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.
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