The Offer Viktor Orbán Couldn't Refuse
When Hungarians vote tomorrow, they should know that Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was on the take from the same Russian mobsters who were laundering millions through Donald Trump's real estate.
Now that J. D. Vance has returned from Budapest where he was campaigning for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Vance’s favored candidate is facing new allegations that he and associates have been backed by a highly suspect benefactor.
More specifically, according to a report earlier this week in The Insider, both Orbán himself and his Interior Minister, Sándor Pintér, allegedly received “large sums of cash” from a key player in the Russian Mafia who also played an important role in the ascent of Donald Trump.
The Mafioso in question is Semion Mogilevich, a leading figure in the Solntsevskaya Bratva, the powerful Russian crime syndicate, who graced the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for many years and has been called “the most dangerous mobster in the world.”
The new report about Mogilevich is not the first linking him to Orbán. In 2014, video host Seva Kaplan and his guest, Leonid Roytman, who allegedly has had ties to the Solntsevskaya Bratva, first discussed Orbán’s ties to the Russian Mafia in a YouTube video. Russian journalist Anastasia Kirilenko later wrote about them for The Insider, as I did in House of Trump, House of Putin.
So who is Mogilevich?
Thanks to his mastery of money-laundering and a host of sophisticated financial crimes, the five-foot-six, three-hundred-pound Mogilevich came to be known as “the brainy Don,” and is said to be worth more than $10 billion. According to classified Israeli and FBI documents, Mogilevich bought major companies that dominated the Hungarian armaments industry and won a huge share of the Russian-Ukraine energy trade. The Semion Mogilevich Organization has allegedly sold weapons to al-Qaeda, financed the sale of enriched uranium to terrorists, laundered money through companies on the New York Stock Exchange and is said to have assembled a private army of brutal killers.
Mogilevich is widely considered to be the top businessman in the Russian Mafia, but he is not the top dog. That honor goes to Sergei Mikhailov, the head of Solntsevskaya Bratva with which Mogilevich is allied.
In the early Eighties, Mogilevich expanded his operation into the United States, and in 1984, one of his lieutenants, David Bogatin, went to 721 Fifth Avenue, better known as Trump Tower, where he met with Donald Trump and bought five luxury condos with $6 million in cash(about $18 million in 2026 dollars). In so doing, Bogatin helped launch a massive operation through which the Russian Mafia laundered hundreds of millions of dollars via Trump real estate.
As I reported in House of Trump, House of Putin, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties.
Throughout the Nineties, Mogilevich oversaw operations in Vienna, Munich, Rome, Athens, and the United States, but he was based in Budapest where he had operatives who infiltrated the Hungarian National Police. One of his key operatives in Budapest, was Dietmar Clodo, a longtime associate who had a colorful history as a mercenary in Rhodesia and as a supporter of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. A suspected international arms and drug trafficker, Clodo was sentenced to ten years in prison for his role in a series of bombings in Hungary in the 1990s and was extradited to Germany in 2005, where he was wanted on charges of murder, bank robbery, and other serious crimes.
As I wrote in House of Trump, House of Putin:
According to a 2017 article by Russian journalist Anastasia Kirilenko for The Insider, Clodo said that in 1994 he was entrusted by Mogilevich with the delivery of large sums of money to various top political officials in Hungary, including Orbán and Sándor Pintér, the current Minister of the Interior who was then chief of police in Budapest.
On one such occasion, Clodo received a suitcase with approximately one million Deutsche Marks and instructions to give it to an unnamed political figure who was coming by to pick it up. As Clodo recalled, when the man arrived, he “didn’t want to come into my house. I told him, ‘Listen to me. I have that damn money in a suitcase. I don’t want to go out in the street with this suitcase. I don’t care. If you refuse to come in, I will give it back to Mr. Mogilevich. I don’t care.”
Of course, Clodo did not tell the man the real reason why he wanted the transaction to take place indoors—namely, that there was a hidden camera inside that would videotape the transfer.
“I wasn’t interested in who this man was,” said Clodo. “It was only after the elections that I understood this young man was Viktor Orbán from Fidesz [the right-wing populist party in Hungary].”
And why would Mogilevich have bothered to pay off a mid-level Hungarian politician? The answer did not become apparent until ten years later. Throughout his early days in politics, and even in his first term as prime minister starting in 1998, Orbán had freely criticized the Kremlin and denounced other European governments as “Moscow’s puppets” while he censured pro-Russian projects as “treasonous.”
But in 2009, Orbán abruptly reversed field. When he became prime minister again in 2010, he immediately became a key Putin apologist.
And what was behind Orbán’s dramatic turnout about? In 2008, Mogilevich had been jailed in Russia on tax evasion charges, and, according to Dietmar Clodo, Mogilevich handed over kompromat videos of Orbán to the FSB in exchange for the Kremlin’s agreement to overlook his tax issues.
Before long, Mogilevich was released from jail, and, thanks to Mogilevich, Putin had Orbán exactly where he wanted him.
“Whatever happened to Orbán in such a short period of time?” asked The Insider in a story whose headline strongly hinted at the answer: “A Suitcase Full of Cash from the Solnstsevo Mafia: Does Putin have Video Kompromat on the Hungarian Leader?”
It is worth noting, as I’ve reported before, that for decades the Russian Mafia has effectively functioned as the enforcement arm of Soviet intelligence, from the KGB to its successor, the FSB. So, if Orbán was compromised by the Russian Mafia, that meant he was, in effect, an intelligence asset of the Russian Federation.
And when Hungary was granted admission to NATO in 1999, that meant Putin, who has long wanted to destroy NATO, had a mole deep inside the heart of his enemy.
Mogilevich and the Solntsevskaya Mafia are not exactly household words in the United States, but they should be. Interpol has characterized Solntsevskaya as “the most powerful criminal organization in the world,” and, as I have documented in two books, House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, they have also cultivated ties to Donald Trump for more than 40 years—dating back to 1984 when David Bogatin bought his 5 condos in Trump Tower.
According to the New York State attorney general’s office, when Trump closed the deal with Bogatin, he was helping launder money for the Russian Mafia, whether he realized it or not. More importantly, he had also begun to build an enormously lucrative relationship with Russian mobsters who later helped him survive his numerous bankruptcies by funneling more than a billion dollars into his coffers through various real estate schemes.
Now, according to The Insider’s new story, it turns out that various members of the Orbán regime reaped even more lucre from Trump’s benefactor. László Kovács, a Mogilevich operative who was professional body builder, has come forward to give a first-person account of how he personally delivered money on behalf of the Russian Mafia to Sándor Pintér, who is now Orbán’s Minister of the Interior but was then chief of police in Budapest. (The YouTube video of The Insider’s interview with Kovács, complete with English translation, can be seen here.)
At this writing, various polls show Orbán’s rival, Péter Magyar of the Tisza Party with a significant lead of up to 19 percent. Much of Magyar’s campaign has been built around the premise that Orbán has transformed Hungary into a mafia state, and the new revelations certainly support his case. But Orbán controls over 400 media outlets directly or indirectly, which means that most Hungarian voters get their news from Fidesz-aligned sources. Ousting Orbán at the ballot box and actually transferring power from him are two different things and may be much more difficult in a system built for one party dominance.
In his interview with The Insider, Kovács promised to give official testimony in a Hungarian court in the event that the country’s leadership changes. Whether that happens or not, we should find out after the elections on April 12.
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
Maybe an appropriate time to start describing regimes in terms of criminality rather than “far-right” or “far-left”. As the transnational hyper-corrupt network now clearly exposed: Putin-Orban-Trump-Xi-Saudi-Netanyahu. Hyper-corruption. Why billionaires “have the cards.” Trump screeding all the quiet parts out loud.
I'm shocked that Russia is Hungarys overlord! Hungary needs to be kicked out of NATO....