Trump began building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  It was partly funded by Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) of Austria, which, according to Glenn Simpson, is “the go-to bank for top-level Russian dirty stuff.”  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco colleague Mashkevich was also working closely with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.  After investors were slammed during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his Trump project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million passed through five shell companies.  The Zaporizhstal buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), which had as the chairman of its board at that time none other than Vladimir Putin himself and which has been sanctioned because of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.  Then-Ukrainian President Yushchenko saw much of VEB’s activity in Ukraine at the time as infringing on his nation’s sovereignty and said that he tried looking into the transactions for Zaporizhstal and other privatizations of national assets, but was blocked by pro-Russian lawmakers.

Furthermore, selling Zaporizhstal to a Russian fit well into Putin’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industry and natural resources using Russia state-owned assets, such as Kremlin-run banks and energy companies, in tandem with the likes of oligarchs such as Dmitry Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov.  Shnaider had carried out a similar operation in Armenia with a company that ran the electrical grid there in 2002, handing it off to a Kremlin-run company and giving Russia further leverage in another former Soviet Republic.  2003 saw him pick up a steel mill in Russia, then sell it to a Russian state military subsidiary company, but was given a quarter-stake in return, making him a business partner with Putin’s government.  The pattern is clear: Shnaider was expanding Putin’s power.

It was reported by the Financial Times in mid-2018 that Shnaider was able to attract the VEB-funded Russian buyer because he had secretly agreed he would pay $100 million “commission” to “introducers” speaking for the Kremlin.  Legal filings in a dispute between Shnaider and his then-main business partner, Shifrin with whom he had bought up Zaporizhstal to begin with, suggest that some of that $100 million ended in the hands of officials in the Russian government.  The $100 million seems to have been a bribe and would make the whole Trump Tower project one huge money laundering machine.  Shifrin claims Russian officials made clear threats that his Russian holdings would be in trouble if he did not sell Zaporizhstal to them.  After the sale, VEB seems to have operated in such a way as to ensure Kremlin control over the steel mill, too.

Akhmetov had seemingly narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaiderback in 2010, and the $850 million price was $160 million more than Akhmetov had offered.  But in a stellar example of the amount of cross-collusion going on, of that difference, $50 million went to Akhmetov (all while Akhmetov was backing the parties to the gas scheme), $10 million to Shnaider and Shifrin’s company, and $100 million, as noted, to the “introducers.”  This deal was set up by the Ukrainian Igor Bakai, who had served in Kuchma’s government and in Naftogaz before fleeing Ukraine to Russia during the Orange Revolution.  Though the succeeding Yushchenko government wanted him for financial crimes, Moscow declined to hand him over and clearly found him useful in 2010.  A lawyer of Birshtein’s indicated in 2017 that $15 million from the Zaporizhstal sale went into the Trump Tower Toronto project, but the newer Financial Times report suggests this figure was $40 million.  After that further investment from Shnaider, Trump would earn millions through the deal. In July, 2011, just a year after Shnaider and Shifrin sold Zaporizhstal, Akhmetov was able to gain majority ownership of it, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions.  Incidentally (or not), with just days until Trump’s 2016 electoral win, Shifrin was granted Russian citizenship.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were lied to and who are apparently still suing both Trump and Shnaider. Late in 2016, the property was placed into bankruptcy receivership, and in the summer of 2017 Trump’s stake in the project was completely bought out, his name removed from the building that July.

Rinse, Repeat for Panama

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period was just exposed by an NBC News/Reuters/Global Witness joint series of exposés on the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama.  Ivanka Trump was particularly involved in this project, and Eric Trump was also involved substantively, though there is, as of yet, no evidence that shows any of the Trumps were aware of the criminality swarming their project; as usual, their best defense is that they are just incredibly stupid.  This project, which began in 2005 and opened in 2011, became a massive hub for organized crime—including the Russian mafia—to use for money laundering, as demonstrated by the overwhelming evidence presented in the reports. 

Notably, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown initiated the Great Recession.

In 2011, the Trump Ocean Club’s Board of Directors voted to end Trump’s management of the building, claiming TRUMP was engaged in financial wrongdoings.  His response was to sue them and a bitter fight ensued, ending in a confidential settlement that still left Trump managing the building.  By 2013, the company Trump had partnered with to make the whole Trump Ocean Club happen was filing for bankruptcy.  The Club’s majority owners kept trying to remove Trump’s name and end his involvement entirely, which they were finally able to do in 2018—including taking physical control of the property away from Trump’s security staff with actions of a Panamanian judge and the assistance of armed police on the site—and court rulings soon after this in New York and Panama affirmed that result, paving the way for Marriott to take over management of the property later that year.  Legal filings made in June, 2019, by the majority owners who pushed out Trump even argue the Trump Organization evaded paying Panamanian taxes while running the property and claim both to have the financial records to prove evasion and that auditing by Panamanian authorities has demonstrated such tax evasion.

But the shady Trump Panama deal also has a link to our Ukraine drama.  A Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy was involved in several companies dealing with Trump Ocean Club units and in marketing the Club’s units to Ukraine.  In 2014, he was convicted in Ukraine for forging travel documents, but had his three-year prison sentence strangely first suspended and then, in 2017, purged from his record.  Even more suspiciously, he has since 2005 been a shareholder in a Ukrainian travel agency that once had among its other shareholders one Oxana Marchenko, who, according to Global Witness, “is believed to be the wife” of Viktor Medvedchuk.

While Oxana (or Oksana) is a major Ukrainian TV personality who dabbles in Russian oil drilling through a Cyprus-based company, Medvedchuk is an even more connected individual.  He was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs and in none other than the natural gas business, and by 1999 he was a close ally of then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, supporting him in tandem with Oleksandr Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma and was the latter’s campaign manager, as discussed previously.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005, yet also became very close with Putin’s number-two, then-Russian Prime Minister and later-President Dmitry Medvedev.  But Medvedchuk is even closer with Putin himself, who is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother) and has pushed for, and seen, Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such roles Medvedchuk backed Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a major role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war. 

Clearly, there is a distinct possibility of some sort of cash flow from Ukraine into the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, and this possibility should be of keen interest to American, Ukrainian, and Panamanian officials, among others.

The Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan Money Laundering Moves

As Tymoshenko moved to fight the overall Kremlin-serving gas scheme, laundering the gas-generated proceeds became even more important to the people involved.

To this end, Manafort may have engaged in money laundering, possibly including his 2006 cash purchase of a $3.675 million Manhattan Trump Tower apartment using one of the shell companies cited in Special Counsel Mueller’s October, 2017, indictment.  If that property was involved, it means a direct link between alleged money laundering that was part of Putin’s Ukraine gas plot and Trump himself. In 2008, Manafort and Gates were personally involved in moving money—alleged laundering—to the U.S. through multiple deals involving Manhattan properties, according to court documents.  Those documents detail how Manafort ran a shell corporation that was part of the machinery that pushed money into real estate deals on behalf of Firtash and their mutual allies, with Firtash in one case allegedly laundering some $25 million in an $895 million deal involving the Drake Hotel.  But that deal never came fruition, resulting a number of parties that felt cheated and defrauded.

Another major money laundering case involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower itself.  A Mogilevich-outfit Russian mafia boss, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (somewhat famous for allegedly rigging figure skating in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah to get Russians gold medals), and his lieutenants Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring.  The scheme drew rich participants and was, in part, operated out of the Trump Tower. The whole caper ended up being the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game.  Important for our story, the gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine and its ringleaders engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.  In 2009, Trincher purchased a Trump Tower unit just below one owned by Donald Trump himself. In his own apartment, Trincher almost held a fundraiser two years later for future-Trump-ally and bigwig Republican Newt Gingrich.  A mold problem ended up derailing the plans for the fundraiser, with a water leak being detected. Other mobsters in this overall Mogilevich cell also owned Trump properties.  Many of these folks did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara, a noted foiler of Kremlin plots but who was later fired by Trump soon after Trump became president.  Tokhtakhounov did manage to get away, though, and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s very own 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there.  Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places in the Russian capital, easily still evading justice.

How does one make sense of so much scandal?  Just the Trump deals involving Bayrock, Toronto, and Panama alone amounted to some $1.5 billion, and there was a clear pattern with each: money connected one way or another to the Kremlin or the Russian mafia, failure, scandal, lawsuits, an overwhelming stench of money laundering, and the Trump name being removed by Trump backing out or Trump being forced out.  Taken together, it is pretty improbable that so much disaster could surround one person without a greater, deliberate purpose behind such losses, that people would risk so much money without money laundering being the real reason behind these deals.  And those deals certainly match the model of the Manafort, Gates, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan money moves for Yanukovych, the Party of Regions, and Putin that were clearly money laundering, even if a court case has not yet produced a guilty verdict regarding those deals.  These were the big deals he was doing while he was rebuilding himself and using his TV show The Apprentice to build a huge national fanbase

Let us also pause here to note Trump’s direct involvement with two major financial firms—Bear Stearns and FL Group—just before they failed and were the two major catalysts for the worst global economic crises since the Great Depression.  FL Group failed spectacularly in 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks and funds.  The firm’s failure was a major factor in the collapse of Iceland’s financial sector, a collapse that served as a catalyst for the 2008 global financial crisis and America’s Great Recession.  Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close (direct and/or indirect) ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking that they were acting more out of Kremlin interests than business ones.  In the case of Bear Stearns, its collapse would be the first big domino on the U.S. side of the global financial crises and the catalyst for the U.S. Great Recession.  The Trump deals were not insignificant and were important factors in both firms’ collapses, so, it would not be without accuracy to say that Donald Trump played an important role in causing the economic crises that erupted in 2008.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindleand Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published by Hill Reporter August 1, 2018

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 6, 2019

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

AMMAN — To many people following the Trump-Russia investigation for the start, it might be surprising that Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump “lawyer” and soldier, and Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican operative, political wizard for a rogue’s gallery of dictators over decades, and Campaign Chairman for Trump’s campaign during arguably the most crucial stretch of 2016, would become two of the most significant current centers of gravity in the Trump-Russia investigations.

But to those who have been paying close attention, this is not surprising at all (I’ve been writing about Manafort for over two years and Cohen for over a year).  And their specific work that raises significant concerns about Kremlin attempts to co-opt Trump and people close to him over the years overlaps in meaningful ways, an overlap that has generally been overlooked, but that merits a closer inspection.

Currently, Cohen is the subject of “many” inquiries that have been ongoing for months, and it seemed as though he could have been arrested at any moment. Now, Cohen seems both to have turned on Trump and to be cooperating with authorities (rather enthusiastically, it seems, with Team Cohen releasing a profoundly relevant and incriminating conversation of a private conversation with Trump and more potential tapes on the way). Cohen’s apparent change of heart occurred after he started feeling as if Trump betrayed him and left him out to dry, taking his loyalty for granted.

Meanwhile, Manafort is, yet again, being further investigated and is locked up in jail because of his attempts to obstruct justice and tamper with witnesses with the assistance of his old long-time colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik, U.S. officials, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller, assert was (and may still be) a Russian military intelligence operative, and is now starting what looks to be a grueling trial in federal court in Virginia, with another trial set to begin in Washington in September.

But one must go back decades to correctly understand why both Cohen and Manafort are so central to the Trump-Russia probe.  And no, this is not about the surprisingly and impressively graceful and tenacious pornstar Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels), who, if anything, has received a disproportionate amount of coverage that has drowned out some of the deeper, more complex aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal.

*****

In the 1980s, Donald Trump bought some 200 televisions for one of his hotels from an electronics store run by Semyon “Sam” Kislin and Tamir Sapir, immigrants from the then-Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Georgia, respectively.  Their store was a known hot-spot for senior government officials, spies, and politicians all from the Soviet Union.

Sapir may have (once) been part of or even come to the U.S. secretly working for the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied). Rumors swirled around the sources of his extremely unlikely and massive wealth.  One of his primary business partners pled guilty to longtime scams with the Gambino Crime family.

As for Sapir’s partner, as I noted in more detail previously, Kislin was a longtime ally of Rudolph Giuliani: a prolific repeat donor to the future-Trump-ally’s mayoral campaigns, with Giuliani as mayor even appointing Kislin to his economic council where he served until Giuliani’s final year as mayor. Kislin would also later serve on another of the city’s economic advisory groups.  By at least the mid-1990s, U.S. authorities believed Kislin had helped launder millions for the Russian mafia, had helped bring in a suspected hired assassin to America, and specifically had been linked by the FBI to Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Russian mob crew based in Brighton Beach as a “member or associate.”

Ivankov—one of the Russian mafia’s top men in America—lived in Trump Tower, had the Trump Organization’s private contact numbers in his address book, and also loved frequently spending time—along with other Russian mobsters at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, NJ.

Ivankov reported to Russian mafia “boss of bosses” Semion Mogilevich, perhaps the most powerful mobster in the world today, a financial mastermind known for long-term schemes, a top concern of the FBI for decades, and a longtime-friend and ally of current Russia President Vladimir Putin, who shields him to this day from U.S. (and other) authorities.

Mogilevich set up a front company in America in 1995 that would perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its ostensible “CEO” was Jacob Bogatin, who made repeated donations in this role to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Jacob’s brother, David Bogatin, had served in the Soviet Army in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, targeting U.S. aircraft.  By the mid-1980s, Bogatin had purchased five Trump Tower apartments that Trump had personally sold to him. By 1990s, he was also a key soldier for Mogilevich.

A man that a U.S. Supreme Court petition for a writ of certiorari alleges was another Mogilevich lieutenant, Mikhael Sheferovsky, had a son, Felix Sater, who, even without his father’s possible relationship with Mogilevich (which Felix denies), ended up having his own ties to the Russian mafia.

Sater was involved in a massive stock fraud and money laundering scheme worth tens of millions. Sater ran his illegal operation in the mid-1990s from an office in none-other-than-Trump-owned 40 Wall Street. It’s well-known that Sater’s plan involved the Russian mafia, but it is not publicly known if Mogilevich was involved. If Mogilevich were involved, it would hardly be surprising because of his involvement in similar stock fraud and money laundering in the U.S. and Canada during the same period.

Many details of Sater’s case remain sealed because he later mysteriously cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues in a deal made on the government’s side by Andrew Weissmann, then a federal prosecutor and now a key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

Glenn Simpson (a Fusion GPS opposition research lead investigator on numerous Russian cases including Trump’s connections to Russia and the infamous Prevezon/Magnitsky case, discussed later) also testified to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staff that Sater has strong ties to the Mogilevich crew. Specifics on which basis Simpson is alleging this are not clear.

Sater also grew up in Brighton Beach—a neighborhood notorious for being a Russian mafia enclave—and had a friend since childhood from that neighborhood whose uncle ran a catering establishment in New York then popular with Russian mafia figures.  That friend was Michael Cohen, the same Michael Cohen close to Trump and at the center of the Stormy Daniels saga.

*****

Mogilevich was hardly only focused on North America.  In 1995, he attended a major summit for Eastern European mafia bosses in Tel Aviv hosted by Boris Birshtein, a Russian émigré living in Canada who ran a number of ostensible businesses under the Seabeco name.  The main agenda was laying out plans for their Ukrainian operations.

Not long after, Mogilevich would be making major moves in Ukraine’s energy sector.

Those moves were all related to corrupt relationships and arrangements with Ukraine’s pro-Russian (then-)President Leonid Kuchma, who was close with Putin and other major Ukrainian politicians. At one point, $5 million was delivered by Birshtein and his Seabeco associates to Kuchma’s campaign manager, Oleksandr Volkov, known for his ties to Russian organized crime. Volkov also just happened to be Seabeco’s representative in Ukraine.

Meeting at Birshtein’s Seabeco and working for it throughout the 1990s were two men who would come to dominate large parts of Kazakhstan’s natural resource sector and forge very close ties with that country’s corrupt political leadership as two members of a corrupt Kazakh “Trio” of oligarchs, one being Alexander Mashkevich.

At the same time, Russian-born Canadian Alexander Shnaider also began working for Seabeco in 1991 while in law school; he would eventually marry his boss’s daughter, Simona Birshtein, and he rose quickly in Seabeco’s steel sector.  Shnaider and a partner would later found a company that began aggressively buying up the Ukrainian government’s shares in Ukraine’s fourth-largest steel mill, Zaporizhstal.

Also in Ukraine was Ukrainian businessman Viktor Topolov. By the late 1990s, Topolov’s construction company was allegedly employing multiple Russian mobsters, including as a “vice president” Leonid Roytman, whom the FBI has found to be a Mogilevich-associated (confessed) hitman and who said that the company regularly functioned to set up mafia meetings.

It seems Topolov was also involved in a scandal involving alleged money laundering and embezzling with Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz, the giant Russian state gas company Gazprom, and a Ukrainian football team named CSKA Kiev.  The football team was managed by Topolov until he handed it off to Andrii Artemenko in 1999. Artemenko was himself involved in, and later took much of the fall for, the laundering/embezzling scandal.

*****

In the 2000s, these relationships would explode into billions of dollars in scandal and shake the foundations of a nation.

By at least 2000, Ukraine’s President Kuchma seemed to tacitly approve of, or at least not try to block, whatever designs Mogilevich had for Ukraine and was also aware both of the mafia don’s longstanding relationship with Putin and that the two were already plotting something big for Ukraine.

Kuchma tried to fix the 2004 Ukrainian election to install his chosen successor Viktor Yanukovych, and the well-known 2004-2005 Orange Revolution thwarted this election fraud.  The disgraced Yanukovych needed a political rebirth, and it was none other than Paul Manafort, who was brought in to help him try to beat the Orange Revolution and then to rehabilitate him.  With his deputy Rick Gates, Manafort was effectively the political manager for Yanukovych and his political party, the Party of Regions.

Essentially, Putin would arrange to have Gazprom sell natural gas cheaply to Firtash, who ran the relevant intermediary company called RosukrEnergo (RUE), and Firtash would then generally sell that gas to Ukraine at much higher rates.  The profits would then be laundered by Mogilevich and others and used both to bribe Ukrainian politicians to do Russia’s bidding and to fund Yanukovych and his party.

Manafort and Gates even allegedly worked directly with Firtash to launder some of this money into fraudulent Manhattan real estate deals using shady shell companies.

One of the shell companies mentioned in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of Manafort (John Hannah LLC) is the same one Manafort used in 2006 for a cash purchase of a $3.675 million Trump Tower apartment, raising a distinct possibility the property was used for Ukraine-related money laundering.

Manafort and Gates also partnered with close Putin ally and Russian aluminum oligarch-billionaire Oleg Deripaska on various projects serving Russia’s and/or Putin’s interests and funneling Yanukovych’s private fortune and those of his inner circle away from prying eyes.

Over the years, Manafort would end up owing Deripaska no less than a staggering $60 million.

Also at this time, from 2004-2007, future-Trump-campaign-advisor and repeated FISA superstar Carter Page advised both Gazprom and another Russian state-owned energy company—RAO UES—all the way on the other end of this massive Ukrainian gas scam, making it highly unlikely he was not at least partly aware of what was going on.

Michael Cohen would also become heavily involved in Ukraine in the 2000s. Cohen started his business career as a personal injury lawyer, then pursued some other business interests that ended in dozens of lawsuits and involved mafia-linked associates.  Both he and his brother, Bryan Cohen, married Ukrainian women, Bryan marrying Oksana Oronov, daughter of Alex Oronov, a “longtime” business partner of Mogilevich-linked Topolov (linked to the earlier alleged money laundering that had involved Gazprom and the Kiev soccer team), who had now become a powerful Ukrainian politician.

Together, the Cohens, Alex Oronov, and Topolov all joined a Ukrainian ethanol business venture.  In 2006, the Cohen brothers personally tried to convince Americans to invest in building a factory for the business and failed to do so, though they did meet Topolov in the process. Others funded the investment to the tune of millions, and no ethanol was produced at the factory.  All this was at the same time that the Ukrainian gas scheme and money laundering of Mogilevich and Manafort were in full effect.

Going back to Sam Kislin, after his work with Giuliani, in the early 2000s, he brokered a deal for a condo in Trump World Tower for Vasily Salygin, who would soon become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was running its political affairs and then some.

Around this time, Kislin’s old partner Sapir—who now owned a $5 million apartment in Trump Tower, with Trump calling Sapir and his family “great friends”—introduced Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.

The earlier-introduced Sater now enters Trump’s orbit as the COO of Bayrock, the office of which was even located in Trump Tower. Sater now famously partnered with Trump (and sometimes his children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr.) in a series of potential deals (including the infamous Trump Tower Moscow with his old friend Cohen) and actual deals, most of which ended in disaster, failure, lawsuits, and scandal, with hundreds of millions in losses.

The most famous of the actual deals was the Trump SoHo, and none other than Alexander Mashkevich was one of its chief financiers.  By this time, Mashkevich was also a dominant player in aluminum and orchestrated a huge aluminum deal with Deripaska in 2004 at a time when Deripaska’s relationship with Manafort was taking off, while the other two members of Mashkevich’s Kazakh “Trio” had been dealing with Gazprom.

Four specific deals, SoHo included, of Bayrock’s that had been signed-off on by Trump personally received $50 million in “financing” from an Icelandic firm—FL Group—known as a hub for Russian investors, investors apparently linked to Putin and money laundering. FL Group’s $50 million investment was illegally structured as a “loan” designed to cheat governments of taxes and helped precipitate some of FL Group’s woes that led to its meltdown, which helped spark the 2008 global financial crises.

Sater was the point man for these deals, which were alleged, in a settled-in-late-February long-running lawsuit, of being RICO money-laundering scams.

Meanwhile, back in Ukraine, by 2001, Shnaider and his business partner had acquired a 93 percent stake in Zaporizhstal for some $70 million. They managed the deal at a time when steel was the country’s most significant industry, accounting for about 25% of Ukraine’s GDP.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

Then came 2007, when Shnaider partnered with Trump to begin building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco partner Mashkevich was also working with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.

After investors were pounded during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his Trump project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million through five shell companies.  His buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), and the chairman of its board at that time was Vladimir Putin himself.  Subsequent chairman Sergei Gorkov, a graduate of the F.S.B.’s academy, would meet Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in December 2016, just after Trump’s victory against Clinton and while the bank was under U.S. sanctions because of the war in Ukraine).

Zaporizhstal fit well into Putin’s and Mogilevich’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industries and natural resources.  Yanukovych financier Akhmetov had apparently narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaider back in 2010 but was able to gain majority ownership in July 2011, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were misled and who are still suing both Trump and Shnaider.

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period involves the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama, which began in 2005, with the Tower opening in 2011.  To get to that point, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown (along with FL Group’s) initiated the global financial crises of 2008.

(Pause: This means that scandalous Trump projects were major catalysts in the two main corporate collapses that were themselves the catalysts for the global financial crises!)

The Panama project involved Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, drug cartels, the Russian mafia, and a Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy, who has strong financial ties to Oxana Marchenko, apparently the same Marchenko who is the wife of Viktor Medvedchuk…

Medvedchuk was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs (and in none other than the natural gas business), and by 1999 he was an important ally of then-Ukrainian President Kuchma, supporting him in partnership with Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma as previously discussed.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005 and also became very close with Putin’s number-two, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.  But he is even closer with Putin himself, who is godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother).

Putin has pushed for and seen Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such positions, Medvedchuk helped Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a significant role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war.  He was also one of the first officials sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea for his role in that affair. That same year Medvedchuk met Manafort whom Medvedchuk has praised as “the best, both among foreign and domestic political consultants,” which makes the fact that Medvedchuk was reported to be in contact with the Trump campaign during 2016 concerning “U.S.-Russia cooperation” unsurprising yet still very troubling.

Even now, a prostitute in a Thai Jail has been exposed by suppressed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny as being connected with Oleg Deripaska. She was with him, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, who is a big-time foreign policy guy in the Kremlin, on a yacht at the height of the 2016 election, shortly before Manafort had offered to brief Deripaska on Trump’s campaign (presumably) on behalf of Putin.  The prostitute, known as “Nastya Rybka,” recorded video of Deripaska and Prikhodko talking about Russian relations with the U.S., and noted more such interactions in writing.

Rybka is threatening to share damning evidence she claims to have—including audio recordings she claims proves collusion between Manafort, Deripaska, and Prikhodko to interfere in the U.S. election. Rybka has asked the U.S. for asylum and protection from Russian authorities in exchange for the information she says she can offer.

If only Deripaska had a fixer like Michael Cohen, who apparently allegedly regularly paid women who had extramarital sexual affairs with Trump (and at least one other significant Republican Party figure, Elliott Broidy) to be quiet and go away.

Outside a courtroom in mid-April of this year in which the business inside centered on criminal inquiries into his own business dealings, Cohen took time to share cigars with Rotem Rosen and other friends.

Rosen married Tamir Sapir’s daughter, Zina Sapir, in 2007 at a ceremony hosted by Donald Trump himself at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and the next year, Trump and Kushner attended the newlywed couple’s bris for their newborn.

Rosen was the longtime right-hand man of Lev Leviev, a famous Israeli diamond oligarch from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.  Leviev is close and, it seems, a friend to Vladimir Putin, but also is close with the Sapirs, Deripaska, and (another) Russian aluminum oligarch named Roman Abramovich, who is himself close to Putin and was apparently the first to recommend Putin to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a successor.  Abramovich owns the UK club football team Chelsea, and until recently lived in the UK. Following Russia’s shocking recent Skripal chemical nerve agent attack on British soil, the UK declined to renew Abramovich’s visa, and he made aliyahto Israel, instantly becoming that nation’s wealthiest citizen).

When former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who had been talking on tape about Putin’s “good relationship” with Mogilevich, among other things, was assassinated with radioactive material in the UK in 2006 on the orders of the Kremlin (not that different from the Skripal poisoning), he was helping both British and Spanish intelligence look into money laundering and organized crime ties surrounding Abramovich.

Ivanka has been very close with Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich’s wife during this period (they separated in mid-2017, and Abramovich has since curiously been spotted with Polina Deripaska, Oleg’s “estranged” wife) for over a decade (introduced, interestingly, by Wendi Deng, then Rupert Murdoch’s wife and more recently a rumored lover/girlfriend of, yes, Vladimir Putin).  Abramovich became acquainted with both Kushner and Ivanka as a result.

His and Putin’s friend Leviev, whose company’s U.S. operations were headquartered at Trump’s 40 Wall St. property (where Sater ran his 1990s’ massive scam), was a business partner of Denis Katsyv, scion of a Putin ally, through Katsyv’s company Prevezon. Their dealings were at the heartof the whole Magnitsky money laundering and Russian sanctions saga that, in turn, led to the infamous June 2016, Trump Tower meeting hosted by Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Jr. with a variety of Russian operatives with deep Kremlin connections.

Leviev later conducted a major business deal with Kushner in 2015 and financing from Deutsche Bank related to that deal is under scrutiny by federal authorities. Deutsche also helped finance Donald Trump for years when few other banks would, and financed the Prevezon deal between Katsyv and Leviev. The Prevezon deal later became the subject of a settled civil case from the local U.S. Attorney’s office and is still the subject of a criminal probe there (a piece I wrote on Prevezon/Magnitsky was even censored in Russia). “Magnitsky” has since become synonymous with a human-rights crusade against Putin, and his Kremlin allies carried out by one Bill Browder, who has been a repeated target of Putin and Russian authorities as a result.

Another money laundering case of note involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower when local boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and his minions Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring. The ring targeted wealthy clientele and was, in part, operated out of the building (and was the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game).  The gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling, its ringleaders also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.

In 2009, Trincher bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Donald Trump, in which Trincher nearly held a fundraiser for future-Trump-ally Newt Gingrich two years later. The fundraiser never occurred after a mold problem, and a water leak was detected. Other mobsters in the outfit also owned Trump properties.  The minions did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by Preet Bharara (later fired by Trump), but Tokhtakhounov did and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there in Moscow, a city where, to this day, Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places.

*****

Meanwhile, Manafort’s and Gates’ work led to the triumphant rise of Yanukovych’s Party Of Regions and of Yanukovych’s ascent to Ukraine’s presidency in 2010.  Ultimately, the gas scam that empowered those wins precipitated the 2014 (Euro)Maidan revolution, the ouster of Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and today’s civil war in Ukraine.  At this time, Manafort and Gates were lobbying the U.S. government to improve the corrupt image of Yanukovych’s government, and it was for lying about this work that Alexander van der Zwaan, son-in-law of major Putin-linked Russian oligarch billionaire German Khan, was sentenced in April, the first defendant in Mueller’s Russia probe sentenced to time in prison.

After Trump’s presidential win and eleven days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Cohen met with a Russian oligarch close to Putin and the Kremlin named Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to Putin’s hostile actions. The two men discussed Russian-American relations in Trump Tower in New York; probably not coincidentally, a company of Vekselberg’s ended up sending Cohen substantial sums of money amounting to more than half a million dollars.

A diplomatic episode from the beginning of Trump’s presidency ties all this together.  Early in 2017, Cohen teamed up with his old friend Sater and Topolov’s old associate Artemenko from the alleged Gazprom-related laundering scam in an unofficial diplomatic meeting in Manhattan regarding Ukraine. This meeting was organized by Alex Oronov, whom Artemenko described in March 2017 as a “partner, mentor, teacher and friend.” His statement was made shortly after Oronov had mysteriously died.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a “peace” plan for Ukraine that had support from senior Putin aides, one that would cede to Russia official control over Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed with a 50 or 100-year “lease.”  At the meeting were also discussed ways to undermine Ukraine’s current anti-Putin president, Petro Poroshenko.  Cohen personally delivered the proposal to National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who had attended a Russian gala dinner in 2015 while seated at Putin’s table, which was next to Vekselberg’s table. Flynn would later resign from Trump’s team because of his Russian entanglements that would then lead to his indictment by the Special Counsel.

Such excellent Ukraine work assisting Russian interests would have made Manafort proud, and Manafort may even have played a role in it.  Manafort few to Europe in July, 2013, on a private plane owned by a company co-founded by Artemenko’s father, and Manafort made at least 19 trips to Kiev in the 20 months after Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 to work for the Opposition Bloc, Artemekno’s party and the successor to the Party of Regions, even possibly partnering with Medvedchuk.

Soon after the last trip, he and Gates joined the Trump campaign, just in time for the campaign to defang the Republican Party Platform’s harsh language on Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Cohen’s work on the 2017 “peace plan” would, had it been adopted, have been the long-worked-for culmination of over a decade of work by Manafort and Gates. This “peace plan” would have basically put an official stamp of approval on the latest in the long series of Putin, Yanukovych, Medvedchuk, and their whole crew’s efforts to enforce Russian domination of Ukraine through corruption, politics, lobbying, laundering, annexation, and war. Russia’s any means necessary approach was often orchestrated in no small part by Manafort.

With Manafort sidelined by the clouds hanging over his head, Cohen, along with his old friend Sater, were virtual representatives of Manafort, both in agenda and in spirit, ready to carry the pro-Russian torch Manafort had so diligently carried steadfastly for so long.

What is clear at a minimum is that an awful lot of people with deep ties to the Russian government, the Russian mafia, especially to Mogilevich, and involvement in (sometimes alleged) money laundering surround both Cohen and Manafort in profound, sustained ways. Those ties also appear to pertain directly to their relations to Trump the businessman, Trump the candidate, and Trump, the president.  At worst, this could go way beyond collusion.

In particular, large-scale involvement by a network of Russian operatives ties dealings in Ukraine to dealings in America, suggesting some sort of coordinated effort by a network spanning continents and oceans.  This network and the way it engaged Trump and his (future) people for years—all out there for those willing to give them the time and scrutiny they deserve—have been woefully undercovered by major American news outlets, with too little coverage and too little depth, often just scratching surface layers and eschewing the core while foregoing any deeper, larger-picture analysis, perhaps mentioning in a major article or two, but failing to connect the dots or revisit when another look is warranted.

If this all looks suspicious to you, we can be sure it all looks suspicious to Mueller, and that he is being more thorough than the news media or most Republicans in Congress.

Manafort and Cohen are at the center of this saga, now more than ever, with law enforcement zooming in on their activities ever more closely with each passing day, getting closer to the truth, far closer than the myopia of the journalistic and editorial class has allowed the news media to reach.

This overlap in pro-Russia work and connections between Manafort and Cohen would be as good a place to start as any if the news media is to unearth the deeper layers of this story and help voters be armed with a far larger sense of the truth than that which has been presented thus far as they consider their votes in the coming midterms and beyond.

Adapted in part from author’s earlier work published on July 31^st, 2016, November 4^th, 2016,March 28^th, 2017, and July 27^th, 2017.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

Also see how Manafort and Cohen fit into the larger Trump-Russia saga and an explanation of the below chart in article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

(Russian/Русский перевод) Author’s note: the odyssey of “Nastya Rybka”—real name Anastasia Vashukevich—has only recently become even more complex with her deportation from Thailand and rough apprehension, detention, and shady release by authorities in Russia at the apparent behest of Russian billionaire oligarch and close Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, who clearly felt threatened enough by her to take drastic action to silence her. That it was also recently revealed that Manafort shared internal polling data during the 2016 campaign (i.e., collusion) with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort partner with clear ties to Russian intelligence and who was acting as a go-between for Manafort and Deripaska, only adds to the importance of this saga withing the Trump-Russia saga.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) Updated April 26, 2022, to use the more sensitive term “sex-worker;” UPDATE: Instagram bowed to Kremlin pressure and removed the content in question

Support Brian and his work by donating here.

AMMAN—While I am proud of the following analysis, I want to point out that the brave Russian dissident, Alexey Navalny, deserve the real credit: he is placing his career as an activist and would-be politician, his family, his freedom, and his very health and life at risk in exposing the blatant, sordid truth about Putin and his henchmen and, in this case, their ties to Trump.

Navalny, who was trying to run against Putin for the presidency but whom Russian authorities have barred from competing in the election and have charged with bogus crimes, has been famous for some time for creating incredibly sharp YouTube videos exposing the corruption of top Russian officials à la Bill Browder (English/Russian Русский) of Magntisky Act fame.

One of Navalny’s latest videos was sparked by a group of apparent call girls who descended upon his office and tried to manufacture controversy for Navalny; this effort backfired as one of the young women, a sex-worker who calls herself “Nastya Rybka,” was easily identifiable from social media, and the much of the rest of the information presented in this video was from her online posts and a book she wrote. Navalny was able to put together what seems to be incontrovertible proof from public data and the verifiable information provided by “Rybka” to place her, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and a special guest on a yacht in Scandinavian waters in August of 2016.

If Deripaska’s name sounds familiar, it is because he is at the center of a good chunk of the intrigue surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. He is a fabulously wealthy Russian billionaire, an aluminum magnate and close Putin ally who has his own history with organized crime that has prevented him from getting a U.S. visa (even with 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole lobbying on his behalf). Deripaska partnered for years with Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Chairman when Trump as a candidate closed out the Republican primaries and accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention, and Rick Gates, a longtime aide to Manafort, on a number of shady multimillion-dollar shadow deals. One scheme involved a failed effort at trying to bend the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro to Moscow’s will (interesting in light of an apparent recent Russian-backed failed coup attempt there late in 2016).

Another one of their projects involved Deripaska paying Manafort millions for promoting Putin’s and Russia’s interests, and a third, which Rick Gates joined, involved laundering millions for then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his inner circle, who were living astoundingly exorbitant lifestyles with the funds. That third caper eventually left Manafort and Gates in a messy financial dispute with Deripaska in the Cayman Islands, and after NBC News revealed the existence of a previously unknown $26 million loan with which Deripaska has graced Manafort, the level of publicly known business dealings between the two men rose to some $60 million. So one could say that Manafort, and to a lesser extent Gates, owed Derispaska bigtime after their joint work helping Putin and Yanukovych.

The pro-Russian Yanukovych was then-outgoing-Ukrainian (also pro-Russian) President Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor back in 2004, and Kuchma tried to rig the election in Yanukovych’s favor, sparking Ukraine’s Orange Revolution that ended up seeing more pro-Western, more anti-Russian leaders come to power. After this, it would be the task of Manafort (with the help of Gates) to restore Yanukovych’s image and electoral prospects. Yanukovych was essentially Putin’s stooge in a dramatic stage play that eventually helped to subvert Ukraine to the Kremlin’s will, increasing the power of Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party—the Party of Regions—and finally seeing Yanukovych emerge as the victor in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. This remarkable comeback was accomplished with a massive political and lobbying effort—run by Manafort with Gates’s help—on behalf of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (and its successor)—conducted side-by-side with an even more massive alleged money laundering scheme worth billions involving Ukrainian-Russian gas deals and the Russian mafia. Manafort is alleged to have played key roles in this operation, too, working with oligarchs and the Russian mafia to launder money through sham New York real estate deals. The proceeds of this overall scam allegedly went to fund Yanukovych and his political party and to bribe and control other Ukrainian politicians in order to bring them along to the Russian way of thinking at a time when the U.S. was working hard to strengthen its relations with Ukraine, meaning Manafort and Gates were acting against U.S. interests. This work of theirs continued until just before they ended upon Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. They have now both been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in part because of money laundering related to this work in Ukraine. 

In putting the pieces together, Navalny was able to show that Deripaska was in close consultation on Russian policy with that special guest on his yacht: one of Russia’s deputy prime ministers, Sergei Prikhodko, a rare longtime survivor in Russia’s top leadership (one of the only major players from the days of Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor, to still be in place) who has a tremendous amount influence over Russian foreign policy, even greater than Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to Navalny. 

Navalny was able to piece all this together because that particularly entrepreneurial Russian escort, who claims to be Deripaska’s mistress, captured pictures and videos of the two Russian giants talking over such matters on board Deripaska’s yacht, enjoying a holiday in Scandinavian waters with the company of young escorts. In one of “Rybka’s” videos, Deripaska and Prikhodko and were discussing that favorite Russian punching bag, Victoria Nuland, a prominent former U.S. State Department official known for fighting against Russian geopolitical schemes, and the intrepid escort notes that they talked about many other political issues. She alleges in her book that Prikhodko (named only as “Papa” in the book) engaged in aggressive sexual harassment against her and others, and that Deripaska (given the moniker “Ruslan”) did not lift a finger to stop it, the only person to which the billionaire gave that kind of deference. 

Manafort reached out to Deripaska on July 7th, 2016, when he was still Trump’s Campaign Chairman, offering to brief him on Trump’s presidential campaign, presumably because of Deripaska’s closeness to Putin and senior Russian government officials. Deripaska’s yacht trip with Prikhodko began on August 6th, less than a month after Manafort offered to brief Deripaska. 

This is direct evidence that Deripaska was in contact with senior Russia government officials, discussing policy, at roughly the same time that Manafort was reaching out to him, and makes an even more compelling argument that Deripaska is still acting as an intermediary for the Kremlin and that Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska is one that could have compromised national security and American interests. 

Russia is already trying to block Navalny’s video in Russia and Deripaska is threatening to sue media outlets that report on it, and in an attack on Navalny in response to his video, Prikhodko referred to Deripaska as “my friend,” hardly denying their closeness.

Correction appended: this article originally misstated that Manafort’s home was raided by the FBI July 26th, 2016, but it was actually 2017.

See related article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 30, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) August 30th, 2017 (based heavily on research from my four previous related articles)

The April 2012 opening of Toronto’s Trump International Hotel and Tower. From left, Jim Petrus, COO of Trump Hotel Collection, Alex Shnaider, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — Alex Urosevic/ Agency

Note: Earlier readers may have been confused because somehow, someone got into my post and edited out names like Topolov, Shnaider, & Seabeco. I have made security adjustments so that will not happen again.

AMMAN — The best prism through which to understand the big picture of how deep and incriminating Team Trump’s connections are with Team Putin/Russia is that of the many crooked business deals Trump and his associates embarked upon with operatives of Putin/the Russian government and the Russian mafia (two entities which can, in fact, be difficult to distinguish or separate from each other). The devil is in the details, and only a full exploration can truly expose the magnitude of this story.

This article is not that full story, but a much shorter gateway to that full story, itself the culmination of a year of meticulous research and involving some 70 close Trump associates, Putin associates, Russian government operatives, and Russian organized crime figures and their associates involved in dozens of crooked business deals totaling many billions of dollars that included international energy giants and over a dozen major luxury real estate deals; nearly all of the people and deals involved criminality and/or scandal.

Perhaps the foundational pillar in this story—besides Donald Trump’s penchant for unethical and criminal business practices and for teaming up with business partners who share it—is a meeting in Tel Aviv in October of 1995. This meeting was hosted by Russian-Canadian “businessman” Boris Birshtein and brought together leading members of Russian and Ukrainian organized crime in order to discuss mutual plans for their activities in Ukraine, which would almost certainly have included some of the later moves discussed below. Among the mafia bosses present was Semion Mogilevich, the “Boss of Bosses” in the Russian mafia and known as the “Brainy Don” because of his wizardry at orchestrating complex financial schemes that took years to plan and set up. And one need not be an expert to realize that so many high-level organized crime bosses would not congregate at one place at one time unless they were discussing something big, very big¸ with enormous amounts of money at stake.

By this time, it should be noted that Mogilevich had already had two major mob lieutenants who had bought units in Trump Tower in Manhattan: David Bogatin and Vyacheslav Ivankov, and Bogatin personally dealt directly with Donald Trump. There was also the case of Felix Sater, who ran a Wall Street fraud and money laundering scheme worth tens of millions of dollars with unspecified elements of the Russian mafia in the mid-1990s from one of Trump’s major Manhattan properties, 40 Wall Street. This was at a time when Mogilevich was also engaged in his own massive stock fraud and money laundering operation in the U.S. and Canada with his Russian mafia crew, and one should remember how hierarchical organized crime generally is, meaning there is a high chance Mogilevich was involved in Sater’s scheme. And, of course, there is the (potential) little detail that I was the first to report: that Sater’s father was alleged to be a captain in Mogilevich’s Russian mafia crew.

At the time of the 1995 Tel Aviv meeting, Birshtein was close to Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, close enough to send him, along with others at Seabeco (the company Birshtein ran), at least $5 million to help him win reelection, and Kuchma would be aware by at least 2000 that Mogilevich had major operations in Ukraine underway and that he was working with Putin and had been close with him for some time. Possibly involved in these efforts, a Mogilevich lieutenant named Leonid Roytman was a “vice president” for a construction company run by Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Topolov, who was himself heavily involved with organized crime. Topolov would be part of a money laundering and embezzlement scandal in the late 90s and early 00s involving Ukraine’s state-owned gas company, Naftogaz, the Russian state-controlled gas giant, Gazprom, a Kiev soccer team, and Ukrainian Andreii Artemenko, who took over the team from Topolov in 1999.

This may have been a for Mogilevich for a far more epic money laundering scheme involving Gazprom and Naftogaz.

*****

As Putin took charge of Russia in 1999, a Ukrainian named Dmitry Firtash became a major shadow broker for the transport and sale of Central Asian gas into Ukraine. And among the employees of Birshtein in the 90s were Alexander Mashkevich and Patokh Chodiev, who just a few years after their Seabeco days would form two parts of a notorious “Trio” of Kazakh oligarchs that would become famous for dominating the Kazakh natural resources sector, for money laundering, and for ties to organized crime; also employed by Seabeco was Alexander Shnaider, who would marry Birshtein’s daughter. By 2001, Shnaider, with a partner, had his own company that owned a 93-percent stake in Zaporizhstal, Ukraine’s fourth largest steel mill when steel was roughly 25% of Ukraine’s GDP, while the “Trio” had become a thing and had been engaged in orchestrating deals with Russian gas giant Gazprom at the same time a massive plot involving the state-owned giant was being put into motion by Putin and his operatives, especially Mogilevich and Firtash, who in the early 2000s, engineered a stranglehold on Ukraine’s gas network through a series of shady-yet-profitable deals and front shell companies. 

Mogilevich was even getting prominent Republicans to lobby to have his name removed from the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, and one man involved in these efforts, Neil Livingstone, would also end up being connected business-wise to Firtash through an introduction by Mississippi GOP-governor Haley Barbour’s consulting firm (Livingstone would later run unsuccessfully to be Montana’s governor, and his running mate in the effort, Ryan Zinke, is now Trump’s Secretary of the Interior).

While those lobbying efforts were underway, Kuchma (who had been a pro-Russian leader) selected the corrupt pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych as his chosen successor for the 2004 elections. The problem for him was that many Ukrainians wanted closer ties with the West and wanted to reject the old Soviet-style corruption of the Kuchma/Yanukovych wing of Ukrainian politics. So Kuchma tried to have the election fixed for his protégé, but it was pretty obvious and masses of Ukrainians took to the streets; the country’s Supreme Court ordered an election redo, and Yanukovych lost. 

In this effort to elect Yanukovych, a Republican political operative from the United States, famous for his work with unscrupulous “Third Word” dictators, was assisting him as a political consultant and would stay after the loss, leading efforts to rebrand Yanukovych and his pro-Russian political party, the Party of Regions. His name was Paul Manafort, and he had already done informal work for Donald Trump by this time as a partner of Roger Stone and would end up running Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 during the crucial stretch when Trump racked up delegates and officially secured the Republican nomination; both in Ukraine and on Trump’s in presidential election effort, Manafort’s junior partner, Rick Gates, would heavily assist. It would be in part under Manafort’s watch when Trump’s presidential campaign would become the most explicitly pro-Russian of any major candidate since WWII. Alongside his political work for Yanukovych and his Party of Regions, Manafort also took on a gig worth millions through Russian aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska to lobby on behalf of Russian interests and for Putin, with whom Deripaska was close. In 2004, Deripaska, who is also tied to organized crime, had also done a massive aluminum deal with Mashkevich, formerly of Birshtein’s and then of the Kazakh “Trio.”

Even as the 2004 Ukrainian election was being decided, Mogilevich’s and Firtash’s gas scheme was in place and working: Firtash’s shell companies would buy gas from Gazprom at low rates, then sell it at much higher rates to Ukraine, partnering with Ukraine’s Naftogaz; the profits would then be used to bribe Ukrainian politicians and bend them to Putin’s will and fill the Party of Region’s coffers so it would be flush with cash, and in exchange, Firtash would be given billions in credit from Putin-linked bankers to buy up major sectors of key Ukrainian industries. Where Firtash was the public face, Mogilevich was moving the money around behind the scenes, laundering away from prying eyes. 

By 2006, this scheme had grown to include RAO UES, a Russian state-owned electric company, which meant Russia was selling its Gazprom-transported gas to Ukraine at marked up rates and then getting some of the fruit of that gas back at a discount when a portion of the gas was used to generate electricity for RAO, which then sold the electricity for even further profit; an American man named Carter Page advised both Gazprom and RAO at this time, and he is smart enough on these matters (if not others) to make it near-impossible to believe he did not know what was going on to a significant degree.

Page would go on to become one of the only foreign policy advisors to Trump’s campaign that Trump could name in 2016, but by then Page had already been under a secret federal surveillance warrant since 2014 on suspicion of being a Russian agent.

Around the time RAO was being integrated into the massive Ukrainian gas scheme, in 2006 a lawyer named Michael Cohen with a shady history had worked his way into Trump’s employ as a key legal advisor; he had married a Ukrainian, and so had his brother, Bryan, whose wife was the daughter of Alex Oronov, who was a major business partner of Topolov, who, as mentioned, had ties to Mogilevich and had been involved in the soccer/Naftogaz/Gazprom scheme from before that also involved Artemenko, who, in turn, would later describe Oronov as his mentor. Both Cohen brothers went into an ethanol business with Oronov and Topolov; the venture did not go as planned and raises natural questions as to if anything illicit was involved.

By 2007, Trump was partnering with non-other than Alexander Shnaider, Birshtein’s son-in-law, to develop a Trump Tower in Toronto. The following year, received a massive loan from FL Group, an Icelandic “investment” firm that was well-known for handling money for close Putin associates and that played a major role in the global financial crises at the end of the decade; the loan was given, ostensibly, to purchase a yacht. That same year, Shnaider sold his stake in the Ukraine steel mill for some $850 million to an unknown buyer tied to the Russian government and who was financed by VEB (Vnesheconombank), a Russian state-owned bank whose board was then chaired by Putin himself. This furthered the Kremlin’s goal of having allies dominate key industries and natural resources in Ukraine, and the following year the mill was sold to Rinat Akhmetov, a super-wealthy Ukrainian oligarch close to Yanukovych. As for the Toronto Trump Tower, the project fell apart in scandal, lawsuits, and bankruptcy, with Trump’s name even being taken off the building just this July.

Also throughout the 2000s, Trump partnered with Felix Sater on a number of shady real estate deals that all failed, ended in scandal and/or lawsuits, and almost certainly involved massive amounts of Russian money laundering. Sater’s real estate business, Bayrock, was even located in Trump Tower, and its five deals with Trump included, most infamously, the Trump SoHo in Manhattan. Sater and his Kazakh partner, Tefik Arif, also secured financing from none other than Alexander Mashkevich and from FL Group; the “financing” was a $50 million package that went to four of the five Sater-brokered deals and was illegally structured as a loan for tax fraud purposes. Given Sater’s possible ties to Mogilevich and known ties to the Russian mafia, it is valid to suspect that some of the money involved could have been related to the whole Eurasian gas scheme.

The Soho deal in involved financing from Tamir Sapir from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, who lived in Trump Tower, was a graduate of the Soviet Ministry of Internal and who had longstanding close ties to a myriad of Soviet officials; an old business partner of his named Sam Kislin had earlier brokered a deal for a condo in Manhattan’s Trump World Tower for Vasily Salygin, who would go on to be an official in Yanukovych’s Party of Regions during the whole gas scam era. At a ceremony hosted by Trump in Mar-a-Lago, Sapir’s daughter also married Rotem Rosen, a close business partner with an international diamond magnate from the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, Lev Leviev, who is close with Putin and worked on issues for him with Russian aluminum oligarch Roman Abramovich, who himself has ties organized crime; Ivanka Trump would become quite close with Abramovich’s wife, while her now-husband, Jared Kushner, would do business with Leviev, who would sell Kushner high-end real estate in 2015. But back in 2008, Leviev sold posh Manhattan real estate to Prevezon, a company owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a former Russian government minister, Petr Katsyv, who worked with a close Putin ally, Vladimir Yakunin, who publicly endorsed Trump’s run for president in June 2016; Prevezon used the Leviev transaction to help launder millions of the Russian government’s illegal proceeds from its Magnitsky-related historic tax fraud scam (an issue on which Denis Katsyv and Yakunin both lobbied U.S. lawmakers), which was one of the issues discussed at the now infamous meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and a number of notorious Russians tied to Putin and the Russian government; at the time, Leviev’s business that conducted the transactions was headquartered at Trump’s 40 Wall Street, the same building Sater had used many years ago in conducting his fraud and money laundering.

Manafort was in on the whole Ukraine gas scheme, too, and starting at least in 2008 even helped, along with Gates, to launder vast sums of money through sketchy Manhattan real estate deals that were never completed, ended in scandal, and helped keep the money away from authorities, helping to give Yanukovych and his Party of Regions their crooked edge over their rivals. A Ukrainian politician, Yulia Tymoshenko—who led the efforts to crack down on this Ukraine gas scheme before she ran for president and lost in 2010 to a Yanukovych who had been successfully rehabilitated by Manafort and who was then imprisoned by Yanukovych on trump-up show charges after her loss—sued Manafort, Gates, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Yanukovych in a New York federal court from Ukrainian prison, arguing that those crooked Manhattan real estate deals had helped enable her enemies to do her harm, both politically and “legally.” The court agreed with some of her claims but felt it lacked the jurisdiction to rule on them and that the evidence did not meet the higher RICO standards.

Yanukovych remained in power until 2014, when his own people drove him out, precipitating the current civil war and Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea. Soon after Trump was inaugurated president, he dispatched Michael Cohen—who had become something of an infamous spokesman for the Trump campaign in 2016 (“Says who?”)—and Felix Sater to meet with Adreii Artemenko to discuss a “peace plan” that had the approval of top Putin aides and that would have handed Russia formal control of Crimea, with the meeting organized by Alex Oronov. Only a few months later, Oronov mysteriously died.

While the latest New York Times story on Sater begs the question of how Sater can claim to have access to Putin, it is quite possible that the answer to that question is Mogilevich himself.

*****

A lot of these Russian-tied real estate deals were so spectacularly poorly executed that they only make sense if viewed primarily as criminal vehicles for Russian and Ukrainian money laundering. Considering that so many of these people and deals can likely be linked to that 1995 Russian and Ukrainian mafia bosses’ meeting in Israel hosted by Boris Birshtein, that is not surprising. 

Even only looking at this portion of the story, it seems the machinery of that major Putin operation designed to dominate Ukraine using natural gas and money laundering was likely set in motion by that 1995 Tel Aviv meeting, and that, eventually, multiple parts of that machine engaged Trump both in what may have been related money laundering scams and then, later, in a political plot to help him win the American presidency using and information operations to both boost him and attack the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and her Democratic Party. A single operation? No. Multiple related operations that used some of the same people and machinery? Most certainly, and the overlap is where the real story—and questions—rise.

Again, keep in mind that this is only a part of the Trump-Russia saga. You can read about these events in more detail and other people and crooked deals involving Trump, his people, Putin’s people, and the Russian mafia in my more exhaustive earlier article.

See the related article that contains this chart: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind.

Correction appended to note the alleged nature of the claim that Sater’s father was tied to Mogilevich

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See author’s Amazon eBooks here!

See related articles:

U.S. Settlement of Prevezon Case Raises More Questions on Trump/Russia Ties; Bharara Led Case Before Trump Fired Him (CENSORED IN RUSSIA)

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Welcome to the Era of Rising Democratic Fascism Part I: Defining Democracy, Fascism, and Democratic Fascism Usefully, and Spin vs. Lies

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Sometimes seeing the bigger picture requires enough steps back to realize there are parts you didn’t even know were there, and in an age of 140-character Tweets, information overload, fake news, short attention spans, and a frequency and scale of scandals unheard of in the history of Western democratic politics, seeing that big picture can be harder than ever, even with the most-covered story in the world. 

Yet in Putin’s cynical salsa with Team Trump, when so many people connected to Trump and Putin are involved in similar money laundering schemes involving Russians and the Russian mafia and each other and Trump properties, we pass out of the realm of allowing for reasonable doubt and suspicion to the point where the crimes become so obvious that what remains to be answered is no longer “if” but simply “how much” these people are guilty and/or stupid.

Below you have the deepest exploration of the big picture of Trump’s crooked Russian business ties you can get from any single account, with a significant amount of information reported here not reported in this context by anyone else, and every detail is from a publicly available, credible, and cited source.

January 23rd, 2019. Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 27, 2017 (over 77,000 unique views) and republished by Ir.net March 15, 2018 (over 36,000 unique views); many major updates in my Nov, 2020, eBook A Song of Gas and Politics,  available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook (preview here) 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 27th, 2017

Built on part on these earlier pieces from: July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

March 28, 2017: Trump’s Russia & Mafia Dealings Expose Him As Fool or Criminal (Traitor?) or Both: Biggest Scandal in U.S. History, Too Many Ties to Be Nothing

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Support Brian’s work by donating here

AMMAN—This story of 1.) DONALD TRUMP, 2.) VLADIMIR PUTIN, and their operatives is exceedingly complex, so I ask readers’ patience in going through this historic tale of political cunning and intrigue, conspiracies and crimes.

CLICK HERE TO ZOOM IN ON CHART

1990s: Laying Foundations

Russian mafia “boss of bosses” 3.) SEMION (Semyon) MOGILEVICH makes moves in North America. Throughout this piece, remember that MOGILEVICH, also known as “the Brainy Don,” has an economics degree and is famous for designing elaborate financial schemes that are extremely difficult, even impossible, to detect, the planning and setup of which can take years and involve a wide range of people in various positions of power whose roles/identities are sometimes never even discovered.

MOGILEVICH starts up a fake company called YBM Magnex International in Pennsylvania in 1995 that would be used to perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The ostensible “CEO” of YBM was 4.) Jacob (Yakov) Bogatin. His brother, 5.) David Bogatin, had served in the Soviet Army in an anti-aircraft battery in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, targeting U.S. aircraft; in the mid-1980s, Donald 1.) TRUMP had personally sold David five apartments in I.) Trump Tower, and by the 1990s, he was, like his brother, a key figure in MOGILEVICH’s mafia organization’s presence in the U.S. Another major MOGILEVICH lieutenant who would rise to be one of the senior Russian mobsters in America, 6.) Vyacheslav Ivankov, also lived in I.) Trump Tower, had the Trump Organization’s private contact numbers in his address book, and also loved frequently spending time—along with other Russian mobsters—at TRUMP’s VIII.) Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, NJ.

Another alleged (according to an apparently uncorroborated U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari) 3.)MOGILEVICH lieutenant, 7.) Mikhael Sheferovsky (aka Michael SATER), had a son named 8.) FELIX SATER (sometimes Satter), who ended up having, predictably, ties to the Russian mafia; FELIX SATER was involved in an at least $41 million (and up to $60 million) stock fraud and money laundering scheme and ran it in the mid-1990s from an office in II.) 40 Wall St., another TRUMP-owned property. We know this scheme involved the Russian mafia, but the details of that case remain sealed because SATER later cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues (there is currently a court fight to get this information released on the grounds that it is a national concern, now that TRUMP is president, and some details about SATER have been released in previous court fights, including his father’s alleged link to MOGILEVICH, which I was the first to report). It must also be mentioned that—as 3.) MOGILEVICH was already heavily engaged in money laundering with the Russian mafia in North America and he was already very powerful in that very hierarchical organization, already had a history of close Russian mafia associates linked to TRUMP-owned entities, and would already have known 8.)SATER if hewas the son of one of his own mafia captains as a U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari alleges—it would be far more likely than not that MOGILEVICH was somehow involved in 8.) SATER’s scheme.

3.) MOGILEVICH was also connected to a Russian émigré living in Canada, 9.) Boris Birshtein, who ran a number of ostensible businesses under the Seabeco name that were staffed heavily by Russians and others from former Soviet republics. In 1995, Birshtein hosted a meeting in Tel Aviv at which 3.) MOGILEVICH and another major Russian mafia godfather—10.) Sergei Mikhailov (Mikhaylov), also a close business partner of Birshtein and who would later develop his own relationship with Russia’s political elite—were present, as were other Russian and former-Soviet-republic mob bosses. They discussed joint plans for their Ukrainian operations, plans that may have set the stage for much of what is discussed below and that would likely have included MOGILEVICH’s moves that acquired influence over significant chunks Ukraine’s economy, particularly the energy sector. This was all related to corrupt relationships and arrangements with Ukraine’s president—then 11.) Leonid Kuchma, close with 2.) PUTIN—and other major Ukrainian politicians, including some $5 million sent by Birshtein and his Seabeco associates to Kuchma’s campaign manager, 12.) Oleksandr (Alexander) Volkov, known for his ties to Russian organized crime. Two men who would come to dominate large parts of Kazakhstan’s natural resource sector and forge very close ties with that country’s corrupt political leadership as two members of a Kazakh “Trio” of oligarchs, 13.) Alexander Mashkevich (sometimes Machkevich)and 14.) Patokh Chodiev, would meet at Seabeco and work for it throughout the 1990s. At the same time, Russian-born Canadian 15.) Alexander Shnaider (Shneider) began working for Seabeco in 1991 while in law school; he would eventually marry his boss’s daughter, 16.) Simona Birshtein Shnaider, and he rose quickly in Seabeco’s steel sector. Shnaider and a partner founded a company, Midland Resource Holdings, which began aggressively buying up the Ukrainian government’s shares in Ukraine’s fourth largest steel mill, Zaporizhstal; they were clearly well-funded and well-connected to be able to do so.

Another Ukrainian, 17.) Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, went into business in post-Soviet Ukraine and quickly amassed a fortune through his commodities business, KMIL. This would eventually bring him into the region’s natural gas business by the late 1990s, when he began trading commodities for gas. At this time, Firtash’s KMIL was struggling and would be absorbed into the soon-to-be-Cyprus-based Highrock Holding, a front for none-other than 3.) MOGILEVICH; one Ukrainian associate of MOGILEVICH, who was a senior executive in his YBM front, was also helping to run Highrock in the late 1990s: the Ukrainian 18.) Igor Fisherman. Firtash came to direct Highrock in 2001, running it along with MOGILEVICH, who also controlled a significant chunk through a shell company run by his ex-wife until Firtash took that over, too, in 2003, giving him a strong majority control of Highrock. 

As Firtash was transitioning to Highrock, Ukrainian businessman 19.) Viktor Topolov ran a construction company, Kyiv-Donbas, that by the late 1990s employed multiple Russian mobsters, including 20.) Leonid Roytman, a 3.) MOGILEVICH hitman, who is employed as a vice-president and who said that the company regularly functioned to set up mafia meetings. It seems Topolov was also involved in a scandal involving money laundering and embezzling with Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz, the Russian state gas company Gazprom, and a Ukrainian football team CSKA Kiev, which he ran at the time before handing the team off to 21.) Andrii (Andriy/Andrey) Artemenko in 1999, who was also involved in, and later took much of the fall for, the scandal.

2000s: Advanced Plots in Motion

By at least 2000, 11.) Kuchma seemed to tacitly approve of, or at least not try to block, whatever designs 3.) MOGILEVICH & co. had for Ukraine (designs that had apparently been discussed in Tel Aviv). At this time, Kuchma was also aware that MOGILEVICH had a relationship with 2.) PUTIN that went back years, and that the two were already plotting together for some time (even today, PUTIN is shielding MOGILEVICH in Russia from U.S. and other international authorities’ extradition requests).

17.) Firtash was also rising in his gas role. It was he who established (with 3.) MOGILEVICH’s lawyer 22.) Zeev Gordon aka Vladimir Averbukh) and ran Eural Trans Gas (ETG) in 2002, a joint project with Gazprom and Naftogaz (Naftogas/Naftohaz), the state-run gas companies of Russia and Ukraine, respectively; immediately after ETG’s creation, it played the role of the dominant intermediary for Russian/Eurasian gas deals for Ukraine, a role previously played by the company ITERA, whose leader, 23.) Igor Makarov, would now be a partner of Firtash’sin Highrock.

Also of note: in the years immediately after this, MOGILEVICH enlisted the lawyerly services of 24.) William Sessions (a Republican who was the only FBI director to be fired until TRUMP fired James Comey, firing him in relation to an investigation into what is discussed herein) in an effort to get his criminal charges cleared with the U.S. Government; the middleman for that effort was consultant 25.) Neil Livingstone , whose firm GlobalOptions was heavily staffed by Russians and people from former Soviet republics (fun/suspicious fact: Livingstone ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for Montana’s 2012 governor’s race with 26.) Ryan Zinke, now the TRUMP Administration’s Secretary of the Interior, as his running mate); two-time Mississippi governor and major Republican operative 27.) Haley Barbour founded a consulting firm that introduced Livingstone’s GlobalOptions to Highrock, which engaged GlobalOptions in at least two contracts, one of which was mysteriously referenced in a lawsuit involving an unnamed member of Ukraine’s government (notice how MOGILEVICH and Firtash are working hand-in-hand, just a bit removed from each other).

As (pro-Russian) President 11.) Kuchma’s second term was coming to end, he made a major deal with his ally 2.) PUTIN in 2004 to replace ETG with a new company, Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo (RUE), to facilitate an ostensibly joint venture between the countries to bring in gas from Turkmenistan and in much the same role as ETG, but, in reality, the shady deals around this were orchestrated by Gazprom, the gas would pass through Gazprom-owned pipes and Russian territory, and 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, with 45% was owned through a complex arrangement of shell companies owned by Firtash acting, in part, as a front for MOGILEVICH.

But as I’ve detailed repeatedly before, this was about far more than gas.

While RUE was being set up, Kuchma was also grooming a potential successor in 28.) Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma’s already-scandal-mired prime minister. 

Enter 29.) PAUL MANAFORT, who had already done informal work for TRUMP at the turn of the century as a partner of Nixon devotee Roger Stone in controversially lobbying against a Mohawk casino that would have competed with TRUMP’s casinos, lobbying that TRUMP failed to properly disclosed and for which he was fined; MANAFORT was an old-hand Republican operative with a specialty for consulting for unscrupulous Third World dictators. At this point, MANAFORT was ostensibly in Ukraine to do work for 30.) Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man for much of the past decade and major patron of Yanukovych; in reality, he was there to run the political campaign of Yanukovych and his political party, the pro-Russian Party of Regions, also heavily backed by Akhmetov. In the process, MANAFORT would become acquainted, and partner with, a whole host of Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and operatives connected to PUTIN and working for Yanukovych, including 3.) MOGILEVICH and 17.) Firtash.

As is now famously known, Kuchma tried to fix the 2004 election for Yanukovych through widespread fraud; the people rose up and took to the streets and Ukraine’s Supreme Court demanded a redo, one which Yanukovych would lose in what would become known as the Orange Revolution. But MANAFORT would stick around, trying to rehabilitate Yanukovych over the years and work his political magic for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. In these efforts, MANAFORT brought in his protégé, 31.) Richard “Rick” Gates.

On multiple projects, 29.) MANAFORT would partner with Russian aluminum oligarch and close 2.) PUTIN ally 32.) Oleg Deripaska, who has his own history with organized crime that has prevented him from getting a U.S. visa (even with 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole lobbying on his behalf); one scheme involved a shady effort trying to bend Montenegro to Moscow’s will, another one of their projects involved Deripaska paying MANAFORT millions for promoting PUTIN’s and Russia’s interests, and another, which involved 31.) Rick Gates, involved laundering millions for 28.) Yanukovych and his inner circle, who were living astoundingly exorbitant lifestyles with the funds.

On one level, MANAFORT and his protégé Gates ran the politics for 28.) Yanukovych and his Party of Regions working with various Yanukovych and PUTIN allies; on another level they all worked with 17.) Firtash and 3.) MOGILEVICH in one of the most elaborate and complex money laundering schemes in history, and perhaps the one with the most far-reaching consequences. If it seemed strange that RUE was so strongly controlled by Gazprom and Firtash, there was a reason for that: Gazprom sold gas at a relatively low price to Firtash via RUE, who then sold the gas directly to Ukraine at a much higher rate; the profits were then used to bribe and control Ukrainian politicians to bend them PUTIN’s will and get them to back Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, and while Firtash was the public face of RUE and other related shell companies, MOGILEVICH was moving the money behind the scenes. Billions were laundered in this way in order to hide the money being used to corrupt Ukraine’s political system and pull Ukraine towards Russia. 

17.) Firtash was also given billions in credit from 2.) PUTIN-linked banks so that Firtash could buy up valuable sectors of industries that controlled Ukraine’s natural resources, allowing him and his allies to further tighten their grip on Ukraine and wield even greater influence. Other allies of 28.) Yanukovych and/or PUTIN, like 30.) Akhmetov, were also moving to make big acquisitions in important sectors of Ukraine’s economy at the time.

Obviously, this arrangement did not sit well with many Ukrainians, and politicians not in PUTIN’s pocket resisted. This led to a major dispute over the gas deals in January, 2006, in which Russia shut off the flow of gas into Ukraine. A new deal was struck that would make RUE the exclusive, direct supplier of all Russian and Central Asian gas imports, one that would, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), sell to a new joint venture between RUE and Naftogaz called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo) that would sell all gas going to Ukraine’s industrial customers while RUE would sell to Naftogaz to sell to Ukraine’s residential and municipal customers. This dramatically increased the markup opportunities and laundering involving Ukraine’s gas. 

Another part of the deal—which I was the first, and apparently only journalist, to point out in the context of this larger scheme—involved the major Russian state-owned power company RAO UES: RAO would pay for and import Ukrainian-generated electricity to sell in Russia; Ukraine would provide this power from the gas Ukraine was paying RUE for that had been bought by UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in return for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE or another Firtash company, apparently, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo and the gas then being sent to Ukrainian power plants, which would then generate the electricity that would go to RAO, which would then sell that electricity in Russia. Obviously, this scheme would give Firtash additional points at which he could mark up prices and generate a profit, and it is telling that gas already being transited by Russia’s Gazprom pipelines into Ukraine through RUE—itself half-owned by Gazprom—was being used, after it was paid for by Ukraine for a high price, to generate electricity that would be used in Russia. This makes no logistical sense, as it would be easier for Russia to just bring gas from Gazprom to RAO through Russia, but when viewed through the prism of generating illicit funds used to dominate Ukraine politically, then it makes sense.

An American named 33.) Carter Page is key here: he moved to Moscow in 2004 to set up Merrill Lynch’s office there, working there until 2007. During this period he advised both Gazprom and RAO on major deals, and, despite his warped worldview, he is clearly steeped in knowledge of the energy sector and regional geopolitics, possessing a master’s degree and a PhD from highly prestigious universities; he very likely knew what was going on, at least to some degree, with the whole Eurasian gas scheme detailed above, as he was advising not just one but two major entities involved on opposite ends of the corrupt process.

As two Americans on different sides of this, did MANAFORT and Page connect at this time? As both men became involved in the 1.) TRUMP campaign in 2016 and since we still aren’t sure who hired Page to work for TRUMP’s presidential campaign, this question is certainly a valid one to ask.

14.) Chodiev and the third member of that aforementioned Kazakh “Trio,” 34.) Alijan Ibragimov, had already partnered with Gazprom, too, and, the most famous member of the “Trio,” 13.) Mashkevich, had, since his days at Birshtein’s Seabeco, risen to be close to Kazakhstan’s ruling family and to be a kingpin himself in the world of Kazakh natural resources as head of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), including the realm of gas for a time when a lot of business was going down with 23.) Makarov’s ITERA, just before Makarov handed off that role to 17). Firtash and joined him at Highrock; this was also a time when newly-elected-PUTIN was having Gazprom set the stage for deep relationships with the Kazakh and Central Asian gas industries. At the time, Mashkevich  and the rest of the “Trio” came under investigation by Belgian authorities for money laundering related to gas deals in a longstanding case that was eventually settled. Mashkevich was also a dominant player in aluminum, and orchestrated a huge deal with 32.) Deripaska in 2004.

Jumping to 9.) Birshtein’s son-in-law 15.) Shnaider: by 2001, he, along with his partner, had acquired a 93 percent stake in Ukraine’s Zaporizhstal steel mill for some $70 million; he managed to do this at a time when steel was Ukraine’s biggest industry, accounting for about 25% of the country’s GDP, and by 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

There is another set of Ukrainian business dealings that are of interest to our narrative here for multiple reasons. Let us return to 19.) Topolov, who ran into problems, along with 21.) Artemenko, with a money laundering scheme involving Gazprom and a Kiev football team at the turn of the century, as previously described. Topolov had a “longtime” business partner named 35.) Alex Oronov, whose daughter, 36.) Oksana (Oxana) Oronov Cohen, was at this point married to 37.) Bryan Cohen. And Bryan was brother to 38.) Michael Cohen (also married to a Ukrainian), whose uncle ran a catering establishment once popular with the Russian mafia. Before his rise, Michael was a personal injury lawyer who also ran a taxi business. He helped run a failed casino boat business in Florida that ended in dozens of lawsuits and whose lawyer, David Goldstein, was well-connected to the mob. One of Cohen’s major partners, Ukrainian Arkady Vaygensberg, ran another casino, and among the managers were 39.) Tatiana Varzar and her husband Michael Varzar; Michael had served prison for mob-related activity, while Tatiana was a Russian immigrant and a pillar of the Russian immigrant community in America who ran nightclubs in Brooklyn and South Florida that are hubs for that community; her restaurant in Brighton Beach—an area notorious for its Russian mafia presence—burned down in highly suspicious circumstances in 2003; New York State found her guilty of tax evasion worth over $230,000 for the years 2004-2006; and 1.) TRUMP himself is known to have patronized one of her clubs in Florida, while she also opened a catering service in one of his Florida properties.

Back to 38.) Michael Cohen: Beginning in 2001, he started buying sets of apartments in multiple TRUMP properties, got his family to buy TRUMP condos as well, and was a big fan of TRUMP, having read his The Art of the Deal twice. As is generally the case with TRUMP, he warmed up to an admirer and brought Cohen in to help with a dispute he was having in 2006 with some of the owners in one of his buildings. Cohen was so helpful that TRUMP quickly brought him on officially as a key advisor, giving him an office close to his own inside I.) Trump Tower, and he has been with TRUMP ever since. Also at this time, Michael and 37.) Bryan joined Bryan’s father-in-law, 35.) Oronov, in a Ukrainian ethanol business venture, one in which 3.) MOGILEVICH-linked 19.) Topolov—now a powerful Ukrainian politician—was Oronov’s co-partner; in 2006, the Cohen brothers tried to get Americans to invest in building a factory for the business and failed to do so (but they met Topolov in the process), but others funded the investment to the tune of millions, which is rather strange considering no ethanol was ever produced by the ensuing factory. 

38.) Michael wouldgo on to be an important public face of 1.) TRUMP’s presidential campaign (remember the infamous “Says who?” incident?, and two days after it, Cohen’s vehement denials were shown to be hollow) and was named in a partially unverified dossier compiled by ex-British MI6 intelligence official Christopher Steele as having met one or more Russian officials in Prague during the 2016 campaign season to discuss the Russian hacking efforts against TRUMP’s opponents. Cohen would also carry out unofficial diplomacy for TRUMP after he was inaugurated president: 38.) Cohen teamed up with 8.) SATER (whose relationship with TRUMP had already mushroomed, as noted below) and 21.) Artemenko in a meeting in Manhattan organized by none other than 35.) Oronov, who was also a major “partner, mentor, teacher and friend” to Artemenko, as Artemenko described him one month later, this March, after Oronov had mysteriously died. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a “peace” plan for Ukraine with support from senior 3.) PUTIN aides, one that would cede to Russia official control over Crimea for a 50 or 100-year “lease.” At the meeting were also discussed ways to undermine Ukraine’s current anti-PUTIN president, Petro Poroshenko. Cohen personally delivered the proposal to National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, shortly before Flynn resigned because of his own Russian entanglements.

Going back to the ethanol venture, it is important to remember that 35.) Oronov’s partner 19.) Topolov had strong ties to 3.) MOGILEVICH and was already linked to a money-laundering scheme involving Gazprom, and that when 38.) Michael and 37.) Bryan Cohen met Topolov, MOGILEVICH was actively trying to launder billions involving Gazprom as part of his Ukraine/Eurasian gas scheme; at the very least, the money involved in the ethanol venture and all profits Michael made from it—including any he may have invested in TRUMP properties—need to be traced, if possible.

As for all the gas scheme money going to fuel the rise of 28.) Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, his now extremely well-funded Party was winning more and more seats under 29.) MANAFORT’s leadership, taking power away from pro-Western, pro-US politicians. This did not sit well with the pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko, who rose to be Ukraine’s Prime Minister in 2007 and directed her oversight powers against her rivals Yanukovych and 17.) Firtash, trying to close off the spigot of corrupt Russian money and influence that was twisting her country’s political system. With her using her office to fight this scheme, laundering its funds became even more integral to said scheme’s success, and anyone doing business with its perpetrators could have been involved, knowingly or not.

29.) MANAFORT and 31.) Gates were also personally involved in laundering money as part of this overall gas scheme through several deals in 2008 involving Manhattanproperties, one involving the b.) Drake Hotel and another the c.) St. John’s Terminal. These deals would never be finalized, but would easily serve their main purpose of laundering money away from Ukrainian and other authorities, and MANAFORT may even have engaged in additional money laundering, which may have included his cash purchase of a multi-million I.) Trump Tower apartment in 2006.

In fact, those Manhattan money laundering scams fit a pattern of transactions that included other shady deals that exploited lax regulations in the U.S. and Canadian real estate markets and that involved 1.) TRUMP and Russians at a time when he was finding other investors and investment hard to come by. As I have noted before, by the mid-2000s, TRUMP had been abandoned by every major Wall Street bank as an unreliable and difficult partner, and was hurting for money, especially after he had to declare a bankruptcy for one of his businesses in 2004; the one exception to the Wall Street bank boycott was Deutsche Bank, which would later be involved in massive Russian money laundering scandals (see below).

By 2008, 40.) Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when TRUMP was aggressively courting Russian business.

Apart from the aforementioned 5.) Bogatin, 6.) Ivankov, and 8.) SATER from before the 2000s, other notables as far as our tale is concerned later rented apartments from TRUMP: 41.) Vasily Salygin, who would later become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time 29.) MANAFORT was advising it, would buy an apartment in New York City’s IX.) Trump World Tower in a deal orchestrated by another Ukrainian, 42.) Semyon “Sam” Kislin, who had done business with Trump decades earlier.

In fact, a report from Reuters from March noted nearly $100 million was invested by Russians (some “politically connected” elites) in seven Trump properties in South Florida, and that over a third of the units in the seven properties were owned by LLCs often designed to mask their owners’ identities.

Over part of the last decade, 43.) Igor Zorin, a Russian government official, once owned three units in Trump Palace in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, valued at some $5.4 million, which, with his modest government salary, screams money laundering; two were likely paid for in cash and one unit was mysteriously transferred to him by former F.S.B. intelligence officer 44.) Svyatoslav Mangushev, who does business with Zorin and who helped found a Russian biker group named after Russian Spetsnaz special forces and that was trying to associate with a PUTIN-linked biker group active in hostilities in Ukraine known as the Night Wolves and subject to U.S. government sanctions; Zorin seems to have transferred that condo to one of Mangushev’s relatives for $1.5 million, and Mangushev was arrested for beating his wife in 2014, though charges were later dropped.

Other deals were far more complex, far more scandalous, and involved TRUMP far more directly; here we get into the next phase of 1.) DONALD TRUMP’s relationship with 8.) FELIX SATER, of multiple deals with Sater’s company, Bayrock, which I have discussed in great detail before.

TRUMP had been acquainted with 45.) Tamir Sapir, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well (once) been part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose sources of his extremely unlikely and massive wealth had long been objects of rumor-fueled suspicion, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family. Sapir had done some business with 1.) TRUMP decades ago, selling him some 200 televisions with then-business partner 42.) Kislin. By the 2000s, Sapir would own a $5 million apartment in I.) Trump Tower and TRUMP would call Sapir and his family “great friends.”

It was 45.) Sapir who introduced 1.) TRUMP to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by 46.) Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable, where 8.) SATER was then Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within Bayrock, the office of which was even in I.) Trump Tower itself. SATER repeatedly directly partnered with Trump throughout this period, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing 47.) Ivanka Trump and 40.) Donald Trump Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through, but some spectacularly scandalous deals did go further in the U.S.

One of Bayrock’s partnerships with TRUMP in Fort Lauderdale was originally conceived of as V.) the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by 46.) Arif in 2003, and from that point, 8.) SATER and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also SATER’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by TRUMP himself in October 2007.

Bayrock’s most famous partnership with 1.) TRUMP was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by TRUMP, 8.) SATER, 46.) Arif, and 45.) Sapir. In a move specifically approved by Trump, it turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its SATER/Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland—FL Group—linked to the Panama Papers revelations and apparently a hub for money of wealthy Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from 13.) Mashkevich, whom we may recall from earlier: was connected to 9.) Birshtein, 15.) Shnaider, and possibly 3.) MOGILEVICH through his work at Seabeco, had a history of money laundering related to gas deals, and had done business with Gazprom and 32.) Deripaska. Besides the above financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money and from which Trump profited. Specifically, there was investment for the purpose of money laundering linked to Mashkevich involving the family of prominent Kazakh politician 48.) Viktor Khrapunov. Furthermore, the III.) Trump SoHo deal was structured to cheat authorities out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally set up as loans to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time.   In the end, the deal went terribly for 1.) TRUMP, who was sued for fraud along with his children 49.) Eric Trump and 47.) Ivanka, who had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers, and in a 2011 settlement, Trump refunded 90% of the deposits for the building’s condos; the property went into foreclosure in 2014.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, a second of the TRUMP/Bayrock projects with the FL Group financing was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the IV.) Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and lead to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; 8.) SATER and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and the three FL Group-linked others—including the SoHo project—in an arrangement made with FL Group for $50 million, equal to the initial “investment”/”loan.” 1.) TRUMP eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing TRUMP and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and TRUMP refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that TRUMP or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

A third deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. 1.) TRUMP began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then TRUMP himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with TRUMP, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems 8.) SATER’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point TRUMP himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the VI.) Camelback propertywho had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/TRUMP developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing SATER of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of SATER’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to Iceland’s FL Group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to the $50 million “investment” of FL Group was a.) a Waterpointe property in Queens that apparently did not involve TRUMP beyond his approval of the FL Group financing but is still illustrative of the rest of their deals. Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and thus was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid for it.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a lawsuit filed with the NY State Supreme Court in May of 2013 rising from a process that began in 2008 in Delaware, former business partners of SATER’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam—sued 8.) SATER and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to SATER’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a criminal organization for criminal activities, especially money laundering and fraud; in this suit, 1.) DONALD and 47.) Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization  are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing SATER’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from his 1998 Wall Street scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of his other schemes discussed above of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; they had been the lowest levels of defendants and the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to them, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability, if any, the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning that the removal was in no way a comment on their guilt, responsibility, or innocence and that the plaintiffs were free to sue them on the same grounds in the future. A version of the lawsuit is still an ongoing case in federal court. 

For the same earlier-discussed reasons that it would be a smart bet to consider it likely that 3.) MOGILEVICH was linked to SATER’s 1998 scam, we can also make the same bet in regards to the Bayrock deals with 1.) TRUMP but for several additional reasons, namely that these deals were going down at a time when 3.) MOGILEVICH and his people involved in the Ukraine gas plot(including 29.) MANAFORT, who had his own history with Trump) were eager to launder billions of dollars out of Ukraine as part of that scheme and at a time when they were facing increased scrutiny from Prime Minister Tymoshenkoand her allies in the Ukrainian government; under such conditions, why wouldn’tMOGILEVICH reach out to SATER, who had: experience in real estate and laundering money, such a close alleged family connection in his father, his father’s penchant for organized crime, and the protection of the U.S. Government? It was also clear at this point that Trump and the people around him were hardly rigorous vetters, let alone eager to turn down deals coming in from people with suspicious business practices and questionable, even criminal pasts, so selecting Trump as either an unwitting or even willing conduit for money that needed to be laundered was pretty much a no-brainer, especially since his playboy celebrity status made it much easier to attract additional partners (or dupes).

What is even more incriminating for 1.) TRUMP is that after 8.) SATER left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP” even after TRUMP was made aware of SATER’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to SATER still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to SATER, with TRUMP lying repeatedly about it and his ties to Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing TRUMP from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 lists three of the Trump-named projects discussed above before all others, lists the Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), and lists DONALD TRUMP as its first “reference” and “I.) Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

It was also recently discovered this March that 8.) SATER owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by 40.) Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; SATER used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Titan is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president.

8). SATER even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign before he was selected to help run back-channel Ukrainian “diplomacy” in 2017, as mentioned before. He is also currently engaged in a nasty fight with 46.) Arif over legal fees, and threatened to reveal dirt both about Arif’s relationship with 8.) TRUMP (“The headlines will be, ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump,’” wrote SATER) and Arif’s ties to organized crime. 

As for 46.) Arif, he was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with both 13.) Mashkevich and apparently underage girls on board a yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.    

Another major scandalous deal would involve a major property development in Toronto. But to understand this, we must first go back to Ukraine, where we left 15.) Shnaider (son-in-law of 9.) Birshtein,who had in the past partnered closely with 3.) MOGILEVICH, other Russian/Ukrainian mafia figures, and also with 13.) Mashkevich), in charge of Ukraine’s huge Zaporizhstal steel mill. In 2007, Shnaider and 1.) TRUMP began building the VII.) Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto. And in 2008, FL Group, interestingly, loans Shnaider  €45.8 million for a yacht. After investors were hit hard during the ensuing global financial crises, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his TRUMP project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million through five shell companies to an ?.) unknown Russian buyer acting on behalf of the Russian government, who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), whose chairman of its board at that time was none other than 2.)PUTIN. Of course, this fit into PUTIN’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industry and natural resources in tandem with the likes of 17.) Firtash and 30.) Akhmetov. And, like the other deals just discussed, it fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were misled and who are suing both 1.) TRUMP and 15.) Shnaider. Late in 2016, the property was placed into bankruptcy receivership, and just last month Trump’s stake in the project was totally bought out, his name taken off the building about a week ago. Akhmetov had also apparently narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaider back in 2010, but was able to gain majority ownership in July, 2011, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions; Akhmetov, though, now seems caught in the middle of the war in Ukraine, with Zaporizhstal itself becoming a flashpoint.

One must wonder why FL Group and their very likely Russian investors and VEB were so eager to invest so much in these projects, and if it was more of an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Manhattan deals led by 29.) MANAFORT and aided by 31.) Gates for 3.) MOGILEVICH, 17.) Firtash, and 28.) Yanukovych; that MANAFORT Manhattan model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again in deals involving 1.) TRUMP and seems also to fit the mold of 15.) Shnaider’s ill-fated venture, even if his intent may be less suspect.

Actually, the performance of these partners was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they cared little about performance. And that could be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition and that would benefit 2.) SATER, 46.) Arif, 1.) and/or TRUMP, but rarely the partners they recruited outside their circle; it seems these other swindled partners and especially TRUMP would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes. When you look at these deals as if their primary impetus was for RICO money laundering (in the complaint against Bayrock, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times), these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid and miserably executed all of a sudden make a lot of sense. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking that they were acting more out of Kremlin interests than business ones.

Taken together, these examples amount to a clear pattern of catastrophic losses, colossal mismanagement, gross negligence, and stupendous incompetence of 1.) TRUMP and his partners at best; he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye or he might have been in on it, and though there is no evidence to support this other than his considerable and risky efforts to obstruct investigations into these dealings, the sheer number of them is enough to suggest some level of complicity on TRUMP’s part personally, the only other reasonable explanation being that he is a gigantic fool.

There is yet another case of Russian money laundering would be tied to 1.) TRUMP, albeit in different ways. The roots of the case go back over a decade to Russia, and for a thrilling read on its origins, you can pick up Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder. Browder was running the wildly successful Hermitage Capital Management in Russia throughout the late 1990s and the 2000s. But when he fell out of favor with the Russian Government for trying to take on the corrupt system of doing business in Putin’s Russia, 2.) PUTIN started playing hardball, having Browder deported in late 2005 through the hands of the F.S.B. and labeling Browder, essentially, an enemy of the Russian state. In 2007, Hermitage’s Moscow offices were raided, one of its employees roughed-up; soon after, Browder’s intrepid lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, eventually helped to uncover a massive $230 million tax refund fraud scheme in Russia, the largest tax scam in Russian history and one carried out through collusion between senior Russian government officials and members of the Russian mafia. Together, they conspired to use profitable companies like Browder’s by seizing control of them on false legal pretexts, throwing a bunch of fake lawsuits at them, and then erasing the companies’ profits from the books and claiming the taxes those companies had paid as a refund since the profits generating those taxes had magically disappeared.

Naturally, it made sense for the culprits to launder this money in order to hide it, and that they did; the U.S. government was able to find enough evidence to accuse a Cyprus-based apparent real estate company Prevezon Holdings of being one of the beneficiaries of the $230 million Russian tax scheme. In charges filed by then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara in a lengthy complaint submitted in September, 2013 (final amended complaint here), the U.S. Government affirmed Magnitsky’s findings and accused Prevezon of receiving, through a convoluted series of transactions involving shell companies through 2007-2008, at least (roughly) $2 million (possibly more) of the $230 million of Russian scam money related to what Magnitsky had uncovered, some of which Prevezon then laundered through the purchase of luxury Manhattan real estate properties.

If the name Preet Bharara sounds familiar, it should: he was fired by TRUMP this March, and rather controversially, as TRUMP had told Bharara that he would not be firing him. As I have written before, a number of past, current and potential cases involving Trump fell, fall, and would fall under Bharara’s jurisdiction, and Bharara had a solid history of going after corporate crime, the Russian mafia, and Russian government operatives—including a whole spy ring—while a U.S. Attorney, and that history involved the arrest of Russian mobsters in I.) Trump Tower. In this case, 3.) MOGILEVICH-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity 50.) Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of I.) Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, 51.) Vadim Trincher and 52.) Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by 1.) TRUMP himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich (later enthusiastic TRUMP supporter) two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 52.) Golubchik owned a unit in a TRUMP building in Florida, where 53.) Michael Sall, a Russian mobster in the very same outfit, also owned a unit. An indictment naming 50.) Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by Bharara that led to a 2013 raid on 51.) Trincher’s I.) Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at 1.) TRUMP’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

Going back to Magnitsky, he was arrested for his efforts on trumped-up charges, and, once in custody, was beaten by guards and denied medical care in Russian prison, dying from his wounds and deliberate lack of medical attention in 2009. Magnitsky’s death turned Browder into a crusader to expose 2.) PUTIN and his operatives and to honor Magnitsky’s memory; in 2012, when a Russian whistleblower named Alexander Perepilichnyy who had already moved to the UK to escape persecution in Russia began working with Browder to help, he mysteriously died while jogging near his home, almost certainly the victim of a Kremlin operation, with an investigation into his death still underway. This mirrored the death and murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former K.G.B./F.S.B. operative who turned on PUTIN and the Kremlin when he began speaking out against them and exposing some of their dirty deeds; in particular, he elaborated on tape about 2.) PUTIN’s “good relationship”with 3.) MOGILEVICH, about whom Litvinenko “knew too much;” because of this, in part, he was poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 by Kremlin agents in November 2006 and died later that same month; he and Perepilichnyy are just two of fourteen suspected hits by Russian government operatives on UK soil in recent years alone.

Browder bravely continued his efforts by pushing the U.S. Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012, allowing for harsher punishments and sanctions of Russian officials involved in these crimes, and pushing the EU to pass a similar law in 2014. This infuriated 2.) PUTIN, and when the U.S. applied sanctions to dozens of Russians under the authority of the new law in 2013, he responded by banning Americans from adopting Russian children and barring 18 U.S. current and former officials, including Bharara. And among those who would end up helping Bharara with his case against Prevezon’s money laundering was Browder. The lawyer working against the Kremlin on behalf of Magnitsky’s family, Nikolai Gorokhov, was thrown out of his fourth-story Moscow apartment window on March 21st of this year, just one day before a major Russian court appearance concerning the same crimes (such “accidents” are not uncommon with Putin critics); Gorokhov suffered severe head injuries, but has since vowed to fight on; he had provided key evidence for Bharara’s prosecution team and was set to be a star witness in the trial that was to start May 15th. Unsurprisingly, Bharara and his team were actually very concerned that something exactly like this would happen to Gorokhov and submitted a formal letter expressing that concern to the presiding judge back in October 2015.

Keeping all this I mind, I noted at the time (in a piece censored in Russia!) that it was odd that Bharara’s successor had chosen, just two months after Bharara’s firing and not even three full days before the trial would have started, to settle with Prevezon for a small fine and no admission of wrongdoing; I didn’t (and don’t) question his motives, but I did and still do want to know the exact reasons why that was the decision and if anyone in the Trump Administration pressured or suggested this move when, after people had been murdered or nearly murdered by Kremlin agents to obstruct this investigation and related ones, it is hard to imagine Bharara settling after so much effort, cost, blood, and risk.

There is also the number of related “coincidences” that involve the Prevezon case that get to be a bit astounding: the essential head of Prevezon is 54.) Denis Katsyv, the son of 55.) Petr (Pyotr) Katsyv, a former Russian government minister who currently helps to run Russia’s state-owned Russian Railways, which until recently was led by 56.) Vladimir Yakunin, a close PUTIN ally with a history of corruption who began publicly backing TRUMP’s presidential candidacy since at least June 2016; Yakunin and Petr Katsyv ran Russian Railways together for about a year. 56.) Yakunin had also partnered with 54.) Denis Katsyv and Republican Congressman 57.) Dana Rohrbacher in 2016 to lobby against a stronger version of the Magnitsky Act under consideration that would expand to cover any government officials around the world involved in human rights abuses, with this version known as Global Magnitsky; the efforts to fight it included promoting a controversial “documentary” trashing Magnitsky and Browder and accusing them of orchestrating the tax fraud, which is Russia’s official version of who is responsible for the $230 million fleecing of Russian taxpayers. Rohrbacher was even specifically given instructions from the office of Russia’s Prosecutor General 58.) Yury (Yuri) Chaika, a point-man for the Kremlin’s anti-Magnitsky/Browder efforts, as to how to proceed in these tasks. Rohrbacher also met this May with an old Soviet military counterintelligence officer-turned 1.) PUTIN lobbyist named 59.) Rinat Akhmetshin (not to be confused with 30.) Rinat Akhmetov) and specifically discussed the Prevezon case with him; the two had also worked with 54.) Katsyv on opposing Global Magnitsky. Just a few days ago, Browder actually filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) against 57.) Rohrbacher and one of his staffers, Paul Behrends, for violations of the Magnitsky Act.

Additionally, one of the Katsyv family/Prevezon lawyers was a woman named 60.) Natalia Veselnitskaya, who is very active as an anti-Magnitsky lobbyist and who has strong ties to the Russian government, including having the F.S.B as a client, a friendship with 58.) Chaika, and a former marriage to 61.) Alexander Mitusov, who was big in Russian law enforcement circles before serving as deputy to 55.) Petr Katsyv. When Veselnitskaya had that infamous June, 2016, meeting with 40.) Donald Trump Jr., then-TRUMP-campaign-manager-29.) MANAFORT, and 62.) Jared Kushner (1.) TRUMP’s son-in-law and top advisor and 47.) Ivanka’s husband), it was Chaika who seems to have provided the supposed information on Hillary Clinton that Veselnitskaya was offering; she was also accompanied by 59.) Akhmetshin and 63.) Ike Kaveladze, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, who has been linked by a U.S. congressional investigation to major money laundering efforts from a few decades ago. And literally just before that meeting, 60.) Veselnitskaya was at a courthouse in New York for legal proceedings of the Prevezon case. Trump Jr. repeatedly lied about the meeting with Veselnitskaya, and both MANAFORT and Kushner failed to previously mention the meeting in interviews and/or disclosure forms. The meeting itself arose from 1.) TRUMP’s relationships with Russian real estate oligarch 64.) Aras Agalarov and his son, pop star 65.) Aras Agalarov, who are close to 1.) PUTIN and who partnered with TRUMP to bring his Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow in 2013, with Emin’s publicist Rob Goldstone reaching out to Donald Jr. about the Veselnitskaya meeting.

Also of interest are that 62.) Kushner has notable contacts with both Deutsche Bank and VEB (the two banks have a “cooperation agreement” with each other)¸ as well with famous Israel diamond oligarch from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan 66.) Lev Leviev.

Leviev is close to and apparently friends with 2.) PUTIN and was also close with 45.) Sapir and his family: Leviev’s “right-hand man,” 67.) Rotem Rosen, married Sapir’s daughter, 68.) Zina Sapir, in 2007; the wedding was held at 1.) TRUMP’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, hosted by TRUMP himself; the next year, TRUMP and 62.) Kushner attended the couple’s bris for their newborn. Leviev and Russian aluminum oligarch 69.) Roman Abramovich were two of the world’s largest supporters of the Jewish organization Chabad and had cooperated in helping 1.) PUTIN gain influence over Russia’s Jewish community, with Abramovich being particularly close to PUTIN, having gifted PUTIN a $35 million yacht and even helping PUTIN in his rise to power, apparently being the first to recommend PUTIN to Boris Yeltsin as a successor. Abramovich himself rose to fortune in part through shady dealings with Russia’s underworld, his relationship with PUTIN, and the bloody “aluminum wars” of post-Soviet Russia. He is also close with and a major business partner of PUTIN-linked 32.) Deripaska, who came out even more on top after the “aluminum wars.” Not incidentally, when Litvinenko was assassinated in the UK in 2006, he was helping both British and Spanish intelligence look into both money laundering and organized crime ties surrounding Abramovich. 47.) Ivanka Trump and 62.) Kushner would marry in 2009, and while she would become very close with 70.) Dasha Zhukova, 69.) Abramovich’s wife, during this period, Kushner would cultivate ties to Leviev. Leviev, whose company Israel Africa Investments’ U.S. operations were registered as being at TRUMP’s II.) 40 Wall St. property, was a business partner of 54.) Katsyv through Prevezon, with Prevezon buying stakes in some of Leviev’s subsidiaries and Leviev selling to Prevezon some condos in Manhattan at d.) 20 Pine St., condos that the U.S. said Prevezon was using to launder the Magnitsky money; this would mean that PUTIN had allies in Katsyv and Leviev on BOTH sides of that transaction that was used for money laundering that helped the Russian government cover up a massive crime; both Prevezon’s stakes in Leviev’s subsidiaries and the condos Leviev sold to Prevezon were held by authorities while Prevezon was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s office until the settlement was reached a few months ago. Prevezon was also able to go through with the Magnitsky-related laundering partly because of $90 million in financing from Deutsche.

66.) Leviev and a partner company, Five Mile Capital, also sold 62.) Kushner a major piece of Manhattan real estate in May, 2015, for $296 million, one month before Trump announced his run for the presidency; the sale price was suspiciously below what Leviev had paid for it back in 2007, and Deutsche would provide Kushner a suspiciously generous $285 million loan a month before the 2016 presidential election as part of a refinancing effort for the property that amounted to $74 million more than what was paid for it; 62.) Kushner initially failed to disclose the loan when he joined the Trump Administration. When Leviev and Five Mile sold to Kushner in 2015, they were represented by Trump lawyer 71.) Marc Kasowitz’s firm, which also represents Russia’s largest state-owned bank, Sberbank and from which another firm partner, David Friedman, was chosen as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and another partner, Edward McNally, is apparently under consideration to replace the fired Bharara. In fact, it seems Kasowtiz was personally instrumental in having 1.) TRUMP fire Bharara, with Kasowitz telling TRUMP “This guy is going to get you” and bragging to his friends about getting Bharara ousted. At the time, Bharara was said to be looking vigorously into Deutsche’s dealings, particularly those involving Russian money laundering.

Deutsche had been 1.)TRUMP’s sole major Wall Street lender for years, and has loaned TRUMP over $300 million since 2012, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President TRUMP in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that seem to have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, separate from DoJ’s investigation. Deutsche is also under pressure to allow an independent investigation into its TRUMP family accounts.

It was revealed just this March that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money for some $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, part of a massive global Russian laundering scheme with many banks involving $20-$80 billion from 2010-2014; among those involved in the scheme include Russian oligarchs and the F.S.B., and some of the money in the scheme was apparently being used to further PUTIN’s and Russia’s interests.

62.) Kushner had also met in December, 2016, with then-VEB Chairman 72.) Sergei (Sergey) Gorkov—a graduate of the F.S.B.’s academy—in New York, at a time when the Russian state-owned bank was under U.S. sanctions because of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, a meeting which, like the meeting with 60.) Veselnitskaya, the Deutsche loan, and many other things, he had initially failed to properly disclose; in his recent disclosure, Kushner noted “I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector;” relied, of course, does not mean he did not receive any Russian funds…

*****

While many of TRUMP’s deals were falling apart and while Prevezon was laundering money from Russian’s massive tax scam, the MOGILEVICH-MANAORT-Firtash-led efforts in Ukraine to serve 28.) Yanukovych, his Party of Regions, and 2.) PUTIN were coming to fruition. Despite some success for Tymoshenko in cracking down on those efforts, early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential election, defeating Tymoshenko in the runoff, the culmination of years of work with 29.) MANAFORT and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to restore the gas scam and undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned (including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011.

29.) MANAFORT and 31.) Gates actually lobbied U.S. lawmakers on behalf of 28.) Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenkoand trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of Yanukovych and Ukraine, lobbying paid in part by 30.) Akhmetov; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. But the spirited Tymoshenko would fight back; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names 17.) Firtash, 29.) Manafort, 31.) Gates, 3.) MOGILEVICH, 28.) Yanukovych, and others, arguing that the proceeds from their crimes, including the Manhattan real estate scams, were used to harm her, resulting in her defeat and imprisonment. A fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015, on largely jurisdictional grounds and that the higher-than-average RICO standards were not met, but in a longer ruling, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

Interestingly, after 28.) Yanukovych was ousted in the 2014 (Euro)Maidan protests—the grassroots reaction to the years of successful schemes described above—17.) Firtash fled Ukraine to Austria and is wanted by U.S. authorities for other crimes, but the U.S. is competing with Spain, which also wants to try Firtash; it would be very interesting to know just how hard the Trump Administration is trying to extradite Firtash.

In the end, 29.) MANAFORT came to run 1.) TRUMP’s campaign during the crucial stretch where TRUMP closed out the primaries, clinched the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and began the general election against Clinton; he also brought with him 31.) Gates, who infamously ended up being in charge of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech, which was largely plagiarized from a speech Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention; this was after both men had been working for years in Ukraine and on Russia-related work, and though both were forced to eventually resign from their Trump work because of these ties, both men seem to, one way or another, still have access to TRUMP. After advising two major Russian companies involved in the Ukraine gas scam, 33.) Carter Page was one of a handful of foreign policy advisors TRUMP was able to name in 2016, and Page, whose views are closely aligned with the Kremlin’s, was under a FISA-warrant FBI surveillance investigation, having had numerous meetings with Russian officials while attached to TRUMP’s campaign. That campaign was the most pro-Russian campaign of any major party nominee since the end of WWII, and the only changes that it insisted be made to the 2016 Republican Party Platform were to weaken statements of support for Ukraine in relation to its conflict with Russia. 38.) Michael Cohen and 71.) Marc Kasowitz, each with numerous ties to the issues in question, are both still representing TRUMP. And, since coming to power, the Trump Administration has pushed for policies favorable to Russia and PUTIN’s agenda, even when seemingly going against U.S. interests.

Taking a step back and knowing what we know about “the Brainy Don,” it seems that 3.)MOGILEVICH had been making moves to control Ukrainian gas with Gazprom and money laundering that could at least go back to the late 1990s with 19). Topolov and 21.) Artemenko and their Kiev football team and would seem to go back even earlier, which lends credibility to the idea that the 1995 Tel Aviv meeting hosted by 9.) Birshtein—in which he, MOGILEVICH, and other top Russian and Ukrainian gangsters met to discuss their Ukraine plans—was a catalyst for the events discussed above (you don’t put that many wanted men in one place at the same time except for something big). That big Ukraine scheme would unfold all while MOGILEVICH-linked mobsters were engaging TRUMP.

That is hardly to suggest that in 1995, a plot to install Trump in the White House was hatched. But it does seem that around then, a massive plot was hatched that came to pass over time in Ukraine, and that to some degree the machinery and personnel behind this plot devoted some of its collective energy to engaging TRUMP, laundering money through his businesses and, eventually, trying to infiltrate and/or manipulate and/or collude with him and/or some of his senior associates during his presidential campaign and/or later during his presidency.  

We can be sure that Special Counsel Mueller is digging into all of this…

What’s important to keep in mind here is that viewing these components apart, you miss the real story; they must be seen as a whole, a massive series of related plots, part of something between an overall conspiracy and a targeted strategy in which Trump was a prime target along with Ukraine. In this light, the overall picture paints a dramatically darker, far more incriminating portrait that erases all doubt that something massive and nefarious was going on involving both Trump and Putin. Clearly, Trump is either breathtakingly stupid or is less stupid than that and is guilty of some degree of treason.

Yes, this is an overwhelming number of ties, deals, relationships, and criss-crossing threads, incredibly confusing and complex, not easy to understand or explain in a tweet or a soundbite; at first glance, it all sounds insane. Yes, the forces that prevailed in these plots bet not on our ability to be able to sift through the noise but on our ability to be consumed by it. Though initial skepticism would be a sensible responsible reaction to such a story and it takes a lot of effort to understand or explain it, the day we lose the ability to overcome these challenges to understand the truth is the day we lose our right to be respected as worthy of our free institutions, for the day we allow complexity to deter us from the path of truth-seeking is the day we surrender the very sovereignty of our minds and, in essence, our nation to those cynically betting on our laziness and credulity, whether agents of Putin’s Kremlin or our own agents of chaos, cynicism, disinformation, and misinformation.

Correction appended to note the alleged nature of the claim that Sater’s father was tied to Mogilevich- 11/30/2018

For some of the latest in Brian’s analysis putting related pieces together, see his eBook from late 2019, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook (preview here) and its related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Support Brian’s work by donating here

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

*****

EXCLUSIVE analysis of information not yet reported in the necessary context shows that Trump the businessman, at best, was an unwitting tool used for Russian (mafia and government-tied) money laundering and that Trump the president is, at best, an unwitting tool for Vladimir Putin; at worst, Trump the businessman was a partner in Russian (organized and governmental) crime and Trump the president is the biggest scandal in American history. Even if Trump is an extraordinarily stupid leader with spectacularly terrible judgment and he is totally innocent of knowing what was really going on, it has been clear for some time that key associates of Trump are far less likely to be innocent when it comes to complicity and collusion and therefore treason, with the latest reports only confirming fire when the smoke was already suffocating. However the fire finally comes to light and whatever his personal involvement, since the best case scenario is that Trump is easily duped and manipulated, Trump is clearly unfit to be president.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 28, 2017 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981) March 28th, 2017 (Updated 4/3; Update of my pre-election piece.); War is Boring version in two parts

Built on part on these earlier pieces from July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

See major follow-up piece:July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Tevfik Arif, & Felix Sater (of whom Trump testified under oath: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like”) © Mark Holden/WireImage

AMMAN — This information concerns business dealings over the last decade and then some of Donald Trump, who at the time was hurting for investors and investment as Wall Street had all but shut down its loaning operations to him; this information involved criminal dirty money laundering coming from Russia, Russian organized crime, and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Putin, his government, his close associates, and future associates of Trump—most notably Paul Manafort, his future Campaign Chairman—were involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and criminal money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars that was part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine. Updates also discuss context involving lobbying efforts, financing for Trump’s projects, and new or related developments that, in terms of Russian intrigue, incriminate even further both associates of Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign (and, therefore, perhaps even his very presidency).

At best, Trump himself may have had no knowledge of this money laundering and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with and how he did business and politics, pillars of his management style and of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.   

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings when it comes to laundering money or tilting a U.S. election with Russian help, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players in these crimes, combined with his positions and public statements as a presidential candidate that are the most pro-Russian of any major presidential candidate or sitting president, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely—not less—that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin. 

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation; with so many questionable people, actions, and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions and no one else’s, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light. After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden is on a sitting President with so many questionable connections to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what, when put together and given proper context, what that information makes clear and what it suggests.

Executive Summary

In earlier work, I revealed significantly deeper relationships than previously understood from all other previous public reporting between associates of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and entities related to them on one hand and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Russian government, and entities related to them on the other hand, relationships concerning efforts to advance the Putin’s interests, Russian government interests, and Russian organized crime interests. 

Two figures in particular, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page, were involved in major geopolitical events and entities that convulsed Ukraine beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution and through a massive Eurasian gas and money laundering scheme designed to facilitate Russian dominance of Ukraine whose effects are still being directly felt up through today with the war in Ukraine. 

Manafort and Page were linked by lines of power and influence connecting them through a short chain of major players and entities, and their presence and roles in the region overlapped in key areas for several years as they worked for Putin’s key allies to enact a plan designed to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian state and to serve the purposes of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western, anti-American agenda. 

Page operated on one end as an advisor not only to the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose pipes much of the gas involved in the scheme passed through on its way to Ukraine (a fact well-reported), but also to another major Russian company, a large domestic power company called RAO UES (which I was the first to report in the context of Putin’s gas scheme) that ended up using some of the Gazprom gas—after passing through Putin-allied middlemen—to power its Russian power plants in a circular scheme returning the fruits of the gas to their country of origin.

Manafort’s part—far more pivotal, central, and direct than Page’s—was working with pro-Russian, pro-Putin Ukrainian political elites (especially Ukrainian on-and-off-again President Viktor Yanukovych, which the Orange Revolution had exposed and deposed, and his Party of Regions, for whom Manafort was the top political advisor) and business elites (especially oligarch Dmitry Firtash) and with Russian political and business elites (especially oligarch Oleg Deripaska); Firtash was linked to Putin friend and Russian mafia godfather Semion Mogilevich, who worked together to launder billions to profit themselves, Yanukovych, and Yanukovych’s political allies so they, flush with cash, could be bribed to do Putin’s bidding, bribe others to do the same, outspend rivals, and thus, overall, dominate Ukraine’s political system.

Manafort himself worked with Firtash and Mogilevich to set up a massive money laundering scheme in 2008 involving a Manhattan development project that defrauded its partners of millions and for which all of them were later sued by the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose loss in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential race to Viktor Yanukovych and subsequent politically motivated imprisonment at the hands of his government were facilitated in part by the Manafort-led Manhattan scheme. Manafort also worked with Deripaska to help launder millions in order to hide/protect the personal fortunes of Yanukovych and his allies. For these efforts, Manafort was paid many millions. A partner of Manafort’s—Richard “Rick” Gates—was also involved with burnishing his efforts there and in efforts to lobby U.S. official to help Yanukovych’s comeback government and hurt the imprisoned Tymoshenko’s reputation.

Manafort, Gates, and Page ended up on Trump’s campaign, from which they are easily among the prime suspects responsible for Trump’s and his campaign’s unprecedented pro-Putin, pro-Russian positions that have made them the most pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate and campaign in American history.

Additionally, but hardly of least concern, Mogilevich is the link from the realm of the first scandal set to another roughly concurrent scandal set that ties directly to Trump at the time it unfolded (a fact not reported elsewhere before my earlier piece): a series of at least three real estate deals—one in Manhattan, one in Fort Lauderdale, and one in Phoenix—all spearheaded by a company called Bayrock and that all ended in scandal and disaster. One of the point-men for Trump on all of these deals was the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky—AKA Michael Sater—an alleged Mogilevich capo (an allegation not reported by any major news outlet before my previous piece); this son, one Felix Sater, has a mysterious but clearly Russian mafia-linked violent criminal past of his own that may have even involved working for Mogilevich. Sater and his Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif helped bring in significant financing and financiers who were either Russians/former Soviets with Putin and/or Soviet ties and/or people with shady and/or criminals pasts, often tied to money laundering, especially Tamir Sapir, Alexander Mashkevich and the now-notorious FL Group of Iceland.   

Through Mogilevich and cores of illicit Russian funding and financiers, then, three international illegal money laundering schemes—the Ukrainian Eurasian laundering plot, its related Manhattan money laundering deal, and the series of Bayrock deals with Trump that all either involved, likely involved, or were likely set up for money laundering—are all linked together at roughly the same time for the first time here.

But in this case the devil—and the Trumps—are in the details.

Setting the Stage in Ukraine: Page & Manafort Arrive

To begin to understand the big picture, one has to go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page moved to Moscow and set up Merrill Lynch’s branch there. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life. 

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician that first attracted global attention in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Victor Yanukovych as his prime minister late in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate in the 2004 election, even to the point of trying to rig and steal the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court-ordered redo election that resulted in the defeat of Yanukovych and victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident (with poisoning hardly an unheard-of fate for opponents of the Kremlin and Putin). 

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Paul Manafort from running Yanukovych’s campaign late in 2004 for the redo election. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions, helping them helping them over the ensuing years to gain power at the expense of Ukraine’s pro-U.S., pro-Western, post-Orange Revolution government.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, as his client list includes dictators like the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi (the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA), and the Kashmiri American Council (a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious activities).

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press (AP) just a few days ago revealed a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed (through a formal memo, no less) a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly help promote Putin, the Russian government, and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe, and former-Soviet republics and targeting government officials, political groups, the news media and journalists, and businesses by acting to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

The proposal was pitched to Oleg Deripaska in 2005, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good—if not always great—relationship with Putin and who, as I noted before, was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro in a campaign designed to get Montenegro to secede from its union with Serbia and allow greater Russian (and Deripaskan) influence with that result (Montenegro would secede anyway in 2006 but not under Russian auspices, and it is quite telling that only a few months ago a Russian plot to overthrow Montenegro’s government and assassinate its prime minister, who is now trying to join NATO, was exposed and foiled). 

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and Manfort used a Delaware shell company—LOAV Ltd.—of his to conduct official business and transactions.

AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story. 

Later, as I also wrote about before, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out c. 2014 that resulted in a Cayman Islands court battle over $19 million related to their efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established. The recent AP story broke just hours before CNN reported that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.,” and AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. 

If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part I: Manafort & Putin Allies Oversee Flooding of Ukraine with Dirty Gas Money to Establish Russian Dominance

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to some of Ukraine’s and Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, at least ones allied with Yanukovych and Putin. Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background. In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman, and Putin ally Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, according to court documents. Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to the essential head, or “boss of bosses”, of the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich, also a friend of Putin’s and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list from 2009-2015.

A Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE) was created in mid-2004 by the outgoing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Kuchma and the not-going-anywhere Putin to replace the company represented by Firtash that was handling Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports. The imports ostensibly came from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan but through shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant company then dominated, and soon to be majority-owned, by the Russian Government and close Putin allies; additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory. But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45% of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. A total of 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand: Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price; Firtash would then sell billions of dollars of the gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine; the profits would then be used to fund pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine with billions of dollars; and, finally, bankers that were close Putin allies would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so that Firtash could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence even further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate and as that candidate-turned-president’s relatively pro-Western government was trying to limit Russian influence in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in a January, 2006, shut-off of Russia’s gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory. 

Soon after the shutoff, a new arrangement was made: RUE would now be the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan) and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s export subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), it would sell to the Ukrainian market to all of its industrial customers through a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, the joint venture being called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo), and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES—Russia’s major and majority-state-owned power company—would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan into Ukraine that had been purchased by the joint-venture UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; the government of Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in exchange for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE (or another Firtash firm) apparently acting as the intermediary, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo; that gas would then be delivered to Ukrainian power plants, which would produce the electricity that would then be sold to RAO to sell in Russia. One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians—who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices and allowing entities with little (or no?) supervision in a process that presented opportunities for massive corruption—that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway. This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

A Page-Manafort Connection Through Gazprom, RAO UES, Firtash, & Mogilevich?

It is important here to note that Carter Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004-2007; the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an advisor on “key transactions” of theirs; it is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe and being sold to both, than the creation of RUE, than RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine; if Page is telling the truth about his role, it is virtually inconceivable—considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006—that he would not be aware of what was going on. 

After all, as someone with a PhD and an MBA and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to align itself with America and Europe and thus escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page and people who did know (of) him suggesting he was actually a nobody (though the veracity of their claims are unverifiable as well, some perhaps being of the sour-grapes variety, others perhaps not wanting information on him to get out and acting to throw the curious off his trail, others saying nothing to confirm that they had actually worked closely or directly alongside Page); maybe Page himself deliberately kept a low profile, staying under the radar purposefully. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is; even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time—even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal (he was apparently often tasked with meeting and greeting, setting up meetings and seeing them through, presenting opportunities for many informal conversations and meetings)—it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally (and I raised this possibility last July), if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that another American in Manafort was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being able to be said of Manafort, and that interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, contact that may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The question of about a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part II: Manafort & Putin Allies Use Dirty Gas Money to Prep Yanukovych Comeback

Russian Government

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the popularly unpopular 2006 deal itself. 

A former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to become prime minister again in December 2007, and it was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall: this meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE. 

The first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash (and thus Mogilevich and the mafia) out of the loop, an admittedly more ambitious step, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. But in October of 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to another shutdown on the part of Russia of gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January. But on January 19th, a long-term, ten-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter; additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics…

Criminal Scheme #2: Manafort Key Agent in Laundering Dirty Gas Money to U.S. During Crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko kill RUE, his agents—including Firtash, Mogilevich, and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)—were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts; some of these involved setting up a fake U.S. investment fund that was initially capitalized with $100 million; Firtash (acting on behalf of himself and Mogilevich) paid Manafort and his people—including Rick Gates, (who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006)—$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of said fund was to act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash/Mogilevich gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various fraudulent deals they went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million towards the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later laundered through the project, but rather than truly move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased: the deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister (remember this model, it will return…).

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich, and their backers, unlike money, natural gas is not something that can be laundered: in early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz—a seizure allowed under the agreement she made with Putin—of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans. 

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit: unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had groomed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a party that campaigned using modern, highly effective techniques and tactics; in both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties. Of course, Manafort and The Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage: the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam. All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party and in making them together a smoother political machine with more power and influence.

The distance would close, and that strike would happen, in 2010.

Uniting Criminal Schemes #1 and #2: the Downfall of Tymoshenko & Setting the Stage for War

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race (with a lot of money from Firtash, who had made over $3 billion from these crooked gas deals), defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned(including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011. 

Manafort and Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. Incidentally, in these efforts—paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, one of Yanukovych’s main patrons, and a client of Manafort’s since Manafort’s earliest days in Ukraine and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney—they utilized the services of two Washington, DC, lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures (the day after this information was made public in mid-August, 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the Campaign Chairman of the Trump campaign during a week in which his role had already been eclipsed by the addition of Kellyanne Conway and extreme-right-wing Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon to run the Trump campaign; as for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign was refusing to clarify the matter). 

Lobbying efforts throughout this period for this circle were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts for years having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole—for whom Manafort had been a strategist—was paid over half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia. 

Yuri Boyko, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who is a close Yanukovych ally, former minister of several energy related sections of Ukraine’s government, and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme, paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans. 

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, co-founded by the former Republican Governor of Mississippi and major GOP insider/activist Haley Barbour, was paid over $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas scheme. 

Though he had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Mogilevich strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of Republican William Sessions, who was the FBI director from 1987-1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges; those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingstone, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russians and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen; GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holding(s) used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for his money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme; Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, Firtash’ relationship with several Conservative MPs in the UK may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden, as once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas, now only too happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash; it was clear in this matter that the Yanukovych government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people; without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June of 2010. 

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom (the corruption is so blatant that the companies apparently do not care that their names announce it to the whole world); Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower; Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings (especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries) and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout Europe; when reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.” From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE (but RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints); the suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud, and money laundering enterprises in the U.S. designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment. After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015; while not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met; still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

*****

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich, and their teams, but, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR: the people had other ideas. 

Many Ukrainians—especially younger ones—realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, towards Europe and the U.S. and less corruption. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the EU.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired EU trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer. In particular, protests erupted in a main square (the Maidan Square) in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, protests that did not go away and came to be known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on February 20th, 2014; in response to the government’s use of violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed, and by the end of February 22nd, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office, security forces had melted away in Kiev, protesters had taken over the capital, Tymoshenko was freed from prison (in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities), and Yanukovych has fled the city; soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin; today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally. 

Putin had overplayed his hand: his royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him; that joker lined up with four 2s consisting of many of the Ukrainian people to make five of a kind, the people beating Putin’s flush. But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years, into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas, Yanukovych, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Manafort: faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him and his intentions once again in place after a decade of effort designed to restore and maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, Putin went to Plan B: the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Which is exactly where the situation is today (and, of course, gas is in the middle of the conflict).

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme; he was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court (the ruling is almost unappealable), though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, as well as the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, his relationship with the Russian mafia, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years. And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mafia will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much, especially as they have demonstrated a willingness to act through any means necessary to silence individuals who put them at risk.

In the end, Manafort made millions and Gates profited too to the tune of who knows how much off the activities mentioned here (e.g., hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the Party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007-2012 alone; Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him the fate of that $19 million is still unknown; all this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal), profiting to an obscene degree all while helping to weaken and corrupt Ukraine’s democracy, assisting massively crooked international energy deals, undermining U.S. interests, helping Putin and his allies profit enormously, and helping Russia dominate Ukraine. The culmination of their work for over a decade can be seen in the first war on European soil in two decades. And it was this resume which earned them spots on Trump’s campaign as he sought to become the leader of the free world and succeeded. For some time it even seemed Manafort had more influence on Trump than anyone whose last name was not Trump.

Manafort and Gates have plenty of other questionable dealings, including one particularly scandalous piece of drama with a Russian oligarch featured in the Panama papers revelations and close to Putin. There are at least two U.S. government inquiries into Manafort and one into Page, and Trump associate and Republican political operative Roger Stone is being investigated by the FBI for his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who have questionable ties to Russia and who the whole world knows is receiving information stolen by Russian government hacks related to Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic party. There are also other Trump campaign staff and/or associates with questionable ties to Russia: Michael Caputo and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and one American ex-spy alleges a plot by the Kremlin to co-opt Trump against the backdrop of all this.

Less is known about Gates and his role, but after he was brought onto the Trump Campaign by Manafort), he was important enough to be trusted with the vetting of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech—Donald Trump’s wife’s introduction to the nation as a whole—a task at which he famously failed, and failed miserably. It was not clear what the status of Gates was once Manafort resigned, but recent reporting has shown that kept a low profile after and acted a link between the campaign and the RNC; once Trump won, he was apparently planned Trump’s inauguration, and since then he was shipped off to a pro-Trump and strangely quiet-ish nonprofit called America First Priorities (which also landed Trump All Star Katrina Pierson), where he has stayed until this the new reporting on Manafort, after which it seems he was deemed too much of a liability and was nudged out just days ago.

As for Page, it still isn’t even clear who brought him into the Trump Campaign (Julia Ioffe’s account of Page, the most exhaustive yet, illustrates how multiple answers have been given and none have been confirmed, but people sure seem angry about being asked about him); what is known (and it isn’t much) is that he was one of only five foreign policy advisors Trump could actually name in a Washington Post interview from a year ago, suggesting his influence on Trump could be far from insignificant. As his relationships with important Russians are being looked into by the U.S. government, to simply dismiss him as being a charade would be premature, indeed—especially in light of information on Page apparently meeting with Russian officials coming out of the as of yet only partly-substantiated dossier from an ex-MI6 intelligence officer—despite questions of how serious his role was at Merrill and how deep his ties to Gazprom and RAO UES actually were. What is certain is that questions about his role remain, questions which need to be answered, especially in light of his incredibly anti-American, pro-Russian views that could just as easily be coming from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or a “pundit” on RT and his continued investment in Gazprom. 

Direct Trump Involvement

Trump might have enough to worry about were it just for what has been described above; still, while both of the previous schemes are relevant to Trump insofar as three future Trump Campaign staff—Page, Gates, one of the most important and powerful people in his entire presidential run: Manafort—were involved in various ways in the just-outlined past criminal schemes and/or in the future acted to further the interests of Putin and his Russian government, now we get into territory where Trump himself was directly involved, and in not just one, but roughly a half-dozen situations linked to Russian organized crime.

A piece of context that is important to note for all of the following cases is that the setting for the following suspicious deals was a Donald Trump and a Trump Organization that was reeling financially.

By the mid-2000s Trump was having a hard time finding investors: he had just declared bankruptcy in 2004 for one of his major casino businesses to the tune of $1.8 billion in debt (and would declare another business bankruptcy in 2009, his fifth and sixth overall business bankruptcies, respectively) and all major Wall Street lenders—whose relationships with Trump had been souring for years—stopped offering Trump loans, in part because of his frustrating and suspicious business practices.

That is, all but one: Deutsche Bank, yet even that relationship “frayed” starting in 2008 because of Trump’s untrustworthiness as a business partner (Deutsche itself would later become involved in major money laundering scandals involving Russia, but more on that later).

So Trump was clearly hurting for investment after that 2004 bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [i.e., the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when Trump was aggressively courting Russian business (it should now be obvious why Trump has not released his taxes and why that information could, and likely will be, so crucial to the investigations into his Russia ties and to the public’s evaluation of Trump).

In fact, a report from Reuters from less than two weeks ago noted how in just seven Trump luxury towers in southern Florida, 63 Russian passport/address-holders have bought $98.4 million in property; they include “politically connected businessmen and other elites,” though “none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle;” one buyer, Alexander Yuzvik, was senior at Spetstroi, a Russian state-owned company that has done construction for Russian military and intelligence, including the G.R.U. and the F.S.B. intelligence agencies that were heavily involved the 2016 American election hackings, with Yuzvik only stepping down in March 2016, after the hacking operations had begun, though as of now, no evidence has surfaced linking him to these operations.

The above figures may even be a conservative estimate: at least 703 out of 2,044 of the units in the seven towers were owned by limited liability corporations (LLCs), often designed to mask their owners’ identities; many owners’ nationalities could not be identified; and Russian-Americans without a Russian passport/address were not included.

*****

At the same time the aforementioned Eurasian gas and Manafort-led New York real estate dual schemes were taking place, and while Donald Trump was losing investors in the U.S., Trump was cultivating Russian/former-Soviet business relationships. One of his point men in these efforts was Felix Sater, the son of an alleged mob captain of Mogilevich’s Russian mafia operation; the offices of Bayrock, Sater’s real estate company where he was Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within, were even in Trump Tower itself.

Sater, a man with a violent, criminal, mafia-rife past of his own, had himself previously been caught up in an elaborate 1990s $41 million stock fraud scheme on Wall Street that had used the Russian mob to launder money at a time, it should be noted, when Mogilevich was active in large-scale stock fraud and laundering in North America. Sater ended up assisting U.S. authorities for years, even, apparently, on CIA-related national security issues involving missile terrorism-related purchases in either Afghanistan or Russia, and the details on all this remain something of mystery: his operations with the government remain secret and the juiciest details of the Wall Street case were sealed and remain so despite repeated efforts to unseal them (they were sealed at the time, interestingly enough, by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, who just stepped down as U.S. Attorney General the day Trump was inaugurated president). 

As a result, there is also virtually no information on the specifics of the Russian mafia’s activities in Sater’s Wall Street scam, but there is a reasonably good chance or even higher that Mogilevich was running the Russian mob’s involvement in it, or was at least involved, since he was actively pursuing similar schemes in the U.S. at the time, possibly had a connection to his alleged old capo in Sater, and since Mogilevich was already such a major figure in the Russian mob at this point, keeping in mind that hierarchy matters quite a bit in organized crime; in fact, it is far less likely that the Russian mafia would be involved without Mogilevich when considering the points just mentioned. 

Now, that last point should not be taken lightly, considering that, just a few years later, Mogilevich was a primary actor in laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Firtash, Manafort, Yanukovych, and Putin; is it more or less likely that he would turn to an old connection—one with experience laundering money who had come to have the favor of the U.S. government, no less—to help with the laundering? Even without the Wall Street capers, Sater would have been an attractive candidate based on (possible) family ties alone, as would his nominal entry into real estate, as the real estate market in the U.S.has been an ideal avenue for money laundering for some time and is a top concern of U.S. officials, in part due to lax state, local, and federal laws.

Sater began working with Trump in in the early 2000s, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka and Donald Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through…

Criminal Scheme #3: The Trump/Sater/Bayrock Deals

But a number of deals in the United States between Trump and Bayrock produced a far more interesting—and incriminating—history. 

Perhap’s Sater’s most famous partnership with Trump was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, and two other partners from former Soviet states: one was Bayrock chairman Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan who’s rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable; the other was Tamir Sapir from Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well been (once) part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose source of his wealth had long been subject to rumor-fueled suspicion, who introduced Trump to Bayrock, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family (incidentally or not, at the time of the SoHo deal, it seems Sapir was not exactly mentally fit).

It turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater-and-Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million specifically approved by Trump for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland, FL Group, linked to the Panama Papers revelations and one apparently known as a hub for the money of Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from Alexander Mashkevich (or Machkevich), a Kazakhstani billionaire with a history of money laundering.

Considering Sater had helped pave the way for this investment and recalling his possible Mogilevich connections, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that there is a high probability that some of the money coming in from Russians was in one way or another tied directly or indirectly to the giant Eurasian gas scheme worth billions, as this period was especially a time when Russians tied to Putin and operating through Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich were aggressively trying to funnel money away from prying eyes of the likes of Tymoshenko. Besides the Russian financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited. Furthermore, the SoHo deal was structured to cheat the U.S. government out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans (not incidentally tax-free) to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time. 

In the end, the deal went terribly for Trump, who was sued for fraud—his children Eric and Ivanka had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers—and in a 2011 settlement, he refunded 90% of the deposits on the building’s condos. 

One must wonder why likely Russian investors were so eager to invest $50 million in this deal, and if it was an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Park Avenue deal involving Manafort & Co, and that model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again, Repeated in deals with Trump and with Sater serving again as a point-man.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, another of the Trump/Bayrock projects was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and led to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; Sater and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and several others—including the SoHo deal—in a deal with the aforementioned Icelandic firm, FL Group. Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing Trump and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and Trump refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

Another Bayrock partnership with Trump in Fort Lauderdale (not part of the FL Group ventures) was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by Arif in 2003, and from that point, Sater and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; as in the SoHo deal, they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October 2007.

Another deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then Trump himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with Trump, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point Trump himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project for himself. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to FL group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to FL’s “investment” involved a Waterpointe property in Queens (apart from approving FL’s money, Trump was otherwise not involved as far as we know). Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a 2013 NY State Supreme Court lawsuit rising from a process that began in 2008, former and then-business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michal Ejekam—sued Sater and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a vehicle for criminal activities; in it, Donald and Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing Sater’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from 1998 scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of the other above schemes of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to the Trumps, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning the removal was no comment on their guilt/responsibility/innocence and that they could be sued again on the same grounds later. 

*****

Taken together, these examples amount to catastrophic losses and colossal mismanagement on the part of Sater and Bayrock and, at the very least, gross negligence and incompetence on the part of Trump; at most, he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye, or, even worse, he might have been in on it, though no evidence exists that proves this).

Actually, the performance of Bayrock was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they did not care at all about performance. And that seems to be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition, but that would benefit Sater, Trump, and others high-up in the deals, but rarely if ever the investing partners outside this upper echelon; it seems these other duped partners and especially Trump would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes that were so poorly managed that the only logical conclusion is that Sater and his friends at Bayrock did not care about the future success of the projects nearly as much as they cared about laundering money and skimming from the top. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking there was something more going on there than met the eye. We may never know all the details or whose money was laundered and for what reasons—and if I had a magic wand I’d love to see if any the Manafort/Yanukovych/Firtash/Mogilevich Eurasian gas scheme money made its way into any of these Trump ventures—but it seems clear a lot of dirty Russian money was involved.

When considering Sater, it is important to remember that he has been busted multiple times by law enforcement and yet has not served jail time in America (with the exception of one year for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass and severing a nerve in the man’s face, or, as Trump put it under oath, Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) and enjoys the favor of the U.S. government, suggesting he is anything but a generally and especially stupid person; also remember that Sater has a long history of money laundering. 

So, in fact, once you look at the Bayrock deals and Sater assuming Bayrock’s primary reason to exist is for RICO money laundering, these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid all of a sudden make a lot of sense, and, in series of lawsuits beginning primarily on behalf of two of Sater’s Bayrock partners—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who weren’t in on the fun—for money they say is owed to them, Bayrock is precisely described as a RICO criminal organization, of which money laundering is one of its primary activities (in the main complaint, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times in the document).

Sater Saga

After Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to Sater still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to Sater, with Trump lying repeatedly about his relationship with Sater and Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 list its three Trump-named projects discussed above before all others and lists The Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), Donald Trump as its first “reference,” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

The Huffington Post also recently discovered just a few days ago that Sater owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; Sater used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Tital is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president. .

Sater even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House is even using Sater as a back-channel diplomatic go-between for Trump’s person lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a heavily-pro-Russian/pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko, who are discussing a Ukraine “peace plan” being pushed by close Putin aides; Artemenko also claims he has information damaging to Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s anti-Russian president facing off against Putin and his proxies in the Ukrainian Civil War. In an only partially-verified-by-U.S.-officials 35-page dossier on Trump and his people compiled by a respected ex-MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, Cohen is said to have secretly met with Russian government officials during the late stages of the presidential campaign, though it is not clear if this—or what—specific information has been corroborated by U.S. officials, with journalists having been unable to thus far verify the information on Cohen, who denies playing this role.

The reason a lot of what is known about Sater and his past misdealings is publicly available, besides a then-revelatory late-2007 New York Times article, is because of the intrepid efforts of two of the lawyers who often represented plaintiffs against Sater in court: Richard Lerner and Frederick Oberlander.

Going back to that 2013 lawsuit, because Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky was included in these accusations for allegedly illegally aiding and covering up for Sater, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara (more on him on in a bit) ended up being involved tangentially in defending him in his capacity as a U.S. Attorney, playing a role in trying to moving the suit from the state court system to SDNY jurisdiction, but it was ultimately moved because of Sater and his ties to the government, not Kaminsky. Once in the hands of the federal court, Kaminsky was removed without prejudice from the proceedings.

Which brings us to one of the untold stories of this election, and one which may never be told in full: how Sater’s cooperation with the government gave him government protection from being held liable in many cases for his misdeeds while also helping to suppress information about him and these misdeeds, and how, had his past and crimes been front and center over the past decade, this knowledge could have done much to derail and discredit Donald Trump, his brand and family at a time when he was building a national following with his hit show The Apprentice, which he even used to promote his fraudulent, money-laundered SoHo deal. 

That the public, including Trump’s and Bayrock’s clients and customers, were kept in the dark about Sater—a fact which undoubtedly helped all of these related deals and others advance, which was not lost on partners of Sater’s, and which is at the heart of much of the legal action against Sater—and were kept in dark because Sater cooperated with the U.S. government, adds quite a what-if twist to the tale of Trump and his dramatic rise over the last decade to become the most powerful man in the world: what if the government hadn’t protected Sater, and all that evidence was out in the open while Trump and Bayrock were courting buyers and were fighting court battles? What would that have done to Trump’s reputation if he became most known for defrauding customers and money laundering with a Russian mafia-deluged violent felon, to his hit show The Apprentice (one can just imagine NBC saying “You’re fired!” to Trump), and to his political aspirations? 

In a much less chaotic, less exciting world than the insanity that confronts us today, one can be sure such a salacious story involving a playboy New York tycoon would have been front, center, and dominant in national and international media coverage; lawsuits, trials, and investments may also have gone differently for Trump if such information was common knowledge, too; he may have just faded away in disgrace, or least into a sideshow, if not landing in jail.

Yes, if not for the favors the U.S. government did in protecting and, thus, abetting, Sater, it is far more likely that Trump would have collapsed in scandal than risen to be our current president. This abetting may very well be unwitting, but the two aforementioned lawyers—Lerner and Oberlander—believe differently, that the government cooperation with Sater yielded disappointing results, that Sater fooled and tricked the government into helping him in exchange for dubious assistance of questionable value and that this arrangement may have been such an embarrassment for the government that they covered up this and his past to save face and protect the careers of those involved. No court rulings have affirmed these assertions, yet it is notable that in the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involved in arguing over Sater’s information being withheld from the public, the Court tacitly admitted that at least some of the points made by Lerner and Oberlander were valid when they ordered many of the documents surrounding Sater be made public, the only reason that much of information about him is now publicly available.

Epilogue of Intrigue

As for Arif and Mashkevich, two other major players in the whole Trump/Bayrock/FL Group saga, Arif was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with apparently underage girls on board a Yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.

Going back to Trump’s sole major Wall Street lender, Deutsche Bank, since 2012, it has loaned trump over $300 million, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President Trump in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that might have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, but DoJ was not part of this and is still investigating, raising the question of the independence and impartiality of Trump’s own new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, himself under fire for possible improper interactions with Russian officials and forced to pledge to recuse himself from any investigations of into the 2016 election and Russian interference in it. Deutsche itself is under pressure to allow an independent investigation into Trump’s accounts with the Bank (his family also has accounts with Deutsche), even after its own investigation apparently found no link to Trump’s accounts and Russia. 

It was just revealed that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money to the tune of $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, with the overall laundering scheme—known as the Global/(Great) Russian Laundromat—involving dozens of Western banks and a sum ranging from $20-$80 billion through the years 2010-2014; the hundreds involved in the scheme include Russia’s notorious oligarchs and Russia’s F.S.B., the main successor to the famed Soviet K.G.B. intelligence agency, with Putin having longstanding intimate ties to both and with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

As if there weren’t enough bad connections to Trump Tower, Mogilevich-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Trump himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 

An indictment naming Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, mentioned earlier, and the same Preet Bharara fired controversially by Trump just last month after Trump had promised Bharara he would not fire him, and it should be noted that several of the past and ongoing cases involving Trump and/or his associates occurred in the jurisdiction of SDNY and that a number of potential future cases would also occur there if they moved forward and would have been handled by Bharara if he had not been fired. It was Bharara’s indictment that led to a 2013 raid on Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

We also have the curious case of the Trump’s fabulously ostentatious mansion—the “Maison de l’Amitie”—in Palm Beach, Florida, that he bought back in 2004 for $41 million. A representative of Trump claimed Trump put $25 million of his own money into renovating the house, but this is doubtful; plans obtained who improvements were relatively minor, and, Typical of Trump, he seemed to be lying through his teeth: when taking a local reporter on a tour, he claimed he installed gold fixtures in bathroom, but when the report scratched a faucet, gold paint came off to reveal not-gold underneath. Trump set his asking price at $125 million when he listed early in 2006, but had trouble finding a buyer; then, in March 2008, he brought his price down to $100 million, but it still wasn’t until that July that he got Russian oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to buy the mansion for $95 million after some haggling in a deal said to be the largest U.S. residential real estate deal ever. If you’re thinking that Trump might have swindled Rybolovlev, that’s very possible: he has a habit of falling for tricksters, especially when it comes to art deals; the house was appraised at less than only $59.8 million in 2013, and though it rose to $81.8 million in the summer of 2016, that was still about 15% less than what he had paid. Just months after he bought the house, he ended up in a messy divorce drama with his wife, who was after the house; there are plans to demolish the house, and Rybolovlev has not even physically entered the house, which may be demolished.

But unlike other major Russian oligarchs doing business with Trump or his allies, either directly or indirectly, Rybolovlev is no apparent friend or ally of Putin or the Russian mafia, which seems to put this story in the category of mere trivial.

But then, multiple reports that Rybolovlev’s private jet had repeatedly been tracked to cities where and when candidate and later president Trump was: Las Vegas in October, just five days before Election Day in North Carolina, and in Miami in February, creating a sense of intrigue. One might be tempted to say this is meaningless, yet on top of this, his accounts of the mansion deal have changed, making people wonder if he has something to hide.

At the very least, this Palm Beach mansion saga is a good reminder that Trump is a swindler and a liar, and if you’re still not convinced, google Trump University, Trump Steaks…

And oh, we just found out that during the campaign, Republicans paid a private intelligence firm that works closely with an ex-K.G.B. officer to dig up dirt in Clinton.

Putting the Pieces Together: Not a Pretty Picture

Sorry, Trump fans, but it’s time a reality check: it’s more likely that you will soon be struck by lighting than that all of these threads together and tied together by a Russian mafia godfather end up as innocent, harmless coincidences when it comes possible connections between Team Trump and Team Putin.

It is also crucial to note that the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political elites of neighboring and other countries along with hacking and (mis/dis)information operations—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do much the same thing throughout Europe, and it was clear he successfully threw his weight around last year during our election to help Trump win in what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, part of his overall war on Western Democracy and promotion of what I call democratic fascism.

The question is now about whether or not there was treason going on during that (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. If (and we don’t know yet) Putin was able co-opt agents people Manafort, Gates, Page, and/or others, this would simply be current Russian standard operating procedure for how it spreads its power throughout the world in the era of Putin; such hybrid warfare and “Cold War”-type or non-hot warfare being directed at America should not only not surprise Americans, it should be expected. And it seems that, along with Manafort and Page, the record-fast-recently-resigned-due-to-Russian-related-stuff Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and longtime Manafort and Trump confidante Roger Stone are all under an official FBI “counterintelligence”—to use FBI Director James Comey’s exact word—investigation, and Manafort, Page, and Stone all just volunteered to testify before Congress.

Should those hearings be public, that would be epic.

Conclusion originally a Part II published here

Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Ivanka Trump on stage for a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention- NBC

Conclusion: Trump Has Terrible Judgment or Is a (Treasonous) Criminal or Both

I will never forgive the news media or the American people for not caring enough about the aforementioned information when it mattered most and had the chance to change the outcome of this election, since any one of these main three threads alone carried more weight than Clinton’s and yet got only a fraction of the coverage that red-herring of a “scandal” got. Nor will I forgive Comey for his political tone-deafness, the politically-suicidal liberals who empowered Trump by myopically and narcissistically not voting for Clinton, or the Republican Party for so willingly spreading its buttocks for Putin; anyone who doubts me on that last point can watch the disgraceful behavior of Republicans on the supposedly relatively non-partisan House Intelligence Committee, especially its Chairman Devin Nunes and shallow grandstander Trey Gowdy, the latter of whom led the partisan witch-hunt that was the last “Benghazi”—really Clinton e-mail—investigation. Yes, I have no faith in Trump—Team Trump has lied at least 20 times about its ties to Russia as of early March and only continues to do so in the most outlandish and unprecedented and Orwellian of ways, making the possible reality of a serious cover-up more and more likely—but seeing Nunes as the Intelligence Committee Chairman act in such an unprecedented way—blatantly covering for the president—made me tear up and almost cry because his behavior is such a dramatic sign of how our government is failing us and how the last bastion protecting this country from what I call democratic fascism—that bastion now being that the party in power won’t twist every organ of government it can to benefit itself politically no matter the cost—may be crumbling. As historian Douglas Brinkley (who implored the public after Trump won to “give…[Trump]…a chance”) said of all of this: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

Trump repeatedly claimed during his campaign he would surround himself with “the best people;” I’m sure he believed himself, and that is the problem. What has been outlined here is probably one of the strongest cases (if not the strongest) against Trump’s judgment as leader, whether in business or in politics; if you surround yourself on a regular basis with mobsters and criminals and those who favor the worldview (or purse) of America’s greatest enemy over America itself, there is no more discussion to be had: Donald Trump is too stupid and too incompetent a leader to be president as he simply cannot be trusted to make decisions about whom to give power to (for every supposed hit there are far more misses and we can’t delegate the fate of our nation a game of chance; sorry, but I’m nearly convinced that Trump picked Gen. Mattis to run the Pentagon simply because he like Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog”); Trump’s selection of Paul Manafort alone would be disqualifying enough, and that’s just the beginning.

And that is the best case scenario that he was too stupid to see that his people were playing him for a fool or were abusing their power in a way that could destroy his potential presidency and do the nation irreparable harm. But if Trump himself in any way knew about any possible collusion with Russia, that takes us from disqualifying incompetence into the realm of treason. Even if that is not the case, the newest revelations are making it more and more likely that some sort of treason from within his camp will be uncovered—Comey recently noted that this counterintelligence investigation began in July, some ten months ago, and if it was clear there was no collusion it would probably have ended long ago—and it is increasingly likely that this issue will cripple Trump’s presidency in ways not seen since the later nineteenth-century, when Reconstruction’s war between President Andrew Johnson and Congressional Republicans, as well as the scandals of the Gilded Age, dramatically weakened the presidency.

Russia is as defiant as ever, just in recent months and weeks assassinating—or trying to assassinate-—opponents, arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters and Russian’s main opposition leader (Alexey Navalny, again) during Russia’s largest protests in five years, trying to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments (Montenegro), hacking foreign politicians in ways designed to sway elections (from Hillary Clinton to France’s Emmanuel Macron and beyond), fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, slaughtering civilians in Aleppo, and assaulting the world of norms the West has known since the end of WWII.

And Donald Trump is in the White House and wants to be Putin’s friend.

*****

Sometimes, if there’s enough smoke, it’s undeniable that there is a fire even if the flames are obscured or not visible from afar. Back in July, when I began my in-depth exploration around the same time the FBI did, I wrote that

… it’s possible there is  some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here  acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact,  almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be  hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the  Russian interference is so obvious…

Sometimes I hate being right.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!