The real estate culture Trump enjoyed

 A rare exception to the lack of good reporting of the economic and cultural environment in which people like Donald Trump operated was this story from the Nation
 
Nation 2014 - Since 2008, roughly 30 percent of condo sales in pricey Manhattan developments have been to buyers who listed an international address—most from China, Russia and Latin America—or bought in the name of a corporate entity, a maneuver often employed by foreign purchasers. Because many buyers go to great lengths to hide their interests in New York properties, it’s impossible to put a number on the proportion laundering ill-gotten gains. But according to money-laundering experts as well as court documents and secret offshore records reviewed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, New York real estate has become a magnet for dirty money.


Public officials and real-estate operatives in New York have mostly applauded the city’s influx of mega-rich homesteaders from overseas, with former Mayor Michael Bloomberg leading the chorus during his time in office. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” he told New York magazine in September.

Combine that give-us-your-rich ethos with state and local policies that lavish tax breaks on Manhattan’s wealthiest homeowners and federal policies that let real estate agents off the hook, and the results are predictable: New York is a magnet for the super-rich homebuyers from other lands bearing money of sometimes dubious provenance.

...US authorities don’t put up many roadblocks for foreigners who want to launder money through American real estate. Escrow and real estate agents aren’t required to find out the true identities of property buyers—the real people behind the front men or corporate shells. The Patriot Act, passed after the 9/11 attacks, requires that banks, securities houses and other financial firms follow stringent anti–money laundering rules and report suspicious transactions to law enforcement. Real estate and escrow agents were included on the list, but a loophole in the law gave an opening for the US Treasury to “temporarily” exempt the real estate industry from these requirements. A dozen years later, the exemption still stands.

... Among the assets that US authorities went after in the wake of the investigation was a condo at New York’s Trump Park Place tower. Clarita Garcia and a third son, Timothy, purchased Unit 6A in the luxury building for $765,000 in 2004. US prosecutors said the money, funneled through a joint account held by mother and son at Citibank, had been amassed through the general’s corrupt activities.

In 2009, as the forfeiture claim and extradition cases against Clarita Garcia and her three sons dragged on, Timothy Garcia was working as a publicist for Marc Jacobs’s fashion empire, getting photographed at Fashion Week wearing an electronic monitoring device and complaining that the court-ordered ankle bracelet was so uncomfortable, “I can’t even wear my knee high croc boots by Sergio Rossi for the fall.”

In late 2012, federal prosecutors in Manhattan won a court order turning over control of the Trump Park Place unit to the US Department of Homeland Security.