10

From Russia with Cash

1984–2017

Perm–Florida–Monaco–Cyprus–New York

Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.

—DONALD TRUMP, JR., speaking in Moscow in 2008 about the Trump Organization

Perm, 1984. It was the beginning of term at Perm’s medical academy. Student doctors were lining up for registration. One of them was Dmitry Rybolovlev, the son of accomplished local medics.

Rybolovlev couldn’t help but notice the girl standing immediately behind him in the line. She was blond, blue-eyed, and—as he would soon discover—smart, a whiz at math, daughter of an engineer. The girl’s name was Elena. Dmitry and Elena took the admissions test together. They found themselves in the same class for cardiology.

Their teenage romance was a coup de foudre. Over the next six years they passed all their exams together. Elena won the Lenin Prize, three times. As well as study, the young couple explored the subsidized cultural life on offer in the late Soviet Union. There were weekly trips to the city’s opera house and ballet, to museums and the theater.

It was a modest lifestyle—but who lived better?

At the age of twenty-one they married. The first of two daughters, Ekaterina—Katia—arrived two years later. By this point Rybolovlev was considering his options. He could pursue the same steady career as his father, Evgeny, a cardiologist. Or he could move to Moscow, learn about finance, and plunge into the untried world of Russian capitalism. He chose the second.

What happened next resembles a dark fairy tale. In 1992 Rybolovlev took a business course in the capital. He returned to Perm, set up an investment bank, and applied what he knew about privatization to the region’s Soviet-era chemical factories. He acquired a stake in Uralkali, Russia’s biggest producer of potassium-based fertilizer. By 1996 he had control.

Rybolovlev would insist that unlike other tycoons he received no leg up from the state. Apparent proof of this came the same year when he spent eleven months in jail, accused of murdering a rival factory executive. After getting out, exonerated, he joined his family in Switzerland and the safety of Geneva. Uralkali expanded. So did Rybolovlev’s fortune.

In 2007 Uralkali floated on the London Stock Exchange. By the spring of 2008, according to Forbes, Rybolovlev was the world’s fifty-ninth richest man. He was worth $12.8 billion, the magazine said. He was considerably better off than Trump.

It was at this point, in July, that Rybolovlev purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for a staggering $95 million. The mansion had eighteen bedrooms, Greek fountains, a hundred-foot swimming pool, a cavernous underground garage, and a Jacuzzi overlooking the ocean. And a French name—Maison de l’Amitié. Rybolovlev managed to knock $5 million off Trump’s original $100 million asking price. Trump’s profit was in the region of $50 million.

Even so, the purchase raised eyebrows. First, the Florida property market had been cooling for some time. Second, the house had been on the market for two years. Third, Trump had paid $41.4 million for it less than four years earlier. Fourth, subsequent renovations were modest. Fifth, Rybolovlev had never set foot on the estate, although he did once visit to take a look and paddled on the edge of the territory. Sixth, the house had mold.

The Palm Beach home would feature in a spectacular divorce action brought in December 2008 by Elena against her husband after two decades of marriage. In court papers, she accused him of infidelity. She alleged that Rybolovlev had secretly shipped off their art collection to warehouses in London and Singapore.

This was no trivial matter. The Rybolovlevs, the papers said, owned several Picassos and Modiglianis, together with two Monets, a Gauguin, a Van Gogh, a Degas, and a Rothko. Plus a collection of rare furniture, much of it from Paris. (One piece, a circular-top table, or guéridon, was decorated with mythical figures celebrating the history of love.) There was a yacht, bought for $60 million, named My Anna after the couple’s second daughter. And other assets.

In 2015 they reached a private settlement. As for the Palm Beach mansion, Rybolovlev showed little interest in it.

He never lived there.

He eventually demolished it.

According to the French sportswriter Arnaud Ramsey, Rybolovlev was not an idiot or the kind of person to throw away money. Rather he was intelligent—“his brain is really quick”—shy, modest, lacking in ostentation or “bling-bling.” His appearance was unremarkable. When Ramsey met him, he was wearing a tracksuit.

At the same time Rybolovlev had an aura of “being the boss” and “not being afraid of anybody,” Ramsey said.

The Russian wasn’t a fan of the media. It took Ramsey several attempts before Rybolovlev finally agreed to an interview. They met at Rybolovlev’s penthouse mansion in Monaco. The apartment had a private elevator, terrace, spa, and library. And a backstory: its previous owner, the Lebanese-Brazilian financier Edmond Safra, burned to death in it in 1999 in a grisly case of arson.

The oligarch acquired another local asset, Monaco’s soccer team. In 2011 he became the majority owner of AS Monaco FC, which soon scaled the French premier league. One person who had lunch with him in his penthouse around this period told me that Rybolovlev said he was looking at productive ways of investing in the United States. The billionaire was on a diet and “ultra-thin,” the person said.

Ramsey interviewed Rybolovlev again on the Greek island of Skorpios. They talked about AS Monaco’s prospects while sitting on the Russian’s yacht. The island used to belong to the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis and was now owned by Rybolovlev’s daughter Katia. Her other assets included an apartment overlooking Central Park, which she bought at age twenty-two for $88 million—a New York record at the time.

Ramsey turned his encounters with the publicity-shy billionaire into a lyrical French-language biography. Its title was The Russian Novel of the President of AS Monaco.

In fact, at age twelve or thirteen, Rybolovlev was inspired not by Russian literature but by the books of an American writer, Theodore Dreiser. As a Soviet teenager he read Dreiser’s novel The Financier. It was from this portrayal of nineteenth-century capitalism, set in Philadelphia, that Rybolovlev learned about speculation and profit, taking inspiration from Dreiser’s youthful hero, Frank Cowperwood. The fictional Cowperwood and the future oligarch both spent time in jail.

Rybolovlev said his success, like Cowperwood’s, was self-made. This was true. But getting rich in Russia and—more important—protecting what you owned from predatory external attack required connections, as Aras Agalarov and other oligarchs well understood.

In 2000 the Perm region held an election for governor. It was assumed that the liberal incumbent, Gennady Igumnov, would win. Instead Rybolovlev unexpectedly backed another candidate, Perm’s mayor, Yuri Trutnev. Trutnev was duly elected.

This was a shrewd move on Rybolovlev’s part. Four years later Trutnev was due to go on vacation when he got a phone call from Moscow. It was the Kremlin. Trutnev had hosted Putin when the president visited Perm. They had got on. Both were practitioners of martial arts: for Putin, judo; for Trutnev, karate. Putin summoned Trutnev and appointed him minister for the environment and natural resources.

This was a key post. Trutnev was now in a position to oversee Russia’s oil and gas sector. He could find environmental violations—or not.

One of Trutnev’s allies was Igor Sechin, the head of the major oil company Rosneft and Putin’s powerful ally. The two sometimes had bureaucratic squabbles. But Trutnev consistently backed Sechin in his conflicts with other oil firms. For example, Trutnev’s ministry supported Rosneft when it took over the assets of Yukos. (In 2003 Putin jailed Yukos’s billionaire owner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky.) Inside Russia’s power structures Trutnev’s reputation was unwavering—he was the president’s loyal creature.

The Russian press wondered whether Trutnev had an interest in Uralkali: Was he Rybolovlev’s shadow partner? All sides strongly denied this. The speculation came about after a disaster in 2006 threatened to wipe out Rybolovlev’s entire business.

His potash mine was located in the Urals, in the city of Berezniki, on the banks of the Kama River. Gulag laborers had originally dug the mine and propped up its tunnels with salt pillars. The city sat on top. A flood caused the walls and supports to dissolve—and opened a giant municipal sinkhole. The hole swallowed up the railway line and menaced the inhabitants.

It was entirely possible that the state would impose punitive fines on Uralkali or seize its Mine-1. Sechin threatened as much. Mysteriously, the state did nothing. Four months after Rybolovlev bought Trump’s mansion, Trutnev issued the government’s verdict.

“I think the investigation into Uralkali’s fault is inappropriate,” Trutnev declared mildly.

He blamed the problems on Stalin-era planners, who were conveniently dead. Uralkali’s share price soared.

For Rybolovlev, 2008 was a hell of a year. His company won a dramatic reprieve, his wife sought $6 to $12 billion, and he acquired an interesting piece of South Florida real estate from a celebrity American TV mogul.

According to the Steele dossier, it was around this time that the Kremlin and the Trump campaign began what the dossier called a “regular exchange” of information.

—

It was November 3, 2016, just five days before the U.S. election, and Anna-Catherine Sendgikoski was waiting for a client. Sendgikoski was a limousine driver. And an ardent Democrat who hated all things Trump. Her station was Charlotte International Airport in North Carolina—specifically the terminal used by private jets.

At around 2:00 p.m. Sendgikoski noticed a newly arrived plane. It had come in at lunchtime. Even by the standards of personal aviation the jet was a head-turner—a sleek Airbus A319, painted in flowing lines of teal, cream, and ink black. There was nothing to identify it apart from a handful of letters on the tail fin. Painted in white capitals they read: M-KATE. The M meant the plane was registered in the Isle of Man.

Sendgikoski snapped a photo. A perimeter fence with barbed wire and a yellow fire truck half obscured the plane, but the call sign was clearly visible. Some twenty minutes later another private jet came in to land. This one wasn’t bashful about its proprietor. Giant letters behind the cockpit screamed out a familiar name: TRUMP. She took another picture. She posted the two photos on Twitter.

The man himself walked from the jet and got into a waiting motorcade. Sendgikoski said she didn’t see anyone emerge from the mystery plane. She did look up its owner—Rybolovlev. The Russian had named his jet after his daughter Katia. It was parked about three hundred feet away from Trump’s. The coincidence struck her as “suspect” and “strange,” she told The Charlotte Observer. Rybolovlev had turned the inside of his plane into a cozy home. It had a bed, shower, table, and state-of-the-art TV.

North Carolina was a battleground state and both Trump and Clinton had been making frequent trips there. At a rally in Charlotte that afternoon Trump accused Hillary of “far-reaching criminal conduct” and said a Clinton victory would create “an unprecedented constitutional crisis.” But why was a Russian billionaire in town?

Over the next months, investigative reporters would spend hours combing through flight records. The White House dismissed their efforts as a conspiracy theory and said that Trump and Rybolovlev had never met.

This appeared to be true.

Still, M-KATE’s hyperactive flight schedule raised more questions than answers. In 2016 and early 2017 Rybolovlev’s jet made seven trips to New York, for several days each, usually at a time when the candidate was there. It flew twice to Miami when Trump was at Mar-a-Lago. And it made seven trips to Moscow, mostly preceding or following flights to Florida or New York.

The simplest way to explain these movements was to inquire. I emailed the billionaire’s adviser, Sergey Chernitsyn, asking if I could interview Rybolovlev. We might speak in Russian, if he preferred, and I was ready to head off to the South of France or any location that suited him. My email said: “The big question, I guess, is why Dmitry’s jet is often in the same place as Donald’s?”

Chernitsyn’s answer was friendly. Regrettably, there would be no interview. He confirmed that Rybolovlev hadn’t met Trump. And “D [Dmitry] often goes to the States—so it’s not so strange that the planes were at the same time at the same place.” The purchase of the Trump mansion was a “good enough investment done,” with the land on sale in three parcels, he wrote.

Okay, but what was Rybolovlev doing in the United States? Chernitsyn: “He travels for business and pleasure. He always travels a lot as you can see from the plane records.”

The answer made a kind of sense but was couched in language so vague as to be meaningless. It left open the question of whether Rybolovlev might have been delivering something. Or had he perhaps met someone else from Trump’s entourage during his travels? Like for example, Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.

The Steele dossier alleged that Cohen played the role of secret intermediary. It said that Cohen made a clandestine trip to Europe in August 2016. The goal was to “clean up the mess” left by media revelations concerning Paul Manafort and Carter Page. The meetings were originally scheduled to take place in Moscow but were shifted to an “operationally soft” EU country “when it was judged too compromising for him [Cohen] to travel to the Russian capital.”

Steele’s sources told him the meeting took place in Prague, the Czech capital. The location may have been the premises of the Russian state cultural organization Rossotrudnichestvo—a “plausibly deniable” place to meet with Kremlin officials. Cohen allegedly held talks with Oleg Solodukhin, a Russian official operating under Rossotrudnichestvo cover.

The dossier further alleged that Cohen turned up at the meeting with three “colleagues.” Who they were was unclear. The agenda: how to make “deniable cash payments” to hackers who “worked in Europe under Kremlin direction against the Clinton campaign.” And “various contingencies for covering up these operations and Moscow’s secret liaison with the Trump team more generally.”

Cohen vehemently denied Steele’s claims. The lawyer said he’d never visited Prague. No proof surfaced that he was there. If Prague was wrong, could the meeting have taken place somewhere else? Cohen—who has a Ukrainian wife—tweeted the cover of his U.S. passport and showed off the visa stamps inside.

According to intelligence sources in Washington and London, the FBI was skeptical of Cohen’s denials. It examined Cohen’s movements and considered whether he might have gone to Europe on a private jet. I asked Chernitsyn if Rybolovlev and Cohen had met.

Chernitsyn’s reply: “As to Michael Cohen—maybe, he [Rybolovlev] meets a lot of people. I myself have never been present on a meeting with this person—so I can’t say you definitely.”

Rybolovlev did know some politicians and public figures, including former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. They watched soccer in Paris. And Prince Albert of Monaco. But not Trump, Chernitsyn said.

With little hard information, reporters were left chasing phantoms. In mid-August 2016 Ivanka and Jared Kushner visited Dubrovnik, Croatia. Rybolovlev’s yacht, My Anna, was spotted in Dubrovnik on the same dates. Was this perhaps planned? Or, as Cohen insisted, was it the musings of a deranged liberal media determined to besmirch the candidate?

Finding out more was made difficult by the fact that Rybolovlev managed his business affairs offshore. Many of his companies were registered in the British Virgin Islands, an impenetrable tax haven. Rybolovlev used a Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca. It was known for asking few questions of its rich customers. One of them was the wife of Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman. The firm’s leaked database became known as the Panama Papers.

Rybolovlev also used another major offshore center, Cyprus. In 2010 he sold most of his stake in Uralkali, held via a Cyprus company, to a consortium of Russian oligarchs, reportedly for more than $5 billion. Soon after he bought nearly 10 percent of the Bank of Cyprus, the island’s biggest lender. Many of its depositors were Russian. Meanwhile, back in Moscow Rybolovlev’s old friend Trutnev was promoted and became an assistant to Putin.

Cyprus was a haven for billions of dollars in Russian capital, much of it of suspect origin. The cash typically went into shell companies. Some of this “investment” was then returned to Russia as foreign revenue. The island was also a significant hub for Russian espionage and intelligence operations.

Rybolovlev’s fellow investors in the Bank of Cyprus were an interesting bunch. After a bailout in 2013 the bank got a new vice chair: Vladimir Strzhalkovsky. Strzhalkovsky was a former KGB agent and longtime Putin associate who served on the boards of Russian state enterprises. Another board member was Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian oligarch on good terms with the Kremlin.

There was one other major investor, an American. His name was Wilbur Ross.

In 2014 Ross became the bank’s chief shareholder. He gained the position of vice chairman, attended board meetings with the ex-KGB agent, and restructured the bank’s debts. Ross is said to have curbed rather than increased Kremlin influence and to have improved corporate governance. Ross brought in Josef Ackermann, the former chief executive of Deutsche Bank, as chairman. According to Chernitsyn, Rybolovlev never contacted Ross or the other Russians and his stake in the bank got smaller.

Even so, it was a curious picture. Like his oligarch contacts, Manafort used Cypriot vehicles for his business affairs, and at one point had at least fifteen bank accounts on the island. Trump set up two companies in Cyprus. One of them, Trump Construction Co. Ltd., was registered in September 2008, two months after he sold Maison de l’Amitié. What the company did, the scale of its activities, its annual filings—all were secret.

So in the months leading up to Trump’s election campaign Ross, an American venture capitalist, was working closely with a group of Putin-connected Russians. All of this in a jurisdiction that the U.S. State Department said was prone to “money laundering.” And where “international criminal networks” were active.

Ross resigned from the Bank of Cyprus in 2017 when he got a new job.

It was a good one.

Trump made him U.S. secretary of commerce.

—

Dmitry Rybolovlev wasn’t the only Russian to acquire a Trump property. In fact, Russian and Eurasian buyers had been purchasing real estate from him for a long time, ever since the building of Trump Tower began in 1980.

Some were legitimate. Others, though, were intimately involved with Russian organized crime. At key moments in Trump’s career, when Western banks were reluctant to lend and credit evaporated, income originating from the former Soviet Union appears to have rescued Trump from financial ruin.

The Russians came in waves. Some arrived with the tide of Soviet refugees who emigrated to the United States in the 1970s, many of them Jewish. Most of the money that left Russia during this late communist period came from the mafia. This meant moving cash, lots of it, sometimes using Israeli contacts as conduits, but more often via banks in Luxembourg and Switzerland. They deposited gold bullion and precious stones.

Trump Tower opened in 1983. Among the new tenants were Eastern European newcomers with considerable cash resources.

In 1984 Trump sold five apartments on the fifty-third floor to David Bogatin, an alleged Mogilevich associate. The price was $6 million. Bogatin then used his Trump properties to carry out a gasoline bootlegging scam and, as prosecutors put it, to “launder money and shelter assets.” In 1987 a court sentenced him to two years in jail for tax evasion. Bogatin pleaded guilty but skipped bail and fled to Poland. He was eventually extradited back to the United States and prison.

There was a second Russian influx in the early 1990s, prompted by the end of the USSR. Inside Russia, there was widespread looting of property and assets that had previously belonged to the Party or state. These new immigrants fueled mafia activity in New York, in particular in Brighton Beach and other parts of Brooklyn.

One of them was Vyacheslav Ivankov, a well-known Moscow felon. Ivankov—known as Yaponchik, or the Little Japanese—was a crime boss, or vor. His criminal career was extensive—forgery, firearms, drug trafficking, extortion—punctuated by long spells inside Soviet penal institutions. In spring 1992 Ivankov moved from Russia to New York.

There, he and a group of gang members took over mafia operations in Brighton Beach, moving into gambling, prostitution, and arms smuggling. Ivankov was a superior kind of villain. He nurtured connections—with Mogilevich’s powerful organization in Hungary and central Europe; with the Solntsevskaya bratva in Moscow, the world’s number one mafia group; and with Russian former intelligence.

Federal agents were keen to arrest Ivankov. There was only one problem—where was he? The bureau found it easy to wiretap and prosecute Italian American mobsters, who were fond of walking and talking. But Ivankov was elusive.

The FBI agent James Moody was tasked with hunting him down. Moody told Robert Friedman, the author of Red Mafiya, a book about the U.S.-based Russian mob, that Ivankov’s hideout was a surprise. It took three years to find it.

“At first all we had was a name. We were looking around and had to go out and really beat the bushes,” Moody said. “And then we found out that he was in a luxury condo in Trump Tower.”

Before he could be arrested Ivankov vanished from Manhattan. A special investigator with New York State’s Organized Crime Task Force, Gregory Stasiuk, followed the clues. According to Friedman, Ivankov went to the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the casino owned by Trump that was later fined nearly half a million dollars for money laundering. The casino was popular with Russians, who spent large sums at Trump’s gaming tables.

The FBI eventually caught up with Ivankov at his mistress’s apartment in Brighton Beach. They found $75,000 in cash and a gun wrapped in a sock. It had been tossed into the bushes outside. Agents recovered a copy of Ivankov’s personal telephone directory. In it, they found a number for Trump Tower and the fax of the Trump Organization’s office.

How much of this could be related to Trump? Like any other successful real estate developer, Trump had sold a lot of properties during his career. He could scarcely be blamed for the nefarious activities of some of his Russian customers. Or the fact that a few of them turned out to be swindlers and professional crooks.

The reality, though, was that Russian clients were a core part of Trump’s business. This was true from his early years as a developer to his later arm’s-length ventures in which he licensed his brand to foreign investors, from Panama to Baku in Azerbaijan, and Toronto in Canada.

Trump’s links to the underworld were multifarious. As were those of his nearest business partners.

—

At the same time that the FBI was looking for Ivankov, another Moscow-born immigrant was sitting in jail. This was Felix Sater. Sater’s family was Jewish. In 1974, when Sater was eight, his parents emigrated from the Soviet Union to Israel. From there they moved to Baltimore and then to Brighton Beach.

According to court documents, Sater’s father—originally called Mikhail Sheferofsky—was a Mogilevich crime syndicate boss who headed the Russian mafia in Brooklyn. He served prison time in Britain for counterfeiting and fraud. In the United States Sater Sr. ran an extortion scheme in Brighton Beach. The charge sheet accused him of terrorizing restaurants, food stores, and a local medical clinic. This took place during the 1990s and involved the “wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence and fear.”

Felix Sater had a criminal record, too. He began his career selling stocks on Wall Street. In 1991, at age twenty-five, he stabbed another man after work during a barroom brawl, attacking his victim with the stem of a margarita glass. Sater spent fifteen months in jail. His conviction meant that he lost his securities license and could no longer work in finance.

At least not legally. Broke, married, and with a four-month-old baby daughter, Sater got involved in a pump-and-dump stock market fraud. His fellow conspirators came from leading New York Italian mafia families. They defrauded investors of $40 million. During this period Sater traveled frequently to Moscow. His involvement in crime—as Sater tells it—ended in 1996.

Normally Sater might have expected another jail term. It was at this point that he cut a deal with the FBI. The bureau said it was struggling to penetrate stock market frauds, including one carried out by Mogilevich using a Philadelphia-based shell company.

The FBI recruited Sater as an informant. He was now a cooperating witness. He pleaded guilty to racketeering and fraud. In return for his services Sater got federal immunity.

There are two ways of interpreting what happened next. One, that Sater’s life entered a new redemptive phase, in which he effaced his past sins by returning from Moscow and working diligently for the FBI. Two, that Sater exploited the fact that his fraud record was under seal, and therefore not public, to make a lot of money.

Not just for him but for his new partner—Donald Trump.

At the turn of the new millennium Sater began working for a real estate development company, Bayrock LLC. The firm had begun in Moscow during the tail end of communism. Its founder was Tevfik Arif. Born to a Turkish family in Soviet Kazakhstan, he was a former bureaucrat who had worked in the USSR’s commerce and trade department.

Arif landed in New York from Russia and Turkey, his operations base for much of the 1990s. He hired Sater to manage the company. In 2003 Bayrock moved into offices in Trump Tower on the twenty-fourth floor, two floors below Trump’s own premises. Sater, Arif, and Trump became partners.

Over the next five years Sater worked on various licensing deals for Trump properties, including a trip with Donald Jr. to Phoenix. He had a Trump Organization business card, which said his role was “senior adviser to Donald Trump.” At Trump’s request Sater met with Donald Jr. and Ivanka in Russia in 2006 and showed them around the capital. And arranged for Ivanka to “sit in Putin’s private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.” (Ivanka said she couldn’t recall this.) Overall, Sater said that he had a “friendly” relationship with Trump. He dropped into his office “numerous times” to pitch ideas.

One topic of conversation was Trump’s latest Manhattan project, Trump SoHo.

Trump unveiled plans for the new forty-six-story glass tower and hotel during an episode of his show, The Apprentice. He failed to mention the fact that other people would be paying for the Spring Street building. One investor was Bayrock. Bayrock in turn teamed up with an Icelandic hedge fund, the FL Group, which contributed $50 million. Another partner was Tamir Sapir, a businessman from Soviet Georgia.

These equity cash flows into Trump’s newest branded property were mysterious. Bayrock had an opaque corporate structure. There were several tiers. The FL Group was based in the British Virgin Islands.

In common with Cyprus, Icelandic banks were a favored destination for Russian capital. There was speculation that Moscow interests might be behind the FL Group. Proving this—or disproving it—was difficult. The group was linked to a maze of shell companies whose ultimate owners were unknown. The FL Group financed two other large Trump projects, in Queens and Fort Lauderdale.

How much did Trump know about his Russian American business partners? The official answer, it turned out, was not a great deal. Trump insisted that he had no idea about Sater’s background. Actually, he scarcely knew the guy…

In September 2007 Trump, Arif, and Sater attended the launch party for Trump SoHo. A photo shows the three of them together, grinning. Two and a half months later The New York Times published an article revealing Sater’s colorful criminal past.

Asked for comment, Trump said the news surprised him: “We never knew that.” He added: “We do as much of a background check as we can on the principals. I didn’t really know him very well.”

Sater left Bayrock soon after the embarrassing piece was published. In 2009 he was sentenced for his role in the original stock scam. Sater told the judge he had “built a very successful real estate company, a Trump project,” and was sad to leave it. Sater’s long years of service to the FBI paid off. Instead of getting twenty years in jail, the usual tariff, Sater received a $25,000 fine.

While Trump was suffering from selective memory loss, Bayrock’s former finance director, Jody Kriss, was preparing a devastating complaint, the first of several in what would turn out to be years of bitter litigation. It alleged that Bayrock had funneled money from the FL Group to people outside the company.

The writ added: “For most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob owned and operated.” Arif and Sater had carried out “a pattern” of crimes, including fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, and embezzlement, it said. Sater and Arif denied this.

The writ didn’t suggest Trump was complicit. But its key allegation was clear: that post-Soviet speculators invested in Trump licensing deals primarily in order to launder money. Arif faced further difficulties when the Turkish police arrested him on a yacht in the company of several young women and charged him with running a prostitution ring. He was later acquitted.

In New York, financial disputes played out in courtrooms, with judges, attorneys, and multipage affidavits. They were measured in years and sometimes decades.

In Moscow, business feuds were fixed more bluntly. Ivankov, the ruthless vor, was deported in 2004 from the United States and extradited to Russia. Back home, he was acquitted on murder charges. He kept a low profile.

In July 2009 he went for lunch in a Thai restaurant. After an enjoyable meal he walked back to his car. From a neighboring rooftop an unknown person shot him in the stomach. The weapon was a sniper rifle.

Ivankov was laid to rest in Moscow’s Vagankovskoye Cemetery, plot 26, in a funeral attended by old-time members of Russia’s waning gangster brotherhood. He was buried next to his mother.

—

It was 2011, the era of Barack Obama, and FBI agents were applying for a court warrant. They wanted to listen in on a suspect’s phone calls. Their target was Vadim Trincher, a poker player who was suspected of running an illegal gambling ring from his upscale New York apartment.

That Trincher was wealthy wasn’t in doubt. He had bought the suite in 2009 from another well-off Russian, Oleg Boiko, paying $5 million in cash. Trincher had filled his home with expensive furniture and a valuable silk rug. The question for the bureau was whether Trincher’s regular card-playing sessions constituted a federal crime.

Using information obtained from wiretaps the FBI sketched out a plan of Trincher’s contacts. One person he called was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, an ethnic Uzbek crime lord from Tashkent. Another was Helly Nahmad, a Lebanese American art dealer who owned a major New York gallery founded by his father.

The FBI spent two years monitoring the activities inside Trincher’s luxury apartment—number 63A. Its location? The fifty-first floor of Trump Tower.

Trump Tower was now a significant crime scene. Trump lived just three floors above Trincher, in a lavish triplex penthouse. Nahmad had purchased the entire fifty-first floor of the building, at a cost of $20 million, and funded gambling operations run by Trincher’s son Ilya.

Federal agents weren’t seeking to eavesdrop on Trump. Rather, their probe was directed at the Russian mob, who happened to be Trump’s almost-next-door neighbors.

In April 2013 the FBI raided Trump Tower in an operation in which thirty people were arrested. Trincher got five years in jail. A court heard that he laundered the profits of his gambling operation—some $100 million—through shell companies in Cyprus. The cash allegedly traveled via the Bank of Cyprus. Nahmad served five months in jail, as did another Russian connected to the case, Anatoly Golubchik.

The only person who managed to escape the net was Tokhtakhounov, whom the FBI termed a major authority inside Russian organized crime. He disappeared.

Tokhtakhounov led a picaresque life. He had spent time in various Soviet prisons, and one in Venice, and had lived in Germany and Paris. The United States accused him of bribing judges to fix the ice-skating competition during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. He was on good terms with his fellow mafia bosses. He liked Putin. Of the late Ivankov, a friend for more than forty years, he said: “A legendary man. Very well-read. Interesting.”

Tokhtakhounov’s whereabouts were unknown until November 2013, when he was spotted in Moscow. According to Kommersant, Tokhtakhounov was seen at a major international event—the Miss Universe competition. He was sitting in the ground-floor auditorium, in the area reserved for VIPs, not far from Aras Agalarov and Donald Trump.

—

The FBI raid had a postscript. The lawyer who approved the arrests in connection with Trump Tower gambling was Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Bharara was Punjab-born, Harvard-educated, and a graduate of Columbia Law School. He would make numerous enemies in a starry, high-profile, conspicuous career, including the presidents of the United States and Russia.

Obama nominated Bharara to the post in 2009. Bharara immediately embarked on a high-profile crusade against corruption. He pursued banks, hedge funds, crooked traders, and politicians from both sides of the aisle. And Russians. One signal feature of his attorneyship was a willingness to pursue suspects who lived far away, in foreign jurisdictions.

Bharara examined the $230 million allegedly stolen in the Magnitsky case. Some of the money, it transpired, had been spent on New York real estate, including on a luxury condominium at 20 Pine Street, just a few blocks from Wall Street. The money had gone from Moscow via shell companies in Moldova to a holding company in Cyprus.

The company was called Prevezon and its owner was Denis Katsyv. It was Katsyv who hired Natalia Veselnitskaya to contest the case in New York. As The Guardian reported, there was also a Trump connection. Prevezon bought the Pine Street apartment from Lev Leviev, a billionaire tycoon and diamond mogul. In 2015 Leviev sold several floors of the old New York Times Building on 43rd Street in Manhattan for $295 million. The buyer was Jared Kushner.

Bharara’s investigations displeased the Kremlin. In April 2013 it barred him, together with seventeen other Americans, from visiting Russia. Bharara carried on as before. The next month he closed down the Rasputin restaurant in Brooklyn, a gathering spot popular with alleged Russian crime bosses. Its owner was arrested for fraud.

It seemed unlikely that Bharara could prosper under Trump. In November 2016 the president-elect summoned him to Trump Tower. The meeting was apparently warm. Speaking afterward in the lobby, Bharara told reporters that Trump had asked him to stay on as U.S. attorney for Manhattan. He said he had agreed and had promised to work independently and without fear and favor, as before.

This concord lasted until March, when Jeff Sessions requested that all forty-six U.S. attorneys appointed during the Obama era resign. Bharara refused. He was fired. Two months later his successor settled the Prevezon case on the eve of trial. The firm paid a $5.9 million fine. Veselnitskaya claimed victory. The sum was so slight “it looked like an apology from the [U.S.] government,” she said.

The deal seemed fishy, at least to sixteen Democratic senators who wrote to the Justice Department asking for an explanation. They wanted to know if the White House had interfered in an agreement described by one constitutional expert as “frankly outrageous.”

—

Felix Sater and Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, were old friends. They had known each other as teenagers. In 2015, in the early stages of his campaign, Trump had said of Sater: “I’m not that familiar with him.” Sater, it appeared, had disappeared from view.

Emails released to Congress, however, suggest that Sater was still in the thick of things. Not only was he plotting to get his old boss elected president, but he was also working to make Trump Tower in Moscow a reality. Sater’s playbook: Trump could use Moscow’s support to his political advantage, showing off his skills as a negotiator and deal-maker.

Sater was confident he could arrange everything. On November 3, 2015, he wrote to Cohen:

I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know that no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this, I will manage this process.

We don’t have Cohen’s reply. But the emails lay out Sater’s plan for glory—a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Moscow and praise from Putin of Trump’s peerless business skills. To achieve this, Sater said he could show video clips to his Russian contacts of Trump speaking glowingly of Russia: “If he [Putin] says it, we own this election. America’s most difficult adversary agreeing that Donald was a good guy to negotiate.”

Okay, but who was going to put up the cash for Trump’s Moscow tower? Sater had a plan here, too. VTB, Russia’s state-run bank, had agreed to provide financing, Sater wrote. VTB was an eyebrow-raising choice. First, it was under U.S. sanctions. Second, it had interesting connections to Russian intelligence.

Sater added that it would be “pretty cool to get a U.S.A. president elected.” His anticipated reward for pulling off this great deed would be modest. He wished to be ambassador to the Bahamas. He told Cohen: “That my friend is the home run I want out of all this.”

So while Trump was out on the campaign trail speaking sweetly of Putin, his aides were seeking to win Russian government support for Trump’s long-cherished Moscow real estate project. Without it, Sater correctly understood, the tower would never get built.

All of this was happening in private. U.S. electors knew nothing of Sater’s Kremlin outreach scheme. Trump did, though. So did Cohen. Cohen said he talked to Trump about the Moscow tower three times. When it appeared that the project was faltering, despite a letter of intent, Cohen took a bold step. He sent an email to someone big: Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov. The email was a petition, a meekly phrased plea for help. It was sent in mid-January 2016.

Cohen wrote:

Over the past few months I have been working with a company based in Russia regarding the development of a Trump Tower-Moscow project in Moscow City. Without getting into lengthy specifics, the communication between our two sides has stalled.

As this project is too important, I am hereby requesting your assistance. I respectfully request someone, preferably you, contact me so that I might discuss the specifics as well as arranging meetings with the appropriate individuals. I thank you in advance for your assistance and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Cohen dispatched the email to a generic address, rather than to Peskov’s personal account. Nonetheless, the email would have been found and closely examined. The email’s recipient, Peskov, wasn’t only Putin’s long-serving mouthpiece—he was also in charge of the operation to compromise Clinton, according to the Steele dossier, and someone who saw Russia’s president practically every day.

Cohen insisted there was no collusion. And yet this is precisely what his email looked like: a direct (and covert) request for assistance from Team Trump to Team Putin. Was this politics or business or both? As always with Trump, it was hard to tell.

In evidence to Congress Cohen said that Peskov didn’t answer—or at least that he couldn’t recall a reply. The tower plan was shelved, he said. As for Sater’s emails? They were salesmanship and “puffery.”

A year later, in January 2017, Sater and Cohen were involved in another clandestine joint endeavor, this time involving Ukraine. Cohen went to see Trump in the White House. He hand-delivered the plan to Michael Flynn, shortly before Flynn resigned as national security adviser, The New York Times reported. It envisaged Russia obtaining a lease on Crimea, for fifty or one hundred years. Sater drafted the document with the assistance of a Ukrainian deputy, Andriy Artemenko. The Cohen-Sater proposal didn’t go off. Had it done so, it would have pleased the Kremlin.

—

For four decades Trump’s property empire effectively functioned as a laundromat for Moscow money. Funds from the former Soviet Union poured into condominiums and Trump apartments. Even as Trump was campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire, his associates were chasing Kremlin permission—and cash—for the candidate’s elusive Moscow tower.

A Reuters investigation found that at least sixty-three individuals with Russian passports or addresses bought $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded towers in Florida. The true figure was probably higher. Nearly one-third of all units were sold to limited liability companies, whose buyers were unidentified.

Trump Tower even offered a refuge for Russian gangsters. Back home, the population of old-school vors was declining, not unlike the woolly mammoths that once roamed the Siberian plains, as Putin’s bureaucratic state took over their territory. New York, by contrast, provided a place of safety and a base for international operations.

Undoubtedly, Russian money helped Trump’s bottom line. But it was another source of revenue that kept Trump’s finances afloat at a time when the global financial crash threatened to drown him.

This money was respectable. It came from a bank. It came from Germany. Or did it?