How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single
buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that
much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters
were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal
vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the
’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by
which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says
Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international
law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that
you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was
a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very
systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where
the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was
built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.
The feds wanted to arrest Ivankov, but he kept vanishing. “He was like a
ghost to the FBI,” one agent recalls. Agents spotted him meeting with
other Russian crime figures in Miami, Los Angeles, Boston, and Toronto.
They also found he made frequent visits to Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic
City, which mobsters routinely used to launder huge sums of money. In
2015, the Taj Mahal was fined
$10 million—the highest penalty ever levied by the feds against a
casino—and admitted to having “willfully violated” anti-money-laundering
regulations for years
The fact that a top Russian mafia boss lived and worked in Trump’s
own building indicates just how much high-level Russian mobsters came to
view the future president’s properties as a home away from home. In
2009, after being extradited to Russia to face murder charges, Ivankov
was gunned down in a sniper attack on the streets of Moscow. According to The Moscow Times, his funeral was a media spectacle in Russia, attracting
“1,000 people wearing black leather jackets, sunglasses, and gold
chains,” along with dozens of giant wreaths from the various
brotherhoods.
Last October, an investigation by the Miami Herald found
that at least 13 buyers in the Florida complex have been the target of
government investigations, either personally or through their companies,
including “members of a Russian-American organized crime group.” Two
buyers in Sunny Isles, Anatoly Golubchik and Michael Sall, were
convicted for taking part in a massive international gambling and
money-laundering syndicate that was run out of Trump Tower in New York. The ring, according to the FBI, was operating under the protection of the Russian mafia.
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1 comment:
The $10M fine shows that the feds aren't serious. If it had been a $10T fine, that would have showed willing.
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