The following comes from the below sources and various mainstream stories. Question Everything
Unlimitedhangout.com. whitney webb
Dark Towers -Deutsche Bank, Enrich
House of Trump, House of Putin, Unge
Trump Nation, O’Brien
Ordo ab Chao Volume Six: The Third Temple , Livingstone
Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, Friedman
The focus here is not on Events during Trumps Presidency. That can be found here
There is some redundancy as this is quite long and there are so many connections it may help to repeat some of them
Also, its important to realize the very rich are a small group and the degree of separation between them is very small. Whole many are psychopaths and evil, not all of them are. That said, if you hang around with evil psychopaths long enough some of that is bound to rub off on you.
The beginning.
In 1885, Trump’s paternal grandfather, Friedrich Trump, emigrated from Kallstadt, Germany to the United States at age 16. During the Alaska Gold Rush, he amassed a fortune by opening restaurants and brothels for gold seekers on their way to the region.
After his death, his fortune was passed on to his wife, Elizabeth Christ Trump, and his son Fred, who used it to start Elizabeth Trump & Son, now The Trump Organization.
In 1905 they set up a small barber shop on the ground floor of a newly constructed building at 60 Wall Street, in the heart of Manhattan’s booming financial district. The barber’s name was Friedrich Trump. The same year that he opened the shop, his wife gave birth to a boy named Fred.
Many years passed,the barber shop closed,and the old 60 Wall Street gave way in 1989 to a new 60 Wall Street, a forty-seven- story tower topped with a distinctive pyramid roof. For a time, it was home to J.P. Morgan & Co.
Then that bank left, and in 2005, Deutsche Bank started relocating its American staff—displaced after 9/11—to its new home at 60 WallStreet. And so Friedrich Trump’s grandson—born to Fred’s wife in 1946—became an occasional visitor to the site of his grandfather’s old barbershop.
Fred Trump’s influence was particularly focused in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brighton Beach and Coney Island.
According to Coney Island historian Charles Denson, Fred Trump was so cunning in his exploitation of the weaker points of federal regulations that “federal laws had to be changed to prevent the kind of nefarious schemes that Trump excelled in.”
Fred’s projects often involved mob ties, with the help of Brad Zackson, a convicted felon who served as Fred’s consigliere, and later worked with Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort as Manafort’s “real estate fixer.”
According to the New York State Organized Crime Task Force’s investigations in the 1950s, Fred’s partner Willie Tomasello was tied to both the Gambino and Genovese crime families, as well as to Lucky Luciano. As well, Fred also relied on Kenny Sutherland, an ally of the Lucchese family, for help in getting favors from city hall insiders.
In the 1950s, Woody Guthrie, at the time a resident of the Beach Haven housing complex built by Fred Trump near Coney Island, wrote a song about “Old Man Trump” and the “Racial hate/He stirred up/In the bloodpot of human hearts/When he drawed/That color line” in one of his housing developments.
Trump and his father were strong supporters of Israel. Fred Trump supported Jewish and Israeli causes and institutions, including significant support for Israel Bonds—debt securities that trade at a risk-adjusted spread to U.S. Treasury bonds and are issued by the government of Israel—and his donation of the land for building the Chabad-Lubavitch Beach Haven Jewish Center in Flatbush, New York.
According to the center’s website, Fred Trump “continuously supported its activities throughout his lifetime.”
1968-Trump received his fourth and final college deferment on 16 January 1968. After graduating from Wharton, he was reclassified 1-A on 9 July 1968. Trump underwent an Armed Forces physical examination (with a result listed only as “DISQ”) on 19 September 1968 and was reclassified 1-Y (qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency) on 15 October 1968.
According to a statement from the Trump campaign, the 1-Y classification stemmed from Trump’s having bone spurs in both heels:
The medical deferment was expected to be short-term and he was therefore entered in the military draft lottery, where he received an extremely high number, 356 out of 365.
The details of that medical exemption remain unclear and controversial, and most draft-related government medical records from the Vietnam era were not preserved.
Despite the supposedly “short-term” nature of Trump’s disqualifying physical condition, on 17 February 1972 he was reclassified 4-F (not qualified for military service), presumably due to the abolishment of the 1-Y classification the previous year.
1970s, Cohn became one of many celebrities hanging out at Studio 54, the epochal New York disco, with Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, and the club’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager.
There, Cohn became known as “the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54,” as described by a character in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.
Kushner’s play, of course, was fiction, but Cohn was described similarly by those who knew him in real life. “You knew when you were in Cohn’s presence you were in the presence of pure evil,” lawyer Victor A. Kovner told Vanity Fair. “He was a tangle of contradictions, a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe, vehemently closeted but insatiably promiscuous,” wrote Michael Kruse in Politico.
Donald also frequented Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise. His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes.
“What went on in Studio 54 will never, ever happen again. First of all, you didn’t have AIDS. You didn’t have the problems you do have now,” he said to me. “I saw things happening there that to this day I have never seen again. I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room. Stuff that couldn’t happen today because of problems of death. “
“You know, it’s a whole different world today,” he added. “I remember watching Truman Capote dancing with himself in the middle, spinning around. Elizabeth Taylor … Halston. Yves Saint Laurent. They had like forty superstars in the room.”
1973-Donald Trump had first met Cohn at another Manhattan nightspot, Le Club, a pre–disco era successor to café society haunts like El Morocco and the Stork Club, where the fixers and society swells had drinks and traded favors. Trump was instantly captivated by Cohn’s combative, belligerent style and later allowed it to shape his approach to politics.
Meanwhile, Cohn helped the Trumps battle a 1973 lawsuit by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department alleging that Trump rental properties refused to rent to minority applicants.
Cohn advised Donald to tell the government “to go to hell and fight the thing in court.” Which is precisely what Trump did, with Cohn as his lead attorney, suing the United States government for $ 100 million (roughly $ 575 million in 2018 dollars) on behalf of Trump Management, asserting that the charges were “irresponsible and baseless.”
In effect, Donald had adopted Roy Cohn’s credo as his own: Always attack. Never apologize. Attack, attack, attack.
As Marie Brenner noted in Vanity Fair, by the time he became Trump’s lawyer, Cohn had carved out a unique place for himself with his unparalleled mastery of New York’s “Favor Bank,” that invisible network of tacit understandings through which cops, lawyers, judges, machers, influence peddlers, and crooks make the world go round.
Years later, in moments of crisis long after Cohn’s death, President Donald Trump was known to say during times of difficulty, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Today we all cry “Oh My Cron” (omicron)
1974-At the same time Trump was learning about wiseguys from Roy Cohn, the Russian Mafia began invading Brighton Beach. It had started as an unintended consequence of legislation dealing with the Cold War.
In 1974, Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio, two Democrats who were concerned about Soviet anti-Semitism, had passed a bill that allowed the Soviet Union to enjoy normal trade relations with the US, but only if it let Jewish refugees immigrate to America.
In the aftermath of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, more than six hundred thousand Soviet Jews emigrated from the USSR, but the KGB made certain that emigration was not limited to innocent victims of anti-Semitism.
Instead, the Soviets opened the gates of their gulags, just like Fidel Castro did later, during the Mariel boatlift of 1980, and released thousands of hard-core criminals, among them convicted murderers, psychopaths, thieves, and the like, many of whom settled in Brighton Beach.
A Yiddish-inflected world that was sentimentalized and satirized in Neil Simon plays and Woody Allen movies, Brighton Beach had long been a place where people strolled the boardwalk, scarfed down hot dogs at Nathan’s Famous, rode the famed Cyclone roller coaster, and enjoyed other rides at Luna Park, Steeplechase Park, and Dreamland, in nearby Coney Island.
For Donald Trump, the fact that the entire city was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 70’s was good news indeed, because prices could not go much lower. For his option to buy the dilapidated, rat-infested Commodore Hotel on East Forty-Second Street, Trump paid exactly $ 1.19 .
Helping Trump navigate the perilous waters necessary to get the political support and legal tax abatements to consummate the deal was none other than Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and role model, the ruthless, heavy-lidded attorney who served as a brutal and pitiless fixer for establishment fixtures (Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Rupert Murdoch, among others) and mobsters alike (Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti).
One of several cases that led to Cohn’s eventual disbarment had him entering the room of a dying multimillionaire mobster client, Lewis Rosenstiel, misrepresenting a document that would have made Cohn executor of his will and emerging with a shakily signed signature that the courts refused to accept.
Roy Cohn and Rosenstiel had for years referred to one another as “Field Commander” and “Supreme Commander,” respectively. Media references to these nicknames appear in other articles from the period.
Though LIFE and other outlets had interpreted this as merely an anecdote about the nicknames shared in jest between close friends, the fact that notorious crime lord Meyer Lansky also called Rosenstiel “Supreme Commander” and the fact that Cohn and Rosenstiel would later become intimately involved in the same pedophile sex ring suggests that there may have been more to these “nicknames.”
After all, the mob to which Rosenstiel was connected often used military-themed titles like “soldier” and “lieutenant” to differentiate the rank and importance of its members.
1977-Another émigré of note was Michael Sheferovsky (aka Michael Sheferofsky and Mikhail Sater), who had been a major player in the black market with the mob in Moscow until he moved to Baltimore with his family in the early seventies.
In 1977, he moved to Brighton Beach with his wife and kids, and worked with Ernest “Butch” Montevecchi, a soldier in the Genovese crime gang, which had begun to forge a partnership with the newly arrived Russians.
Sheferovsky’s specialty was extortion: his targets included restaurants, food stores, and a medical clinic in Brighton Beach. Sheferovsky had a son, Felix (who changed his last name to Sater), who went into the family business but had grand dreams for the future that led to a working relationship more than two decades later with Fred’s son Donald that was full of intrigue.
In addition, petitioners in a court case regarding Felix referred to Sheferovsky as “a Mogilevich crime syndicate boss.” Semion Mogilevich, “the boss of bosses” of the Russian Mafia, as the FBI has called him, a man who graced the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list for many years—and a man who surreptitiously played an extraordinarily powerful role in the ascent of Donald Trump.
Mogilevich started to make his fortune in the early eighties by approaching fellow Jews who were emigrating en masse to Israel and the United States and were trying to get market value for art, antiques, jewelry, and other collectibles at a time when there were strict limits on what assets could be taken out of the Soviet Union.
Mogilevich came to their rescue—or so it seemed—by buying their possessions cheaply and promising to send more money once he had resold their property. In the end, however, he simply kept the money and used it to help finance a petroleum import-export company called Arbat International that was registered in the Channel Islands, an international center for money laundering and other financial
Mogilevich was also “responsible for [Solntsevo’s] relations with Ukrainian criminal organizations.” While he partnered with Solntsevo, Mogilevich also ran his own smaller 250-person gang, the Semion Mogilevich Organization, which allegedly became a launching pad for criminal enterprises that included arms dealing, drug running, prostitution, contract murder, financial crimes, and more all over the world.
Much of this was done through Arbat, which Mogilevich controlled, while Mikhailov and his pal Viktor Averin co-owned 25 percent and Vyacheslav Ivankov owned the remaining quarter. But in the end, it was Mogilevich’s expertise at laundering money that made him so invaluable to other mobsters. He had mastered a skill that was deeply coveted by the most formidable gangsters on the planet: He took dirty money and made it clean.
1977, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic’s secret service (StB), which reported directly to the Soviet’s KGB, began an intelligence gathering operation on Donald , the year he married Ivana Zelnickova of Czechoslovakia.
The StB’s work on Trump and Ivana intensified in the late 1980s, after Trump announced his interest in running for president. A former StB official, Vlastimil Danek, stated, “We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”Ivana was “not only a well-heeled US citizen” but moved in “very top political circles,” Sury said.
Between then and 1980, Donald Trump entered an electronics shop known to be a hotbed for Russian spies, government officials, and mafia members.
Trump was looking to buy hundreds of television sets for the Grand Hyatt, and the store he chose was Joy-Lud Electronics, The store owners were Tamir Sapir and Semyon “Sam” Kislin
As Craig Unger details in his book American Kompromat, Joy-Lud was a tourist attraction for Soviets visiting the Big Apple. “Their largest Soviet clientele was known as ‘vacuum cleaners,’ a moniker bestowed on officials, émigrés, and tourists who hoovered up vast quantities of electronic equipment and consumer goods to take back to the Soviet Union,” Unger writes.
American electronics sold for thousands on the black market back home, and the Kremlin needed our technology to view intelligence gathered with our technology.
Joy-Lud was also a resource for the KGB. Electronics sold by Joy-Lud were guaranteed to be free of any tampering or American wiretapping devices. Russian intelligence also saw an opportunity for the store to be used by “spotters,” agents on the lookout for potential Russian intelligence assets.
1978-One thing the Chabad was known for was pushing awareness of Seven Noahide Laws to non-Jews. These are Noahs laws that apply to all humanity while Moses laws are for Israelites.
Rebbi Schneerson was chief Rabbi of Chabad - Lubavitch movement and who some believe is the Messiah.
However, his birthday had been celebrated as a holiday since 1978 when the U.S. Congress asked President Carter to designate the Rebbe's birthday as the national Education and Sharing Day to recognize and pay tribute to his efforts for a better education for all American citizens. Every President since has done so.
1978-Wilbur Ross, who is known as the “King of Bankruptcy,” specializes in leveraged buyouts of distressed businesses. In the late 1970s, Ross began 24 years at the New York City office of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, where he ran the bankruptcy-restructuring advisory practice.
1980-Donald and the Pritzkers and the family, as well as Manufacturers Hanover Bank and Equitable Insurance, joined forces on the Commodore overhaul. (Fred and the Pritzkers had to guarantee a portion of Donald’s loans because the younger Trump still hadn’t earned complete credibility with the lending community.)
Trump had bought an option buy the old Commodore Hotel in 1977 for $1 for his first project in Manhattan. With the help of extensive tax abatements, he and his new partner, the Pritzkers, spent $120 million converting the dowdy Commodore into the glitzy Grand Hyatt, a development that signaled the revival of New York after the fiscal crises of the 1970's.
It had cost about $50 million more than its original budget. Fred had to come to Donald’s rescue with a loan to help cover the overruns; he also convinced Chase’s Stephenson to extend loans to his son to help cover the excesses.
1981-David Bogatin was considered by the FBI to be one of the key members of Semion Mogilevich’s Russian organized crime family in the United States, with a long string of convictions for big-ticket Mogilevich-type offenses like financial fraud and tax dodging.
At one point, David Bogatin owned five separate condos in Trump Tower that Donald Trump had reportedly sold to him personally
Bogatin may have been the first Russian to use Trump condos to launder money, but other criminals with ties to the Italian mob had already done the same.
Indeed, Lucchese crime family associate Robert Hopkins, who ran one of New York’s biggest illegal gambling operations, bought his Trump Tower apartments in 1981—two years before the building opened. When he met Trump at the closing, he opened his briefcase and approximately $ 200,000 in cash spilled out on Trump’s conference table.
Similarly, soon after Trump Tower opened in 1983, Italian financier Roberto Polo, who was subsequently jailed for embezzlement, bought six Trump Tower apartments in the names of offshore shell companies.
And Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the brutal and corrupt former leader of Haiti, bought an apartment on the fifty-fourth floor in August of 1983.
1981-Trump attended parties of Adnan Khashoggi in early 80’s at his plush condo at Olympic Tower. He Implemented some ideas from Adnans condo in his Trump Tower project
1980s, One of Epstein's clients was the Saudi Arabian businessman Adnan Khashoggi, who was the middleman in transferring American weapons from Israel to Iran, as part of the Iran–Contra affair in the 1980s.
In the 1980s, Donald Trump donated to help build new infrastructure for the Israelis removed from the northern Sinai by the Begin government, which returned the peninsula to Egypt as part of the peace agreement.
Then, in 2005, Trump gave again, to help resettle the Jews of Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip, exiled by the Ariel Sharon government.
Trump’s father was friends with Netanyahu in the 1980s, and the Chabad-Lubavitch sect supported Netanyahu for PM in the 1990s. Netanyahu was apparently friends with Jared Kushner’s family, too, and reportedly stayed in Jared’s bedroom while Jared slept in the basement.
Trump’s father, Fred, apparently had Chabad ties via Bunny Lindenbaum, who gave to the Chabad Brooklyn Jewish Center (as did his son Sandy). He met Bunny Lindenbaum in the 1940s.
His Netanyahu ties appear to be from Bunny Lindenbaum, as well. Furthermore, Trump’s father helped set up and finance the Beach Haven Jewish Center in the 1950s, which currently has a Chabad leader, and probably always did.
Like his father Fred, Donald Trump has also had an exceptional number of ties to the mafia.
According to Steve Villano, Wayne Barrett’s book Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, “reads like a Who’s Who of Mafioso in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Areas over the past 45 years.”
David Cay Johnston, author of Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business, wrote in Politico, “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.”
1981 the S.E.C.’s Jonathan Harris and Robert Blackburn took Epstein’s testimony and that of other Bear Stearns employees in part of what became a protracted case about insider trading around a tender offer placed on March 11, 1981, by the Seagram Company Ltd. for St. Joe Minerals Corp.
Ultimately several Italian and Swiss investors were found guilty, including Italian financier Giuseppe Tome, who had used his relationship with Seagram owner Edgar Bronfman Sr. to obtain information about the tender offer.
After the tender offer was announced, the S.E.C. began investigating trades involving St. Joe at Bear Stearns and other firms. Epstein resigned from Bear Stearns on March 12
After leaving Bear Stearns in 1981, Epstein began working in the realms of shadow finance as a self-described “financial bounty hunter,” where he would both hunt down and hide money for powerful people.
One of these powerful individuals was Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer with close ties to both Israeli and U.S. intelligence and one of the main brokers of Iran-Contra arms deals between Israel and Iran.
Epstein would later forge a business relationship with a CIA front company involved in another aspect of Iran-Contra, the airline Southern Air Transport, on behalf of Leslie Wexner’s company, The Limited.
During this period, it is also known that Epstein became well acquainted with the British arms dealer Sir Douglas Leese, who collaborated with Khashoggi on at least one British-Saudi arms deal in the 1980s.
Leese would later introduce Epstein to Steven Hoffenberg, calling Epstein a “genius” and describing his lack of morals during that introduction.
Thus, there are indications that Epstein was involved with Middle Eastern arms deals, including some related to Iran-Contra, during this period. In addition, Epstein would later claim (and then subsequently deny) having worked for the CIA during this period.
After having been introduced to Epstein, Ben-Menashe claimed that neither he nor Davies were impressed with Epstein and considered him “not very competent.”
He added that Ghislaine Maxwell had “fallen for” Epstein and that he believed that the romantic relationship between his daughter and Epstein led Robert Maxwell to work to bring the latter into the “family business” — i.e., Maxwell’s dealings with Israeli intelligence.
This information is very revealing, given that the narrative, until now at least, has been that Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein did not meet and begin their relationship until after Robert Maxwell’s death in 1991, after which Ghislaine moved to New York.
1981- While much has been said of the ties between Cohn and Trump, Cohn was particularly close to Ronald Lauder’s mother, Estee Lauder (born Josephine Mentzer). Estee was even counted among Cohn’s most high-profile friends in his New York Times obituary.
A small window into the Lauder-Cohn relationship surfaced briefly in a 2016 article in Politicoabout a 1981 dinner party held at Cohn’s weekend home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The party was attended by Ronald Lauder’s parents, Estee and Joe, as well as Trump and his then-wife Ivana, who had a weekend home just two miles away.
That party was held soon after Cohn had helped Reagan secure the presidency and had reached the height of his political influence. At the party, Cohn offered toasts to Reagan and to then-Senator for New York Alfonse D’Amato, who would later urgeRonald Lauder to run for political office.
1983, Ronald Lauder — whose only professional experience at that point was working for his parent’s cosmetics company — was appointed to serve as United States Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO Affairs.
Soon after his appointment, he served on the Dinner Tribute Committee for a dinner hosted by the Jewish fraternal and strongly pro-Israel organization B’nai B’rith, the parent organization of the controversial Anti-Defamation League (ADL), in Roy Cohn’s honor.
Cohn’s influential father, Albert Cohn, was the long-time president of B’nai B’rith’s powerful New England-New York chapter and Roy Cohn himself was a member of B’nai B’rith’s Banking and Finance Lodge.
The dinner specifically sought to honor Cohn for his pro-Israel advocacy and his efforts to “fortify” Israel’s economy, and its honorary chairmen included media mogul Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and then-head of Bear Stearns Alan Greenberg, all of whom are connected to Jeffrey Epstein.
1983, the Khashoggi-led group formed the gold company whose name was soon changed to Barrick Gold Corp. Sheik Kamal Adham was reportedly one of the new company's founding co-owners. Adham, the chief of Saudi intelligence, had coordinated royalist guerrillas in Yemen, with British arms secretly provided through Khashoggi.
1984, Trump met with Lois Romano of the Washington Post, and expressed his interest in wanting to lead negotiations between the Americans and the Soviets about the threat of nuclear war.
He said his friend Roy Cohn, told him the interview was the perfect opportunity to start. “Some people have an ability to negotiate. It's an art you're basically born with. You either have it or you don't,” Trump boasted.[] “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles… I think I know most of it anyway. You’re talking about just getting updated on a situation… You know who really wants me to do this? Roy … I’d do it in a second.”
Trump claimed he could learn all he needed to know about nuclear technology from his uncle John Trump, a nuclear scientist at MIT.
1985, Mar-a-Lago was purchased by Donald Trump at a price of around $10 million. His wife at the time, Ivana Trump, was charged with running the property. Trump retained Mar-a-Lago through both his divorces. His family maintains private quarters in a separate, closed-off area of the house and grounds.
Trump has frequently visited there as President of the United States, referring to it as the Winter White House and his "Southern White House". Mar-a-Lago has been used to host meetings for President Trump and international leaders, including Japanese prime minister Shinzō Abeand Chinese president Xi Jinping.
In September 2019, Mar-a-Lago became the primary residence for Donald and Melania Trump, who previously held primary residence in New York City
It is the second largest mansion in the state of Florida and the 22nd largest mansion in the United States. In 2018, Forbesestimated the value of the estate at around $160 million, having appreciated greatly throughout the past decades since Trump's purchase due to several factors such as the extensive renovation, lavish features and furniture, the exclusivity of the location, as well as its historic meaning and significance.
1985- bugged version of PROMIS was sold by Israel for Soviet government use, with the media mogul Robert Maxwell as a conduit.
1985, Khashoggi borrowed $21 million, using his Barrick stock as collateral, for the covert transfer of arms to Iran for the Bush-North group, during an official U.S. arms embargo against the Khomeini regime. Khashoggi made Donald Fraser, the Toronto-based businessman who allegedly provided the loan from his Cayman Islands company, president of Khashoggi's Triad American holding company
Khashoggi used the Monte Carlo office of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International to launder money for Iran arms sales.
Barrick Gold Corp. co-founder Kamal Adham was later prosecuted for fraud in the BCCI case, and paid a $100 million fine.
Khashoggi's Saudi royal piggybanks also underwrote George Bush's Central American ``Contras'' adventures, making payments through the Swiss Bank Corp. and a Cayman Islands bank, totalling about $27 million.
1986-Trumps mentor Roy Cohn dies of AIDS
Among Cohn’s friends were top media personalities like Barbara Walters, former CIA directors, Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy, media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mort Zuckerman, numerous celebrities, prominent lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, top figures in the Catholic Church and leading Jewish organizations like B’nai B’rith and the World Jewish Congress.
Many of the same names that surrounded Cohn until death in the late 1980s would later come to surround Jeffrey Epstein, with their names later appearing in Epstein’s now-infamous “little black book”.
While President Trump is clearly connected to both Epstein and Cohn, Cohn’s network also extends to former President Bill Clinton, whose friend and longtime political advisor, Richard “Dirty Dick” Morris, was Cohn’s cousin and close associate.
Morris was also close to Clinton’s former communications director, George Stephanopoulos, who is also associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
Yet, these were only Cohn’s connections to respectable members of the establishment. He was also known for his deep connections to the mob and gained prominence largely for his ability to connect key figures in the criminal underworld to respected influential figures acceptable to the public sphere.
Ultimately, as New York attorney John Klotz stated, Cohn’s most powerful tool was blackmail, which he used against friend and foe, gangster or public official alike. How much of that blackmail he acquired through his sexual blackmail operation will likely never be known.
In addition to Fisher, future Mega Group (formed in 1991) member Ronald Lauder was connected to Roy Cohn and Tom Bolan, both of whom were closely associated with this same Lansky-led crime network and who regularly represented top Mafia figures in court.
1986-the year that Roy Cohn died, Lauder left his post at the Pentagon and became the U.S. ambassador to Austria, where his tenure was shaped by his confrontations with the then-Austrian president and former Nazi collaborator, Kurt Waldheim.
Lauder’s interest in Austrian politics has continued well into recent years, culminating in accusations that he sought to manipulate Austrian elections in 2012.
In 2019 police discovered an Austrian passport with Epstein’s picture and a fake name after raiding his Manhattan residence, the source and purpose of the passport came under media scrutiny.
According to the Associated Press, Epstein’s defense lawyers specifically argued that “a friend gave it to him [Epstein] in the 1980s after some Jewish-Americans were informally advised to carry identification bearing a non-Jewish name when traveling internationally during a period when hijackings were more common.”
This claim appears to be related to concerns that followed the hijacking of Air France Flight 139 in 1976 when Israeli and Jewish hostages were separated from other hostages based largely on the passports in their possession.
Given that Epstein was unable to meet the conventional qualifications for an Austrian passport — including long-term residency in Austria (the passport lists him as a resident of Saudi Arabia) and fluency in German — it appears that the only way to have acquired an Austrian passport was by unconventional means, meaning assistance from a well-connected Austrian official or foreign diplomat with clout in Austria.
Furthermore, the passport had been issued in 1987, when Lauder was still serving as an ambassador.
In any event after leaving his ambassadorship, Lauder founded the Ronald S. Lauder Foundation in 1987 and later went on to run for Mayor of New York against Rudy Giuliani in 1989.
Lauder was encouraged to run by then-Senator Alfonse D’Amato, who had close ties to Roy Cohn and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan, who was D’Amato’s adviser. At the aforementioned 1983 B’nai B’rith dinner honoring Cohn, D’Amato was the featured speaker.
The likely reason was that Giuliani, though once an ally of the “Roy Cohn machine,” was at the time deeply disliked by the late Cohn’s associates for prosecuting Cohn’s former law partner, Stanley Friedman, for racketeering, conspiracy and other charges.
Giuliani also had a history of bitter disagreements with D’Amato. Lauder’s primary campaign, though unsuccessful, was noted for its viciousness and its cost, as it burned through more than $13 million.
1986, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Trump insisted on meeting Bernard Lown, a Boston cardiologist who won the Nobel Peace Prize with Yevgeny Chazov, the personal physician of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Trump met Lown at Trump Tower, and insisted he tell him everything he knew about Gorbachev. Trump was planning on asking his good friend “Ronnie” to make him ambassador to the Soviet Union.
1986-Trump recounts in The Art of the Deal that he had been invited to Moscow by the Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin. Dubinin’s daughter Natalia Dubinina, who was part of the Soviet delegation to the UN, recounted that when her father visited her in New York, in March of 1986, she took him to see Trump Tower.
Dubinin was apparently so impressed that he insisted on meeting its owner. In a breach of the usual protocol, Dubinin took the elevator and paid him a visit. Following some carefully worded flattery, Dubinina said “Trump melted at once. He is an emotional person, somewhat impulsive. He needs recognition. And, of course, when he gets it he likes it. My father’s visit worked on him [Trump] like honey to a bee.”
According to Natalia, it was all part of a determined effort by the Soviet government to recruit Trump.
Six month later, Trump was invited to a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, the businessman son of Estée Lauder, where he was seated next to Dubinin. Estée Lauder was a friend of Roy Cohn.
Lauder’s brother Ronald, also a close friend of Roy Cohn, has also been close to Donald Trump, who have been friends since they were teenagers, as both attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania together in the 1960s, and they shared the same social and political circles in New York City.
Lauder is also a close friend of Roy Cohn, whose influential father, Albert Cohn, was the long-time president of B’nai B’rith’s powerful New England-New York chapter and Roy himself was a member of B’nai B’rith’s Banking and Finance Lodge.
1987-Random House published his bestseller Trump: The Art of the Deal, which was written by Tony Schwartz and stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for nearly a year.
Real estate developer, casino operator, football team owner, bestselling author: Trump had transformed himself into a marketing phenomenon in which his brash self-promotion, however distasteful, generated a self-perpetuating, larger-than-life aura of success, wealth, status, and opulence.
To summarize
1982, Trump began construction of the thirty-six-story Trump Plaza on Sixty-First Street and Third Avenue.
Then he bought the iconic Plaza Hotel (not to be confused with the aforementioned Trump Plaza), which, he proclaimed, was not a building but “a masterpiece—the Mona Lisa
He announced never-realized plans to build “the world’s tallest and greatest building,”a 150-story tower on Manhattan’s West Side.
In 1984, he bought the New Jersey Generals in the USFL football league.
Later, he bought Eastern Airlines’ New York–Boston–Washington routes for $365 million and transformed it into the Trump Shuttle, making sure its flight attendants were accessorized with pearls.
In 1985 he bought Mar-a-Lago, the 128-room, 100,000-square-foot mansion that heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post hoped would one day serve as a winter White House.
Trump bought a Boeing 727; a “Darth Vader” helicopter; a huge estate in Greenwich, Connecticut; and a massive yacht, the Trump Princess.
1987, Donald Trump purchased his first casino interests when he acquired 93 percent of the shares in Resorts International, which evolved from a CIA money-laundering front company set up by CIA chief Allen Dulles in the 1950’s.
Resorts International has a sordid history that began in the early 1950’s when it evolved from a CIA and Mossad front company which had been established for the purpose of money laundering the profits from drug trafficking, gambling, and other illegal activities.
The appropriation by the mafia of casinos like those operated by Resorts International was the result of a decision by the Meyer Lansky Syndicate to expand operations outside Las Vegas.
On October 30, 1978, The Spotlight newspaper reported that the principle investors of Resorts International were, in addition to Lansky, Tibor Rosenbaum, William Mellon Hitchcock, David Rockefeller, and Baron Edmond de Rothschild.
1987-As reported by Luke Harding in Politico, the top level of the Soviet diplomatic service arranged Trump’s first visit to Moscow in July 1987, together with his wife Ivana with assistance from the KGB.
The purported purpose of the trip was to discuss the possible construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow. As was typical of Trump’s several such attempts, nothing came of the trip.
Upon his return Trump had a new interest in running for President.
Trump turned to Roger Stone, a Nixon-era dirty trickster then with the firm of Black, Manafort & Stone, for political advice. Trump had met Stone and his colleague Paul Manafort through Roy Cohn.
Although they worked in somewhat different spheres—Cohn was a hardball fixer, Stone a political strategist and lobbyist—to a large extent, they were cut from the same ethically challenged cloth.
Under Stone’s tutelage, on September 1, 1987, just seven weeks after his return from Moscow, Trump suddenly went full steam ahead promoting his newly acquired foreign policy expertise, by paying nearly $ 100,000 for full-page ads in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, and New York Times calling for the United States to stop spending money to defend Japan and the Persian Gulf, “an area of only marginal significance to the U.S. for its oil supplies, but one upon which Japan and others are almost totally dependent.”
Eastern Bloc security service records suggest a file on Trump had been opened as early as 1977, the year he married Ivana Zelnickova of Czechoslovakia. According to files in Prague, declassified in 2016, Czech intelligence kept an eye on the couple in New York.
Ivana’s father Milos Zelnicek was never an agent or asset, but he had a functional relationship with the Czech secret police, who would question him about his daughter. StB, the Czech secret service, routinely shared secrets with KGB colleagues and the, known as “the friends.”
According to StB records, Ivana, after giving birth to her first child, Donald Trump Jr., received "a reward" of a million dollars. And the same thing was said to be the second child. In the summers before the divorce, Donald Jr. stayed at the Zelniceks’ home near Prague, and his grandfather taught him hunting and the Czech language.
The StB’s work on Trump and Ivana intensified in the late 1980s, after Trump announced his interest in running for president. A former StB official, Vlastimil Danek, stated, “We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”
Ivana was “not only a well-heeled US citizen” but moved in “very top political circles,” Sury said. In 1988, on the eve of the American election, “Zelnicek said his daughter had assured him of G. Bush's victory, and it was taken as a clear matter in US leaders,” the StB wrote. The prediction came “from the highest echelons of power in the US.”
1987, Epstein began his relationship with his principal financier, Leslie Wexner, who is also closely associated with Lauder . By 1986, Wexner ranked sixth on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth estimated at $1.4 billion.
Epstein showed up in Columbus a few months later and announced Wexner had put him in charge of his finances
Between about 1987 and 1993, Epstein worked for Hoffenberg, who paid him $25,000 a month and gave him a $2 million loan in 1988 that Epstein would never have to pay back, according to court documents.
In 1987, Towers began constructing one of the largest frauds in history. The scheme began when Towers acquired the parent of two insurance companies, Associated Life Insurance and United Fire. After acquiring the insurance companies, Towers began siphoning funds from them to make a bid for Pan Am look viable.
Hoffenberg and Epstein also began pulling out hundreds of thousands of dollars for themselves, court documents show. Hoffenberg issued more than 50 checks from the insurance companies to pay his stepdaughter’s tuition, expenses on his private plane and monthly $25,000 checks to Epstein.
When the airline takeover failed, the insurance companies faltered. Then, in 1988, Towers took another $1.8 million from the insurers and used it to attempt another airline takeover, of Emery Air Freight. That takeover also failed, leaving the insurance companies insolvent. The looting of the two insurers left 4,000 Illinois customers out $9 million that had been set aside to cover their medical bills. Another 2,200 Ohio customers lost about $1.8 million. The Illinois Department of Insurance placed the companies in receivership. The state and the SEC sued Towers.
Beginning in 1988, Towers began selling more than $270 million worth of promissory notes, offering returns of 12 to 16 percent. Hoffenberg and his company used several million dollars from those investors to show Illinois regulators that they were putting sufficient capital into the insurance companies to guarantee that those insurers could cover claims.
The money Towers used to try to buy control of Emery Air Freight was lost when Emery’s stock price plummeted.
By 1993, after Billy Barr leaves as AG, prosecutors in Illinois and New York who had spent years investigating Hoffenberg’s companies were able to proceed. In front of a grand jury in Chicago, federal prosecutor Edward Kohler walked Hoffenberg, who had just agreed to cooperate with the government, through the design of the scam. In the narrative Kohler laid out, Epstein was the technical wizard who kept the money moving around to support Hoffenberg’s various schemes.
That was in November 1993. Three months later, Epstein’s name disappeared from the case.
Rudy Giuliani was the attorney for Towers Financial
1988-Shortly after Mike Tyson flattened Michael Spinks in ninety-one seconds in a 1988 Trump bout, the boxer, then married to actress Robin Givens, paid Donald a visit at Trump Tower.
Tyson, a human pile driver who later bit off part of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a fight, had a cordial, almost filial, relationship with Donald.
When Donald heard Tyson was in his lobby he told his guards to send up his champion thumper. Tyson sat down in Donald’s corner office hundreds of feet above Fifth Avenue and the two men chatted for about fifteen minutes before the boxer got to the point.
Donald recalled their conversation in detail. “Mr. Trump, could I ask you a question?” Tyson asked.
“Whatever you want, Mike,” Donald responded
. “Are you fucking my wife?”
“What?”
“Are you fucking my wife? Everyone’s telling me that you’re fucking my wife.”
Tyson then pulled out a copy of Vogue magazine that featured a picture of Ms. Givens wearing a TRUMP PRINCESS hat from Donald’s yacht.
“Everyone’s telling me that you’re fucking my wife and I think you’re fucking my wife,” Tyson said.
“Mike, let me tell you something: I never ever even thought about it. And I heard those rumors and they’re disgusting. In fact, I called you a couple of times to tell you that I heard those rumors and it pisses me off. And I never, ever even thought about it. She’s your wife, she’s with you, she’s loyal to you, and it’s total bullshit.”
(Donald told me years later that his life flashed in front of his eyes during the encounter. “That was a scary moment, you understand. He didn’t say: There’s a rumor. He said, ‘Could I ask you: Are you fucking my wife?’ Now if I froze, I’m dead … You would have zero chance … Here’s the heavyweight champion of the world sitting there and he’s a solid piece of fucking armor.”)
“Mike it’s absolutely bullshit, it’s false,” Donald reiterated. “I give you my word.”
“Could I lie down on your couch?” asked Tyson
“Why?”
“Because I’m so tired I just want to nap.”
“Sure, go ahead.”
Tyson then stretched out on a red couch to the right of Donald’s desk.
One of Donald’s staffers later walked into his office and found Tyson asleep. “Donald, Mike Tyson is drooling on your couch,” the employee said.
“You wake him and tell him,” Donald responded.
I don’t know if this is true but if you know how scary Mike Tyson is, its funny as hell
1988-, CIA front Riggs Bank bought a controlling interest in a little known company based in Isle of Man called the Valmet Group.
The Bush connected Riggs-Valmet “immediately began business contracts with Russian KGB operatives” and it was this relationship that led to the creation of Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. Both Riggs-Valmet and Menatep then became conduits for moving KGB money out of Russia.
1988-The Plaza Hotel was where Cohn used to host his “blackmail parties” with Lew Rosenstiel.
New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case longer after Rosenstiel fourth wife Susan Kaufman’s testimony, also found evidence of the “blue suite” at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after poring through local government documents and information gathered by private investigators.
Klotz later told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned: “Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That’s where Cohn got his power from—blackmail.”
Though it is unknown how long Cohn’s “blackmail parties” at the Plaza Hotel continued, and whether it continued after Cohn’s death from AIDS in 1986, Trump purchased the hotel in 1988.
Gross reported that Trump threw parties in the 1990s in a suite at New York’s iconic Plaza Hotel, when he was its owner, where “his wealthy friends, high-rollers from his Atlantic City casinos, and potential Trump condominium buyers could meet models” from second-tier agencies.
Several men who attended those parties emerged to share specifics about Trump’s presence and behavior at these parties, where illegal drugs and young women were passed around. Trump would “go from room to room,” said the one fashion photographer, who added that “I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor.”
1989 May - Robert Maxwell hosted a party on his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine — named for his youngest daughter and Epstein’s future “girlfriend.” Attendees of the party included Roy Cohn’s protege Donald Trump and his long-time law partner Tom Bolan.
Ghislaine Maxwell was also at this rather notable event.
When Maxwell wasn't making hundreds of millions hocking Israels pirated and bugged version of Bill Hamilton’s PROMIS software to intelligence agencies, governments, and criminals around the world - even penetrating the Unites States' most secure nuclear installation, Sandia National Laboratories - Maxwell was helping Jewish-Soviet mob bosses like Simeon Mogilevich launder money ..."
1989-after Wexner bought the NY residence for $13.2 million , he spent millions more decorating and furnishing the home, including the addition of the electronic equipment in the “James Bond” bathroom, only to apparently never live in it.
Epstein told the Times, which identified Epstein as Wexner’s “protege and one of his financial advisers,” that the house, by that time, already belonged to him.
1989, 71,000 Soviet Jews had been given permission to emigrate to Israel, only 12,117 actually went to Israel, the remainder instead chose to move to the USA. Among them was a small criminal hardcore that settled in the Brighton Beach area of NYC and soon reached out to the Greek Mafia in Astoria and the Five Families down in Little Italy.
1990, after Trump built the stupendously extravagant Trump Taj Mahal, with its minarets and carved elephants, the Taj began to cannibalize the nearby Trump Castle so much that it almost fell into the hands of bondholders.
It was saved only when Fred Trump, Donald’s father, famously bought $3.3 million in poker chips and didn’t use them—thereby giving his son’s casino a questionable loan.
It should be noted that between the ages of 3 and 58, president Donald Trump inherited at least $413 million from his father’s business empire using some potentially fraudulent tax-dodging methods, a blockbuster New York Times investigation shows.
The last tranche came in 2004—years after his father, Fred, died—when Trump and his siblings sold off their father’s empire. The deal seems to have been done in a rush, and they offloaded the building for hundreds of millions less than it was worth, the Times reports.
Nonetheless, Donald picked up $177.3 million, the Times reports.
The following year, however, the Castle’s decline in revenue was so dire that the New Jersey Casino Control Commission ruled that the resort was at risk of losing its license. Trump’s casino empire had so much debt, at such high interest rates, there was almost no chance he would succeed.
Then came the bankruptcies, with four trips to bankruptcy court.
Rothschild employee Wilbur Ross and billionaire Carl Icahn saved Trump in 1990-91 from tipping over the brink of financial disaster.
Together, the two men rescued one of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, the Taj Mahal, from foreclosure after Trump had missed an interest payment on bonds. Ross would later acknowledge the importance of his handiwork to the New York Post.
“We could have foreclosed [on the Trump Taj Mahal], and he would have been gone,” Ross told the paper last year. Trump was allowed to keep a 25-percent share of the Taj. The bondholders took half. And as the Post reported, “To outsiders it seemed Trump was still running the casino.”
Ross began 24 years at the New York City office of N.M. Rothschild & Sons, where he ran the bankruptcy-restructuring advisory practice. Along with Carl Icahn, Ross convinced bondholders to strike a deal with Trump that allowed Trump to keep control of the casinos.
By the mid-1990s, Ross was a prominent figure in New York Democratic Party politics and had caught the attention President Bill Clinton who appointed him to lead the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund.
1990-Trump . “Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it,” he told Playboy in 1990. “I predict [Gorbachev] will be overthrown, because he has shown extraordinary weakness. . . . Yet Gorbachev is getting credit for being a wonderful leader—and we should continue giving him credit, because he’s destroying the Soviet Union.” Which wasn’t far from the truth.
1990-, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland for Boston Consulting Group. The government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations.
1990’s-Born in Leningrad, Evsei Agron (1932 – 1985), called the “Godfather” of the Russian American mafia, immigrated to the United States under the Jackson–Vanik amendment in 1975.
Agron soon gained control of criminal operations among the Soviet Jews in Brighton Beach, and organized a motor fuel racket that earned him millions, if not billions, through fuel tax fraud. Agron died after being shot twice in the head outside his Brooklyn apartment in 1985, and was succeeded as leader of the Russian mob in the United States by Marat Balagula (1943 – 2019).
Balagula, who was born the Russian city of Orenburg, decided to move his family to the United States under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment in 1977. Balagula developed close ties with Five Families, the five major Italian mafia families of New York City, which included the Maranzano, Profaci, Mangano, Luciano, and Gagliano families, which are now known as the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families.
Boris Nayfeld, Agron’s former bodyguard, arrived in the United States in the late 1970s as a Soviet Jewish refugee under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, and became Balagula’s enforcer. Together with Italo–Polish gangster Ricardo Fanchini, Nayfeld ran a heroin-smuggling operation that transported China White from Thailand to Brighton Beach, where it was sold partly to the Five Families.
Before long, virtually every business in Brighton Beach was either connected to the Russian mafia or had to pay them off.
In the early 1990s, Boris Urov, former chief investigator of major crimes for the Russian attorney general, warned, “It’s wonderful that the Iron Curtain is gone, but it was a shield for the West. Now we’ve opened the gates, and this is very dangerous for the world. America is getting Russian criminals. Nobody will have the resources to stop them. You people in the West don’t know our Mafiya yet. You will, you will!”
1990-Feldman points out that the first Noahide gathering, which took place in Texas in 1990, was attended by Rabbi Meir Kahane. After Kahane’s assassination, that same year, the Temple Institute, which advocates the building of the Third Temple on Jerusalem, on the site of the first two, started to promote the Noahide project.
In the view of the institute’s rabbis, the gentiles’ upholding of the Seven Laws is an important stage in the messianic process at the height of which the temple will be built and Israel will become a theocracy that will gain the gentiles’ support.
1991” The U.S. Congress officially recognized the Noahide Laws in a declaration that was passed by both houses. Congress and the President of the U. S., George Bush, indicated in Public Law 102-14, 102nd Congress, that the United States of America was founded upon the Seven Universal Laws of Noah, and that these Laws have been the bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization. They also acknowledged that the Seven Laws of Noah are the foundation upon which civilization stands and that recent weakening of these principles threaten the fabric of civilized society, and that justified preoccupation in educating the Citizens of the U.S. of America and future generations is needed.
For this purpose, this Public Law designated March 26, 1991 (Rebee Schneerson birthdate following Hebrew calender) as Education Day.”
1991-On the Spirit of New York, a large private yacht , a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights surrounded by a crowd of older men surrounding them.
This was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour.
At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas.
Casablancas was sued by a former Look of the Year contestant. According to the lawsuit, when she was 15 and Casablancas was 46, at Look of the Year 1988 in Japan, Casablancas said he was “falling in love” with her. At the end of the competition, the lawsuit states, “contestants drank and partied late into the evening” and Casablancas told the teenager to come to his hotel room. There, Casablancas sexually abused the girl “several times over the evening”. The abuse allegedly continued the following year; when the girl became pregnant, Casablancas told her “she would be having an abortion”. The abortion was allegedly “arranged and paid for” by Elite.
Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. He was also one of its 10 judges.
One of the judges in 1991, Gèrald Marie, raped one of the contestants when she was 13
In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others.
Another contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition.
“I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.”
While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19.
Over the last six months, the Guardian has spoken to several dozen former Look of the Year contestants, as well as industry insiders, and obtained 12 hours of previously unseen, behind-the-scenes footage. The stories we have heard suggest that Casablancas, and some of the men in his orbit, used the contest to engage in sexual relationships with vulnerable young models.
No such allegations have been levelled against Trump, who at the time was dating Marla Maples, the woman who in 1993 became his second wife.
Trump married a former Look of the Year contestant: the current first lady, Melania Trump, allegedly had narrowly missed out on a trip to New York in 1992, after coming second in the Slovenian heat.
The Slovenian model’s life landed in New York in 1998 (allegedly at age 28 ) and would meet Donald and begin dating in 2000
Trump, Epstein and Casablancas all knew each other. In 1990, Casablancas sent a teenage model to Epstein’s house in New York City where she was assaulted. Trump and Casablancas were often seen together starting in the late 80s.
1991-During Gorbachev’s reign, the KGB began to hide communist party funds abroad, according to top-level Western and U.S. intelligence sources.
The KGB consequently set up some two thousand shell companies and false-flag bank accounts, some as far away as Nevada and Ireland. Over the next eleven years, perhaps as much as $600 billion was spirited out of the country, in the greatest looting of a nation in world history.
No matter what happened to Russia during a political transition from communism to a quasi-market economy under perestroika, the party bosses had effectively guaranteed that they would continue to control key state resources and property.
Stealing such a massive amount of wealth, however, turned out to be a larger job than anyone had expected. The KGB ran out of people to sequester assets, so they expanded their operation to the criminal Mafiya, explained Richard Palmer, a twenty-year veteran of the CIA, whose final assignment was as a station chief in the former Soviet Union from 1992 to 1994.
in early 1992 the Bratsky Krug, or the Circle of Brothers, the ruling council of the vors, is said to have ordered Ivankov to “Go to the New Land and invade America!”
Vyacheslav Kirillovich Ivankov’s arrival in America on March 8, 1992, was tantamount to the coming of a great white shark.
Swiftly setting up offices in Brighton Beach, Ivankov recruited two “combat brigades” led by an ex-KGB officer and composed of 250 former athletes and Special Forces veterans of the Afghanistan war.
He put the combat brigades on a $20,000-a-month retainer to kill his enemies, collect tribute from legitimate businesses worldwide, “arbitrate” disputes among Russian businessmen, and establish “an international link closely connecting thieves-in-law to the United States,” according to a classified FBI document. “When Ivankov came into town, I never saw such fear,” remarked a Genovese wiseguy.
1991-Mogilevich reportedly cultivated a relationship with Czechoslovakia-born Robert Maxwell, the powerful British press lord who had bought control of the Bulgarian Cooperative Bank. That became another vehicle through which Mogilevich could launder money for Solntsevskaya. Now was the time to go global.
Thanks to Israel’s Law of Return,* the easiest route for Mogilevich, one favored by countless Russian mobsters, was to get Israeli citizenship. “There is not a major Russian organized crime figure who we are tracking who does not also carry an Israeli passport,” said Jonathan Winer, the former money-laundering czar in the Clinton State Department.
Many of them, Winer added, such as Sergei Mikhailov, were not even Jewish. It was not unusual for Russian gangsters to suddenly discover a Jewish grandmother lurking in their family tree.
Not long after his arrival, according to an Israeli intelligence report, Mogilevich “succeeded in building a bridgehead in Israel . . . [and] developing significant and influential [political and business] ties” by forging relationships with both Russian and Israeli criminals to run businesses in tourism, real estate, and catering through proxies.
That included opening bank accounts in Israel, attending gatherings in Israel with other criminals, and, according to a classified FBI document, the “alleged purchase” by Mogilevich of an unnamed Israeli bank, with branches in Moscow, Cyprus, and Tel Aviv, for “laundering money for Colombian and Russian Organized Crime groups.”
The Taj Mahal had become a favorite destination for the Russian mob because Trump made a point of giving high rollers “comps” for up to $ 100,000 a visit, an amenity that casinos often offered big-time gamblers.
Later, two other Trump casinos, the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino, and the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, agreed to pay fines for “willfully failing to report” currency transactions over $ 10,000 and failing to comply with laws designed to prevent money laundering.
Ivankov’s mandate from Mogilevich was to consolidate the Russian Mafia in the US, to form alliances with the Cosa Nostra and other Mafias, to take over smaller gangs, and to bribe politicians as part of a plan to infiltrate governments in the US and elsewhere.
Ruthlessly systematic, the Russians began scrutinizing the vulnerabilities of America’s campaign finance system, the K Street lobbying system, Wall Street, and more.
Ivankov became a regular at Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City and communicated frequently with an associate at Trump Plaza. FBI Agents investigating him tracked Ivankov to Boston, Miami, Toronto, and Los Angeles.
Authorities believed his operation was based in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, ground zero for Russian mafia in the United States.
At one point during their search, the New York State Organized Crime Task Force found Ivankov at Trump Taj Mahal but lost track of him. That discovery eventually leads them to Trump Tower where he was living
Inside his condo is an address book with a fax number for the Trump Organization and a phone number for a Trump Tower residence owned by the Trump Org. We don’t know if that residence was home to Donald Trump himself, but the FBI would know.
One of Ivankov’s associates is Semyon Kislin, the Rudy Giuliani donor and electronics store owner who alerted the KGB about Donald Trump in the late 1970s.
According to a confidential December 1994 FBI report and underworld sources, Kislin is a member of the Ivankov[mafia] organization. These sources say that Kislin’s New York commodities firm has been involved in laundering millions of dollars, and co-sponsored a U.S. visa for a man named Anton Malevsky, who is a contract killer and head of one of Russia’s most bloodthirsty Mafiya families.
Beginning in 1993, Kislin and his family donate $64,950 to Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral campaigns over the course of four years. In 1995, the FBI finds Kislin’s boss Vyacheslav Ivankov living in Trump Tower.
In ’96, Giuliani appoints him to the board of New York City’s Economic Development Corporation. He reappoints him to the board in ’99.
Even after he was locked up for extortion in 1996, Ivankov continued to order the murders of his underworld adversaries from his prison cell. Witnesses who dared testify against him were forced to take new identities in the Federal Witness Protection Program. FBI agents who investigated him ended up on his hit list.
1991-Anatoly Sobchak, a former law professor of Putin’s at Leningrad State, became mayor of Leningrad.* Sobchak hired Vladimir Putin, whom he had known when Putin worked at Leningrad State. Putin was still on active reserve with the KGB.
Putin’s tenure in Sobchak’s office was so rife with scandal that it led to a host of investigations into illegal assignment of licenses and contracts . Putin was head of the Committee for Foreign Liaison; collaborated with criminal gangs in regulating gambling; a money-laundering operation by the St. Petersburg Real Estate Holding Company, where Kumarin was involved and Putin served on the advisory board; Putin’s role in providing a monopoly for the Petersburg Fuel Company, then controlled by the Tambov criminal organization; and much, much more—virtually all of which was whitewashed.
While he was in St. Petersburg in the nineties, Putin signed many hundreds of contracts doling out funds to his cronies.
1991, Charles Bronfman and billionaire Les Wexner—who built Victoria’s Secret, Pink, Express and The Limited into one of America’s all-time great retail fortunes—formed the Mega Group, a secretive group of billionaires, to which belongs Ronald Lauder.
Media profiles of the group describe it as “a loosely organized club of 20 of the nation’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish businessmen” focused on “philanthropy and Jewishness,” with membership dues upwards of $30,000 per year.
Mega Group members founded or have been closely associated with some of the most well-known pro-Israel organizations. For instance, members Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt formed Birthright Taglit with the backing of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Leslie Wexner himself has documented ties to both organized crime and U.S. and Israeli intelligence.
Other well-known groups associated with the Mega Group include the World Jewish Congress—whose past president was Mega Group member Edgar Bronfman—and B’nai B’rith, particularly its spin-off known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The Bronfman brothers were major donors to the ADL, with Edgar Bronfman serving as the ADL’s honorary national vice-chair for several years.
Mega Group member Max Fisher founded the National Jewish Coalition, now known as the Republican Jewish Coalition, the main pro-Israel neoconservative political lobbying group, known for its support of hawkish policies, and whose current chief patrons, Sheldon Adelson and Bernard Marcus, are among Donald Trump’s top donors.
Lauder, who has long-standing ties to Benjamin Netanyahu, himself has been alleged to have ties to Mossad, as he is a long-time funder of IDC Herzliya, an Israeli university closely associated with Mossad and their recruiters as well as Israeli military intelligence.
Lauder co-founded the Eastern European broadcasting network CETV with Mark Palmer, a former U.S. diplomat, Kissinger aide and Reagan speechwriter. Palmer is better known for co-founding the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an organization funded by Richard Mellon Scaife and often described as an accessory to U.S. intelligence, and one whose first president confessed to the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
Furthermore, another member of the Mega Group, director Steven Spielberg, is a well-known protege of Lew Wasserman, the mob-connected media mogul and long-time backer of Ronald Reagan’s film and later political career.
One surprise connection to Cohn involves Mega Group member, and former president of U.S. weapons firm General Dynamics, Lester Crown, whose brother-in-law is David Schine, Cohn’s confidant and alleged lover during the McCarthy hearings, whose relationship with Cohnhelped bring about the downfall of McCarthyism.
Another member of the Mega Group worth noting is Laurence Tisch, who owned CBS News for several years and founded Loews Corporation.
Tisch is notable for his work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, where Donald Barr, who hired Epstein at the Dalton School, also served and which forged ties with Lansky’s criminal empire during World War II.
1991-November 5, Robert Maxwell ,allegedly drowned after falling off his yacht in the Canary Islands near the northwest coast of Africa. Billions were missing from his pension funds
Maxwell’s investment bankers included Salomon Brothers. Eventually, the pension funds were replenished with monies from investment banks Shearson Lehman and Goldman Sachs, as well as the British government.
It was March 1991 when William Browder went to work for British billionaire Robert Maxwell as his “investment manager”. Just how deep into the investment decisions of Maxwell did Browder participate as an investment manager?
1991-Following Maxwells mysterious downing on November 10, his funeral took place on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, the resting place for the nation's most revered heroes. Prime Minister Shamir eulogized: "He has done more Israel than can today be said."
1992-Interestingly, after Maxwell died, Bill Browder went to work for the Salomon Brothers in the middle of their own scandal.
Browder was put in charge of the Russian proprietary investments desk at Salomon Brothers. He was given 25 million to invest and used it by paying cash for vouchers in Russian companies the government had issued to citizens , and used them to buy shared at public auction. In a short period he turned that into 125 million
The scandal at Salomon Brothers was the manipulation of the US Treasury auctions back then.After that scandal where the government was threatening to shut down Salomon Brothers who was the biggest bond dealer in the USA for manipulating markets, all of a sudden, people from Goldman Sachs started taking posts in government.
1993, Trump organized a party for Epstein:
“George Houraney, a businessman whose American Dream Calendar Girls beauty contest had been running in Las Vegas casinos since 1978, recalls encountering Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in January 1993.
Houraney says that Trump asked him to organise a party that month with some of his pageant’s finalists, promising to invite heads of modelling agencies and prospective sponsors for his competition. “He had me fly in all these girls, and gave me a $30,000 budget for airfares and limos to pick them up at the airport,” he says. “The girls were all decked out, expecting to meet all these VIPs.” But after an hour at the party,
Houraney says, there seemed to be only one other guest: Epstein. “I was like, ‘Donald, where are the guys? What’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘Well, this is it.’” Houraney says he realised “this is a Jeff Epstein party, basically.”
1994- Trump had worked himself up over his latest nemesis: Jay Pritzker, one of the owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain and Mr. Trump's 50-50 partner in the Grand Hyatt hotel, located next to New York's Grand Central Station.
This 34-story building, which has been losing millions according to Mr. Trump, and desperately in need of repair according to the Hyatt organization, is one of many Trump assets now partially in the hands of his bankers.
In this case, the banks are Bankers Trust New York Corp,' and Chemical Banking Corp. Bankers Trust made an unsecured $100 million loan to Mr. Trump in 1990 and took equity in the hotel as collateral when Mr. Trump's empire began to unravel that summer.
Chemical Bank inherited a $30 million loan on the property when it merged with Manufacturer's Hanover in 1993.
Home Savings of America, which bought the Bowery Savings Bank in 1988, also inherited a hotel loan, for $45 million. But Home Savings and Equitable Life Assurance - which has a $30 million original mortgage on the Grand Hyatt - are receiving regular payments and see no need to become embroiled in the acrimonious and expensive legal battle the Grand Hyatt has spawned.
From Citicorp, which led the pack with a $993 million exposure to Mr. Trump and his various affiliates, to Midlantic, with a relatively paltry $13 million casino-related loan, the position of the banks is to get some piece of collateral in exchange for leniency
Nearly all of the large American banks that lent money to Mr. Trump prefer to keep him relatively unsullied in the public eye so that he can continue to pull people into his casinos and persuade them to buy his high-priced condominiums.
Says one banker close to the situation:
"Every dollar of value that Donald has created since 1990 has been created for us. He will work for the banks forever. He's a marvelous employee in the casino business.”
"His condominiums sell at a premium to every other apartment in New York. Donald is a marketer. He can act like a used car salesman and become very rich. He is an icon to the type of people who go to Atlantic City. We like him as an employee."
Each of the banks with the largest exposure to Mr. Trump has taken some piece of his assets, leaving just enough left over so that Mr. Trump still has a stake in using his public stature to generate wealth.
Chemical Bank, for example, now owns Trump's Regency Hotel in Atlantic City, in exchange for $75 million of the $161 million in total debt it is owed. A Trump organization operates the property.
Chase Manhattan Bank, which originally held $295 million in Trump-related loans, holds the mortgage on the commercial and retail space in Trump Tower, a building of high-priced condominiums, retail stores, and office space on Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in New York City.
Citi led a $300 million mortgage for the New York Plaza Hotel and on top of that gave Mr. Trump's partnership an additional $125 million loan. Now, Citi and the other banks in the mortgage group have a 49% equity stake in the Plaza and can take pleasure in the $22 million operating profit and $5 million net the Plaza posted in 1993.
Citicorp's other big Trump-related exposure, part of a $245million loan on the Trump Shuttle, is shared with 17 other banks. The group owns the airline with US Air and a source close to the situation says Citicorp, along with the other banks involved, is receiving interest payments on the shuttle mortgage.
Bankers Trust, that institution is making money on a $125 million public bond offering to refinance the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. Bankers Trust's BT Securities unit will earn a sizable fee as one of two lead underwriters in the offering. In addition, the bank is listed as a $10 million beneficiary if the refinancing is a success.
There is not much about the Taj refinancing to give the public cause for confidence. The casino has shown losses of $71.1 million, $35.1 million, and $22.5 million, respectively, in the three years since its opening in 1990.
In 1991, the Taj went through a prepackaged bankruptcy and has emerged only to face increased competition from Nevada, growing gambling on Indian reservations, and the possibility that casinos may be built in the nearby Meadowlands and Philadelphia.
1994, the Russian economy was in such disarray that a plan called “loans for shares” was instituted through which Russian banks lent the government money in exchange for temporary stakes in the state-owned companies that were to be auctioned off.
But once the auctions began, the New York Times reported, “it became all too obvious that a fix was in. Foreign investors were barred from bidding for the most desirable assets, and the same banks that were assigned by the Government to organize the auctions ended up winning them, and usually at only a fraction over the minimum bid.”
A tiny elite began to acquire control over a vast number of public enterprises. Oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky got a 78 percent share of ownership in Yukos, the oil and gas giant, worth about $5 billion, for just $310 million. Boris Berezovsky bought Sibneft, another oil giant, worth $3 billion, for a mere $100 million.
A majority stake in Gazprom, the state-owned energy company that controlled a third of the world’s gas reserves, was sold for just $230 million, according to an article by James Henry, former chief economist at McKinsey & Company, in the American Interest.
Russia’s entire national electric grid was privatized for just $630 million. Natural resources such as oil, iron and steel, and aluminum; high-tech arms; airline industries; diamond mines; and most of Russia’s banking system went for next to nothing.
In all, Russia privatized 150 state-owned companies for just $12 billion.
Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s first deputy prime minister and the so-called father of Russian privatization, framed the dilemma in stark terms. “We did not [at first] have the choice between socialism and ideal capitalism,” he said.
“The choice in Russia . . . was between a criminalized transition and civil war.” What Russia faced was nothing less than the looting of its natural resources, the betrayal of a capitalist revolution, and the birth of Putin’s kleptocracy, an era of unimaginable corruption and greed.
1994, Mogilevich’s Inkombank was able to have “virtually daily interaction” with the Bank of New York (BONY), one of the largest banks in the United States, meaning that he finally had direct access to mainstream international banks to launder billions of dollars.
1994, Riggs reduced it’s stake in Valmet after Khodorkovsky ‘s Menatep purchased a twenty percent share in the company and here’s where Avisma comes into the picture. A year after Menatep increased their stake, they obtained a controlling interest in Avisma and according to the First Amended Complaint in the Avisma case, Khodorkovsky,
“…compelled AVISMA to sell titanium sponge and other products at below-market prices to offshore companies, who resold the Avisma products on the international market and kicked back the resale profits to Menatep, and compelled AVISMA to purchase raw materials at inflated prices from the offshore companies, with profits again funneled back to Menatep.”
1995-trump acquires 40 Wall Street Building and named it Trump building. The purchase price figure is still debated. New York Times wrote at the time, it was less than $8 million. Trump wrote in his book, Never Give Up, and said on The Apprentice and CNBC he paid $1 million for it. (Sounds like a gift)
The Federal Election Commission disclosure forms from 2015 show he has a debt of over $50 million on 40 Wall Street for the lease of the land
Built in the 1930’s and briefly the worlds tallest building .
On the evening of May 20th, 1946, an army plane crashed into 40 Wall Street at the 58th floor. It was en route to Newark Airportfrom Lake Charles Army Air Field in Louisiana.All five passengers aboard the plane were killed. The cause of the accident – fog – was similar to the army plane crashinto the Empire State Building, which took place only the year before.
It did not collapse.
Originally the Bank of Manhattan Building . It contains huge underground vaults
In 1982, 40 Wall Street was purchased by Joseph J. and Ralph E. Bernstein, who were discovered later to have been operating as a front behind dictatorial Philippines president Ferdinand E. Marcos.
It was not the only building in Marcos’ portfolio of buildings in New York City: the Crown Building on 5th Avenue and the Herald Square shopping mall were among others likely using funds taken from the Philippine government treasury.
Once Marcos was removed from leadership, his assets in the United States were frozen, which led to a contentious feud between the Bernstein brothers and the associate of an arms dealer, who both claimed ownership of the building
Financial companies like Deutsche Bank, Manufactures Hanover’s Trust Company, Toronto Dominion Bank, Loeb, Rhodes & Co., Bache & Co., White, Weld & Company have all been headquartered at 40 Wall Street.
In 2016, Bloomberg News reported on the large number of “frauds, thieves, boiler rooms and penny-stock schemers” that have taken up residence in the building since it was bought by Trump, adding to the site’s fascinating history. It was also the headquarters of Trump University
[Maybe there is Marcos Gold in those vaults and this is why banks like Deutsche Bank continued to loan him Money despite his many bankruptcies?]
After all, at the end of the Marcos presidency in the Philippines, there were a number of reports that Marcos had secreted away in UBS, large quantities of the Philippine national treasury. There are reports that these funds came from multiple sources: the looted Japanese treasury, Nazi gold money-laundering, and embezzlement of US aid.
The point that has not been disputed is that regardless of the source, there was "a lot" of illegal gold and money moved to Switzerland by Marcos, with the assistance of Adnan Khashoggi.
[Again, maybe some of it made its way to 40 Wall Streets vaults?]
1995-Felix Sater grew up near Brighton Beach and, as a teenager, counted among his friends Michael D. Cohen, who later became President Trump’s personal attorney.
Sater, a Brooklyn resident like Arif, was born in Russia in 1966. He reportedly emigrated with his family to the United States in the mid-1970s and settled in “Little Odessa.” It seems that his father, Mikhael Sheferovsky (aka Michael Sater), may have been engaged in Russian mob activity before he arrived in the United States.
According to a certified U.S. Supreme Court petition, Felix Sater’s FBI handler stated that he “was well familiar with the crimes of Sater and his (Sater’s) father, a (Semion) Mogilevich crime syndicate boss.”
A 1998 FBI report reportedly said Mogilevich’s organization had “approximately 250 members,” and was involved in trafficking nuclear materials, weapons, and more, as well as money laundering.
But Michael Sater may have been less ambitious than his son. His only reported U.S. criminal conviction came in 2000, when he pled guilty to two felony counts for extorting Brooklyn restaurants, grocery stores, and clinics. He was released with three years’ probation. Interestingly, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York who handled that case at the time was Loretta Lynch,who succeeded Eric Holder as U.S. Attorney General in 2014.
Back in 2000, she was also overseeing a budding informant relationship and a plea bargain with Michael’s son Felix, which may help to explain the father’s sentence.
In 1991 he stabbed a commodity trader in the face with a margarita glass stem in a Manhattan bar, severing a nerve. He was convicted of a felony and sent to prison. As Trump tells it, Sater simply “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”
The sentence for this felony conviction could not have been very long, because, by 1993, 27-year-old Felix was already a trader in a brand new Brooklyn-based commodity firm called “White Rock Partners,” an innovative joint venture among four New York crime families and the Russian mob aimed at bringing state-of-the art financial fraud to Wall Street.
In 1995, Sater was given an opportunity to take part in a telecommunications deal for AT& T in Russia, and while he was there, he entered the world of espionage. He began working for the US government—the Defense Intelligence Agency.”
in 1998, Felix Sater pled guilty to stock racketeering, as one of 19 U.S.-and Russian mob-connected traders who participated in a $40 million “pump and dump” securities fraud scheme.
Facing twenty years in Federal prison, Sater and Gennady Klotsman, a fellow Russian-American who’d been with him on the night of the Manhattan bar fight, turned “snitch” and helped the Department of Justice prosecute their co-conspirators.
Unfortunately for Sater, about the same time the NYPD also reportedly discovered that he had been running a money-laundering scheme and illicit gun sales out of a Manhattan storage locker. He and Klotsman fled to Russia.
However, according to the New York Times, which cited Klotsman and Lauria, soon after the events of September 11, 2001, the ever-creative Sater succeeded in brokering information about the black market for Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to the CIA and the FBI. According to Klotsman, this strategy “bought Felix his freedom,” allowing him to return to Brooklyn.
It is still not clear precisely what information Sater actually provided, but in 2015 U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch publicly commended him for sharing information that she described as “crucial to national security.”
Meanwhile, Sater’s sentence for his financial crimes continued to be deferred even after his official cooperation in that case ceased in late 2001. His files remained sealed, and he managed to avoid any sentencing for those crimes at all until October 23, 2009.
When he finally appeared before the Eastern District’s Judge I. Leo Glasser, Felix received a $25,000 fine, no jail time, and no probation in a quiet proceeding that attracted no press attention.
Some compared this sentence to Judge Glasser’s earlier sentence of Mafia hit man “Sammy the Bull” Gravano to 4.5 years for 19 murders, in exchange for “cooperating against John Gotti.”
Sater grew up with and is close with Trumps future lawyer Michael Cohen, and both are connected to Chabad of Port Washington.
Cohen’s tactics earned him the nickname of “Tom,” a reference to Tom Hagen, the consigliore to Mafia Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Jay Goldberg, the attorney who was working for Trump at the time, said Cohen stepped into the void left by the 1986 death of Roy Cohn.
Although Cohen described himself as an “agnostic Jew,” he kept a framed photo of Menachem Schneerson in his office.
Many of his associates from the former Soviet Union had connections to Russian organized crime. Cohen was drawn to the Russian émigré community of Brighton Beach and eventually learned to speak Russian.
Cohen’s uncle, Morton Levine, was a wealthy Brooklyn doctor who owned the El Caribe Country Club in Brooklyn, a well-known hangout for Russian gangsters. Cohen and his siblings all had ownership shares in the club, which for years rented to the first Russia mob boss of Brighton Beach, Evsei Agron, along with his successors, Marat Balagula and Boris Nayfeld.
According to a report by ProPublica and WNYC, before he joined up with Trump in the mid-2000s, Cohen was involved in a series of scams, including insurance and IRS fraud, for which he always avoided indictment while others were jailed or fined.
In 1994, Cohen married Laura Shusterman, who was born in the Soviet Union (Ukraine).
Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS testified before the House Intelligence Committee that Cohen “had a lot of connections to the former Soviet Union, and that he seemed to have associations with organized crime figures in New York and Florida – Russian organized crime figures,” including Garber.
1995-Southern Air Transport (SAT) — a well-known front company for the CIA — relocated from Miami, Florida to Columbus, Ohio.
First founded in the late 1940s, SAT from 1960 until 1973 was directly owned by the CIA, which sought to use the company as a cover for covert operations.
After 1973, the company was placed in private hands, although all of its subsequent owners would have CIA ties, including James Bastian, a former lawyer for the CIA, who owned SAT at the time of its relocation to Ohio.
SAT was intimately involved in the Iran-Contra affair, having been used to funnel weapons and drugs to and from the Nicaraguan Contras under the guise of delivering “humanitarian aid,” while also sending American weapons to Israel that were then sold to Iran in violation of the U.S. arms embargo.
In 1986 alone, SAT transported from Texas to Israel 90 tons of TOW anti-tank missiles, which were then sold to Iran by Israel and Mossad-linked intermediaries like Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.
Even though the airline’s CIA links were well known, Leslie Wexner’s company, The Limited, sought to coax SAT to relocate its headquarters from Miami, Florida to Columbus, Ohio, a move that was realized in 1995.
In addition to Wexner the other main figures who were key in securing SAT’s relocation to Ohio were Alan D. Fiers Jr., a former chief of the CIA Central American Task Force, and retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord, head of air logistics for SAT’s covert action in Laos between 1966 and 1968, while the company was still known as Air America.
Secord was also the air logistics coordinator in the illegal Contra resupply network for Oliver North during Iran-Contra. Fiers was one of the key individuals involved in Iran-Contra who was later pardoned by George H.W. Bush with the assistance of then-Attorney General Bill Barr.
Barr — who recently served as attorney general in the Trump administration, and top of the chain of DOJ command in the investigation of Epstein’s death in prison — had refused to recuse himself from the investigation into Epstein’s network and his recent death. Barrs had worked at law firms doing work for both Epstein and Southern Air Transport
Despite the involvement of these CIA-linked men, as well as the organized crime-linked Leslie Wexner, the then-president of SAT told the Columbus Dispatch that the airline was “no longer connected to the CIA.”
Notably, It was during this same time that Epstein exerted substantial control over Wexner’s finances; and, it was Epstein who orchestrated logistics for Wexner’s business operations, including The Limited.
As was revealed in the Arthur Shapiro murder file and in ties between SAT and The Limited, much of The Limited’s logistics involved figures and companies connected to organized crime and U.S. intelligence.
It is also important to note that SAT was well-known for being a CIA front company prior to the efforts of Wexner et al. to bring the airline to Columbus, and that, a few years prior, Epstein himself had previously worked for intelligence-linked figures also involved in Iran-Contra, such as Adnan Khashoggi.
In addition, during this time period, Epstein had already begun to live in the now infamous New York penthouse that had first been purchased by Wexner in 1989.
Wexner had apparently installed CCTV and recording equipment in an odd bathroom in the home after his purchase, and never lived in the home
In an exclusive interview, Bob Fitrakis told MintPress that Epstein and Wexner’s involvement with SAT’s relocation to Ohio had caused suspicion among some prominent state and local officials that the two were working with U.S. intelligence.
Fitrakis specifically stated that then-Ohio Inspector General David Strutz and then-Sheriff of Franklin County Earl Smith had personally told him that they believed that both Epstein and Wexner had ties to the CIA.
Strutz had referred to SAT’s route between Hong Kong and Columbus on behalf of Wexner’s company The Limited as “the Meyer Lansky run,” as he believed that Wexner’s association with SAT was related to his ties to elements of organized crime that were connected to the Lansky-created National Crime Syndicate.
1995-Trump met Paolo Zampolli, the co-owner of Metropolitan Models.
Paulo offered Melania her representation if she came to the U.S in 1996. After moving to Manhattan the following year, she lived in a Zeckendorf Towers apartment with photographer Matthew Atanian, an arrangement made by Zampolli. In January of that year, the French men's magazine "Max" featured sexually explicit photos of Melania with another model
1996-Ross was a prominent figure in New York Democratic Party politics and had caught the attention President Bill Clinton who appointed him to lead the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund. In 2014, Vekselberg’s Renova Group became a partner with Ross in the takeover of the Bank of Cyprus, which had held billions in deposits from wealthy Russians.
1996-Donald J. Trump sold his half interest in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York to the Pritzker family's Hyatt Corporation yesterday for $140 million, bringing to an end an often rancorous, 17-year partnership in a landmark property that marked the developer's rise to prominence.
Mr. Trump, who has wrestled with the Pritzkers over the management of the 32-story black glass hotel next to Grand Central Terminal, said he had some regrets about the sale.
''It's both a very happy and a very sad day,' Mr. Trump said. ''I am selling an asset to which I gave birth. But not only did I make money over the years, I'm getting $140 million for a half interest.''
The Hyatt Corporation and an affiliate now own 99 percent of the 1,407-room hotel, with the remaining owned by the Pritzker Family Philanthropic Fund. Hyatt officials in Chicago, who declined to confirm the sale price, said the deal reflected the company's optimism in both the hotel and the New York market.
But the two partners never really got along. Two arbitration proceedings failed to stem the bickering, and in 1993 Mr. Trump sued Jay Pritzker and the Hyatt Corporation. The company countersued seven months later. The two sides managed to settle their dispute in 1995, with the Pritzkers agreeing to pay Mr. Trump's legal fees and to finance a $25 million renovation of the hotel.
But the peace treaty was seen by many hotel analysts as a prelude to a sale.
''The transaction concludes what for a fair amount of time has been an acrimonious relationship between the parties,'' said John A. Fox, senior vice president of PKF Consulting, which specializes in the hotel industry. ''I think this represents a substantial profit for Mr. Trump, but it finally gives Hyatt complete control of the property.''
1996-Trump bought three beauty pageants—Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA—from ITT. As is often the case with Trump, the exact amount of the transaction is unclear. In The Art of the Comeback, he wrote that his winning bid was $10 million. But later, he couldn’t resist changing the narrative to make reporters think he had gotten a steal and paid only $2 million.
1996- November, Trump’s trip to Moscow. According to the recently released 966-page fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, “Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,” Leon Black was on the Trump trip, along with David Geovanis and Bennett LeBow, two men Black knew from his days as head of mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the long defunct Wall Street investment bank.
Black came out of Drexel and Drexel attempted to entrap its clients with sex. Connie Bruck’s The Predators’ Ball described the famed annual bash for Drexel’s raiders. One part was when the heavy hitters were brought to a room full of enticingly beautiful women.
Howard Lorber was New York real estate developer and also attended, along with his business partner Bennett LeBow. Lorber was the president of the Brooke Group, whose holdings included Liggett-Ducat Ltd. (formerly known as Liggett & Myers), America’s third-largest tobacco company, and major real estate assets in both New York and Moscow; LeBow was founder and chairman.
LeBow had begun partnering with Vadim Rabinovich, the pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch who had spent seven years in jail for embezzlement. Only a month before Trump, Lorber, and LeBow’s Moscow visit, Rabinovich had participated in the Tel Aviv summit meeting at which Mogilevich was granted control of the Ukraine energy trade.
Once Trump and his entourage arrived in Moscow, they were shown around town by its mayor, Yuri Luzhkov.
Mayor Luzhkov was alleged to be deeply in bed with Mogilevich, Ivankov, and company. In fact, according to a classified cable Ambassador Beyrle wrote, “Luzhkov used criminal money to support his rise to power and has been involved with bribes and deals regarding lucrative construction contracts throughout Moscow. [Source redacted] told us that Luzhkov’s friends and associates (including . . . crime boss Vyacheslav Ivankov and reputedly corrupt Duma Deputy Joseph Kobzon) are ‘bandits.’”
Mayor Luzhkov asked Trump about possibly renovating the run-down Rossiya and Moskva hotels in the style of the Commodore in New York.
Before leaving Russia, Trump held a press conference in Moscow’s Hotel Baltschug Kempinsky. At the press conference, Trump announced he planned to invest $250 million to build two “super-luxury” residential towers, to be called Trump International and—surprise—Trump Tower, both of which he said “Moscow desperately wants and needs.”“Moscow is going to be huge, take it from the Trumpster!” he later told Playboy.
But, as in the eighties, the project remained eternally stalled
1996, Anatoly Sobchak lost his reelection bid as mayor of St. Petersburg, leaving his protégé Putin without a highly placed mentor. But two months later, in July, Putin was invited to Moscow by Nikolai Yegorov, Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff, and offered a job as a deputy.
Things weren’t stable in the short term for Putin, either. Just days after Putin moved in as deputy chief of staff, his job was eliminated. His patron, Chief of Staff Yegorov, had been fired in the internal warfare.
For all the palace intrigue, Putin was playing a longer game, and by August he had finagled a position as a public liaison to the Presidential Property Management Directorate. That meant his new job was to oversee hundreds of palaces, dachas, hospitals, spas, yachts, aircraft, state factories, and more.
One has to wonder if Trump had any contact with Putin during his trip in November
1996 article entitled, “The Money Plane,” published by New York Magazine which detailed how the “Russian mob gets a shipment of up to a billion dollars in fresh $100 bills,” Edmond Safra’s bank, Republic National, was directly implicated.
After reporting that the Russian mob had long been using “an unimpeded supply of freshly minted Federal Reserve notes to finance a vast and growing international crime syndicate,” the author of the article, Robert Friedman, asked the obvious question, “So then why are Republic National Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve continuing to supply millions of crisp, clean $100 bills to banks that so many money-laundering experts agree are tainted?”
And that’s a great question especially since the article went on to quote an official from the office behind regulating Republic National Bank, the Comptroller of the Currency, who stated that the U.S. government “sees nothing wrong with it.”
1996-Browder tells how Steinmetz introduced him to the Lebanese-Brazilian Jewish banking billionaire Edmond Safra, who invests and becomes not just a partner but also a mentor and friend.
Browder and Edmond Safra (1932–1999) founded Hermitage Capital Management in 1996 for the purpose of investing initial seed capital of $25 million in Russia during the period of the mass privatization after the fall of the Soviet Union. Beny Steinmetz was another of the original investors in Hermitage, the Israeli diamond billionaire.
Cyprus is a favorite place for Russians to launder money. Thats probably why Browder and his accounting advisor Jamison Firestone chose it to launder Browder’s Russian profits.
Browder from about 1997 to the mid-2000s used Cyprus shell companies to move money out of Russia to cheat the country of multi-millions of dollars in taxes. He used the Russian shells to invest in shares, including Gazprom shares that were illegal for foreigners to buy in Russia, then moved the shares to Cyprus shells
Browder hired a former Israeli Mossad agent, Ariel, to set up his security operation, manned mainly by Israelis. Over time, Browder and Ariel become close. How did that connection come about? Was it through Maxwell?
Safra is also internationally renowned as the dean of Sephardi Jewish philanthropy; the main backer of Israel’s Shas party, the Sephardi Torah Guardians, and of New York’s Holocaust memorial museum, and a megadonor to Yeshiva University, Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and much more. Browder must have known all that. Considering the closeness of the two, it’s surprising that none of it gets mentioned.
1996, Vekselberg co-founded the Siberian-Urals Aluminium Company (SUAL) via a merger of the Ural and Irkutsk Aluminum Plants. (SUAL would later be incorporated into United Company RUSAL, the largest aluminum company in the world). Using revenues generated from his aluminum business, he purchased a minority interest in Tyumen Oil (TNK), one of Russia's largest oil and gas companies.
1997, Vekselberg’s secured a controlling interest in Tyumen and was appointed to the Board of Directors; in 1998, he was appointed Chairman of the Board. Later, he integrated those and other assets under the umbrella of Renova Group, delegating operating responsibilities to managers.
1997- In a New York Times article published in September, 1999, it was reported that Valmet not only stashed profits for Avisma but was also used to hide some of Yukos’ assets, you know, the same company that Kenneth Dart was involved in.
According to the article, Khodorkovsky denied the allegations that Menatep was skimming profits but did acknolwedge that “Valmet has been the recipient of some of Yukos assets.”
From the 1999 Times (UK) article, “Yeltsin ‘Family’ Tycoon Linked to Cash Scandal”
“The Times has learnt that Roman Abramovich, a tycoon, controls the trading arm of one of Russia’s largest oil companies through an Isle of Man company that has figured in the Bank of New York affair.”
Mr. Abramovich runs the Siberian oil giant Sibneft, which sells its oil through a company called Runicom. His name has emerged after speculation that Swiss investigators are looking into the role of Runicom as part of the widening investigation into the laundering of up to $15 billion of Russian money through American banks.
Runicom is owned by at least two offshore companies set up by the Valmet Group, a financial services concern partly owned by Menatep, a failed Russian bank that used the Bank of New York.”
So not only was Valmet allegedly used to stash both Avisma and Yukos assets, this means it was tied in with the Bank of New York money laundering scandal
Anyways, Khodorkovsky didn’t hold on to Avisma very long because in December, 1997, he sold his majority holding to Bill Browder’s investment group.
According to Avisma, Browder purchased the company illegally when he used “interstate wires to transfer $2 million to Austrian Creditanstalt Bank (CAIB),” and not only that, at the time of purchase Avisma was in the process of being sold to VSMPO so they had to transfer their shares in AVISMA to VSMPO in order to continue their asset skimming scheme.
Jonathan Hay was accused of using his position as general director of H.I.I.D. “to structure the transfer of control of Avisma from Bank Menatep to the ‘investors’ and that he was elected to the board of VSMP “as part of the effort to retake control of Avisma and gain control of VSMPO in order to continue the scheme of kickbacks.”
Summers worked closely with Jeffrey Sachs, Russians Anatoly Chubais and Boris Nemtsov, and former World Bank consultant, Jonathan Hay, who was appointed H.I.I.D’s general director in Moscow. According to Janine R. Wedel via thenation.com, Hay ‘assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics; he not only controlled access to the Chubais circle but served as its mouthpiece.’
This cozy little group of co-conspirators helped direct everything from the Russian voucher program and the State auctions to IMF funds earmarked for Russia.”
So yes, Browder became business partners with the guy who was appointed general director of the H.I.I.D. which is code for “We’re here to f*ck up your country.”
Hay’s criminal activities in Russia eventually landed him in a courtroom facing three counts of violating the False Claims Act and he was eventually disbarred from working for USAID for two years
1997-Even William Sessions, director of the FBI from 1987 to 1993, was not above doing a complete about-face when it came to Russian organized crime. In 1997, after he returned to private practice, he traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian Mafia.
A few years later, William Sessions decided to take on a Russian client. In this case, the client had been charged with racketeering and was trying to negotiate a deal with the US Department of Justice, and was so powerful that he not only had made the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list, but had now gotten a former FBI director, William Sessions, to represent him.
Sessions’s client, of course, was Semion Mogilevich. In the end, Mogilevich did not get the plea deal he wanted. But the mere fact that the former head of the FBI had a client who, according to the US Department of Justice, represented an enormous national security threat provides a sense of how deeply the Russian Mafia had penetrated America’s defenses.
What would be worse, of course, was if the Russian Mafia somehow managed to go even further and breach the White House. All of which seemed extraordinarily far-fetched.
1997-Donald Trump flew at least seven times on Jeffrey Epstein's private Lolita Express jet - six more times than was previously known, new documents released at Ghislaine Maxwell's trial have revealed.
His last flight was 1997, 1 year before Epstein purchased his Island.
Trump also travelled on the plane four times in 1993, once in 1994 and once in 1995 with his ex-wife Marla Marples and children Tiffany and Eric, flight logs show.
1998-Vladimir Putin, a mere lieutenant colonel in the KGB, had leapfrogged over scores of multistarred generals to take charge of the Russian secret service and reshape it in his image. He moved into a relatively modest office on the third floor of Lubyanka and turned the official executive office, which had been occupied by KGB chiefs from Beria to Yuri Andropov, into a shrine of sorts, with a small statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, aka “Iron Felix,” the Bolshevik revolutionary who was the founder and director of the Soviet secret police, on the desk.
He started by completely restructuring the agency he loved, bringing in confederates from his old days at the KGB, and purging his enemies.
Among the latter were two key agencies, the Directorate for Economic Counterintelligence and the Directorate for Counterintelligence Protection of Strategic Sites, both charged with investigating high-level economic crimes, which inevitably involved Putin and his allies.
In the hands of his political foes, these agencies, not unlike the Special Counsel’s Office in the United States, potentially posed a serious threat to Putin. Now that he had the power, Putin made sure that both agencies were swiftly eliminated.
1998-Since the late 1990s, Deutsche had been peddling products to hedge funds, including the enormous Renaissance Technologies, that helped them avoid taxes.
Founded by a former government code-breaker, Renaissance specialized in using computer programs to scout out tiny market inefficiencies that could be exploited. The firm recruited engineers and mathematicians, including an IBM programmer named Robert Mercer, a right wing zealot who once noted that he enjoyed spending time with cats more than with people.
Mercer eventually rose to the top of Renaissance, helping it become one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.
Robert Leroy Mercer is an American billionaire hedge fund manager, former principal investor in the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica, computer scientist who was an early artificial intelligence researcher and developer, and former co-CEO of the hedge fund company Renaissance Technologies.
He is also a major funder of organizations supporting right-wing political causes in the United States, such as Breitbart News and Donald Trump's 2016 campaign for president. He is the principal benefactor of the Make America Number 1super PAC.
Renaissance was always looking for a new, sharper edge, and that’s where Deutsche came in. The bank hatched a plan in which Renaissance parked billions of dollars of securities and other assets with Deutsche. The bank legally owned the assets, but Renaissance handled the trading of them.
Once a year,Renaissance could withdraw profits from the Deutsche account and get taxed at along-term capital gains rate of 20percent—about half what it would have faced without the Deutsche structure.
The strategy generated billions of dollars in tax savings for Renaissance. Deutsche collected fees totaling $570 million from Renaissance and other hedge funds for setting up the structures.
1998-About $10 billion in ill-gotten gains by Russian companies may have been laundered through the Bank of New York since early 1998 – including $4.2 billion just from October to March – The New York Times reported on Aug. 19.
The big news is that the account holder is probably part of one of the most notorious mobs ever spawned in the post-USSR, which is led by the Ukrainian-born Lviv University economics graduate, Semion Mogilevich (Simon Mohylevych).
Prior to this money-laundering scandal, the FBI and Israeli intelligence suspected Mogilevich of being involved in gun-running, drugs, prostitution and investment scams.
Three trails tie Mogilevich's name to the Bank of New York scandal: the companies Benex and YBM, as well as the two Bank of New York employees in charge of Russian accounts at the Bank of New York.
1998, Russia defaulted on $40 billion in debt, causing the ruble to plummet and Russian banks to close. The ensuing financial panic sent the country’s oligarchs and mobsters scrambling to find a safe place to put their money.
That October, just two months after the Russian economy went into a tailspin, Trump broke ground on his biggest project yet.”That project was Trump World Tower, briefly the tallest all-residential tower in the world.
As Bloomberg Businessweek reported recently, it wasn’t long before one-third of the units in Trump Tower’s most expensive floors were purchased, either by individual buyers from the former Soviet Union, or by limited liability companies connected to Russia.
1998-Trump began working with Deutsche Bank, securing a loan for renovations at 40 Wall Street and a $300 million loan for Trump World Tower
1998- Black was a widely respected figure on Wall Street, and an important connection for Epstein. The two met in the late 1990s, and Epstein soon began working for Black. Over the next 15 or so years, including after Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008, the two men met at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan.
Black also put Epstein on the board of his family foundation, according to public charitable filings. Those documents show that Epstein stayed on the board of the Debra and Leon Black Foundation until 2012, well after he pleaded guilty in Florida. Black has described that as a paperwork error; he said Epstein stepped down in 2007, the year before his plea.
Epstein’s financial advisory firm took a roughly 6 percent equity stake in Environmental Solutions Worldwide in 2011.
Two of Black’s sons serve on the board of the company, which makes emission control products, according to the company website. Bloomberg, reported that he had given Epstein access to Apollo’s senior executives.
It would later come out Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black paid child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for financial advice from 2012 through 2017, despite knowing Epstein pleaded guilty to sexually abusing an underage girl in 2008, a probe by a law firm retained by Apollo found.
1999 August 5, , Yeltsin called Putin to his dacha outside Moscow. “I’ve made a decision, Vladimir Vladimirovich,” Yeltsin told him, “and I would like to offer you the post of prime minister.”
Putin wanted the job, but he had no desire to be a sacrificial lamb like so many short-lived previous prime ministers. He needed political capital because Yeltsin and his “Family” were still facing possible criminal prosecution and wanted protection. But to the public at large, he was a nonentity.
Thus, according to historian David Satter, a plan called Operation Successor was implemented to resolve precisely those problems.
It began on the night of September 4, when a huge explosion rocked a five-story building in Buynaksk, a town of about sixty thousand in the Russian republic of Dagestan, killing sixty-four people.
Five days later, another explosion destroyed a nine-story apartment building in Moscow. This time, ninety-four people died.
On September 13, yet another explosion rocked another Moscow apartment building. This time the death toll was 118.
And a fourth bombing took place on September 16 in the southern city of Volgodonsk, killing seventeen.
To tens of millions of Russians, these bombings were roughly the equivalent of 9/11, and were widely blamed on separatist rebels from Chechnya, the tiny, largely Muslim republic near the Caspian Sea that had been part of the Soviet Union.
In the aftermath of the bombings, with all of Russia crying out for vengeance, Putin, who had just been appointed prime minister, appeared on national television night after night, the one man who could assuage their fears and stave off the collapse of the Russian state.
1999 October 7, , on CNN’s Larry King Live, Trump formally announced that he would form a presidential exploratory committee, in hopes of winning the Reform Party’s presidential nomination.
Over the next six months, he jousted with fellow Reform Party candidates, principally pundit and strategist Pat Buchanan, in the closest approximation of a political campaign he had ever had. But close was not good enough, and on February 14, 2000, Trump dropped out, and blamed the Reform Party itself, noting that it was dominated by a “fringe element” that he didn’t particularly care for.
More specifically, Trump complained that at a reception in California for the party, “the room was crowded with Elvis look-alikes.”
1999-Alex Brown was acquired by Bankers Trust in 1997, which, in turn, was purchased by Deutsche Bank in 1999. Krongard’s last job at Alex Brown -Bankers Trust was to oversee “private client relations.” This means that Krongard personally arranged confidential transactions and transfers for the bank’s unnamed wealthy clientele.
After “Buzzy” Krongard’s departure to the CIA, his successor at Alex Brown -Bankers Trust was his former deputy Mayo Shattuck III, who had worked at the bank for many years. In 1997, Shattuck helped Krongard engineer the merger with Banker’s Trust, and he stayed on after Deutsche Bank acquired Bankers Trust – Alex Brown in 1999
1999-More or less from the moment he joined the committee, Roach had been chasing Deutsche. The first time he came across the bank was in 1999, right after its acquisition of Bankers Trust. Roach was investigating how banks catered to dictators and their families, helping them keep their embezzled money secret.
It turned out that Bankers Trust—through its private-banking division that served many of the world’s richest people—was among the banks that moved money for Raul Salinas, the corrupt brother of Mexico’s former president.
A few years later, Deutsche popped up again. This time it was part of a Senate investigation into tax shelters arranged by accounting firms like KPMG. Deutsche had extended a huge credit line to KPMG to finance what appeared to be fraudulent financial structures. Roach and his team uncovered evidence that Deutsche executives in Frankfurt knew about the illicit practices.
Next up, Roach dug into Deutsche’s peddling of sure-to-lose CDOs to unsuspecting clients. Later Roach got wind of the bank’s tax work with Renaissance, and it smelled foul. He would convince his boss, Senator Levin, that it was a worthy target of a major investigation.
1999-April 7, Russia's chief prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Boris Berezovsky, the tycoon and political mover who has taken a sensational tumble from the graces of Russian high finance and of President Boris N. Yeltsin.
Officials in the prosecutor's office said Mr. Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov, a former senior official of the Russian airline Aeroflot, had been charged with money-laundering and ''illegal entrepreneurship'' that diverted foreign currency from Aeroflot to a company in Geneva that they control.
Mr. Berezovsky has long been said to be a dominant figure in Aeroflot, although he denies owning even one share of stock. The charges, the first from a fusillade of recent Government investigations of Mr. Berezovsky's business empire, would seem to signal that his days as a political and financial power are, at best, numbered.
Prosecutors chose to issue the warrant while Mr. Berezovsky was in France, beyond the immediate reach of the flaccid arm of Russian law.
Mr. Berezovsky, a onetime car dealer who parlayed currency trading into a huge fortune in the wild early days of post-Soviet Russia, was a principal backer of Mr. Yeltsin's 1996 re-election campaign. A year ago Mr. Yeltsin appointed him secretary of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the frayed alliance of most of the nations that had been part of the old Soviet Union.
The prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, who has strong Communist backing, was one investigators. After Mr. Yeltsin sought unsuccessfully to fire Mr. Skuratov early this year -- and the state-controlled television broadcast videotape of the prosecutor covorting in bed with two prostitutes -- Communists and some other critics accused Mr. Yeltsin's office of trying to quash probes into Mr. Berezovsky's dealings.
They have suggested that Mr. Berezovsky holds secrets that could ruin the Yeltsin presidency. And when audiotapes surfaced of conversations between Mr. Berezovsky and Mr. Yeltsin's daughter Tanya Dyachenko, who is her father's close adviser, some took it as a veiled warning from Mr. Berezovsky that efforts to topple him could bring down Mr. Yeltsin's family, too.
Mr. Yeltsin has since dismissed Mr. Berezovsky from his post as commonwealth secretary, and outwardly the estrangement between the President and the tycoon appears real. While Mr. Yeltsin recently ordered -- again -- that Mr. Skuratov be removed, corruption inquiries under Mr. Skuratov's deputy seem to continue apace.
1999-Republican National Bank of New York was owned by Israeli Safra who was a Browder investor in Hermitage and flew 40 billion in USD to Russia in the 90’s
On May 11, 1999 HSBC, one of the most corrupt financial institutions of our time, announced a $10.3 billion deal to purchase Edmond Safra’s holdings including the Republic National Bank of New York and Safra’s shares in Bill Browder’s firm, Hermitage Capital. The announcement came only nine months after Russia’s economy collapsed and Browder’s clients, lost over $900 million.
It was also nine months after $4.8 billion in IMF funds was deposited in an undisclosed account at Safra’s bank and well before the public became aware that that same money was dispersed and stolen through the Bank of New York, off-shore companies, and foreign financial institutions.
HSBC Cyprus owned hermitage fund after purchasing safra Tepublican National Bank of New York
1999 August, 19, Russian titanium company Avisma filed a RICO anti-racketeering suit in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey against a group of investors that included Bill Browder, Kenneth Dart, and Jonathan Hay.
Avisma which is known today as VSMPO-AVISMA is the world’s largest titanium producer and is currently held by the Rostec Corporation. Boeing has been in business with them since 1993 and according to Rostec’s website, “all civil aircraft made by Boeing utilize Russian titanium.”
Browder’s investment group became involved in Avisma after purchasing a majority share in the company from Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 1997.
According to Avisma’s complaint, the investment group then engaged in a “scheme of fraud and money-laundering by which tens of millions of dollars were misappropriated from Avisma and diverted to bank accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Investors and/or their agents and co-conspirators.”
Dart, like Browder, was also a big player in Russia during the 1990s and at one point owned twenty-five percent of Yukos’ subsidiaries. He also owns Dart Management which is considered a vulture fund—a fund that usually buys up government debt at reduced prices and then later forces the government to pay it back in the full amount. Enter Argentina.
Before Argentina defaulted on its debt in 2002, Dart’s company invested approximately $120 million in Argentinean bonds at a discounted price. After the default, Dart sued Argentina in the Southern District of New York, demanding that he be paid full price for the bonds.
According to businessobserverfl.com, “To the surprise of some observers, in September Judge thomas P. Griesa ruled in Dart’s favor.” The case didn’t end there but that’s not what’s interesting about this story in regards to Kenneth Dart and Bill Browder. What’s interesting is who Dart teamed up with to go after Argentina. Paul Singer.
The same Paul Singer that originally paid for the Dirty Dossier. Not only that, the Daily Callerreported that Singer hired Fusion GPS to “investigate the Argentine government and provide PR and media relations as part of the firm’s dispute over a multi-billion dollar bond investment.”
Singer would one day donate $1 million to Trump's inauguration and be a participant in key funders meetings convened by President Trump. Singer became a strong financial backer of Trump's.
On August 20, 1999, the very next day after Avisma filed their suit against Browder, the New York Times dropped their articleabout the Bank of New York money laundering scandal.
Interestingly, according to journalist Oleg Lurie, Edmond Safra met with Boris Berezovsky, another Russian oligarch who was implicated in both the money laundering scandal and missing IMF funds, sometime in the “early autum” of 1999, which would have been around the time the New York Times article came out and the September Congressional hearings on the money laundering scandal. Lurie reported that the meeting was tense,
Safra seemed quite upset by it, and by December 3, 1999 Safra was killed in suspicious firethat broke out in his Monte Carlo home.
Although some believe that Safra was killed by the Russian mafia, Lurie reported that a Swiss prosecutor investigating the missing IMF money believed that Safra was killed “because of his revelations to the FBI and the Swiss Prosecutor’s Office investigating the disappearance and laundering of $4.8 billion of the IMF stablilization loan.”
One of the more interesting things to note here is that the prosecutor implied that Safra not only spoke with the FBI about the missing IMF funds but with Swiss authorities as well. If true, it makes Safra’s death/murder even more intriguing especially since we know from a 1996 New York Magazine articlethat Safra was absolutely working with the Russian mafia.
So let’s recap: Browder and two other guys, one who practically headed up the Russian privatization program and the other who had previously worked with Paul Singer who’s tied to the Dirty Dossier and Fusion GPS, bought a majority share of a titanium company that was once majority owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Khodorkovsky was once the richest man in Russia because of Bank Menatep and Yukos which were both tied to the KGB, Valmet, CIA front company Riggs Bank, the Bank of New York scandal, and the missing IMF money.
After purchasing a majority share in the titanium, Browder and friends were sued for essentially stealing millions of dollars from the company.
In the meantime, Browder’s partner, Edmond Safra, who had a history more checkered than Altuzarra’s 2015 Spring collection, was working with the Russia mafia, his bank was tied to the missing IMF money, he sold his bank shortly after the IMF money went missing, and was killed days before the HSBC deal—where he was expected to pocket $3 billion—was finalized.
On Aug. 18, the day before The New York Times made its revelation, Britain's national crime squad raided the apartment of Berlin and Edwards, located in the Marylebone district of London, Britain's Guardian newspaper reported on Aug. 21.
Berlin's connection to Mogilevich is through Benex as the distributor of Mogilevich's YBM. YBM Magnex International was founded in Hungary by Mogilevich. He probably selected Hungary as his worldwide headquarters – and not Israel where he took up citizenship after leaving the USSR in the 1980s – because it was safer for his criminal activities. Settling in Hungary was helped by marrying a Hungarian, Katalin Papp.
In the last few years, while Benex was money laundering, YBM was fleecing North American investors. Mogilevich set up a YBM office in Newtown, Penn., and a factory in Kentucky. YBM tricked auditors – Parente, Randolph, Orlando, Carey & Associates in 1996 and Deloitte & Touche in 1997 – to raise hundreds of millions on the Toronto stock exchange. YBM's business activities turned out to be a scam. In June of this year, YBM Magnex pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud and since filed for bankruptcy. Shareholders lost about $429 million from 1993-7.
YBM's chief executive from 1996-8 was Jacob Bogatin, a recent American citizen who came from Russia in the 1980s. While Jacob managed YBM, his brother David was serving an eight-year prison term in New York state for a multi-million dollar gasoline tax fraud, according to the New York City's investigating newspaper, Village Voice, on May 26, 1998.
What happened to the YBM money is still under investigation, but the investors will probably never see it again. The accounting firm – Miller, Tate – found that the chief operating officer of YBM – Igor Fisherman, also a former Soviet citizen – seemed to have diverted company funds to a Cayman Islands registered company called United Trade.
Mogilevich's companies are said to be active in Eastern Europe. His gangs supposedly control all smuggling through Moscow's Shermetyevo airport, and own much of the Hungarian armaments industry – including companies like Digep General Machine Works, Army Co-op and Magnex 2000 – and are thus a NATO supplier, according to the Village Voice.
In Ukraine, Mogilevich's companies sell diesel and oil products to Ukrainian railways, have an YBM factory, and nightclubs in Kyiv, the Village Voice. reported.
His contact at the railway administration was a high-ranking official called Vahtang Ubiriya. In March 1994 the FBI photographed Ubiriya at a Republican Party presidential fundraising event in Dallas.
The Village Voice also claims that Mogilevich's gang – dubbed the Red Mafia – is strongest in Ukraine, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the United States. Authorities should make a statement on whether the Red Mafia operates in Ukraine, especially the charges about Mogilevich's relations with a government ministry. Jaroslav Koshiw is the Post's national editor.
1999-, the bombings that killed nearly three hundred innocent Russians were likely the product of a “false flag” operation that enabled Putin to consolidate power, much as Adolf Hitler did after the Reichstag fire. “To blow up your own innocent and sleeping people in your capital city is an action that is almost unthinkable,” writes Karen Dawisha. “Yet the evidence that the FSB was at least involved in planting a bomb in Ryazan is incontrovertible [ . . . ] and it strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the Putin regime.” But few Russians were aware of what had really happened.
As the newly appointed prime minister who had been put in charge of the war, Putin won popularity overnight.
On December 31, 1999, the last day of the millennium, Boris Yeltsin resigned and appointed Putin acting president. He became president having pledged to chase Chechen terrorists everywhere, famously promising to “rub them out in the outhouse,” if necessary.
He had promised to stop the plundering of the Russian state by rich oligarchs. Berezovsky then fled to London while others linked to Safra fled to Israel.
But very few Russians knew that Putin had been a primary actor in the same kind of activity in St. Petersburg. And as for cleaning up corruption, one of Putin’s first acts as president was to pardon Boris Yeltsin, thereby guaranteeing immunity from prosecution to the outgoing president.-
In addition to overseeing the massive flow of flight capital that resulted from “privatization,” Putin had a deft touch when it came to consolidating his power. That became apparent when, just after becoming prime minister, Putin recruited two oligarchs who were among his closest confidants, Roman Abramovich and Lev Leviev, to undertake the highly unlikely mission of creating a new religious organization called the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.
The idea was to bring together various Orthodox Jewish communities in Russia through an Orthodox Hasidic sect known as Chabad. To anyone familiar with the long and bitter history of anti-Semitism in Russia, Putin’s outreach on behalf of Jews was extraordinarily unusual.
Until Putin’s ascent, the leading Jewish organization in Russia had been the Russian Jewish Congress, or Rossiiskii Evreiskii Kongress (REK), which had been cofounded by Vladimir Gusinsky. A former theater director turned media mogul, Gusinsky was unique among the oligarchs in that his wealth was created from the ground up rather than from taking over formerly state-run properties.
Putin got Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia, under the leadership of Rabbi Berel Lazar (aka Putins Rabbi), a leader in the Hasidic movement called Chabad-Lubavitch.
Lazar, an American citizen from Brooklyn and a native of Milan, Italy, was quickly granted Russian citizenship
Founded in the late eighteenth century, the tiny, Brooklyn-based Chabad-Lubavitcher movement is a fundamentalist Hasidic sect centered on the teaching of the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who is sometimes referred to as a messiah—moshiach—a savior and liberator of the Jewish people. It is antiabortion, views homosexuality as a perversion, and often aligns itself politically with other fundamentalist groups on the right.
Its biggest donors included Leviev, an Israeli billionaire who was an Uzbek native and was known as the “King of Diamonds” thanks to his success in the diamond trade, and Charles Kushner, an American real estate developer who was later jailed for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. Kushner is also the father of Jared Kushner, who married Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and later became a senior adviser to President Trump.
Leviev’s friendship with Lazar dates back to 1992 and, according to Haaretz, made Leviev “the most influential, most active and most connected person in the Jewish community of Russia and made Lazar the country’s chief rabbi.”
1999, when the Russian economy was in a tailspin and scores of oligarchs were looking for a safe haven, construction was already under way on Trump’s biggest project yet. Rising to seventy-two stories in midtown Manhattan, Trump World Tower, overlooking the United Nations, was touted as the tallest residential building on the planet.
After Trump World Tower opened, Sotheby’s International Realty teamed up with a Russian real estate company to make a big sales push for the property in Russia. Dolly Lenz, a New York real estate broker, spoke to USA Today. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” Lenz said. “They all wanted to meet Donald.” In the end, she said that she sold some sixty-five units in Trump World Tower to Russians.
Ukrainian billionaire Semyon “Sam” Kislin assisted the sales effort by issuing mortgages to buyers of Trump’s latest luxury condos.
1999-Trump teamed up with Tommaso Buti, to open Trump Modelling Agency, Buti was one of the Italian entrepreneur brothers behind the Fashion Cafe, a restaurant based in New York City featuring celebrity models, initially fronted by super models Naomi Campbell, Elle Macpherson, Claudia Schiffer, and Christy Turlington.
The Butis would later be charged with conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering and the New York Post reported that Tommaso fled for Italy shortly before his indictment, leaving his then-wife model Daniela Pestova behind.
Italian businessman Tommaso Buti is one of the 73 individuals granted a pardon by Donald Trump during his final hours in office.
Trump went on with opening the New York-based agency without Buti. Trump had previously been married to professional model Ivana Trump, and he was dating then model Melania Knauss, whom he would marry, but this was Trump's first step into the business side of the industry.
Today, Trump Models represents more than 100 women, which, along with its main line of talent, includes a "development" line, which focuses on new talent, and a "legacy" line, which represents more experienced models. Trump Models' website says that the agency "is the brainstorm and vision of owner, Donald Trump."