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By the time the 2016 presidential campaign entered its last month, intelligence analysts in the Obama administration had already figured out that Russia was playing a key role in aiding Trump’s campaign. On October 7, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence on Election Security issued a joint statement declaring that:

the intelligence community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of emails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

The statement notably did not mention the Republican Party or Donald Trump by name, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out who was being hacked. The press release said that leaks “mirror the methods and motivations of past Russian-directed cyberattacks” and were “intended to interfere with the US election process.” Moreover, earlier that summer, on June 14, the Washington Post reported that Russian government hackers had penetrated the Democratic National Committee’s computer network.

As a result, all of America should have known that the Russians had hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee to aid Trump. Senators John McCain(AR-R) and Ben Cardin(MD-D) both called Russia’s interference in the election “an act of war.”Coming as they did just two days before the second debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, these were precisely the kind of revelations that ordinarily would have been a devastating blow to the Trump campaign.

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But October 7 was a Friday. In the political and media worlds, it is well known that if you want to bury a story, you release it on a Friday afternoon when it is too late for the evening news and will be consigned to the Saturday newspapers, which, famously, are not widely read. Given that Obama was still in the White House, one might think they would have wanted to promote it widely first thing Monday morning as a way of trying to dominate news coverage for the entire week. After all this was an historic even: A hostile foreign power—Russia—had secretly been working on behalf of the Republicans to help Trump’s campaign!

But instead of releasing it when the story might have had huge impact, the DHS and the Office of National Intelligence on Election Security made the announcement at 4:00 pm on Friday.

That meant almost no one would hear the news.

Then, just 30 minutes after the story was released—came another spectacular bombshell. At 4:30 pm, the Washington Post’s David Farenthold released the infamous Access Hollywood video in which Trump boasts about grabbing women “by the pussy.” That meant the Obama administration’s report on collusion—yes, collusion—between Russia and the Trump campaign was pretty much assured of being deeply entombed in the rapid-fire news cycle.

The entire country was agog—and that meant Trump desperately needed to have a miracle up his sleeve. In late July, at a campaign rally in Doral, Florida, Trump had gone so far as to suggest that Russian operatives should hack into the email account of Hillary Clinton, to help retrieve her deleted emails. “Russia, if you’re listening,” he said, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

In the ensuing weeks, Trump operative Roger Stone had been “predicting” that devastating revelations would be forthcoming from WikiLeaks about the Clinton Foundation. On August 21, Stone had tweeted, “Trust me, it will soon [be] Podesta’s time in the barrel,” a reference to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta. Afterwards, during a Q and A session at a meeting of Republican activists in Florida, Stone had said, “I actually have communicated with [WikiLeaks chief Julian]Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation.”

And later, during a radio appearance, Stone had said he expected Assange and WikiLeaks to drop “a payload of new documents on Hillary” fairly soon.

And now, finally, when it was needed most to diffuse the Access Hollywood video, WikiLeaks rode in to Trump’s rescue like the cavalry of yore. Less than an hour after the Access Hollywood tape was leaked, WikiLeaks released thousands of hacked emails of Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, as if they were valiantly fighting to win back control of the narrative. The first tranche of Podesta’s emails contained 2,050 messages that would dominate headlines for the next month. In addition, to make sure the emails were disseminated to millions of social media accounts, at least 2,552 Twitter accounts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency went into action on Trump’s behalf. Former Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, who had become CEO of the Trump campaign, assiduously aligned the campaign’s messaging with the emails that were being released.

And so it went, Russian hackers and bots leading a supine press corps by its nose. After all, it is far easier to write stories about hacked emails that are delivered on a silver platter than to probe a multifarious political conspiracy to sabotage a presidential election. By late October, the WikiLeaks weapon had been deployed with devastating effect. Every news cycle brought fresh stolen emails. The Trump campaign promoted each release, knowing they came from Russian intelligence.

Then, finally, on October 28, 2016 — just 11 days before the election — FBI Director James Comey sent a letter to Congress announcing that the FBI had discovered emails potentially relevant to its already-closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The emails had turned up on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner (the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin) during an unrelated investigation. On November 6, two days before the election, Comey sent a follow-up letter saying the FBI had reviewed the emails and found nothing to change its earlier conclusion.

The damage, however, was done. In fact, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight analysis argues compellingly that the letter cost Clinton the election — her polling lead was cut roughly in half in the days after it dropped, and she lost several key states by razor-thin margins. Clinton herself said: “I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me.

The operation that began with Trump’s cultivation in the 1980s was in its endgame. One last week, and an asset of Russian intelligence would be in the White House, in the Oval Office, seated behind the Resolute Desk.

And, as for the DHS memo—who the hell remembers that?

Cast of Characters

John Podesta: Campaign manager of Hillary Clinton, Podesta’s emails were hacked by Russian trolls and released during the final days of the campaign..

Roger Stone: Trump political operative Stone served as back-channel between Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. Had advance knowledge of Podesta email release.

Steve Bannon: Breitbart chairman Bannon became the Trump campaign’s CEO in August and began coordinating the campaign’s messaging. Coordinates messaging around WikiLeaks email releases.

Julian Assange/WikiLeaks: Releases stolen emails in coordination with Russian intelligence and Trump campaign timing needs.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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By June 2016, Donald Trump had all but nailed down the Republican presidential nomination. His last two major rivals, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, had both dropped out in early May 2016 — Cruz on May 3rd after Trump won the Indiana primary, and Kasich the following day. That left Trump as the sole remaining candidate and the presumptive Republican nominee.

So, in June 2016, Trump was in the process of consolidating the party behind him, selecting Mike Pence as his running mate, and preparing for the Republican National Convention the following month where the Republican Party chose him as their presidential candidate running against Hillary Clinton.

But a lot was going on behind the scenes. Especially with the Russians. On June 3, 2016, music publicist Rob Goldstone, who represented Emin Agalarov, the pop star son of Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, sent Donald Trump Jr. an email with an explosive subject line: “Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.”

The message promised “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” from the “Crown prosecutor of Russia.” Goldstone added: “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

Seventeen minutes later, Donald, Jr. responded: “if it’s what you say(sic) I love it especially later in the summer.”

Then, on June 7, Don Jr. sent Goldstone another email, this time confirming who would attend the meeting: “It will likely be Paul Manafort (campaign boss) my brother in law(sic) and me.”

Two days later, Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner sat down in Trump Tower with a Russian delegation that included Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya, former Soviet counterintelligence officer Rinat Akhmetshin, and Agalarov business associate Irakly Kaveladze. A translator was also present.

But when the meeting got underway, rather than focusing on the promised “dirt” about Hillary Clinton, the discussion immediately centered on sanctions that had been imposed on Russia as a result of the Magnitsky Act. Participants later claimed that the meeting lasted only 20 minutes and was full of nothing but “inane nonsense.”

Nevertheless, what transpired became one of the most tangible pieces of evidence that the Trump campaign was ready, willing, and able to conspire with a foreign adversary. Later that evening, Donald Trump himself announced he would be giving a “major speech” on Hillary Clinton’s dealings, saying, “I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”

Next, on June 14, the Washington Post reported that Russian government hackers had penetrated the computer networks of the Democratic National Committee networks. According to CrowdStrike, a leading cybersecurity firm, the hackers were identified as “Cozy Bear” and “Fancy Bear.” The next day, Guccifer 2.0 was outed. It was later identified as a front from Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU (Glavnoye Razvedyvatelnoye Upravleniye, or Main Intelligence Directorate). In other words, this was clearly an operation run by Russian intelligence.

Then, in the third week of July, came the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

The party elders had had little input from the presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, on most issues, with the striking exception of American policy with regard to Ukraine. Throughout the campaign, Trump had been less than supportive of Ukraine in its ongoing battle with Russia. In August 2015, asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Meet the Press what he thought about Ukraine’s joining NATO, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t care.” He also said that Ukraine was “really a problem that affects Europe a lot more than it affects us.” Coupled with his prediction to Bill O’Reilly that “I would have a great relationship with Putin,” Trump’s remarks led anti-Russia activists in Ukraine to call Trump a “Kremlin agent.”

They were right.

Meanwhile, at the convention, two men who were part of the Trump campaign, came over to Diana Denman, a member of the platform committee, and said the language in the Republican platform regarding Ukraine had to be reviewed. In the end, J. D. Gordon, one of the two men on the Trump campaign, won, and the language was changed from calling on the US to provide Ukraine “lethal defensive weapons” to the phrase “appropriate assistance”—whatever that meant.

The direction indicated by the new plank was far-reaching and a profound departure from everything the Republican Party had stood for.

But it must have made Vladimir Putin very, very happy.

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Then, on July 22, 2016, the day after the Republican Convention ended, and three days before the DNC convention began, Wikileaks released 20,000 DNC emails which it had obtained thanks to hacking by the GRU’s online persona, Guccifer 2.0.

Finally, five days later, on July 27, at a press conference, Trump publicly asked Russia to find Clinton’s “missing” emails: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

As it turned out, Russia was listening. Hours later, Russian hackers targeted Clinton’s personal servers for the first time.

As July ended, the Trump campaign had accepted an offer of Russian government assistance, changed its platform to benefit the Kremlin, and publicly encouraged Russian hacking. Through Trump operative Roger Stone, they were coordinating with WikiLeaks about future email releases.

The asset was cooperating. Now came the final push—deploying the email weapon at precisely the right moments to tilt the election.

Cast of Characters

Rob Goldstone: British music publicist for Emin Agalarov who arranged Trump Tower meeting. Later admitted he “embellished” the email to get Trump Jr.’s attention.

Natalia Veselnitskaya: Russian attorney who lobbied against Magnitsky Act sanctions. Denied working for Kremlin but met with Russia’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika before the Trump Tower meeting.

Roger Stone: Long-time Trump advisor who maintained back-channel communications with WikiLeaks about upcoming email releases.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

In June 2015, when Donald Trump famously descended the golden escalator(it was really brass) at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy in June 2015, the media focused largely on his inflammatory insults about Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and rapists.

In fact, like an all-too-credulous spectator falling for the misdirection of a magician, the audience missed the real story—namely, that Trump was putting together a presidential campaign that was doing exactly what the Russians wanted.

Indeed, just four months later, Trump did something that went almost completely unnoticed but which should have set off alarms throughout the entire national security establishment. On October 28, 2015, he signed a letter of intent to develop Trump Tower Moscow. Even though Trump repeatedly asserted that he had “no business” in Russia, the transaction continued to be negotiated throughout his campaign.

The deal included a big upfront fee for Trump— $4 million for starters, plus a percentage of sales. But it also had one other condition in it that violated the most fundamental tenets of national security: it required Vladimir Putin’s approval.

And so, as he began his campaign for the presidency, Trump pursued a private campaign for highly remunerative deal with Russian developer Andrey Rozov to build a high-rise tower that would feature 250 luxury condos, a hotel, and an Ivanka Trump Spa.

All of which meant that as Trump’s presidential campaign got underway, Russian intelligence was able to develop a sophisticated, multi-pronged penetration of his campaign through Michael Cohen and Felix Sater, who helped with his business affairs; Paul Manafort, who became his campaign manager; foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos; and Michael Flynn, who became Trump’s first national security adviser.

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Even though the deal would be a clear violation of the emoluments clause of the Constitution if Trump won, his operatives thought it would help his chances. On November 3, 2015, less than a week after the letter of intent was signed, Felix Sater emailed Michael Cohen: “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected...Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this.”

Then, a month later, on December 10, 2015, Michael Flynn, who later became Trump’s first, but short-lived, National Security Adviser, attended the tenth anniversary gala for RT, Russia’s state TV in Moscow. When it came time for dinner, Flynn was conveniently seated next to Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, Cohen and Sater greased the wheels of the proposed Moscow Trump Tower development by suggesting they give Vladimir Putin a free $50 million penthouse in the proposed tower. “In Russia, the oligarchs would bend over backwards to live in the same building as Vladimir Putin,” Sater told Cohen.

Then, in January 2016, Cohen emailed Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov seeking assistance with the Trump Tower Moscow deal. The Kremlin confirmed receiving the email—but there was little follow up, so Sater arranged for Cohen to get an invitation to attend the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, where he could meet Putin or Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

In the end, the efforts to develop the tower simply petered out. Nevertheless, the Trump Russia relationship continued to evolve. In March, foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos joined Trump campaign, and, while traveling in Italy, met Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor who “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials."

Meanwhile, the operation shifted into high gear. On March 19, the email account of John Podesta, the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, was successfully phished by the GRU(Russian intelligence). Two days later, Trump named Papadopoulos as a foreign policy adviser to the campaign. Then, on March 24, Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman who falsely claimed to be Putin’s niece. They discussed Clinton’s “dirt.”

Four days later, on March 28, Paul Manafort, who had spent a decade as an operative for a pro-Putin party in Ukraine, joined Trump’s entourage as campaign manager, hoping to do in the United States what he had already done for Putin in Ukraine—namely, install a pro-Putin president.

Now that he was playing a major role in Trump’s campaign, Manafort stayed in contact with his former deputy, Konstantin Kilimnik, who was later revealed to be a Russian intelligence officer. Through Kilimnik, Manafort offered to provide private briefings for Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch to whom Manafort allegedly owed almost $20 million. (Manafort’s lawyers have denied that this was the intent behind the emails, and dispute that Manafort owes Deripaska money.)

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According to The Guardian, Manafort visited Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in March 2015.

Both Manafort and Assange deny having met, and The Guardian’s report remains unconfirmed. Nevertheless, by late Spring 2016, all the pieces were in place. Trump clinched the Republican nomination in May—all while secretly pursuing a prestigious and lucrative deal that required Vladimir Putin’s blessing. By this time, Russian intelligence had completed a multi-pronged penetration of the Trump campaign that breached the future president’s business, political, foreign policy and national security operations.

By this time, Russian intelligence had completed a multi-pronged penetration of the Trump campaign that breached the future president’s business, political, foreign policy and national security operations.

More specifically, Russian operatives had acquired advance knowledge that Podesta’s stolen emails could be deployed as oppo research when necessary. At the same time, the Trump campaign’s messaging(anti-NATO, anti-immigrant, anti-trade deals) had become perfectly aligned with Russia’s strategic objectives.

Finally, on April 27, Trump gave a major foreign policy address at Washington”s Mayflower Hotel sponsored by the Center for the National Interest(CNI). That Trump chose the Center was in itself of interest in that Putin, in 2013, referred to its director, Dimitri Simes as his “American friend and colleague.”

For his part, Simes had pledged his full support for Russia’s aggressive stand on Syria. Moreover, according to Yuri Shvets, a former major in the KGB who now lives in the United States, Simes was working for Russian intelligence. (I first reported this for American Kompromat in 2021. At the time Simes and the CNI declined to return multiple phone calls.)

By late spring 2016, all the pieces were in place. Trump’s campaign had assembled a team of high-level advisors with extensive—and compromising—Russian connections. The Moscow deal negotiations continued in secret. Russian intelligence had successfully hacked Democratic emails and offered them to the Trump campaign through Papadopoulos. And the campaign had shown it was willing to listen.

If your name was Vladimir Putin, you very well might ask, “What’s not to like?”

Cast of Characters

Michael Cohen: Trump’s longtime fixer working on Moscow deal while publicly denying Russia connections. Later sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress about the deal’s timeline.

Felix Sater: Russian-American developer with mob ties and history as FBI informant. Promised to deliver Putin’s support for both the tower and Trump’s candidacy.

Paul Manafort: Political operative with decade-long history working for Russian-aligned Ukrainian oligarchs. In debt to Oleg Deripaska for nearly $20 million.

George Papadopoulos: Young foreign policy advisor who became key conduit for Russian outreach about Clinton emails.

Michael Flynn: Former Defense Intelligence Agency director who developed compromising Russia connections, including $45,000 RT payment for Moscow gala.

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For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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In February 2014, only months after Donald Trump staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made a quiet four-day trip to Russia arranged through Ivanka’s close friend Dasha Zhukova, who was then married to Roman Abramovich, one of Russia’s most powerful oligarchs. Abramovich, Bloomberg reported, was one of Putin’s most trusted associates, and the owner of Russia’s second largest steel company, the Chelsea football club. As I wrote in my post about Trump’s Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, that 2013 outing successfully embedded the Trump family inside a Kremlin-adjacent network that was built around Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov, and his son, Emin.

These meetings were important not because anything illegal took place or even that money was changing hands. Instead, the ties between Trump and Russia, which had been a series erratic and fitful contacts that took place over more than thirty years, were solidifying into cohesive relationships. Ivanka’s and Jared’s trip in 2014 attracted little attention in the United States, but it further strengthened those relationships and put the entire Trump family directly inside the same Kremlin network that had hosted him only a few months earlier, and that later became the target of investigations into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election.

The high point of the 2014 visit was a fundraising dinner for Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which was overseen by Viktor Vekselberg, chairman of the Renova Group conglomerate, and was attended by roughly one hundred guests from the top tier of Russia’s political, financial, and cultural elite. The guest list included oligarchs whose fortunes depended on Kremlin favor, senior executives tied to state industries, top Russian officials, and Western-connected financiers. It was a world in which “philanthropy” served as a mechanism that fueled power and influence operations.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were seated at the same table as Zhukova and Abramovich, a detail later disclosed on Kushner’s security-clearance forms, which noted multiple social meetings with Abramovich. The guest list also included Len Blavatnik, another Kremlin-connected billionaire who had extensive business interests in both Russia and the West, and who has made contributions to politicians from both parties, including Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, Marco Rubio, and, of course, Donald Trump.

Also in attendance was Wendi Deng, the former wife of Rupert Murdoch, who had introduced Dasha Zhukova to Ivanka years earlier and whose social and investment networks tied Russian oligarchs together with Silicon Valley capital, and Western media elites. Deng, Zhukova, and the Kushner brothers had previously co-invested in Artsy, an online art platform backed by Jared’s brother, Joshua Kushner, and in which Jared Kushner also held a stake before entering the White House.

These internecine relationships placed the Trump family firmly inside the Kremlin’s transnational elite, and later became even more incestuous. In 2024, after his divorce from Deng, Rupert Murdoch married Elena Zhukova, Dasha’s mother and Roman Abramovich’s former mother-in-law.

The 2014 gathering brought Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner into a network where oligarch wealth, political loyalty, and access to the Kremlin converged, a network Roman Abramovich had navigated for decades. Abramovich first benefited from a Kremlin-approved sale of Sibnetft, the oil company he had purchased for $250 million, to the Russian state in 2005 for $13 billion, a deal personally sanctioned by Putin. Abramovich later served as governor of the Chukotka region, a role widely viewed as a demonstration of loyalty to the Kremlin. All of which made Abramovich one of a handful of oligarchs who was able to maintain extensive Western access while also maintaining a strong relationship with Putin.

During the visit, Ivanka met again with Emin Agalarov and toured the Crocus City development as a potential site for Trump Tower Moscow, extending discussions that had begun during the Miss Universe pageant the previous year. The Trump Organization and the Agalarovs explored a large residential tower project in detail, discussing design concepts, scale, and market positioning.

One reason the 2014 visit was so significant was that it took place just weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea. In other words, the Trump family disregarded the growing risk of sanctions and continued to engage with the Kremlin’s oligarchs as they continued to pursue a real estate project that depended on Putin’s approval.

The February 2014 visit also placed Jared Kushner within oligarch networks that later intersected directly with U.S. politics. Viktor Vekselberg, who chaired the fundraiser, later drew FBI scrutiny during and after the 2016 election when investigators examined whether his companies and his associates played roles in Russian political influence operations to help Trump win.

Kushner’s presence during the Moscow trip was particularly significant, as he later established contact during Trump’s first term with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and with Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state-owned development bank VEB. He also tried to establish a private backchannel between the Trump transition team and the Kremlin to avoid detection by U.S. intelligence.

And that wasn’t the end of it. During Trump’s second term, Kushner has reemerged working alongside Steve Witkoff on a Moscow plan to pressure Ukraine into surrender as Russias genocidal war continues. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Kremlin’s plan effectively trades a peaceful end to the war in exchange for Ukrainian sovereignty and business deals and economic incentives that would benefit Russia.

Ultimately, the February 2014 trip was part of a broader pattern in which Trump and his family operated within Kremlin-linked networks that were later activated during Russia’s attack on the 2016 election, but that also extend back decades into the late Soviet period, when Trump first began his alignment with Russia’s strategic interests.

Cast of Characters

Roman Abramovich
Russian oligarch closely aligned with Vladimir Putin. Then married to Dasha Zhukova. Hosted Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in Moscow in 2014. Jared Kushner
Senior adviser to Donald Trump and son-in-law. Present during the February 2014 Moscow trip alongside Ivanka Trump. Later emerged as a central figure in contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign and transition, including meetings with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak and VEB chairman Sergey Gorkov, and proposing a private backchannel using Russian diplomatic facilities.

Aras Agalarov
Russian-Azerbaijani billionaire developer. Financed the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Partnered with Trump Organization on “efforts” to build Trump Tower Moscow.

Emin Agalarov
Son of Aras Agalarov. Vice president of Crocus Group and pop singer. Hosted Ivanka Trump during her 2014 Moscow visit and toured her through Crocus City as a potential Trump Tower site. Ivanka Trump
Donald Trump’s daughter and Trump Organization executive. Traveled to Moscow in February 2014. Maintained long-standing social and business ties to Russian oligarch circles through Dasha Zhukova and the Agalarovs. Previously visited the Kremlin in 2006 during a Trump Organization trip arranged by Felix Sater.

Sergey Gorkov
Chairman of VEB, Russia’s state-owned development bank. Met with Jared Kushner in December 2016 during the transition.

Sergey Kislyak
Russian ambassador to the United States during the 2016 election. Met with Jared Kushner during the Trump transition period.

Wendi Deng Murdoch
Former wife of Rupert Murdoch. Present at the 2014 Moscow fundraiser. Introduced Ivanka Trump to Dasha Zhukova years earlier. Co-investor with the Kushner brothers and Zhukova in Artsy.Dasha Zhukova
Former wife of Roman Abramovich. Close friend of Ivanka Trump. Arranged Ivanka and Kushner’s February 2014 Moscow visit. Co-founder of Artsy, an online art platform backed by the Kushner brothers’ investment firm.

Viktor Vekselberg
Russian oligarch and chairman of the Renova Group. Chaired the fundraising dinner for Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center attended by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Later surfaced in U.S. investigations related to Russian influence operations surrounding the 2016 election.

Steve Witkoff
Trump associate and billionaire real estate investor. Recently involved with Jared Kushner in discussions related to Russia’s war in Ukraine, including Moscow proposals to pressure Ukraine to surrender.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

The story behind Donald Trump’s Moscow Miss Universe pageant in June 2013 began several months before the actual event, in Las Vegas, where Trump hosted the Miss USA pageant at Planet Hollywood. Notable among the VIP guests were Aras Agalarov, a billionaire developer close to Vladimir Putin, and his son, Emin, who had spent several days in Trump’s company during rehearsals, backstage meetings, and private dinners.

In the course of those meetings, the Agalarovs proposed that Trump stage the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. By offering to finance the event through their real estate company, the Crocus Group, they were able to revive Trump’s dreams of building a Trump Tower in Moscow and help Trump make his first contacts with Putin, albeit through intermediaries.

The most memorable incident that weekend in Vegas took place during a late-night visit by Trump, the Agalarovs, and Michael Cohen to The Act, a nightclub inside The Venetian known for performances featuring semi-nude actors in scenes of simulated urination, simulated violence, sexual themes, and other provocative skits. Not exactly a conventional setting for serious business negotiations, but for Trump, the weekend solidified his personal relationship with the oligarchs he believed could finally help him build the Moscow project he had sought for years.

Trump repeatedly made it clear that staging the pageant in Moscow was not just another business arrangement. After all, he had been trying to cultivate a relationship with Putin for several years. Indeed, on December 19, 2007, he had written a celebratory missive to Putin: “Congratulations on being named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. You definitely deserve it! As you’ve probably heard, I’m a big fan of yours!”

Now, like an anxious schoolboy dying to ask out a girl to the prom, Trump reached out to Putin again. He couldn’t keep his feelings to himself. So on June 18, 2013, just as the planning for the pageant was getting underway, Trump tweeted: “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow — if so, will he become my new best friend?”

It was not until June 26, 2013, more than a week after his tweet, that Trump finally mustered the courage to write Putin, inviting him to be “guest of honor” at the upcoming pageant in November. Dropping Aras Agalarov’s name, as if to show that he was in bed with one of the Russian’s president’s favored oligarchs, Trump noted that “we turned down many other competing countries in favor of Russia.”

At the bottom of the typewritten letter, he added, in his own familiar penmanship, “The World’s Most Beautiful Women!”

Ultimately, Putin declined to attend, but he sent Trump a black lacquered box as a gift and a warm personal letter delivered through the Agalarovs. It was a small but calculated gesture, enough to convey interest, while withholding the face-to-face meeting Trump clearly wanted.

In November 2013, just before the pageant got underway, Trump flew to Moscow. The Agalarovs and their staff managed his movements from the moment he landed. Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Moscow, a hotel widely known among diplomats and business travelers for heavy security and surveillance of foreign guests. His days were filled with media events, pageant appearances, and private engagements that brought him into contact with key figures in Russia’s political leadership and state-aligned financial institutions.

Among the most significant events was a dinner hosted by Aras Agalarov at Nobu Moscow. Around the table were Trump: Aras and Emin Agalarov; Herman Gref, the CEO of Sberbank and a former Russian minister; and Trump’s New York partners Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, the CEO of the Sapir Organization, which had longstanding relationships with investors from the former Soviet Union and had played a key role in financing Trump SoHo, the failed high-rise project developed Bayrock that franchised Trump’s name.

Gref’s attendance at the dinner suggested that Trump’s proposed tower was being evaluated at senior levels of Russia’s state banking system, which often operated as an instrument of Kremlin policy. So, in addition to promoting his pageant, the Agalarovs signed a letter of intent to develop the Trump Tower Moscow project. Shortly after the pageant, Sberbank announced a major financing package for the Crocus Group, which was widely read as confirmation that the Kremlin favored Agalarov’s ventures, especially his collaboration with Trump. Around the same time, Putin awarded Aras Agalarov the Order of Honor, reinforcing his position within the Kremlin’s circle of trusted oligarchs.

Inside Agalarov’s Crocus City Hall, where the Miss Universe pageant unfolded, the overlap of business, political, and criminal networks was ubiquitous. Seated in the VIP section was Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov, a Russian organized-crime figure who had been indicted by U.S. prosecutors just several months earlier for running an illegal gambling and money-laundering operation that partly operated out of Trump Tower in New York. (See Dealer’s Choice: Trump and the Russian Mafia #33) His presence underscored how easily fugitives from American law enforcement moved in the same circles as oligarchs, Kremlin-linked executives, and foreign business partners. Russian media covered Trump’s visit extensively, casting it as a major cultural event marked by his interactions with high-profile businessmen, while U.S. outlets focused on Trump’s attempts to secure a meeting with Putin and use the pageant as a springboard to revive the stalled Moscow tower project.

Throughout Trump’s weekend in Moscow, he was shadowed by Yulya Alferova, an Agalarov aide who documented his movements on social media in real time. Her posts cast Trump’s visit as a succession of high-level business meetings rather than pageant logistics, photographing his arrival, tracking his private sessions, and noting his repeated criticism of President Obama. Alferova later appeared in photographs with Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin—Kremlin operatives who infiltrated conservative networks in the United States—underscoring her ties to Russia’s intelligence. (Butina was later indicted by the U.S. for conspiring to act as an agent of Russia in the U.S.)

But in January 2014, just two months after the pageant, and long before Trump publicly signaled his presidential ambitions, it became clear that the people he associated with in Moscow in 2013 were playing major roles in promoting his political ascent. Indeed, Alferova tweeted: “I’m sure @realDonaldTrump will be a great president! We’ll support you from Russia!” Her husband, Artem Klyushin, an operative who had worked with Kremlin internet strategists, had also been present at Miss Universe, and boasted a resume full of close associations with key Kremlin operatives. Not only did he participate in political-technology programs funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the oligarch behind Wagner paramilitary network and the troll factory known as Internet Research Agency, he also went on to play visible roles in Russia’s influence and disinformation operations during the 2016 election, by registering pro-Trump domains and amplifying pro-Trump messaging across Russian social platforms.

Trump repeatedly described his Moscow visit in later interviews as a series of high-level encounters. In a 2015 radio appearance, he said, “I was with the top-level people, both oligarchs and generals and top-of-the-government people.”

At various times, Trump claimed, falsely, to have met Putin during the trip, and at other times he denied it. But throughout, he stressed the significance of the connections he had made. And even though the Trump Tower Moscow project stalled after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine, the relationships formed at Miss Universe remained very much in play as the 2016 election cycle approached. Emin Agalarov continued traveling to the United States. Ivanka Trump visited Moscow, and Goldstone maintained regular communication between the Trump family and Russian intermediaries.

By the time Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, Russia had established firm ties to Trump—as the preceding 33 posts in my Trump Russia Timeline show. But now the White House was in play.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin: “Trump’s decision to run had been in the works for some time. In January, Emin Agalarov and Rob Goldstone, Emin’s publicist, had visited Trump in Trump Tower. Having seen Emin perform at the Miss Universe pageant, and having appeared in one of Emin’s music videos, Trump told him, ‘Maybe next time, you’ll be performing at the White House?’”

Later, Goldstone, who had helped shape Trump’s media presence in Moscow, emailed Donald Trump Jr. offering “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton” as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” That led to the infamous Trump Tower meeting that June. Ike Kaveladze, the Crocus executive who had managed Trump’s logistics in Moscow, attended the meeting as Aras Agalarov’s representative, as did Rob Goldstone and Emin Agalarov.

In the end, the ties established during Trump’s 2013 weekend in Vegas had brought Trump directly into the world of Kremlin-aligned oligarchs, state bankers, and political operatives, a system where personal relationships, state interests, and covert political operations were intertwined. As a result, when the moment arrived in 2016, Moscow already had the networks in place to act.

Cast of Characters

Aras Agalarov
Russian-Azerbaijani billionaire developer and Kremlin-favored oligarch known as “Putin’s builder.” Financed the 2013 Miss Universe pageant, brokered Trump’s access to political and financial elites, and co-signed the letter of intent for Trump Tower Moscow.

Emin Agalarov
Pop singer, vice president of Crocus Group, and son of Aras Agalarov. Served as the personal bridge between Trump and his father’s political circles. Trump had a cameo appearance in one of Emin’s music videos. His publicist, Rob Goldstone, later initiated the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting.

Herman Gref
CEO of Sberbank and former Russian Minister of Economic Development. Attended the Nobu Moscow dinner with Trump and the Agalarovs, signaling that Trump’s Moscow tower proposal was being evaluated at senior levels of Russia’s state banking system.

Alex Sapir & Rotem Rosen
Trump’s New York business associates with deep ties to wealthy Russian investors. Participated in the Moscow meetings and served as intermediaries for Russian capital in Trump developments.

Ike Kaveladze
Crocus Group executive who handled Trump’s logistics, transportation, and backstage coordination in Moscow. Later attended the 2016 Trump Tower meeting as Aras Agalarov’s representative.

Yulya Alferova
Agalarov's aide, who documented Trump’s movements on social media throughout the Moscow weekend, presenting him as engaged in high-level business meetings. Later photographed with Russian agents Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin. In January 2014, over a year before Trump announced, she tweeted that Trump “would be a great president” and declared, “We’ll support you from Russia!”

Artem Klyushin
Alferova’s husband and a Kremlin-connected political technologist. Participated in Prigozhin-funded political-technology programs. Present at Miss Universe and later involved in online messaging and domain registration efforts, boosting Trump during the 2016 election. Close associate of Konstantin Rykov, who helped run online networks supporting Trump in 2016.

Rob Goldstone
British publicist for Emin Agalarov. Managed media for Trump in Moscow. In 2016, emailed Donald Trump Jr. offering “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary Clinton” as part of “Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” triggering the Trump Tower meeting.

Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov
Russian organized crime figure indicted by U.S. authorities in April 2013 for running an illegal gambling and money-laundering ring that included operations inside Trump Tower. Attended Miss Universe as a VIP guest.

Maria Butina
Russian influence operative indicted in the United States for acting as an unregistered foreign agent while infiltrating American conservative organizations. Friends with Yulya Alferova, and though not formally connected to Miss Universe, her presence in the same social network underscores how closely Kremlin operatives intersected with the Agalarov orbit.

Alexander Torshin
Russian politician and handler of Butina, who cultivated channels into U.S. political and conservative circles. Appeared in overlapping networks with Alferova and Klyushin, underscoring the convergence of political-influence operatives around the Miss Universe ecosystem.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Let’s take a break from the Epstein feeding frenzy for a moment, and go back to an old favorite—Trump Russia. That’s right. It’s not a hoax.

This time, we have another chapter tying Donald Trump to the Russian Mafia.

On April 16, 2013, police burst into an apartment on the sixty-third floor of Trump Tower, and rounded up suspects who were part of two gambling rings allegedly run by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a longtime associate of Semion Mogilevich and other major figures in the Russian Mafia.

Widely known as Taiwanchik, a diminutive that referred to his Asian facial features, Tokhtakhounov, according to a racketeering and money-laundering indictment before the Southern District of New York, had been designated as a Vor, and, “as a Vor, Tokhtakhounov had substantial influence on the criminal underworld and offered assistance to and protection” to the Russian Mafia. In 2011, Tokhtakhounov had made the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. At number five, he was just two slots behind Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don” of the Russian Mafia who was known as its brilliant money laundering expert.

But Tokhtakhounov told The New York Times that he was innocent of all wrongdoing. “I am not bad, like you think,” he said. “I am not the Mafia, I am not a bandit.”

Tokhtakhounov likely first developed ties to key figures in the Russian underworld when he was just a young boy growing up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, through Mikhail Chernoy, the metals-oligarch-in-waiting. By the eighties, he had established good relations with such Russian Mafia bigwigs as Sergei Mikhailov, Vyacheslav Ivankov (who owned condos in Trump Tower), and Anton Malevsky, a leader of the Izmaylovskaya Organized Crime Group.

In the early nineties, Tokhatkhonouv represented Ivankov’s interests in Germany, lived the high life with a spectacular nine-million-euro apartment in Paris’s chic Sixteenth Arrondissement, and enjoyed living in now fewer than four villas in Italy— all while traveling the world as a cardsharp engaging in high-stakes gambling and money laundering. In 2002, Tokhtakhounov allegedly fixed an ice-dancing competition at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

And now, in 2013, Tokhtakhounov was named in an indictment charging thirty-four members and associates of two Russian-American organized crime families—the Taiwanchik-Trincher organization based in New York, Kiev, and Moscow, and the Nahmad-Trincher organization, based in Los Angeles and New York—with operating international sports books that laundered more than $100 million through shell companies in Cyprus, and funneled it into investments in in an enterprise that was based in Trump Tower. The entire operation, prosecutors said, was working under the protection of Tokhtakhounov, who was paid $10 million during a single two-month stretch.

This was no ordinary gambling bust. First of all, the apartment in question, 63A-B, was one of the most sought after in the entire building and was so highly prized that Trump himself had bought it when the building was completed in 1983. In 1994, however, he personally sold it to Oleg Boyko(sometimes spelled Boiko), an oligarch who was sometimes described as Boris Yeltsin’s personal banker.

In 2009, Boyko sold the apartment for $5 million to Vadim Trincher, a high-stakes poker player who is a dual citizen of Israel and the US. By the time the gambling bust took place, according to Smoking Gun, the apartment, with its twenty-four-karat-gold faucets, alabaster walls crafted by Portuguese artisans, and $350,000 bathroom floor made of amethyst imported from Tanzania, had become one of the most ostentatious apartments in what was already one of the most ostentations buildings in America. (Which didn’t mean it was terribly livable. A leak from the apartment upstairs in 2012 caused $6 million in mold and mildew damage and was so bad that the Trinchers had to cancel a fund-raiser for New Gingrich’s presidential race that year.)

The sixty-third floor was not the only place in Trump Tower where the ring was operating. Hillel “Helly” Nahmad, a billionaire Manhattan art dealer who ran an eponymous New York gallery in theCarlyle Hotel, had bought up the entire fifty-first floor of Trump Tower and used it as the site of a high-stakes gambling operation that catered to A-list celebrities and Russian oligarchs.

Another key figure in the gambling ring was Anatoly Golubchik, who owned a condo in Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida. As James Henry reported in the American Interest, Golubchik also owned a shell company called Lytton Ventures, with a director named Galina Telesh—who just happened to have been married to Semion Mogilevich.

According to the indictment filed by United States Attorney Preet Bharara, the gambling ring had been in operation since 2005, and had laundered at least $100 million. In the end, twenty -eight defendants pleaded guilty and went to jail.

As for Tokhtakhounov, he fled the country.

Later, in 2013, when Trump staged the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, the event put him in close proximity to Tokhtakhounov and other high-profile Russians, including, Trump hoped, Vladimir Putin, who he had invited. Months before the contest, Trump tweeted, “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?”

As it happens, Putin didn’t show, but Tokhtakhounov did.

According to Mother Jones, when a spokesperson for the Miss Universe pagaent was asked how Tokhtakhounov came to be part of the red-carpet crowd at the event, she said she was not familiar with his name.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat.

And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

In 2012, Donald Trump was not yet ready to pursue the presidency, but he continued to cultivate relationships with oligarchs and autocrats in Central Asia who ruled over the remnants of the Soviet empire.

That year, in fact, the Trump Organization signed a letter of intent to license the Trump name to a luxury real estate development near the presidential palace of Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s in Astana. As a McClatchy investigation noted, the project, called Trump Diamond, was never built, but the attempt to develop it underscored how Trump’s organization operated—through alliances with authoritarian thugs, fueled by opaque capital, and protected by layers of secrecy that shielded corruption from scrutiny.

As we have seen, with the help of Felix Sater and the Bayrock Group, Trump had already been franchising his name to brand luxury high-rise projects in SoHo, Toronto, Panama, Georgia and more that were largely lucrative failures. Now, Trump partnered with another outfit, the Silk Road Group, the same company that was behind his failed venture in Batumi, Georgia.

This time, Trump’s target market was Kazakhstan, which just happened to be newly awash in oil money. Its capital, Astana—since renamed Nur-Sultan—had become a playground for Nazarbayev’s vision of absolute power. Financed via an intricate web of state contracts, kickbacks, and offshore accounts, it was a shimmering city built in glass and gold as if to reflect his personality cult. Enter, Donald Trump, who planned to have his name atop its most striking glass tower.

Behind the illusion of modernization was a regime built on graft. Nazarbayev’s relatives controlled the banks and energy firms. His cronies controlled the construction companies and transport networks. Vast fortunes siphoned from the nation’s oil and mineral reserves were quietly parked in London real estate, Swiss trusts, and Caribbean shell companies. Western developers and consultants, eager to profit from the boom, rarely asked where the money came from—or who was really paying.

For Trump, whose company was still staggering from the 2008 financial crisis, Kazakhstan offered another desperately needed lifeline. Trump’s post-recession strategy was to continue selling his name to anyone with cash and power—just as he had with Bayrock. Markets like Kazakhstan—operating in an unregulated, Wild West-like environment, and desperate for Western validation—were ideal.

In Trump Diamond, the future president saw all the benefits he sought with none of the risk: licensing fees, management contracts, and global publicity without a single dollar of investment. In exchange, Nazarbayev’s inner circle would be able to market one of the most recognizable brands in the world, a Western symbol that could buy them legitimacy and launder money at the same time.

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According to contemporaneous reports, the 2012 letter of intent envisioned a gleaming skyscraper complex near the Ak Orda Presidential Palace, a tower meant to proclaim Kazakhstan’s arrival on the global stage. Trump’s role was purely symbolic. His company would provide branding and “consulting,” while local partners, deeply embedded in the political and financial machinery of Nazarbayev’s regime, handled financing and construction. Many of those partners had long histories of corruption and close ties to Russian oligarchs. They operated within the same ecosystem that bound Kazakhstan’s kleptocracy to the Kremlin’s economic interests: a world where revenue from oil sales, state contracts, and organized crime flowed together through offshore vehicles stretching from Cyprus to Switzerland to the British Virgin Islands.

Trump’s coziness with shady, criminal figures was nothing new. Since the 1970s, he had surrounded himself with mob-connected contractors, fixers, and financiers—legitimate or otherwise. After the 2008 crash, the Trump Organization became dependent on branding deals in countries where the rule of law could be bought and where the illusion of Western legitimacy carried enormous value. In Baku, Azerbaijan; in Panama City, Panama; and now in Astana, Kazakhstan, the Trump brand served as validation for businessmen who were, in reality, conduits for dirty money. The pattern never changed: minimal exposure for Trump, maximum access for his partners, and no questions asked about where their dirty money came from.

Among the other businessmen who backed major Astana developments was Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch whose fortune and influence depended on Nazarbayev’s patronage and on his ties to Moscow’s security networks. Rakishev maintained close ties to senior Russian officials and to figures associated with the FSB (Russia’s security services), including allies of Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov. Many of his ventures overlapped with Kremlin-controlled enterprises and showed how deeply intertwined Kazakhstan’s business elite was with the Kremlin and Russia’s intelligence-linked circles—and how easily Trump’s brand became part of that same system.

Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan was a textbook kleptocracy. The country was formally independent but politically and economically dependent on Russia. Its image of stability masked a system built on corruption, where Nazarbayev’s relatives and loyalists controlled major industries and operated like an organized crime syndicate. Government, business, and the criminal underworld were part of the same power structure. Trump’s business model fit easily into this environment, where political connections and private profit were traded interchangeably. He didn’t need to understand the details of Kazakhstan’s corruption to profit from it—he only needed to sign the deal and wait for the money to arrive.

During the Trump Diamond negotiations, Michael Cohen also worked with Giorgi Rtskhiladze, a Georgian-American businessman with the Silk Road Group, to explore financing for the project in Kazakhstan as he had previously done in Georgia. Cohen, then serving as Trump’s personal attorney and fixer, acted as the go-between, connecting the Trump Organization to prospective partners across the region. As I wrote in my previous article, Giorgi Rtskhiladze later resurfaced during the 2016 election, texting Michael Cohen about rumored “tapes from Russia” linked to Trump’s business partners at the Crocus Group.

Crocus—and the networks behind it—were already central to Trump’s next move. By 2013, his focus had shifted to Russia. That November, the Miss Universe pageant brought him into partnership with Aras Agalarov, who, as the Kremlin’s favored developer and head of the Crocus Group, maintained close ties to Nazarbayev’s inner circle in Kazakhstan at the same time that he was building luxury projects for the Russian state.

Consequently, the same nexus of oligarchs, fixers, and Kremlin-linked financiers that had surfaced in Baku and Astana now gathered around Moscow. From Azerbaijan to Georgia to Kazakhstan, the pattern never changed: Trump supplied his brand, and in return gained entry into networks saturated with laundered money and political influence. These relationships formed a financial ecosystem that Russia’s intelligence services already understood intimately. They didn’t need to invent kompromat; Trump’s record of risky partnerships, opaque finances, and moral bankruptcy had already provided them with all the leverage they could ever need.

Kazakhstan’s role in this transnational network has often been overlooked, but it was central to the movement of Russian and Central Asian money into the West. Its energy and banking sectors functioned as key channels for oligarchic wealth, moving billions through European shell companies and real estate portfolios. Nazarbayev’s regime maintained a careful balance in which it was loyal to Moscow while it was eager for Western validation. Consequently, it positioned itself as a bridge between the Kremlin’s political ambitions and the global financial system. Many independent investigations and policy reports have since detailed how money from across the former Soviet bloc—including Kazakhstan—moved into Western economies through real estate and shell companies designed to hide their true owners. Trump’s ventures fit neatly into that same pattern, turning his developments into entry points for corrupt money and status symbols for the oligarchs and power brokers who moved it.

As with many Trump Organization projects, the Trump Diamond in Astana was never even built, but the deal revealed a deeper truth about how Trump’s business functioned.

By the time Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015, he had spent years embedded in a circuit of post-Soviet capital that blurred the lines between business, politics, and crime. And, when he entered the White House, those relationships continued and gave the Kremlin the keys to the vulnerabilities through they could manipulate Trump.

In the end, the failed project showed how easily Trump’s brand could be sold to corrupt regimes hungry for legitimacy. Within months, his pursuit of oligarch money would carry him to Moscow—into the orbit of Aras Agalarov, the Kremlin’s favored developer, and into a partnership that would bring him closer than ever to Putin’s inner circle.

Cast of Characters

Nursultan Nazarbayev
Dictatorial President of Kazakhstan who ruled his country from 1991 to 2019, Nazarbayev governed through patronage, repression, and a sprawling system of corruption that enriched his family and loyalists who controlled the nation’s banks, energy firms, and construction.

Kenes Rakishev
Kazakh oligarch with close ties to Nazarbayev’s regime and to Russian security-linked networks. Rakishev maintained relationships with figures associated with the FSB and Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. His business ventures overlapped with Kremlin-connected enterprises and later surfaced in leaked communications tied to Russian influence operations.

Giorgi Rtskhiladze
Silk Road Group partner and deal-maker with U.S.–Eurasia networks; later surfaced in 2016 texts to Michael Cohen about rumored “tapes,” illustrating how Batumi-era intermediaries re-entered Trump’s political orbit.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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In March 2011, five years before his first presidential run, Donald Trump stood beside Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in the marble lobby of Trump Tower Manhattan to unveil yet another new international venture. This one was called Trump Tower Batumi, a luxury skyscraper planned for Georgia’s second biggest city which has become a resort known as the pearl of the Black Sea.

The announcement, staged with Trump’s characteristic flair, presented the project as a symbol of partnership. But the staging concealed a far more interesting story. Just as Bayrock had begun licensing Trump’s name for the SoHo Trump and other projects, so now the Trump brand was being licensed by another group. This one was linked to Kazakhstan’s B.T.A. Bank, a financial institution at the center of a multibillion-dollar embezzlement scandal, and a network of businessmen whose later activities would reverberate through Trump’s 2016 campaign.

The Batumi project, like most of Trump’s foreign ventures, was a branding agreement rather than a fully capitalized investment. Trump’s role was to contribute his name, generate publicity, and approve the design, while his partners supplied the financing, political access, and local permissions. The Georgian developer was the Silk Road Group, controlled by businessman George Ramishvili, with Giorgi Rtskhiladze acting as an intermediary who helped promote the project. But the group’s financial backing came from the B.T.A. Bank of Kazakhstan, whose former chairman Mukhtar Ablyazov stood accused of embezzling more than $6 billion in state funds through offshore companies and fraudulent loans.

Investigators and court filings later alleged that portions of Ablyazov’s missing money were routed through offshore vehicles that invested in Western real estate. That included companies tied to the Trump SoHo in New York, a project I wrote about that was connected to Trump partners Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif of the Bayrock Group, and was awash in dirty money funneled through shell companies, anonymous LLCs, and offshore accounts.

But now, as Bloomberg News reported, the same financial currents that ran through Manhattan’s luxury market turned up in Batumi, of all places, underscoring the fact that the Trump name was now a reliable ongoing global conduit for capital originating in the opaque Russian and Eurasian kleptocratic networks.

By the time Trump posed for cameras with Saakashvili, however, Mukhtar Ablyazov was living in London, fighting extradition on charges of embezzlement and fraud, and B.T.A. Bank was under investigation in multiple jurisdictions. As usual, Trump faced no risk. That’s because he was following a familiar model in which he had zero investment, and no obligation to vet the source of funds behind his partners.

It was a different story, however, for the Silk Road Group, which had borrowed heavily from B.T.A. Even though Silk Road denied any wrongdoing, its connection to the bank tied the deal to Kazakh capital that Western regulators already considered high-risk.

Indeed, as The New Yorker reported in 2017, B.T.A. Bank’s offshore web of subsidiaries provided financing to Silk Road entities even as international courts were freezing Ablyazov’s assets. The Kazakh regime of Nursultan Nazarbayev, which had once elevated Ablyazov to power, was simultaneously pursuing him for fraud while profiting from the same opaque system of cross-border capital flight that underpinned Silk Road’s expansion. In effect, Trump’s Batumi deal inserted his brand into a cycle of money laundering that reached from Almaty to London, and from Georgia’s political elite to Manhattan’s luxury towers.

By this time, such arrangements were business as usual for Trump. The Batumi venture, financed by Kazakh-linked funds and celebrated by a Western-leaning autocrat, established the blueprint for what came next: Trump Diamond Astana, yet another never completed project, this one in the capital city of Kazakhistan, in 2012.

In Batumi, construction had never even begun, but the deal resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign. As Trump faced scrutiny over his Russian ties, Silk Road Group’s Giorgi Rtskhiladze re-entered the picture. According to the Mueller Report, on October 30, 2016, Rtskhiladze texted Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen: “Stopped flow of some tapes from Russia but not sure if there’s anything else. Just so u know ….”

When questioned by investigators, Rtskhiladze said the message referred to rumored “compromising tapes” allegedly held by associates of Russia’s Crocus Group, which had helped organize Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. He later insisted the tapes were fake.

The Batumi deal, of course, was just one of many shadowy projects that showed how comfortable Trump was operating in a world of opaque money, political access, and zero accountability. What began as a handshake with Mikheil Saakashvili and a licensing contract with Silk Road Group quietly tied Trump to a web of financiers and fixers operating across Russian and Eurasian kleptocracies. In the end, it was just another chapter in transnational corruption.

Cast of Characters

Mikheil Saakashvili
Former president of Georgia and a pro-Western reformer who used the Batumi announcement to attract foreign investment.

Silk Road Group
Georgian conglomerate behind Trump Tower Batumi that pursued Western branding while drawing on financing lines linked to Kazakhstan’s B.T.A. Bank.

George Ramishvili
SRG co-founder and public face of the Batumi project, who leveraged Trump’s brand to market Georgian real estate to regional elites and offshore buyers.

Giorgi Rtskhiladze
SRG partner and deal-maker with U.S.–Eurasia networks; later surfaced in 2016 texts to Michael Cohen about rumored “tapes,” illustrating how Batumi-era intermediaries re-entered Trump’s political orbit.

B.T.A. Bank (Kazakhstan)
Major Kazakh lender whose funding streams intersected with SRG, as they were embroiled in multibillion-dollar laundering allegations and cross-border litigation.

Mukhtar Ablyazov
Former B.T.A. chairman accused of siphoning billions through offshore structures; his capital flows recur in Western real-estate vehicles, including entities noted in prior Trump SoHo reporting.

Nursultan Nazarbayev
Long-time ruler of Kazakhstan, who presided over a system where state-adjacent money moved through offshore channels that intersected with SRG’s financing ecosystem.

Michael Cohen
Trump’s personal lawyer; recipient of the Oct. 30, 2016, text from Giorgi Rtskhiladze about “stopped flow of some tapes from Russia,” a Mueller-documented episode of unverified kompromat chatter.

Aras Agalarov (Crocus Group)
Kremlin-linked developer named by Rtskhiladze as the circle where rumored “tapes” were said to exist.

Felix Sater & Tevfik Arif (Bayrock Group)
Trump partners on Trump SoHo; operated in the same Eurasia-to-U.S. capital corridors as SRG/B.T.A. flows, providing an earlier template for opaque money meeting Trump-branded real estate.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

By the time he ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump had begun insisting that he had absolutely “nothing to do with Russia.” More specifically, Trump pointed out that he never owned a tower in Moscow and never borrowed money from Russian banks. But these denials conveniently omitted essential facts that showed for decades Trump had been supported by Kremlin-connected businessmen and Russian intelligence figures who had poured hundreds of millions of dollars into his properties. Just as Trump Tower in New York had become a magnet for Russian wealth, as had Trump projects in Panama City, Toronto, and Baku, so now Sunny Isles, Florida showed all the signs of having become another laundromat for Russian wealth.

That’s how the Russians came to own him.

Indeed, the way the Russians invested in Trump-branded real estate revealed all the tell-tale signs of money laundering. The fact that properties could be bought via all-cash purchases and owned by anonymous limited liability companies that masked the beneficial ownership made Trump-branded real estate ideal for laundering vast amounts of money, which is precisely why they were so appealing. In fact, a 2018 Buzzfeed investigation found that across his developments, Trump and his partners sold at least $1.5 billion worth of condos to shell companies, cash buyers, and others who raised red flags for money laundering risk.

Think about it. You could buy a condo for two or three million, sell it to a friend, and then flip it back and forth to your little heart’s content.

What more could an oligarch ask for?

Trump’s New York properties have commanded more attention, but the epicenter of these new sales was Sunny Isles Beach, a strip of oceanfront about 20 miles north of Miami where six Trump-branded towers were built starting in the early 2000’s. They quickly transformed the skyline and, thanks to the influx of Russian buyers, earned the nickname “Little Moscow.”

A Reuters investigation in 2017 found that at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses had purchased nearly $100 million worth of condos in Trump developments there. One of the real estate broker claimed to have sold 500 condos there and said that one-third of the buyers were “Russian-speakers.”

Moreover, the buyers were not ordinary faceless investors. They were tied to Russia’s political and business elite. Among them was Alexander Yuzvik, a senior executive at Spetstroi, the state construction firm responsible for building facilities for Russia’s intelligence services, including the FSB and GRU. In 2010, Yuzvik bought a $1.3 million apartment in Trump Palace with his wife, linking Trump’s brand directly to Russia’s security state. Another buyer was Alexey Ustaev, the founder of St. Petersburg’s Viking Bank, who acquired a $1.2 million condo in Trump Palace in 2009 and followed that with a $5.2 million penthouse in Trump Royale two years later.

Yet another customer of these Trump-branded condos was Oleg Misevra, a coal baron from Russia’s Far East who had been praised by Vladimir Putin. Misevra paid $6.8 million penthouse in the Trump Hollywood. As a result, Trump’s real estate empire was even more deeply beholden to the networks of Kremlin-favored oligarchs and mobsters.

Behind the surge of Russian buyers stood one curious figure: Elena Baronoff. A Soviet émigré from Uzbekistan who moved to Miami in the 1980s, Baronoff became the exclusive sales agent for the Trump Grande and other Trump-branded towers in Sunny Isles. Fluent in Russian, she acted as the bridge between Trump’s partners in Florida and wealthy clients from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and beyond.

She traveled regularly to Russia and Europe to pitch units, cultivating oligarch buyers and reinforcing Sunny Isles’ reputation as “Little Moscow.” Colleagues described her as glamorous, mysterious, and almost “spy-like,” a woman whose Soviet background and poise gave her unique access to Russia’s elite. In an interview before the House Intelligence Committee, Glenn Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who later founded Fusion GPS, testified that Baronoff was “a suspected organized crime figure” who had lots of relationships with Russians as well.

Gil Dezer, Trump’s partner in the towers, later admitted: “She was huge, she was big for them. No one has filled her shoes.” In 2014, Baronoff was diagnosed with leukemia and died the following year at the age of 53, but not before she had helped funnel millions in Russian wealth into Trump’s branded developments.

Other buyers came from Russia’s political class. Vadim Gataullin, a regional parliamentarian from Bashkortostan and the son of a deputy prosecutor, bought multiple Trump Hollywood units through his U.S. company, VVG Real Estate Investments. He paid $3.5 million for one apartment and $920,000 for another, flipping both for a profit while never disclosing the holdings in his official asset declarations back in Russia. Pavel Uglanov, a former deputy minister in the Saratov regional government and a member of Putin’s United Russia party, also entered the market. In 2012, he bought a Trump Hollywood condo for $1.8 million and sold it two years later for $2.9 million. Uglanov later posted photos online with Alexander Zaldostanov, the leader of the Kremlin’s Night Wolves motorcycle gang, sanctioned by the United States for its role in Russia’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea.

The Miami Herald uncovered another layer regarding Trump condos sold to Russian officials tied to pro-Kremlin biker clubs. One $1.5 million apartment in Trump Palace was transferred to a relative of Svyatoslav Mangushev, a former Spetsnaz officer, part of Russia’s elite special forces, who later became associated with Putin’s notorious motorcycle club, a group that has carried out destabilizing operations abroad and has been designated a national security threat in several European countries. According to The Miami Herald, at around the same time, Vladimir Zorin, a senior Russian official, purchased two Sunny Isles condos for a combined $4.5 million between 2012 and 2013, one of which was the same property linked to the Mangushev family. Together, the transactions showed just how far into Trump-branded towers the networks of Russian state and intelligence connected figures had penetrated.

The most notorious deal came not in Sunny Isles but in Palm Beach. As I recounted in a previous post, That’s What Friends Are For, in 2008, fertilizer billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump’s oceanfront estate “Maison de l’Amitié” for $95 million, more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier.

Trump had originally acquired the property at a 2004 bankruptcy auction, even though his longtime friend, Jeffrey Epstein had told him that he very much wanted the property. As The Palm Beach Post reported, Trump outbid Epstein and later crowed about the win—in the process, destroying their friendship. Four years later, when Rybolovlev bought it, the massive infusion of Russian capital rescued Trump at a precarious moment during the 2008 fiscal crisis.

Other figures also appeared in Trump’s orbit. Simon Kukes, a Russian-American oil executive who once ran Yukos, owned property in Trump developments and later donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign. Kukes’s career had long straddled Russian energy and Western finance, placing him squarely among the Kremlin-linked business class that sought legitimacy abroad. His name later surfaced in connection with the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, where Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and other campaign officials met with Russian intermediaries offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

In the wake of the Trump Tower meeting in June, and the weakened Ukraine plank, Russian support came pouring in—in the form of money, strategic advice, and newly forged alliances. Simon Kukes, a Russian-born American citizen who had replaced Putin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky as head of Yukos, gave a total of $283,283 to various Trump entities, including a joint fund-raising committee called Trump Victory, whose beneficiaries included the Trump campaign, the RNC, and several state-level committees.

These purchases followed a familiar pattern, involving all-cash purchases and limited liability companies. In Sunny Isles alone, nearly one-third of all Trump condos were held by LLCs, making it impossible to know how many additional Russian buyers slipped through undetected.

Trump’s properties epitomized a broader vulnerability in American real estate. The U.S. Treasury has repeatedly warned that opaque property deals pose a national security risk, and Trump’s branding empire—fed by a wave of Russian capital flight—turned those risks into direct entanglements.

The result was a network of ties that belie Trump’s denials of Russian connections. A Spetstroi executive tied to intelligence services, a coal magnate praised by Vladimir Putin, a United Russia politician, a former Spetsnaz officer linked to biker gangs, and an oligarch with billions to spare all parked their money in Trump-branded properties.

And this is only a small sample. As then-Representative Adam Schiff(D-CA) warned in 2017, the money flowed one way, out of Russia and into Trump’s world, leaving him financially bound to the Kremlin and its networks long before he entered the White House.

Cast of Characters

Elena Baronoff
Soviet émigré from Uzbekistan and exclusive sales agent for Trump’s Sunny Isles towers, who marketed condos to wealthy Russians until she died in 2015.

Vadim Gataullin
Regional politician from Bashkortostan and member of United Russia, bought multiple Trump Hollywood units through his U.S. company and flipped them for profit.

Simon Kukes
Russian-American oil executive and former Yukos CEO, owned property in Trump developments, and later donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign.Svyatoslav Mangushev
Former Spetsnaz officer turned bureaucrat with ties to Putin’s infamous motorcycle club, whose family received a $1.5 million Trump Palace condo.

Oleg Misevra
Coal magnate from Russia’s Far East, praised publicly by Vladimir Putin, who purchased a $6.8 million penthouse in Trump Hollywood.Alexander Yuzvik
Senior executive at Spetstroi, the state construction firm building facilities for Russia’s FSB and GRU, who bought a $1.3 million condo in Trump Palace.

Dmitry Rybolovlev
Fertilizer billionaire and oligarch, bought Trump’s Palm Beach estate for $95 million in 2008, more than double what Trump paid just four years earlier.lexey Ustaev
Founder of Viking Bank in St. Petersburg, purchased condos in Trump Palace and Trump Royale worth over $6 million.

Pavel Uglanov
Former deputy minister in Saratov, United Russia member, bought a $1.8 million Trump Hollywood condo and later posted photos with Night Wolves leader Alexander Zaldostanov.

Vladimir Zorin
Senior Russian official, purchased two Sunny Isles condos for $4.5 million, including one connected to the Mangushev family.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

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For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

The Ivanka Trump-promoted Trump Ocean Club in Panama(now the JW Marriot Panama) was so crooked it had to be completely rebranded(see Luffing all the way to the Bank). But her venture in Baku, Azerbaijan fared even worse.

It, too, had to be renamed—as the Ritz-Carlton Baku Hotel. Even then, it wasn’t opened until 2022, after several years of inactivity. None of which kept Trump from collecting a few million dollars here and there for licensing rights.

As Adam Davidson reported in The New Yorker, it was Trump’s “worst deal” ever.

So let’s go back to 2011, when a gleaming glass-and-steel skyscraper was being erected on Baku’s Heydar Aliyev Avenue. The Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, as it was known then, was marketed with enormous fanfare as Ivanka Trump’s “signature” project.

Like many Trump-branded projects after his massive failures in Atlantic City, the Baku tower was not financed or developed by Donald Trump. Rather, it was the product of a 2010 licensing and management agreement Trump signed with the Mammadov family, whose patriarch, Transportation Minister Ziya Mammadov, was described in U.S. diplomatic cables as “notoriously corrupt.”

According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Mammadov was a beneficiary of the AzerbaijaniLaundromat, “a money-laundering scheme and slush fund used by Azerbaijani elites to disguise the origin of billions of dollars.”

As the Baku skyscraper neared completion in 2011, Ivanka was on the ground in Baku, touring the site in a hard hat, appearing in promotional videos, and touting its “tremendous location,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was in an underdeveloped part of downtown that, as The New Yorker reported, was filled with dingy shops, hookah bars and low-budget hotels, and was really difficult to get to.

More to the point, the project showcased Trump’s insatiable appetite for doing business with notoriously corrupt partners even when they raised glaring issues about national security.

The signs of fraud were hard to miss, even for the most innumerate. For one thing, Mammadov had a salary of $12,000, but he had somehow managed to become a billionaire. In addition, the Mammadovs had longstanding ties to an Iranian construction firm, Azar Passillo, which U.S. officials believed to be a front for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Oops.

Reports later indicated that IRGC-linked entities handled logistics and subcontracting for the Baku project, raising the possibility that Trump’s licensing fees were entangled with funds from an organization sanctioned as a terrorist entity by the U.S. Treasury. And that wasn’t the worst of it.

The fallout extended beyond Azerbaijan. In March 2017, Senators Sherrod Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Ben Cardin wrote to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and FBI Director James Comey, asking whether the Trump Organization had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) or U.S. sanctions law. Their letter warned that the lack of due diligence “exposed President Trump and his organization to notoriously corrupt Azerbaijani oligarchs, and may also have exposed the Trump Organization to the IRGC.” They urged federal agencies to investigate whether the deal involved “willful blindness”—a legal term for deliberately ignoring criminal activity.

Ivanka’s visibility as promoter for the project only amplified the problems. Marketed as her personal flagship, the Baku project featured promotional materials with photos of Ivanka working alongside Anar Mammadov, Ziya’s son and the head of the development company. As I observed in House of Trump, House of Putin, “One Trump-branded project after another was beset by corruption, lawsuits, and the like.” The Baku tower was no exception—emblematic of Trump’s global model of partnering with kleptocrats, ignoring due diligence, and profiting while others bore the risk.

Alan Garten, the Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, asserted that the company had no responsibility for any violations of the law because Trump had “no equity” in the project and “did not pay any money to anyone.” Yet the broader picture was undeniable: Trump and Ivanka had eagerly partnered with a family accused of embezzling billions, while U.S. diplomats and compliance experts warned that the project provided cover for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to move money and gain legitimacy.

As Trump launched his first successful presidential campaign in 2015, the Baku tower was unfinished and abandoned—at least temporarily. The Trump name was quietly removed.

It finally opened, in 2022, under the Ritz Carlton brand. For Trump and Ivanka, it was another lucrative licensing deal—charges of money laundering, corruption, and threats to national security be damned.

Cast of Characters

Donald Trump
Licensed his name and services, earning millions in fees while disclaiming responsibility for his partners’ corruption.

Ivanka Trump
Oversaw the project as her “signature” development, promoted it in person, and worked closely with Anar Mammadov despite the family’s reputation.

Ziya Mammadov

Azerbaijan’s transport minister, described by U.S. diplomats as “notoriously corrupt,” accused of embezzlement and laundering billions through offshore structures.

Anar Mammadov
Ziya’s son and head of the Trump partner company, known for extravagant spending and his role as Ivanka’s local counterpart.

Elton Mammadov
Ziya’s brother, then a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, also tied to the development company.

Azarpassillo / IRGC Front
Iranian construction company believed to be a Revolutionary Guard proxy, embedded in the project’s supply chain, raising sanctions and terrorism-finance concerns.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

When the sail-shaped Trump Ocean Club first took its place in Panama City’s skyline, the building(later renamed the Trump International Hotel and Tower Panama and, still later, renamed again the JW Marriott Panama) was presented as the last word in international luxury. But by the time it opened in 2011 as the Trump Organization’s first overseas hotel, the cognoscenti realized it had become something entirely different. Instead of functioning as a glamorous oasis for the rich and powerful, it had become a high-speed laundromat that washed enormous amounts of tainted capital. At the heart of the operation was a sales team that expertly courted wealthy foreigners—many of whom were Russian or Soviet émigrés—and leveraged the Trump brand to command inflated prices and launder money.

Like most of the projects he started after his crippling bankruptcies in Atlantic City, the Panama tower was not built by or financed by Donald Trump. After all, most banks wouldn’t touch him. Moreover, Trump had become party to a scheme by which he licensed his name and provided management services so that he could shift all the risk that went along with financing and development to local partners while he benefitted from a lucrative payday. Better yet, the arrangement continued to generate millions in management fees and royalties for Trump that amounted to nearly $14 million, even though the project itself faltered and buyers were left exposed

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

Trump fostered similar relationships all over the world. In 2003, Trump had whetted Latin American interest in the Trump brand by staging the Miss Universe pageant in Panama City, Panama. Three years later, he struck a deal in Panama to develop the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower, a sail-shaped seventy-story waterfront complex that included residential apartments and a casino. According to an investigation by Global Witness, an anticorruption watchdog, Trump was entitled to a licensing fee, 1 percent of any financing he secured, and a cut of every unit sold—all of which would add up to more than $75 million. Many of the problems behind the project led to a man named Alexandre Ventura Nogueira, the tower’s primary broker. According to a report by Reuters, Nogueira, who, with his partners, sold more than half the apartments in the project, marketed the condos largely to Russians because, a colleague said, “Russians like to show off. For them, Trump was the Bentley” of real estate brands.

According to conversations secretly recorded by a former business partner, in 2013 Ventura Nogueira said he had laundered tens of millions of dollars through real estate. “More important than the money from real estate was being able to launder the drug money—there were much larger amounts involved,” he said in the recording. “When I was in Panama I was regularly laundering money for more than a dozen companies.”

Nogueira told Reuters that he became the leading broker for the project thanks in part to the support of Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who appeared in a promotional video with him. The Trump Organization went into overdrive with the new model. Why not? Since Trump did none of the financing and almost none of the development, its risks were minimal and the upside was high. The Trump Organization’s role in the Panama project “was at all times limited to licensing its brand and providing management services,” said Alan Garten, the company’s chief legal officer. “As the company was not the owner or developer, it had no involvement in the sale of any units at the property . . . No one at the Trump Organization, including the Trump family, has any recollection of ever meeting or speaking with this individual [Nogueira].”

Garten’s assertions notwithstanding, Nogueira was at the center of sales for the project. A Brazilian who won his position after meetings with Ivanka Trump, Nogueira reportedly treated the project as “Ivanka’s baby,” and sold between 350 and 400 units. He even celebrated his success at Mar-a-Lago in 2007, where guests tied to the project mingled with the Trump family and where a promotional pitch boasted that the tower was selling “like hot cakes.”

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Nogueira admitted on camera and on tape that “nobody ever asked” who his customers were or where their money came from, noting that neither banks, developers, nor the Trump side ever showed interest in the source of funds. In separate recorded conversations authenticated by people who knew him, he bragged about laundering “tens of millions of dollars” through contacts in Miami and the Bahamas, while still insisting he didn’t “knowingly” channel dirty money through the Trump Tower itself.

According to an investigation by Global Witness, among Nogueira’s customers and partners were alleged Colombian money launderer David Murcia Guzmán, who wired $1 million towards his condo purchases; early investor Louis Pargiolas, later convicted in a U.S. cocaine-import conspiracy; Belarus-born Alexander Altshoul and his relative Arkady Vodovozov, the latter of whom had been convicted by Israeli authorities of kidnapping and death threats; Canadian émigré Stanislau Kavalenka, who faced pimping and kidnapping charges that were later dropped; and Igor Anopolskiy, was eventually sentenced on charges of forgery and people smuggling in Ukraine.

The pipeline from Moscow and the post-Soviet space was cultivated deliberately. Trump’s partners made repeated trips to Russia, hired Russian-speaking brokers, and pitched the brand as a kind of luxury premium—“for them, Trump was the Bentley,” one participant recalled. The sales structure was designed for opacity: in 2006–2007 alone, at least 131 Panama holding companies with variations of “Trump” and “Ocean” in their names were registered to warehouse pre-sale agreements. Bearer shares, bulk contracts, and corporate shells made it nearly impossible to trace beneficial owners, while airport pickups in a white Cadillac emblazoned with a Trump logo offered arriving foreign investors a frictionless buying experience where documentation, not due diligence, was the priority.

Legal and compliance experts later said the red flags should have been unmistakable. According to the Reuters report, former Manhattan assistant District Attorney and JPMorgan anti-corruption head Arthur Middlemiss warned that any U.S. counterparty doing business in a high-risk jurisdiction like Panama risked “turning a blind eye” under U.S. law by failing to vet clients, while former Treasury enforcement undersecretary Jimmy Gurule emphasized that sound ethics alone should have barred working with people linked to criminality. Yet at the time, no laws required developers or brand licensors like Trump to conduct due diligence on unit purchasers. The Trump Organization has consistently maintained that its role was “limited” to branding and management, with no control over unit sales or broker retention, and, as always, had no recollection of substantive dealings with Nogueira.

Behind the glossy marketing lay the ugly reality of kleptocratic finance. Panama’s real estate market, described by prosecutors as filled with towers designed to “legalize your money,” provided the perfect venue for anonymous corporations to park illicit cash, flip contracts, and cycle proceeds into banks. The Trump Ocean Club became a magnet for organized crime, with Russians and other foreign buyers leading the way even though many of them never intended to live in their units. Journalist who visited the development found darkened apartments, empty restaurants and deserted hallways— a physical reminder that the building was less a residence than a money-laundering machine

So, ultimately, the Trump Ocean Club collapsed under its own weight. In 2009, Nogueira was arrested on unrelated charges of fraud and forgery, released on $1.4 million bail, and fled while facing multiple criminal cases. Investors later alleged that he had double- and triple-sold units, while the global financial crisis wiped out speculative demand. The developer, Newland, defaulted on its bond payments, leaving investors and bondholders to absorb losses after restructuring. Yet Trump still walked away with between $30 million and $50 million, according to court records from the 2013 bankruptcy, thanks to a licensing model that secured his revenue.

In a country long defined by corruption and money laundering, the deal was bound to unfold this way. Long a haven for money laundering, Panama sought to rehabilitate its image with global prestige projects such as hosting Miss Universe in 2003 and unveiling the Trump Ocean Club in 2011. Yet its former president, Ricardo Martinelli, was later arrested on an extradition request tied to corruption, and watchdogs repeatedly warned that without more transparency regarding beneficial owner and without serious screening regarding the source of funds, luxury real estate would remain a laundromat for drug cartels, mobbed-up intermediaries, and post-Soviet elites who needed a place to park their stolen gains.

The tower’s troubles did not end with its construction or even its bankruptcy. According to The Guardian, in 2018, the Trump Organization was forcibly ousted from management of the Panama property after a standoff with its new owners, who accused Trump’s team of mismanagement and obstructing the handover.

For all the mirrored glass and promises of luxury, the Trump Ocean Club was never really about condos but about moving money, more often than not, dirty money, and once again, Donald Trump just couldn’t get enough Mafia money. It was a pattern that he repeated throughout his career.

Cast of Characters

Donald Trump

Licensed his name to the Panama tower, stood to make over $70 million without investing a cent, and walked away with tens of millions even as investors and buyers lost out.

Ivanka Trump

Oversaw the project, promoted it as her “baby,” appeared in sales videos, and cultivated relationships with brokers like Nogueira.

Alexandre Ventura Nogueira

Brazilian salesman who sold up to half the units, later admitted to laundering money, fled Panama after fraud charges, and became the face of the scandal.

David Murcia Guzmán

Colombian narco-operator who wired $1 million to buy multiple units, later convicted in the U.S. for laundering cartel money.

Louis Pargiolas

Early investor, later pleaded guilty in Miami to conspiring to import cocaine.

Alexander Altshoul & Arkady Vodovozov

Belarusian-Canadian investor and his cousin; Vodovozov was convicted of kidnap and violent threats in Israel.

Igor Anopolskiy

A Ukrainian investor in the Panama development, Anopolskiy received a suspended sentence for people smuggling and forgery.

Stanislau Kavalenka

Belarusian-Canadian athlete turned investor, accused of pimping and kidnapping in Canada, charges later dropped when witnesses vanished.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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In April 2012, when Donald Trump and Russian-Canadian developer Alexander Shnaider unveiled the gleaming 65-story Trump International Hotel & Tower in Toronto, the grand opening was presented as a crowning moment in Trump’s foray into a new business model. As I described it in a previous post, he had become the Colonel Sanders of luxury condos.

By that I mean that the glamorous ribbon-cutting ceremony concealed the fact that, as I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin, it was “propped up by opaque financial pipelines from Moscow to Vienna and entangled in post-Soviet money networks.”

By this time, Trump, who was billions of dollars in debt and was desperately working his way out of multiple bankruptcies, had effectively ceased being a real estate developer and had just begun licensing his name in exchange for an equity stake and lucrative fees. In so doing, Trump was relying on developers who were assets of Russian intelligence and on oligarchs who accrued great wealth after the Soviet Union collapsed and was transformed into a Mafia state.

In the case of Toronto, the glossy brochures and Ivanka Trump’s assertion that the building was “virtually sold out” concealed the fact that, money-wise, the tower was already collapsing under dubious financing, inflated promises, and lawsuits that ultimately exposed the entire development as what Canadian courts later described as an “investment scheme.”

In the end, as the Toronto Star explained it, every investor in the Toronto project lost money, but Donald Trump made millions anyway.

The financials behind the project were as murky as they were troubling. In 2007, the developers secured a $310 million construction loan from Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB), a Vienna-based bank that U.S. officials had long flagged for its role in the RosUkrEnergo gas venture—a shadowy intermediary widely believed to be controlled by Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash and, behind him, the powerful billionaire Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin, U.S. diplomat Scott Kilner described one Raiffeisen affiliate as “a front to provide legitimacy to the gas company [Mogilevich] controls, RosUkrEnergo.” And that meant that most of the financing of Trump Toronto likely came from the Mogilevich–Firtash pipeline.

In addition, at around the same time, Russia’s state development bank Vnesheconombank (VEB)—chaired by Vladimir Putin himself—financed Alexander Shnaider’s $850 million sale of the Ukrainian steel plant Zaporizhstal. The Wall Street Journal later reported that approximately $15 million of the proceeds were directly invested in the Trump Toronto project.

Shnaider’s lawyer said that he could not confirm whether VEB money specifically entered the tower. But the deal did go through, and Trump did collect fees.

The cast of characters surrounding the Toronto project underscored just how deeply enmeshed Trump’s phoenix-like rebirth from bankruptcy was rooted in the post-Soviet networks that transformed the new born Russian Federation into a Mafia state. Shnaider, though raised in Canada, was born in Leningrad and rose to prominence in Russia’s chaotic, Wild West-like Nineties through steel trading and privatizations. His success was likely due, in some measure, to the fact that his father-in-law was Boris Birshtein, a wealthy Swiss-Israeli-Canadian businessman who successfully straddled the murky worlds of post-Soviet business, intelligence, and organized crime. Western intelligence repeatedly flagged Birshtein as a conduit for KGB-linked funds and money tied to the Solntsevskaya crime syndicate with which Mogilevich was associated.

In the 1990s, Swiss prosecutors investigated Shnaider, and by the mid-decade, he had become an executive at Seabeco and was known to have met directly with Mogilevich.

Shnaider’s partners added more to the mix. Val Levitan, a Russian émigré, co-founded Talon International Development and managed the project’s day-to-day operations, handling the marketing and sales of condo units. Another partner, Leib Waldman, was a New York businessman who had been convicted of fraud and fled the U.S. in the 1990s before resurfacing in Canada, only to be extradited in 2006. Together, they marketed Trump Toronto as a can’t-miss investment, offering condo-hotel units with promised returns of 7 to 21 percent annually.

Ivanka Trump’s 2009 claim that the building was “virtually sold out” provided a Trumpian sheen to what was already a catastrophe. Occupancy lagged well behind projections. Revenues collapsed almost immediately. Canadians who had put their retirement savings into the project saw their investments vanish. There were no returns.

Lawsuits soon followed, and Ontario courts sided with the investors, rescinded their contracts, and awarded damages. When the Supreme Court of Canada refused to hear Trump’s appeal in 2017, dozens more investors were cleared to recover losses. As litigation proceeded, the truth about Toronto’s Trump Tower was finally laid bare: Donald Trump had no equity in the project whatsoever.

And that’s precisely what provided the Trump Organization with its line of defense. Donald Trump was not the owner, developer, or seller. He was merely the licensor of the name and manager of the property. Shnaider’s lawyer reinforced the point, telling Business Insider, “Trump was never a partner. He never had an equity interest. We licensed his name, and there was a contract for him to manage the hotel.”

All of which was technically accurate, but profoundly misleading. Trump profited handsomely from licensing and management fees. He stood alongside Shnaider at the launch to confer legitimacy on the project. And he allowed Ivanka to hype sales figures. When the project collapsed into receivership in 2016, Trump walked away unscathed, and by 2017, his name was stripped from the tower. It is now known as the St. Regis Toronto, and is owned by Marriott’s St. Regis Hotels and Resorts.

Nor was Trump's Toronto an isolated debacle. It was a pattern that was repeated when the Trump name was removed from towers in Vancouver, Canada; Chicago, Illinois; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Panama, and Baku, Azerbaijan(where the project was never completed).

Time and again, Trump partnered with opaque developers enmeshed in corrupt, authoritarian, and Mafia-linked networks. He pocketed lucrative fees while making inflated sales claims, only to disown responsibility once the projects collapsed. What set Toronto apart is the clarity of the trail it left behind: direct ties to Kremlin-connected state banks, post-Soviet oligarch pipelines, mafia conduits, and shadowy offshore structures—all converging in a Trump-branded skyscraper in the heart of Canada.

In the end, Trump Toronto was not a story of luxury real estate at all. It was another look into Trump’s business model—risk nothing, license the name, attract shady capital, reap millions, and leave investors to absorb the losses. It provided yet another window into the convergence of Trump’s business interests with the Russian Mafia and Kremlin power structures.

And it explained how and why they own him.

Cast of Characters

Boris Birshtein
Alexander Shnaider’s father-in-law and mentor. Birshtein led the Panama-registered Seabeco Group, which Western intelligence linked to both the KGB and the Russian Mafia. By the mid-1990s, he was known to have met with Semion Mogilevich, the so-called “Brainy Don,” who was considered a wizard at money laundering.

Dmitry Firtash
Ukrainian oligarch, close associate of Mogilevich, and key figure behind RosUkrEnergo. Firtash was indicted in the U.S. on bribery charges and lives in Vienna, fighting extradition.

Val Levitan
Russian émigré and co-founder of Talon International Development. Managed day-to-day operations of Trump Toronto, including marketing and sales of condo-hotel units.

Semion Mogilevich
The Russian mob boss regarded by the FBI as one of the world’s most dangerous criminals, Mogilevich, controlled RosUkrEnergo, the gas intermediary backed by Raiffeisen affiliates. Mogilevich appears to have been behind funding Trump Toronto via the money from Dmitry Firtash’s gas pipeline and the Raiffeisen financing.

Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB)
A Vienna-based bank that provided a $310 million construction loan for Trump Toronto. U.S. officials repeatedly flagged Raiffeisen for its role in laundering money through RosUkrEnergo, the intermediary controlled by Firtash and Mogilevich.

Alexander Shnaider
The Russian-born Canadian real estate developer behind the Toronto tower, Shnaider, was the son-in-law of Seabeco’s Boris Birshtein, who became a billionaire steel trader after the fall of the Soviet Union. His financing deals drew in Kremlin-linked banks, including Raiffeisen and VEB.

Leib Waldman
An American businessman and fugitive fraudster who fled U.S. authorities in the 1990s. Resurfaced in Canada as an early partner in the project before being extradited in 2006.

Vnesheconombank (VEB)
Russia’s state development bank, chaired at the time by Vladimir Putin. VEB financed Shnaider’s $850 million sale of the Ukrainian steel plant Zaporizhstal, about $15 million of which was reported to have flowed into Trump Toronto.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

In 2008, just as the final touches were placed on the gleaming Trump SoHo tower in Lower Manhattan, Donald Trump appeared to be celebrating yet another milestone in the ongoing narrative behind his carefully cultivated brand. This time it was the ascent of a $450 million skyscraper rising above New York with his name emblazoned in gold. But the real story behind this “work of art,” as Trump described it to the millions of viewers of his nationally televised show, The Apprentice, was far murkier and more complex than he let on: The project’s conception, financing, and sales channels were inextricably tied up with post-Soviet oligarchs, Kremlin-connected financiers, and organized crime figures. As I showed in House of Trump, House of Putin, wealthy emigrés from the former Soviet Union had become accustomed to laundering their riches through Trump real estate. Trump SoHo was one of the crown jewels of that enterprise—luxurious on the outside, rotten at the core.

Trump SoHo was spearheaded by Bayrock Group and the Sapir Organization, two companies whose principals, Tevfik Arif and Tamir Sapir, respectively, were themselves part of the chaotic, often lawless, oligarchic explosion that followed the collapse of the USSR as it was transformed from Soviet style Communism into a Mafia state. In working with them, Trump effectively ceased being a real estate developer and instead entered the world of franchising by licensing his name in exchange for an equity stake and lucrative fees.

That said, Trump’s role was anything but passive. He appeared in promotional videos, worked the press, and lent his brand’s legitimacy to a project conceived and driven by men whose careers were forged in environments where politics, organized crime, and business were indistinguishable.

Tevfik Arif, a longtime bureaucrat in the Soviet Ministry of Commerce and Trade — an agency whose hotel and tourism divisions were closely monitored and sometimes staffed by KGB officers — spent 17 years rising to deputy director before leaving in the early 1990s to capitalize on post-Soviet privatization, building a metals-trading empire across Kazakhstan and Turkey. His inner circle included Felix Sater, the Bayrock dealmaker whose father was reportedly connected to Semion Mogilevich, the powerful Russian mafia boss who earned a position on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Quite apart from his father, Sater himself had been convicted twice, once in a barroom brawl, and once in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Colombo crime families.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin, that in itself posed a serious quandary for Bayrock, which was trying to raise $1 billion, because “Sater was a twice-convicted felon; no banks would lend to Bayrock if they knew about Sater’s convictions.”

Bayrock’s partner, the Sapir Organization, was led by Tamir Sapir, a Georgian émigré who had made his fortune importing Soviet oil and electronics into the United States during the Cold War through labyrinthine offshore structures. Sapir’s network reached deep into Moscow’s political elite, with longstanding ties to Kremlin insiders. His son Alex became the operational face of the company during the Trump SoHo project. Both the Sapir and Arif families exemplified the new breed of post-Soviet oligarchs—men whose wealth was built on crony capitalism, state capture, and intelligence links, and who found in Trump a perfect partner willing to look the other way.

The core sales strategy of the Trump SoHo was to target wealthy clients from Russia and Central Asia, often with the aide of Russian-speaking brokers based in Trump Tower. Because the new building was designated as "non-residential," all purchases required cash—and that meant no mortgages. Many units were sold to shell companies or foreign buyers, particularly from Russia and Kazakhstan, obscuring true ownership. Internal communications later revealed that sales figures were inflated—casting the building as more successful than it was in reality.

This deceit formed the basis of a lawsuit by Bayrock’s former finance director, Jody Kriss, who portrayed Trump SoHo as a “monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.” Documents and emails unearthed in that litigation indicate that the project served as a vehicle for laundering illicit funds. (Bayrock settled the lawsuit out-of-court in 2018. Terms of the settlement were not revealed.)

The criminal taint surrounding Trump SoHo intensified in 2010 when Turkish authorities arrested Arif on suspicion of running an underage prostitution ring aboard a luxury yacht off the Turkish coast. The vessel, reportedly leased by a Kazakh oligarch, was staffed with models flown in from Russia and Eastern Europe, and its guest list included high-ranking Russian officials. Arif denied the allegations and was later acquitted.

Meanwhile, Sater’s work extended far beyond SoHo. In later years, he emerged as a central figure in repeated attempts to develop Trump Tower Moscow, invoking his Kremlin contacts and, in one now-infamous email to Michael Cohen, promising, “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”

Grandiose as Sater’s words may have seemed, they reflected years of relationship-building with Russian officials, relationships that had been cultivated in part through deals like Trump SoHo.

Meanwhile, the building also became a repository for capital from some of the most notorious kleptocrats in the former Soviet Union. As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin, “(Viktor) Khrapunov(former mayor of Almaty, the biggest city Kazakhstan) and Mukhtar Ablyazov(a wealthy Kazakh businessman)… have been accused of embezzling about $10 billion… and laundering it through shell companies… particularly in the United States.”

In the case of Trump SoHo, lawyers alleged that the Khrapunov network used entities named Soho 3310, Soho 3311, and Soho 3203—corresponding to specific units in the building—to launder their assets. The vendors of these apartments included the Bayrock Group, Sapir LLC, and Trump himself as the third co-owner.

By 2014, more than two-thirds of Trump SoHo’s condos remained unsold. Facing foreclosure and mired in lawsuits, the developers agreed to settle a suit brought by buyers who had been misled about sales numbers, returning 90 percent of their deposits. According to The New York Times, other cases brought fresh allegations of laundering, including charges from the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, that former mayor Viktor Khrapunov and his family had conspired to loot hundreds of millions of dollars in public assets and funnel them into Trump SoHo through a “complex web of bank accounts and shell companies.”

Even as Trump SoHo’s fortunes deteriorated with sales lagging, lawsuits piling up, and a foreclosure looming, the tower's allure among Russian elites endured. In November 2013, Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, principals in the Sapir Organization, traveled to Moscow to join Donald Trump in discussions with oligarch Aras Agalarov, exploring plans to build a Trump SoHo–style property there. As Trump told The Real Deal, a weekly publication for the real estate industry, “The Russian market is attracted to me. I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”

More than just a failed luxury high-rise, Trump SoHo was a hub for both laundering money and cultivating highly questionable relationships that showed how Trump-branded real estate could serve as a vehicle for laundering illicit capital while forging lasting ties between Trump and the post-Soviet elite. The deal followed a pattern Trump would repeat for decades: license his name, hide true ownership behind shell companies, seek foreign money from opaque sources, and deny responsibility when it collapsed. By the time Trump entered politics, many of the key Trump SoHo players were still in his orbit, ready to shift from real estate to political influence.

In the end, Trump SoHo offers perhaps the clearest early blueprint for understanding the convergence of Trump’s business model, Russian organized crime, and Kremlin-aligned capital.

Cast of Characters:

Donald Trump
Licensed his name to Trump SoHo in exchange for an equity stake and fees, personally promoting the project despite its deep ties to post-Soviet oligarchs, Kremlin-connected figures, and convicted criminals.

Tevfik Arif
Kazakh-born former Soviet Commerce Ministry official and founder of Bayrock Group. Made his fortune in metals trading during the chaotic post-USSR privatization period. Arrested in Turkey in 2010 on suspicion of running an underage prostitution ring aboard a luxury yacht frequented by Russian officials—later acquitted.

Felix Sater
Bayrock’s dealmaker and Arif’s right-hand man. Convicted in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Colombo crime families. Became an FBI informant while embedding himself in Trump’s business, structuring Trump SoHo’s financing, and later spearheading Trump Tower Moscow proposals.

Tamir Sapir
Georgian émigré who built a fortune importing Soviet oil and electronics to the U.S. via offshore structures. Maintained deep ties to Moscow’s political elite and partnered with Bayrock on Trump SoHo.

Alex Sapir
Son of Tamir Sapir and operational head of the Sapir Organization during Trump SoHo. Traveled to Moscow in 2013 with Trump and Rotem Rosen to discuss replicating the project with oligarch Aras Agalarov.

Viktor Khrapunov
Former mayor of Almaty, Kazakhstan, accused—along with his family—of embezzling hundreds of millions in public assets and laundering the money through shell companies tied to Trump SoHo units.

Mukhtar Ablyazov
Former Kazakh banker accused of embezzling approximately $10 billion and laundering it worldwide, including via Trump SoHo-related shell companies.

Aras Agalarov
Kremlin-connected Russian oligarch who hosted the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow with Trump. Explored building a Trump SoHo–style project in Moscow with Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen.

Rotem Rosen
Israeli-born real estate executive and close associate of Alex Sapir. Involved in Trump SoHo’s development and the 2013 Moscow meetings with Agalarov and Trump.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Even when you think you know everything about Trump’s ties to Russia, new ones turn up in some of the most unusual places—this one in the mixed martial arts, as reported in articles by Politico and the Washington Spectator

This one took place in the summer of 2008 when Trump held a press conference inside Trump Tower, where he unveiled a new venture: Affliction Entertainment, an MMA promotion fronted by Russia’s most celebrated fighter, Fedor Emilianenko. Trump praised the heavyweight champion, marveling that his specialty was “inflicting death on people.” As part of the deal, Trump announced plans for a reality television series titled Fighting Fedor, a 15-episode spectacle to be filmed in St. Petersburg, where contestants would battle for a shot against the Russian legend. Trump promised it would be “spectacular,” insisting he would personally attend the filming in Russia.

This was not just another sports spectacular, however. The project carried unmistakable geopolitical undertones. Fedor was not simply a fighter; he was a Russian national hero, a close ally of Vladimir Putin, and a public face of Kremlin-backed sports nationalism. Years later, he joined Putin’s presidential sports council, campaigned for Putin’s re-election, and supported Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, a precursor to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. His reputation in Russia was such that few men had closer symbolic ties to the Russian president. In addition, Trump’s new partner in the venture, Vadim Finkelchtein, was an influential promoter who ran St. Petersburg’s premier MMA organization and boasted the kind of political connections that ensured state-run television broadcasts for his events. Through Affliction, Trump was positioning himself inside a sporting world steeped in Kremlin influence.

The business side of Affliction was as chaotic as its ambitions were grand. Trump lent his name and image to the fledgling promotion while his long-time fixer, Michael Cohen, took a hands-on role as chief operating officer. Cohen managed operations, brokered deals, and—according to accounts from those involved—was the driving force behind persuading Trump to stake his brand on an MMA league dominated by Russian interests. Donald Trump, Jr. publicly boasted that the family was prepared to invest heavily if necessary. For a brief moment, it seemed plausible that Trump would extend his entertainment empire into a Russian-dominated fight promotion.

So in the summer of 2008. Emelianenko headlined two lavish spectacles that were accompanied by live rock music and all sort of pyrotechnics: Affliction’s Banned and Day of Reckoning. But the events only drew modest audiences, costs soared, and plans for a third pay-per-view collapsed under poor ticket sales.

By late 2009, Affliction folded entirely, having lost millions of dollars. A planned Moscow visit for Trump and the Fighting Fedor reality show never materialized. Ultimately, Fedor’s camp sued the promotion for breach of contract, marking a bitter end to the ill-fated partnership.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Vadim Finkelchtein—the promoter who partnered with Trump’s MMA venture—had long faced allegations in the Russian media of having ties to the Russian Mafia.

Finkelchtein dismissed the charges as “childish,” insisting that government officials would never attend his events if such links existed. While no hard evidence emerged proving organized crime or intelligence services directly engineered the project, the optics were striking: Trump was yet again entangled with powerful Russian actors operating in a shadowy environment where politics, business, and organized crime overlapped.

A decade later, when FBI agents questioned Emelianenko in Chicago during inquiries into Trump’s Russia ties, the failed 2008 MMA scheme resurfaced as yet another curious footnote in Trump’s long, uneasy dance with Kremlin-connected figures. In hindsight, the MMA fiasco was just another Trump stunt—loud, gaudy, and doomed. But it revealed something deeper: Trump’s instinctive pull toward Kremlin-linked and mob-connected shadowy figures.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Back in 2016, in a little-noticed interview with ABC News, Belarusian-American businessman Sergei Millian claimed that Donald Trump’s business ties to Russian investors were worth “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Millian, about whom I wrote in a previous post for the Trump Russia Timeline post(#20 Trump Markets His Brand in Moscow (2007), is a shadowy figure who has hovered around the Trump-Russia story for years. He met Donald Trump in 2007 at the Moscow Millionaire’s Fair.

In his ABC interview, Millian described a 2008 meeting with Trump and Michael Cohen that, if true, would provide even more evidence connecting Trump’s real estate empire to the massive inflow of Russian capital:

“Trump’s team, they realized that we have lots of connection with Russian investors. And they noticed that we bring a lot of investors from Russia. And they needed my assistance, yes, to sell properties and sell some of the assets to Russian investors.”

At the time, Trump had all but stopped developing luxury high-rises, and instead licensed his name to real estate groups such as Bayrock who developed the buildings as part of their “Trump Tower” franchise and allowed Trump to rake in a sizable share of the profits.

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These deals were extraordinarily attractive to Trump, who had already had multiple bankruptcies, in that they provided a steady stream of cash with little personal risk. As I reported in The Franchise, for Bayrock, the deals were equally attractive in that Trump was giving them something priceless— the most marketable brand imaginable for selling luxury high-rises.

And all this came at a time when wealthy Russians were desperately trying to launder hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital from Russia’s corrupt and volatile Mafia and find a safe haven in the West.

Millian's assertion that Russian buyers were funneled into Trump properties further corroborates my reports in The New Republic, in House of Trump, House of Putin and my Trump Russia Timeline that Trump’s real estate had become a laundromat for the billions in flight capital pouring out of Russia,

The two key predicates that suggest a transaction involves money laundering are, first, that the deal that is an all-cash transaction and, second, that the properties are being bought by anonymous corporate entities such as limited liability corporations.

By 2008, Russian and post-Soviet oligarchs had begun using Western real estate, especially in cities like Miami, New York, and London, as a parking lot for offshore cash. At the same time, the Trump Organization had become notorious for turning a blind eye to buyers who came in to make all-cash purchases that may have come from a suspicious provenance.

Millian, the president of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce in the United States and the owner of a translation service, once described himself as the Trump Organization’s “exclusive broker” helping Russians buy apartments in Trump buildings.

Millian is also reportedly one of the key sources whose claims about Russian attempts to cultivate Trump were cited in the set of memos compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. The Washington Post has reported that Millian told associates he was in touch with George Papadopolous, the Trump campaign’s foreign policy adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians. Papadopolous and Millian were Facebook friends, the Post noted.

Sergei Millian himself is no stranger to controversy. He is a U.S. citizen born in Belarus and the founder of the shadowy Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, which has no known membership roster and appears to exist largely on paper. Court records show that when Millian first arrived in the U.S., he went by the name Siarhei Kukuts and later Sergei Kukuts. On a 2009 resume for Sergei Kukuts posted online, he described himself as having worked in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an interpreter and translator.

Multiple reports, from The Washington Post and Mother Jones and other publications, suggest that Millian regularly bragged about his close ties to top Russian officials. “Usually if I meet top people in the Russian government, they invite me, say, to the Kremlin for the reception, of course I have a chance to talk to some presidential advisers and some top people,” Millian said.

He also claimed to be a conduit between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. During the 2016 campaign, Millian reportedly told George Papadopoulos that the Russians had compromising material on Hillary Clinton—and he was later cited as a key source in the Steele dossier, though he denies this.

He told ABC News about the Russians’ affinity for working with Trump and pointed to “hundreds of millions of dollars that [Trump] received from interactions with Russian businessmen.”

Millian added that Trump “likes Russia because he likes beautiful Russian ladies — talking to them, of course. And he likes to be able to make lots of money with Russians.”

Despite—or perhaps because of—his murky background, Millian managed to embed himself in Trump’s orbit. His own social media posts and press interviews show him meeting with Trump associates, attending campaign events, and promoting Trump’s brand abroad.

The 2008 Hollywood, Florida meeting that Millian described wasn’t an isolated episode—it was part of a broader pattern. In House of Trump, House of Putin, I documented how Trump properties across the U.S.—from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Florida—became magnets for post-Soviet money, often in the form of all-cash purchases by anonymous shell companies:

‘Trump specifically marketed his Sunny Isles, Florida, apartment units in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other venues designed to attract Russian organized crime money,’ said Kenneth McCallion, a former federal prosecutor and New York attorney who specializes in human rights, money laundering, and civil racketeering cases.

A Reuters investigation did not find any wrongdoing by Trump or his real estate organization. In response to media inquiries, Trump Organization lawyer Alan Garten commented that the firm did not track nationalities of buyers and that the company rarely plays a role in recruiting buyers.

However, the dubious character of Trump’s clientele was so obvious that the Financial Times suggested that the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, headed by Sergei Millian, who claimed to be Trump’s exclusive broker for Trump properties in Russia and the former Soviet Union, was the kind of Russian operation that harkened back to Cold War–style espionage.

Konstantin Borovoi, who was president of Russia’s first commodities exchange, agrees that Millian’s chamber of commerce is reminiscent of the kind of practices one saw from the secret services at the height of the Cold War. “These institutions have been revived and developed,” he said. “The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network . . . Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”

In Moscow, of course, since the demise of the Soviet Union, the KGB had been replaced by the FSB, but that did not mean its vaunted tradecraft had been lost or in any way diminished. To the contrary, the Kremlin was now being run by a career KGB operative—in fact, one whose life’s goal was to revive Russia’s shattered dreams of empire. To that end, at almost every turn there is evidence of the Russians throwing the KGB textbook at Trump, trying to entangle him and compromise him in as many ways as possible. And in Trump, the Russians seemed to have found the perfect mark.

In 2016, Trump told reporters, “I have nothing to do with Russia.” But figures like Millian, Cohen, Felix Sater, and many others paint a different picture.

Trump didn’t just “have something to do” with Russia—his survival depended on it.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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Donald Trump’s first known connection to the Russian Mafia took place when he sold five condos to David Bogatin for $6 million in an all cash deal, with Trump personally attending the transaction in 1984, just a year after Trump Tower opened its doors(see Trump’s Russian Laundromat). A Soviet émigré with direct ties to the Russian Mafia, Bogatin was a known associate of Semion Mogilevich, the billionaire “Brainy Don” who was a wizard at money laundering and made the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

That sale was the beginning of a longterm relationship that became increasingly important to Trump in the 1990s and early 2000s, as Trump’s access to U.S. banks dried up following multiple bankruptcies. Instead of traditional banking relationship, Trump became increasingly reliant on capital from post-Soviet oligarchs and shell companies. Thanks to lax regulations on the real estate industry, from Manhattan to Florida, Trump-branded buildings—often sold anonymously in all-cash transactions— became ideal vehicles for laundering enormous amounts of money.

By 2009, the pattern had been well established and another shadowy transaction took place inside Trump Tower—this one involving two figures connected to Russian organized crime. One of them was Vadim Trincher, a high-stakes gambler later convicted of running an international gambling and money laundering ring, who purchased a $5 million condo in Trump Tower from Russian oligarch Oleg Boyko.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

In May 2009, Boyko sold his Trump Tower apartment to Vadim Trincher, a high-sakes poker player whois a dual citizen of Israel and the US, for $5 million. According to an FBI analysis of the purchase, “the funds used to buy the apartment moved through shell companies Trincher maintained in Cypus….[A]ccording ot The Smoking Gun, the apartment, with its twenty-four karat gold faucets, alabaster walls crafted by Portuguese artisans, and $350,000 bathroom floor made of amethyst imported from Tanzania,had become one of the most ostentatious apartments in what was already one of the most ostentatious buildings in America. (Which did not mean it was terrifically livable.

The apartment soon became the command center of Trincher’s sprawling criminal enterprise, which stretched from New York to Moscow and ultimately involved more than 30 co-conspirators in what federal prosecutors described as a transnational racketeering conspiracy. In addition to the Russian mobsters, one of the defendants was Molly Bloom, the notorious Hollywood “poker madam” who. became known for hosting games for celebrity poker players such as DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, which provided the storyline for the movie, Molly’s Game.

Boyko, the seller, was no ordinary property owner. He had bought the Trump Tower unit in 1994, just as waves of post-Soviet capital were pouring into Western real estate markets. A Kremlin-linked billionaire known for funneling money through opaque offshore networks, Boyko has long been suspected of working with or for Russia’s FSB intelligence service. His name later surfaced in the Panama Papers, as well as in Ukrainian sanctions lists for his financial support of Kremlin-linked enterprises.

With total lifetime poker winnings of $1,230,262, Trincher, meanwhile, had spent years cultivating a reputation in elite poker circles, hosting high-stakes underground games for oligarchs, celebrities, and Wall Street financiers. But behind the glamour, he was laundering tens of millions of dollars through a complex web of shell companies, financial fronts, and real estate deals—much of it flowing directly through Trump Tower.

The FBI later described Trincher’s operation as part of a broader criminal network overseen by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a Russian mob boss (Vor v Zakone) known as “Taiwanchik.” In 2013, Taiwanchik appeared in the VIP section of the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, an event Trump co-owned and personally attended, even though he was under indictment in the US at the time.

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The investigation into Trincher’s gambling ring also swept up Trump Tower resident and prominent New York art dealer Hillel “Helly” Nahmad, whose apartment and gallery were used to launder proceeds from the illegal gambling empire. In a move that raised eyebrows, Trump pardoned Nahmad in January 2021 during his final hours in office.

Another Trincher associate, Anatoly Golubchik, also convicted in the case, owned property in Trump‘s Sunny Isles Beach in Florida—another Trump-branded property with a reputation as a haven for Russian all-cash buyers, many of them linked to criminal networks.

But Trincher wasn’t just laundering money—he was also insinuating himself into Republican political circles. In 2011, he planned to host a fundraiser for GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich in his Trump Tower apartment. The event was abruptly canceled, not because of Trincher’s criminal ties, but because of a mold infestation in the unit. Russian operatives were buying access to Trump properties and to American politicians. The fact that a Kremlin-linked criminal like Trincher nearly hosted a fundraiser for a GOP presidential candidate shows how deeply Russia had embedded itself in both Trump’s orbit and the Republican Party.

The 2009 Trump Tower sale between Oleg Boyko and Vadim Trincher was not an anomaly—it was a continuation of a pattern that began with David Bogatin in 1984 and ran through a generation of Russian oligarchs, mobsters, and intermediaries. These deals were part of a systemic pipeline—one that helped inject Kremlin-linked money and influence into Trump’s orbit long before he ran for president.

And like so many episodes in Trump’s entanglement with Russia, the surface story—a luxury real estate sale and a high-stakes poker game—was merely a front for something far more corrosive: a laundering operation of cash, power, and access that operated right under the nose of the man who now occupies the Oval Office.

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Cast of Characters:

Vadim Trincher
High-stakes gambler and convicted ringleader of a sprawling transnational gambling and money laundering operation run by the Russian mafia. Ran his criminal enterprise out of a $5 million condo in Trump Tower, located directly above Donald Trump’s penthouse. Attempted to host a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich in 2011.

Oleg Boyko
Russian oligarch who sold the Trump Tower condo to Trincher in 2009. Bought the unit in 1994. Known for his ties to the Kremlin, offshore financial networks, and long-suspected connections to Russian intelligence. Sanctioned by Ukraine for supporting Kremlin-linked enterprises.

Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov
Russian mob boss and fugitive wanted by U.S. authorities. Allegedly oversaw Trincher’s criminal network from abroad. Appeared in the VIP section at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow—an event co-owned and attended by Donald Trump.

Hillel “Helly” Nahmad
Wealthy New York art dealer and Trump Tower resident. Used his apartment and gallery to help launder proceeds from Trincher’s illegal gambling network. Pardoned by Donald Trump in his final hours in office in January 2021.

Anatoly Golubchik
One of Trincher’s top lieutenants. Convicted in the same racketeering case. Owned property in Trump Sunny Isles Beach, another Trump-branded property known for cash sales to Russian buyers.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

In July 2008, as the U.S. economy was teetering on the brink of collapse, Donald Trump, who had already survived six bankruptcies, was enmeshed in his own financial crisis, and moved forward with a plan that he thought would make a killing. Four years earlier, Trump had acquired a lavish Palm Beach estate known as Maison de L’Amitié at a bankruptcy auction for $41 million. Over the next few years, Trump repeatedly boasted about the lavish improvements he had made to L’Amitié, presumably so he could cash out at a much higher price.

But in fact, Trump had only made a few cosmetic changes. “I’d been in the house before, at one of [the previous owner’s] charity parties, and Trump had hardly changed anything—just put on a couple of coats of paint,” gossip columnist Jose Lambiet told The Miami Herald. “Even that — well, he told us the fixtures in one of the bathrooms were gold, but as he walked away, I scratched a faucet with my fingernails and it was just gold-covered paint.”

Lambiet added that had visited the lavish homes of many socialites who had more money than taste, but the Maison de l’Amitie in a class by itself. “It was just terrible-looking, really gaudy,” he said. “Nothing fit together — it was sort of haphazard inside….I thought, he’s never gonna sell this. And he didn’t, the house stayed on the market for a couple of years.

And then along came a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev to take the extravagant estate off Trump’s hands for an astonishing $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid for it.

A fertilizer tycoon with a controversial past, Rybolovlev bought the property through a family trust, never lived in it, and eventually secured permission to tear it down.

But that’s not the whole story. The story began earlier in 2004 when it was Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex criminal and financier who died in his jail cell in 2019, who was committed to buying the Maison de l’Amitié. As I wrote in American Kompromat, Trump’s sudden and surprising purchase of the property played a key role in rupturing Trump’s longterm friendship with Jeffrey Epstein:

“The property, a nearly sixty-two-thousand-square-foot neoclassical palace, had once been owned by Leslie Wexner, the billionaire retailer who was so close to Epstein. Epstein had his heart set on the house, but he planned to make at least one major renovation project once he bought it: He wanted to relocate the swimming pool, and he brought Trump to the property to give him advice on how to do it. But before the sale was finalized, Epstein was horrified to see that Trump, who was still underwater financially from his Atlantic City bankruptcies, outbid him with an offer of more than $41 million for the property. The purchase was financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already holding dubious loans for Trump. Epstein was apoplectic and became even more enraged when Trump soon thereafter put the house up for sale for $125 million. Finally, Trump sold the house to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $96 million in 2008—never having lived there—and Epstein threatened to sue him. The two men never spoke again. And from then on, whenever Epstein’s name was mentioned to Trump, the whole tenor of the conversation instantly changed.”

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On the surface, Rybolovlev’s willingness to pay top dollar might appear to be yet another example of Trump’s putative dealmaking savvy Trump. But the timing, the inflated price, and the identity of the buyer suggest a far murkier story—one that fits into a broader, troubling pattern of Russian capital flowing into Trump’s properties and raises questions that have followed him into his political life.

By 2008, as his Atlantic City casinos were bleeding money and heading toward bankruptcy, Trump was under even more financial pressure thanks to $334 million loan due to Deutsche Bank for his Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago—$40 million of which Trump had personally guaranteed. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came Rybolovlev’s $95 million cash purchase of Maison de l’Amitié—just months before the loan came due. The transaction netted Trump more than $50 million in profit, more than enough to pay Deutsche Bank the amount he personally owed.

So, who is Dmitry Rybolovlev, and why did he pay such an inflated price for a home he would never use? By 2008, Rybolovlev was one of the richest men in Russia, having built his fortune as chairman of Uralkali, a dominant force in the global potash fertilizer market. Like many of the oligarchs who emerged from Russia’s chaotic post-Soviet era, his wealth was shadowed by controversy. In the 1990s, he was jailed on charges of arranging a contract killing of his business partner—charges for which he was later acquitted—but the experience left him wearing a bulletproof vest and eventually relocating his family to Switzerland.

As his wealth soared, he began snapping up assets around the world: an $88 million Manhattan penthouse, a Hawaiian estate previously owned by Will Smith, and an art collection acquired through now-disgraced dealer Yves Bouvier. According to Politico, during a bitter 2008 divorce, Rybolovlev’s wife accused him of hiding billions in assets using offshore trusts—specifically citing the Palm Beach mansion. The Panama Papers later confirmed he had shifted valuable assets, including real estate and art, into opaque shell companies during the dispute.

Rybolovlev’s ascent to extreme wealth was the result of the Mafia state created by Putin, a system where billionaires survived only by staying in the Kremlin’s good graces and carrying out requests by the state. In 2010, he sold his stake in Uralkali to a group of oligarchs seen as having closer ties to the Kremlin. While Rybolovlev is not considered a Putin confidant, his wealth—like that of many Russian billionaires—was contingent on remaining in good standing with the Kremlin and security services. His 2008 purchase of Trump’s Palm Beach estate wasn’t improper, but the opacity surrounding the deal—including the use of a trust, the above-market price, and the fact that the home was never occupied—raised red flags among financial watchdogs and some U.S. investigators.

Senator Ron Wyden(D-OR), who serves on both the Senate Finance and Intelligence Committees, formally requested in 2018 that the Treasury Department release any Suspicious Activity Reports or due diligence materials related to the sale. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team was also said to have scrutinized the deal as part of its broader Russia investigation. The central question was whether this was simply a lucky real estate flip for Trump, or whether it served another purpose—a disguised financial rescue, a covert political favor, or a means of influence.

The 2008 Rybolovlev transaction did not occur in isolation. Around the same period, Trump-branded buildings in Florida’s Sunny Isles Beach and Hollywood, FL, saw a wave of Russian buyers acquiring multimillion-dollar condos, many of them via shell companies. Trump Organization executives openly courted wealthy Russian clients during this period, and Donald Trump Jr. bragged in 2008 that "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets." He added "we see a lot of money pouring in from Russia."

By the time Trump ran for president in 2016, these questions of financial exposure and foreign influence were no longer abstract. His long history of opaque deals with wealthy Russians, particularly those with access to offshore wealth and political influence, became central.

While Rybolovlev has stayed mostly out of U.S. political controversies since the 2008 mansion purchase, the shadow of that $95 million wire transfer has never fully faded.

Trump, for his part, has always dismissed concerns about the transaction. When asked about Rybolovlev, he insisted he had no relationship with the man, had never met him, and didn’t know anything about him. "He just happened to be from Russia," Trump told Politico. “I never met him. He was represented by a broker,” Trump said in the interview. “I heard good things about him in many ways, and about his family.” Trump added that Rybolovlev’s nationality was not relevant to him. “He just happened to be from Russia. He’s a rich guy from Russia.”

But in the end, Rybolovlev’s purchase of L’Amitié sale was more than just a high-priced real estate transaction. It was a pivotal financial moment that may have helped keep Trump afloat at a time of mounting debt and economic uncertainty.

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Cast of Characters

Dmitry Rybolovlev
Russian oligarch and former owner of Uralkali, one of the world’s largest fertilizer producers. Known for extravagant spending and murky offshore dealings, Rybolovlev bought Trump’s mansion through a trust, never moved in, and later demolished it.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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As I wrote earlier, in Trump Russia Timeline post #19, 2004-2006 Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!, Bayrock managing director Felix Sater oversaw several attempts to help Trump realize his dream of building a Trump Tower Moscow, but none of his initiatives reached fruition.

Nevertheless, in 2008, Trump made another stab at it, this time working with Pavel Fuks, a Ukrainian-born businessman who had made a fortune during Moscow’s post-Soviet real estate boom.

Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in 1971, Fuks navigated the Wild West-like chaos of the Nineties well enough to become one of Moscow’s most prominent real estate developers. In a world dominated by murderous mafioso, ruthless oligarchs, and a Kremlin-run mafia state, Fuks’ firm, Mos City Group, thrived, and helped him amass a fortune of $740 million. Other factors in his ascent, according to multiple investigative reports, were his deep ties to Russian organized crime and, according to both U.S. and Ukrainian authorities, his connections to Russian intelligence.

Although Fuks was later ostracized by the Kremlin, when he signed the preliminary contract, he was still very much an insider who was embraced by Moscow’s elite and flush with capital.

Having chased a Moscow deal since the late 1980s (see 1987 The KGB Reels Him In), Trump was not about to give up. He had been introduced to Fuks through Tamir Sapir, the co-owner of Joy-Lud Electronics, a small outfit that sold Trump TV sets for the Hyatt Grand Central when it was developed by Trump, and which was reportedly a KGB front (see 1980 The KGB Sets Its Trap).

Trump began talking with Fuks in 2005 and before long the latter was hosting Donald Jr. and Ivanka in Moscow, and showing them potential sites for what Trump envisioned as a glittering centerpiece of the Russian capital. At the same time, to build up his brand in Russia, Trump registered the “Trump” trademark in Moscow, Sochi, and St. Petersburg, positioning himself to cash in on a market awash in oligarch wealth and state-directed growth.

While all this was going on, Trump was weighing other Moscow proposals, including one put together by Felix Sater. But Trump saw Fuks as the ideal partner to help him break into the Moscow real estate world: well-financed, politically connected, and capable of navigating the opaque world of Russian markets. Fuks already had a solid track record of building skyscrapers in Moscow, and his plan may have been the most concrete proposal that had been put forth. Trump’s children were in Moscow to help put the deal together.

Moreover, the contracts were in motion, and they reflected Trump’s new business model that focused on franchising rather than real estate development: Fuks would handle the financing and construction, while Trump would lend his name and collect a hefty licensing fee, along with a share of future profits.

But negotiations broke down in 2008 when Trump demanded $20 million up front just to license his name. Fuks countered with a $10 million offer, paid in installments, and Trump refused. That it collapsed over a licensing fee is a testament to Trump’s obsession with monetizing his brand at all costs.

So much for the art of the deal!

Even though the deal collapsed, Fuks remained a critical figure both in the post-Soviet business world and in the treacherous criminal underworld consisting of the Russian Mafiya, with its exotic and ritualistic criminal codes, financial crime syndicates, intelligence agents, and Kremlin fixers.

Over time, it became increasingly apparent that Fuks, with his privileged access to top officials and his alleged mastery of money laundering, was not merely a real estate developer. That became more than apparent in 2017 when, according to The New York Times , he hired Rudy Giuliani to lobby on behalf of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where Fuks then resided. All of which later made him a footnote in Giuliani’s shadow diplomacy in Ukraine as one of several oligarchs and intelligence figures caught up in the murky campaign to fabricate dirt on the Bidens during the 2020 election, an operation that led to Trump’s first impeachment, in 2020.

But even after the Trump Tower Moscow deal fell apart, Fuks paid $200,000 to attend Trump’s inauguration—a move that led to a lawsuit against the broker who failed to come up with the promised tickets. That same year, Fuks was banned from entering the United States for reasons that were never made public.

Notwithstanding his privileged status in Moscow, Fuks was later sanctioned by both Russia and Ukraine.

Cast of Characters

Pavel Fuks
Ukrainian-born developer who made his fortune in Moscow’s real estate boom. Once an insider among Kremlin-aligned elites, Fuks entered negotiations with Donald Trump in 2005 to develop a Trump Tower in Moscow—a deal that collapsed in 2008. In 2017, he paid Rudy Giuliani $400,000 for lobbying and separately spent $200,000 to attend Trump’s inauguration. He was assessed by U.S. and Ukrainian authorities as having ties to Russian intelligence and organized crime.

Felix Sater
Russian-American businessman and longtime Trump associate with a criminal past and reported links to U.S. and Russian intelligence. Sater was pursuing a separate Trump Tower Moscow deal during the same period, on a site across the Moskva River from Fuks’s proposal.

Rudy Giuliani
Trump’s personal lawyer and key figure in Trump’s extortion campaign in Ukraine to fabricate dirt on the Bidens. In 2017, he was reportedly hired by Fuks for $300,000 to represent Kharkiv’s interests, though their dealings later would intersect with Giuliani’s murky network of Russian operatives and oligarchs.

Tamir Sapir
Georgian-born immigrant and former Joy-Lud partner. Like Kislin, he rose from poverty to billionaire and was later involved in the Trump SoHo project. Allegedly tied to Russian organized crime, though he denied any such links. He lived in Trump Tower and died in 2014.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

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As I noted in 2004-2006 Moscow! Moscow! Moscow! Felix Sater’s trips to Moscow—with Ivanka reportedly spinning around in Putin’s desk chair in the Kremlin— failed to will Trump Tower Moscow into existence, but that didn’t mean Donald Trump had given up on his efforts to bring his brand to the Russian capital.

In November 2007, Trump returned to Moscow, this time with a new venture that was specifically created for the Russian market: Trump Super Premium Vodka 24k. It was a product that Trump, ever the teetotaler, would not especially enjoy, but it was suitable for the kind of spectacle he relished. In this case, the product was launched at the Millionaire’s Fair, an opulent, over-the-top luxury expo hosted at Crocus Expo, a massive exhibition center just outside the city, built by Kremlin-connected oligarch Aras Agalarov.

Upon his arrival, Trump was flanked by Russian models, golden bottles of vodka, and wall-to-wall branding for Russia’s elite consumer market. The Millionaire’s Fair was a vulgar display of wealth and status that brought out Moscow’s elite to gawk at diamond-encrusted cell phones, superyachts— even purebred Turkmen horses. Trump, ever drawn to glitz and excess, fit seamlessly into the scene. His vodka—its bottles trimmed in 24-karat gold—was served by glamorous models while giant banners bearing his face and the slogan “Success Distilled” loomed above the crowd.

Perhaps the most surreal aspect of the entire affair was the promotional video(above) for Trump Vodka featuring a bizarre mashup of Trump’s face, Vladimir Lenin, a roaring tiger, and a pin-up model, set against a backdrop of gold, with the phrase “Money, Money, Money” emblazoned in Cyrillic script.

For all that, Trump Vodka itself never gained traction. Russian consumers—loyal to domestic brands and wary of gimmicky imports—were not swayed. By 2009, Trump Vodka vanished from shelves, leaving behind little more than press clippings and unsold inventory.

Nevertheless, Trump succeeded in embedding himself among Moscow’s elite and courting future business partners such as Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire who later partnered with Trump in presenting the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Agalarov also later played a shadowy role in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump also had a reunion with Shalva Chigirinsky, a Georgian-born oil and real estate tycoon who first met Trump in 1992 during a visit to Atlantic City with a delegation that included the son of a former high-ranking KGB official. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chigirinsky said he and Trump discussed future development deals.

In addition, Trump met Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American who made enough of an impression that Trump invited him to future events in Florida, and later made Millian his Russian broker for Trump-branded properties in South Florida that had cultivated a Russian clientele.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

[T]he dubious character of Trump’s clientele was so obvious that the Financial Times suggested that the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, headed by Sergei Millian, who claimed to be Trump’s exclusive broker for Trump properties in Russia and the former Soviet Union, was the kind of Russian operation that harkened back to Cold War-Style espionage.

Konstantin Borovoi, who was president of Russia’s first commodities exchange, agreed that Millian’s chamber of commerce was reminiscent of the kind of practices one saw from the secret services at the height of the Cold War. …..”The chamber of commerce institutions are the visible part of the agent network….Russia has spent huge amounts of money on this.”

Several years later, Millian’s name surfaced again, this time as a figure tied to Russia’s interference in America’s 2016 presidential election.

Meanwhile, the trip boosted Trump’s image among Russia’s wealthy not just as a flashy mogul, but as someone with ambitions that stretched beyond vodka—and possibly beyond business altogether.

But Trump’s visit wasn’t just about vodka, and he spent most of the evening exploiting a branding opportunity by presenting himself as a celebrity-businessman whose vulgar self-promotion and theatricality were perfect for the Russian market and for the high-level business contacts he was making.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin, he still wanted to expand his brand into Russia, “and that meant Putin had to be on board.” Later that month, Trump typed a personal letter to the Russian president inviting him to attend. People familiar with the document said it showed how eager Trump was to win over Putin.

According to the Washington Post, Trump had just one other desire on his mind that he wanted to share with the Russian dictator, and he alluded to it at the bottom of his letter with a postscript saying that he looked forward “to seeing ‘beautiful’ women during his trip.”

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

Cast of Characters

Aras Agalarov
Kremlin-connected Azerbaijani-Russian oligarch and real estate developer. Hosted the Millionaire’s Fair at his Crocus Expo center. Later partnered with Trump on the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and played a key role in brokering Kremlin-Trump connections.

Shalva Chigirinsky
Georgian-born oil and real estate magnate. Met Trump at the vodka launch and reportedly discussed joint development projects.

Sergei Millian
Belarusian-American businessman who introduced himself to Trump at the event. Later emerged in investigations surrounding Russian election interference and the Steele dossier.

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House

Will Donald Trump ever get his Trump Tower Moscow?

Discussions about a Moscow version of the original Trump Tower at 721 Fifth Avenue, the crown jewel of Trump’s empire, began more than forty years ago, but they’ve never come to fruition. Now that he is back in office and is negotiating with Russia to end the Ukraine war(theoretically at least), one has to wonder if Vladimir Putin will finally deliver this elusive and long-sought-after prize to Trump in return for selling out Ukraine.

Trump’s obsession with a Moscow tower all started back in the Eighties, as I wrote in 1985-1986 The KGB Sets Its Trap, when the idea was first proposed to him by Yuri Dubinin, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, and his daughter Natalia Dubinina.

At the time, the notion of erecting a gaudy monument to conspicuous consumption next to a citadel of Marxist-Leninism(the Kremlin) seemed like an insanely incongruous and narcissistic fantasy to just about everyone—unless, that is, your last name was Trump and you were highly susceptible to flattery. Or you were a KGB agent trying to lure a new asset into your fold.

After the Russian Federation replaced the fallen Soviet Union, as I wrote in “1996 Sex! Lies! Videotape?” Trump returned to Moscow for financing, for his personal and recreational adventures, and, he hoped, for a Trump Tower in Moscow.

But in the end, nothing came of it.

By the mid-2000s, however, the Soviet Union had been dead for more than a decade. A class of newly wealthy, luxury-deprived consumers had emerged. The Moscow real estate market was booming. Meanwhile, Trump had left behind real estate development for the business of licensing his name to franchised developments financed by Russian oligarchs. The unspoken part of this new equation was that in laundering their ill-gotten lucre through Trump real estate, Putin’s operatives were also bailing out Trump from billions of dollars in debt.

In other words, Donald Trump had become a ward of Putin’s Mafia state.

Bayrock, a real estate development company that was based in Trump Tower, played the principal role in creating this laundromat for Russian émigrés. (For more, see 2000-2010 The Franchise.) And leading the way was Bayrock’s managing director, Felix Sater.

Felix had grown up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where so many Soviet-era émigrés had settled, and, as a teenager, counted among his friends Michael Cohen, who later won notoriety as Trump’s attorney. The dark side of Sater’s resume included alleged ties to the Russian Mafia, the fact that he had served fifteen months for a barroom brawl in which he stabbed another patron in the face with a broken glass, and his role in an illegal pump-and-dump stock scam.

Trump, in public, downplayed his relationship with Sater. But Sater jumped on every opportunity available to ingratiate himself with Trump, and delighted in dashing upstairs in Trump Tower to Trump’s office to apprise him of the latest developments.

As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:

“In 2005, when Trump flew to Colorado to give a motivational speech, he and Melania brought Felix with them. Trump and Sater were interviewed and photographed together in Denver and Loveland, Colorado; Phoenix; Fort Lauderdale; and New York. A former colleague of Sater’s told Politico, “Trump called Felix like every other day to his office. . . . They were definitely in contact always. They spoke on the phone all the time.” And they occasionally dined together at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District called Kiss & Fly, with what New York magazine described as “a quasi-Roman-bathhouse feel” for its “young, rich, and overwhelmingly European” patrons.”

The fact that Sater was a convicted felon didn’t seem to bother Trump—even though any responsible bank would likely refuse to finance any of Bayrock’s projects if they found out that a convict was running the firm. Moreover, concealing Sater’s criminal past from investors was illegal, but Bayrock did it anyway—and got away with it.

Thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, two powerful forces had begun to come together—and Bayrock was perfectly positioned to take advantage of them.

On the one hand, the disintegration of the USSR had opened a fire-hose-like torrent of hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital that began to pour forth from oligarchs, wealthy apparatchiks, and mobsters in Russia and its satellites. On the other hand, Trump’s zeal to sell condos, no questions asked, to shell companies meant that Russians could launder vast sums of money while hiding their personal identities.

As the Financial Times reported, the fact that the US (and the UK) allows anonymous ownership of real estate facilitates the laundering of roughly $300 billion per year in the United States alone.

So, one after another, Bayrock launched Trump-branded projects —some of which were later canceled or never finished—all over the world, from White Plains, New York to Kolkata and Pune, India; from Vancouver to Washington to Jersey City, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Charlotte, Phoenix, New Orleans, Dubai, Rio, Stuttgart, Tel Aviv, Baja, and more.

But Moscow was the brass ring.

In 2004, negotiations resumed, this time with the co-owner of MosCityGroup, Pavel Fuchs, a Russian-Ukrainian oligarch who the FBI considers to be a Russian intelligence asset, according to Kommersant newspaper.

But the deal fell apart because Trump wanted to receive 20 to 25 percent of the projected $1.2 billion investment in the tower—that is, $240 to $300 million—in return for the use of his name, without making any investment whatsoever.

In 2005, Sater pursued a plan to build a Trump Tower on the site of an old pencil factory along the Moscow River. As The New York Times reported, “Letters of intent had been signed and square footage was being analyzed.” But this deal fell apart as well.

And that wasn’t the end of it. Around 2006, Trump’s children jumped in to help out, though not without reservations. Donald Trump Jr, an executive vice-president of the Trump Organization, reportedly said that Moscow was a “scary place” to do business because one had to ask oneself: “Can I actually trust the person I am doing a deal with?”

But that didn’t stop him from making about half a dozen trips to Russia over an eighteen-month period after which, he said, “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

During one trip that year, Sater chaperoned Donald Jr. and Ivanka on a trip to Moscow, where they stayed at the historic Hotel National Moscow and met a number of potential business partners. On one visit, Sater reached out to an old friend, an unnamed Russian billionaire, who arranged a tour of the Kremlin, during which, according to Sater, Ivanka asked if she could sit in Putin’s chair at an antique desk.

“Are you crazy?,” asked one of the guards.

“I said, ‘What is she going to do, steal a pen?’” Sater recalled. “He let us in. She sat behind the desk, spun in the chair twice, and that was that.”

And so it went. Each time Trump tried to develop the Moscow project, he ran into difficulties securing land, getting local permits, and obtaining financing. One disadvantage about building in Moscow had to do with money laundering. Virtually all of Bayrock’s projects in the United States gave its customers an opportunity to launder their money through Trump real estate. But the last place to launder money was Russia.

“If you want money laundering, you want Cyprus or other offshore havens,” said James S. Henry, an investigative economist and lawyer who has written widely about international corruption and money laundering. “Russia is a source, not a destination.”

In any case, Trump is back in the White House, and, according to The Moscow Times, that means Trump Tower Moscow may be back on the table as part of a grand bargain which “would effectively mean U.S. recognition of Russian dominance in the post-Soviet space — including Ukraine — and, to some extent, an acknowledgment of its influence in Europe.”

In return, the paper reported, “the Kremlin is now scouring for incentives it believes can catch and hold President Donald Trump’s attention, ranging from rare earths deals and geopolitical leverage in Iran and North Korea to a long-dreamed-of Trump Tower in Moscow….Officials have brainstormed building a 150-story Trump Tower in Moscow City, the capital’s business district.”

“The project could be quickly launched, and Trump himself could participate in the groundbreaking,” the paper added.

So stay tuned for further developments.

Cast of Characters

Felix Sater

A convicted felon with alleged ties to the Russian Mafia, Sater was managing director of Bayrock Group, and as such was instrumental in trying to develop Trump Tower Moscow and often briefed Trump personally after trips to Russia. Sater also worked as a U.S. intelligence asset for the DIA, the FBI, and other American agencies.

Donald Trump Jr. & Ivanka Trump

Trump's children traveled to Russia numerous times in pursuit of business deals, including Trump Tower Moscow. On one trip, Ivanka was allegedly taken to the Kremlin and sat in Vladimir Putin's chair.

If you have tips, leads, or insights, please reach out—I am always looking for new information. And don’t forget to comment and share your thoughts!

For the complete story on how Trump became a Russian asset, buy House of Trump, House of Putin, and/or American Kompromat. And don’t miss my latest book, Den of Spies!

House of Trump, House of Putin

The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

American Kompromat

How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

Den of Spies

Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House