by Craig Unger
Left to right: Rotem Rosen, Aras Agalarov, Donald Trump, and Alex Sapir at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Rosen is the right-hand man of Lev Leviev, who is closely aligned with Putin. Alex Sapir’s father, Tamir Sapir, partnered with Trump for Trump SoHo and was alleged to have Russian Mafia connections. (Courtesy Real Estate Weekly)
President Donald Trump (left) and Stephen Bannon, who was chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign and had been vice president of Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm specializing in “psychographic” profiling as a way of microtargeting voters. CA’s parent company, Strategic Communications Laboratories, had ties to Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
On October 1, 2012, Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev (left) receives a T-shirt from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg during their meeting at the Gorki residence outside Moscow, at which they discussed Facebook’s role in the 2012 presidential election. Russia used Facebook as a purveyor of huge amounts of pro-Trump, anti-Clinton propaganda in the 2016 election. (Yekaterina Shtukina/AFP/Getty Images)
CEO of Cambridge Analytica Alexander Nix speaks at the 2016 Concordia Summit on September 19, 2016, in New York City. Even before his firm had finalized a contract with the Trump campaign, Nix reached out to WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange and asked him to share the DNC emails so that CA could help disseminate them. (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for Concordia Summit)
Shown here in Moscow, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was present at the Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 with Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner that was reportedly arranged to provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. Veselnitskaya has admitted to acting as an informant on behalf of the Kremlin. (Yury Martyanov/AFP/Getty Images)
Before the infamous June 2016 meetings with the Russians, Donald Trump Jr., shown here in an elevator in Trump Tower, responded to the prospect of getting “dirt” on Hillary Clinton by emailing a contact “if it’s what you say I love it.” (Albin Lohr-Jones/Bloomberg, Pool/Getty Images)
Donald Trump rides an escalator to a press event to announce his candidacy for the US presidency at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, in New York City. (Christopher Gregory/Getty Images)
Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump (center) onstage at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, July 21, 2016. From left to right are campaign adviser Rick Gates, Donald Trump, campaign manager Paul Manafort, and Ivanka’s husband, Jared Kushner. At a time when Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak was meeting with various members of the Trump campaign, the Ukraine plank in the Republican platform was changed in Russia’s favor. (Mark Reinstein/Corbis/Getty Images)
Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Russian Mafia money first made its way to Trump Tower when shell companies owned by David Bogatin, whose brother worked for Semion Mogilevich, bought five condos in the building. Since then, many alleged figures in the Russian Mafia have called Trump Tower home, and it has provided a base of operations for several money-laundering operations. (Mark Lennihan/AP)
Michael Flynn (left) the retired general chosen by President-Elect Donald Trump as national security adviser, speaks to Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney and “fixer.” Flynn had dined with Vladimir Putin at a Moscow gala in 2015 and was paid approximately $45,000 for a speech at a related event. Michael Cohen was working with Felix Sater on a deal for Trump Tower Moscow, which never came to fruition. (Sam Hodgson/The New York Times/Redux)
Together at last: Trump chats with fellow president Vladimir Putin as they attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam, on November 11, 2017. (Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP/Getty Images)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the help of many people. At Dutton, I was fortunate to have wonderful editing by editor in chief John Parsley, who oversaw the book, and Brent Howard. I am also grateful to Dutton publisher Christine Ball and president Ivan Held, who assembled a terrific team that treated the book with the highest level of professionalism. They include Maria Whelan, Amanda Walker, Carrie Swetonic, Kayleigh George, Cassidy Sachs, Linda Rosenberg, Susan Schwartz, Andrea St. Aubin, Aja Pollock, Nancy Resnick, Dora Mak, Sabila Khan, Leigh Butler, and Chris Lin. I’d also like to thank Penguin Publishing Group president Allison Dobson. My thanks as well to Anke Steinecke for her comprehensive legal review.
My literary agent, David Kuhn, did a superb job of taking this project from its inception to finding a great home for it at Dutton. He and Lauren Sharp at Aevitas have been enormously supportive and were always there with valuable advice throughout the entire process.
Parts of this book grew out of articles that appeared initially in The New Republic and Vanity Fair. At The New Republic, I’m indebted to former publisher Hamilton Fish and editors Eric Bates and Bob Moser for editing my piece “Trump’s Russian Laundromat.” At Vanity Fair online, I’d like to thank John Homans for editing “Why Robert Mueller Has Trump SoHo in His Sights.”
I’m deeply indebted to my research assistant, Olga Lautman, a wonderfully talented and resourceful investigator who opened the doors to Russian-language websites and other sources, and who often worked late into the night doing so much in so many ways to make this book better. Similarly, I’d like to thank other members of my team, including fact checker Ben Kalin, photo editor Cynthia Carris Alonso, and my friend, photographer James Hamilton, for the author photo.
I want to thank fellow investigative reporters Richard Behar and Anastasia Kirilenko for generously sharing related materials and their views on the subject. Among the many people who were either interview subjects or gave me assistance, I’d like to thank Anders Åslund, Mark Galeotti, Alex Goldfarb, Ryan Goodman, Ze’ev Gordon, Steve Halliwell, Julie Holstein, Scott Horton, Oleg Kalugin, Richard Lerner, Bernard Lown, Ken Ann Marlowe, Kenneth McCallion, James Moody, Frederick Oberlander, Nikos Passas, Tomasz Piatek, Nick Pileggi, Howard Rosenberg, Sandra Rubin, Felix Sater, Anya Schiffrin, Giannina Segnini, John Sipher, Jonathan Winer, Robert S. Wolf, Sherman Teichman, and Beverly Zabriskie.
And I would also like to thank the many sources who helped me on a background or not-for-attribution basis. Helpful as such sources have been, this book also relies extensively on declassified government documents, congressional investigations, and news accounts from thousands of newspapers and journals from all over the world. I should add that the endnotes provide a far more complete list of people and sources that have contributed to this book.
It would have been impossible to research this book without the Internet, and I am especially grateful to the people and institutions who built the Internet research tools that enabled me to search through such vast amounts of material from all over the world so quickly. Wherever possible, I have cited relevant websites in the endnotes. The reader should be advised, however, that Internet links are not eternal and some web addresses may be out of date or dead. Because I made a practice of citing original sources whenever possible, a number of extraordinarily useful resources do not appear in my endnotes nearly as often as they should. Among them, I’m particularly grateful to the Kleptocracy Initiative Archive Project and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Many friends and colleagues helped either by contributing in one way or another to the book itself or through much-needed moral support. They include John Anderson, Sidney Blumenthal, Patricia Bosworth and Doug Schwalbe, Edmundo Desnoes and Felicia Rosshandler, David Duffy and Marcelline Thomson, Michael Klebnikov and Alexandra Ourusoff, Clara Mulberry, and Cody Shearer. I’m especially grateful to Susan Letteer, whose friendship, insight, and support were so valuable.
Finally, my gratitude goes to my family—Chris, Shanti, Thomas, Marley, and Miles; and Jimmy, Marie-Claude, Adam, Mel, and Otis; Matthew and Jacelyn; Harlow and Richard Unger; and Romy-Michelle.
NOTES
EPIGRAPH
1. Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America (New York: Little, Brown, 2000).
CHAPTER ONE: (
VIRTUAL) WORLD WAR III
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HzAdP3y-k8.
2. Donald Trump (@realdonaldtrump), “Russia has never . . . ,” Twitter, January 11, 2017, https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/819159806489591809.
3. James Clapper interview, “Clapper: Russia Treating Trump Like an Asset,” The Lead, CNN, http://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/12/18/james-clapper-trump-putin-russia-asset-intv.cnn.
4. Jeff Stein, “Putin’s Man in the White House? Real Trump Russia Scandal Is Not Mere Collusion, US Counterspies Say,” Newsweek, December 21, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/trump-putin-man-white-house-russia-investigation-scandal-moscow-kremlin-755321.
5. James Comey, A Higher Loyalty (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).
6. Ibid.
7. “Russian President Vladimir Putin honors Russia’s intelligence network,” Viral World News, June 24, 2017, https://www.worldnews.com.ng/2017/06/24/russian-president-vladimir-putin-honors.html.
8. Sandra Peddie, “At 100, Mob Underboss Sonny Franzese Gets out of Federal Prison,” Newsday, updated June 23, 2017, http://www.newsday.com/long-island/crime/sonny-franzese-released-from-prison-1.13756776?view=print.
9. “100 Jahre alter Ex-Mafiaboss aus Knast entlassen,” Spiegel Online, June 24, 2016, http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/new-york-sonny-franzese-100-jahre-alter-ex-mafia-boss-aus-knast-entlassen-a-1153883.html.
10. Michael Hechtman, “100-Year-Old Crime Boss Beats the Odds, Is Released from Prison,” New York Post, June 24, 2017, http://nypost.com/2017/06/24/100-year-old-crime-boss-beats-the-odds-is-released-from-prison/.
11. Associated Press, “93-Year-Old Crime Boss Gets 12-Year Sentence,” CBS News, January 14, 2011, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/93-year-old-crime-boss-gets-12-year-sentence/.
12. Michael Franzese, Blood Covenant (New Kensington, PA: Whitaker House, 2003).
13. Ibid.
14. Fredric Dannen, “The Born-Again Don,” Vanity Fair, February 1991, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1991/02/john-gotti-joe-columbo-fbi-investigation-witness.
15. Franzese, Blood Covenant.
16. Dannen, “Born-Again Don.”
17. Russian Organized Crime in the United States, Hearing Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 104th Congress, Second Session, May 15, 1996, https://archive.org/stream/russianorganized00unit/russianorganized00unit_djvu.txt.
18. Franzese, Blood Covenant.
19. Ibid.
20. United Press International, “In What Federal Prosecutors Called the Biggest Motor Fuel . . . ,” UPI.com, August 7, 1995, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1995/08/07/In-what-federal-prosecutors-called-the-biggest-motor-fuel/7331807768000/.
21. Franzese, Blood Covenant.
22. Ibid.
23. Nicholas Horrock and Linnet Myers, “Extradition Target Says His Real Crime Is Success,” Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1992.
24. James S. Henry, “The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections,” American Interest, December 19, 2016, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/19/the-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections/.
25. Ibid.
26. Russian Organized Crime in the United States.
27. Franzese, Blood Covenant.
28. Prepared Statement of Michael Franzese Before the Senate Governmental Affairs Permanent Investigations Subcommittee Section, Federal News Service, May 15, 1996.
29. Russian Organized Crime in the United States.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Norval White and Elliot Willensky with Fran Leadon, AIA Guide to New York City, 5th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
33. Ada Louise Huxtable, Letter to the Editor, “Donald Trump’s Tower,” New York Times, May 6, 1984.
CHAPTER TWO: TRUMP’S BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE
1. Wayne Barrett, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention (New York: Regan Arts, 2016).
2. Horrock and Myers, “Extradition Target Says.”
3. David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (New York: Melville House, 2016).
4. Author’s telephone interview with Winer.
5. Barrett, Trump.
6. Friedman, Red Mafiya.
7. Ibid.
8. Edward Luce, “Russia and the West’s Moral Bankruptcy,” Financial Times, March 28, 2018, https://www.ft.com/content/feda2630-31dc-11e8-b5bf-23cb17fd1498.
9. Thomas Frank, “Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos to Unknown Buyers,” BuzzFeed, January 12, 2018, https://www.buzzfeed.com/thomasfrank/secret-money-how-trump-made-millions-selling-condos-to.
10. Sam Howe Verhovek, “Entrepreneur Who Left US Is Back, Awaiting Sentence,” New York Times, April 30, 1992, https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/30/nyregion/entrepreneur-who-left-us-is-back-awaiting-sentence.html.
11. Barrett, Trump.
12. Dan Dorfman, “On the Trail of Baby Doc,” New York, July 14, 1986.
13. Author’s interview with Kalugin.
14. Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, Comrade Kryuchkov’s Instructions (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
15. Katie Sanders, “Did Vladimir Putin Call the Breakup of the USSR ‘the Greatest Geopolitical Tragedy of the 20th Century’?” Punditfact, March 6, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/mar/06/john-bolton/did-vladimir-putin-call-breakup-ussr-greatest-geop/.
16. C. J. Chivers, “Editor’s Death Raises Questions About Change in Russia,” New York Times, July 18, 2004.
17. “Journalists Killed in Russia Since 1992,” Committee to Protect Journalists, https://cpj.org/europe/russia.
18. Author’s interview with Kalugin.
19. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
20. David Z. Morris, “Vladimir Putin Is Reportedly Richer Than Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos Combined,” Fortune, July 29, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/07/29/vladimir-putin-russia-jeff-bezos-bill-gates-worlds-richest-man/.
21. Garry Kasparov, Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015).
CHAPTER THREE: MARRIED TO THE MOB
1. David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016).
2. Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a Presidential Candidate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).
3. Johnston, Making of Donald Trump.
4. Blair, Trumps.
5. Charles Denson, “Fred Trump’s Coney Island: 50th Anniversary Exhibit,” Coney Island History Project, July 5, 2016, http://www.coneyislandhistory.org/blog/news/fred-trumps-coney-island-50th-anniversary-exhibit.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Katherine Clarke and Will Parker, “Meet Paul Manafort’s Real Estate Fixer,” Real Deal, August 31, 2017, https://therealdeal.com/2017/08/31/meet-paul-manaforts-real-estate-fixer/.
9. Katherine Clarke, “Manafort Pal Sues PMG over LIC Clock Tower Site Deal,” Real Deal, April 3, 2017, https://therealdeal.com/2017/04/03/manafort-pal-sues-pmg-over-lic-clock-tower-site-deal/.
10. Tom Winter, “DOJ: Ex-Manafort Associate Firtash Is Top-Tier Comrade of Russian Mobsters,” NBC News, July 16, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-ex-manafort-associate-firtash-top-tier-comrade-russian-mobsters-n786806.
11. Clarke and Parker, “Meet Paul Manafort’s Real Estate Fixer.”
12. Johnston, Making of Donald Trump.
13. Blair, Trumps.
14. Barrett, Trump.
15. Blair, Trumps.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Roger Dunstan, “Overview of New York City’s Fiscal Crisis” (PDF), California Research Bureau, California State Library, March 1, 1995. Retrieved January 20, 2011.
19. Charles V. Bagli, “Trump Sells Hyatt Share to Pritzkers,” New York Times, October 8, 1996, http://www.nyt
imes.com/1996/10/08/business/trump-sells-hyatt-share-to-pritzkers.html.
20. Michelle Dean, “A Mentor in Shamelessness: The Man Who Taught Trump the Power of Publicity” Guardian, April 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/20/roy-cohn-donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy-rosenberg-trial.
21. Albin Krebs, “Roy Cohn, Aide to McCarthy and Fiery Lawyer, Dies at 59,” New York Times, August 3, 1986, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/aids/080386sci-aids.html.
22. Timothy L. O’Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald (New York: Warner Books, 2005).
23. Marie Brenner, “How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America,” Vanity Fair, August 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship.
24. Michael Kruse, “He Brutalized for You,” Politico Magazine, April 8, 2016, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump-roy-cohn-mentor-joseph-mccarthy-213799.
25. Ibid.
26. Lana Adler, “Roy Cohn and the Shocking Jewish Mentorship That Created Donald Trump,” Forward, October 10, 2016, http://forward.com/opinion/351591/roy-cohn-and-the-shocking-jewish-mentorship-that-created-donald-trump/.
27. David W. Dunlap, “1973: Meet Donald Trump,” New York Times, July 30, 2015, https://mobile.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/07/30/1973-meet-donald-trump.
28. Brenner, “How Donald Trump.”
29. Barrett, Trump.
30. Michael S. Schmidt, “Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation,” New York Times, January 4, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/04/us/politics/trump-sessions-russia-mcgahn.html.
31. Johnston, Making of Donald Trump.
32. Tom Robbins, “A Brief History of Donald Trump and the Mafia,” Vice, April 28, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ppx7b9/a-brief-history-of-donald-trump-and-the-mafia.
