by Craig Unger
In an interview with the Russian daily Moskovsky Komsomolets, Agalarov denied having any significant ties to the underworld. “In the early 90’s, I had many personal conflicts, conversations, meetings, ‘arrows,’ as they were then called. But we never colluded with anyone—and we never had any ‘roofs’ [i.e., krysha, or protection] . . . And how can bandits threaten such a person? Physical reprisal? But if they kill me, they will not get anything.”41
In 2006, Emin married Leyla Aliyeva, the daughter of pro-Putin Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, who, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, “systematically seized shares in the most profitable businesses: banks, construction and telecommunications companies, gold mining and other deposits.” President Aliyev was voted the most corrupt “person of the year” by the OCCRP in 2012, beating out Vladimir Putin and Albanian drug lord Naser Kelmendi.42
Not long after this politically connected marriage took place, Crocus, which was largely known for developing upscale shopping malls, began to win massive government contracts, such as a $1.2 billion deal to develop the campus for Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok on Russia’s Pacific Coast.43 That was followed by enormous contracts to build part of a superhighway ringing Moscow, and two huge stadiums for the World Cup. Under Putin’s reign, massive government contracts like that are awarded only to those who happen to be in Putin’s good graces.
Meanwhile, the Agalarovs kept their close ties to the United States. In 2007, Emin bought a $3 million home in Alpine, New Jersey, and his father got an $8 million home there as well.44 His sister, Sheila Agalarova, became a real estate agent nearby.
But for all the success the Agalarovs had, Emin’s career as a pop star had never really taken off in the West. By 2006, he had begun releasing roughly one album per year but had never gotten traction in the US or Europe. So in 2012, he hired British-born publicist Rob Goldstone to come up with a strategy for breaking out as an international star.45
Before long, it became clear that partnering with Donald Trump might prove valuable for both father and son. For his part, Emin hoped Trump could line up a gorgeous woman—a Miss Universe, perhaps—for Emin’s newest video. They might even get Trump himself to make a cameo appearance. Finally, the Agalarovs hoped to persuade Trump to stage the next pageant at Crocus City Hall, their 7,500-seat arena in Moscow. And if that were to take place, Aras would be sure to insist that Emin perform in front of that huge global audience.
If that couldn’t make his career take off, nothing could.
* * *
—
On April 16, 2013, about two months after Mikhailov’s fete in Moscow, police burst into an apartment on the sixty-third floor of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, just three floors below Donald Trump’s penthouse, and rounded up suspects who were part of two gambling rings46 that were allegedly run by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a longtime associate of Mogilevich, Mikhailov, and other leaders of Solntsevo, from Uzbekistan.
Widely known as Taiwanchik, a diminutive that referred to his Asian facial features, Tokhtakhounov, according to a racketeering and money-laundering indictment before the Southern District of New York, had been designated as a vor, and, “as a Vor, Tokhtakhounov had substantial influence in the criminal underworld and offered assistance to and protection” to the Russian Mafia.47 In 2011, Tokhtakhounov had made the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list—at number five, he was two slots behind Semion Mogilevich.
But Tokhtakhounov told the New York Times that he was innocent of all wrongdoing.48 “I am not bad, like you think,” he said. “I am not the Mafia, I am not a bandit.”
Tokhtakhounov likely first developed ties to key figures in the Russian underworld when he was just a young boy growing up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, through Mikhail Chernoy,49 the metals-oligarch-in-waiting, who was a classmate of his younger brother and bestowed the nickname “Taiwanchik” on Tokhtakhounov. By the eighties, he had established good relations with Sergei Mikhailov, Vyacheslav Ivankov, and Anton Malevsky, leader of the Izmaylovskaya Organized Crime Group,50 who appears to have been the source of the mysterious $350,000 check to Michael Cohen from Russian hockey player Vladimir Malakhov.51
In the early nineties, Tokhtakhounov represented Ivankov’s interests in Germany, lived the high life with a spectacular nine-million-euro apartment in Paris’s chic Sixteenth Arrondissement,52 and had four villas in Italy,53 all the while traveling the world as a cardsharp engaging in high-stakes gambling and money laundering. Then, in 2002, Tokhtakhounov allegedly fixed an ice-dancing competition at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.54
And now, in 2013, Tokhtakhounov was named as the ringleader in an indictment charging thirty-four members and associates of two Russian-American organized crime families—the Taiwanchik-Trincher organization, based in New York, Kiev, and Moscow, and the Nahmad-Trincher organization, based in Los Angeles and New York—with operating international sports books that laundered more than $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and funneled it into investments in the United States in an enterprise that was based in Trump Tower. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Tokhtakhounov. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.55
This was no ordinary gambling bust. First of all, the apartment in question, 63A-B, was one of the most sought-after units in the building and was so highly prized that Trump himself had bought it when the building was completed in 1983.56 In 1994, however, he personally sold it to Oleg Boyko, an oligarch who was sometimes described as Yeltsin’s personal banker.57
In May 2009, Boyko sold his Trump Tower apartment to Vadim Trincher, a high-stakes poker player who is a dual citizen of Israel and the US, for $5 million. According to an FBI analysis of the purchase, the funds used to buy the apartment moved through shell companies Trincher maintained in Cyprus.58 By the time the gambling bust took place, according to the Smoking Gun, the apartment, with its twenty-four-karat-gold faucets, alabaster walls crafted by Portuguese artisans, and $350,000 bathroom floor made of amethyst imported from Tanzania, had become one of the most ostentatious apartments in what was already one of the most ostentatious buildings in America.59 (Which did not mean it was terrifically livable. A leak from the apartment upstairs in 2012 caused $6 million in mold and mildew damage, the Trinchers said, and was so bad they had to cancel a fund-raiser for Newt Gingrich’s presidential race that year.)60
The sixty-third floor was not the only place in Trump Tower where the ring was operating. Hillel “Helly” Nahmad, a billionaire Manhattan art dealer who ran an eponymous New York gallery in the Carlyle Hotel on the Upper East Side, had bought up the entire fifty-first floor of Trump Tower61 and used it as the site of a high-stakes gambling operation that catered to A-list celebrities and Russian oligarchs.62
Another key figure in the gambling ring was Anatoly Golubchik, who owned a condo in Trump International Beach Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.63 As James Henry reported in the American Interest,64 Golubchik also owned a shell company called Lytton Ventures with a director named Galina Telesh—who happens to have been married to Semion Mogilevich.
According to the indictment filed by United States Attorney Preet Bharara, the gambling ring had been in operation since 2006, if not earlier, and had laundered at least $100 million.65 In the end, twenty-eight defendants pleaded guilty, including Helly Nahmad66 and Vadim Trincher,67 and went to jail.68 As for Tokhtakhounov, he fled the country.
* * *
—
In June 2013, just two months after the Trump Tower gambling bust, Emin and Aras Agalarov traveled to Las Vegas to meet Trump while the Miss USA pageant was being held there.
Just as Aras had begun to position himself in the world of Russian real estate as Russia’s Donald Trump, so had his son, Emin, reached out to Trump’s Miss Universe Pageant in hopes of adding a bit of heat to his own career. In 2008, the Miss Universe pagea
nt had featured entertainment by a newcomer named Lady Gaga, and Emin hoped a similar showcase might help him break through.69 Olivia Culpo, the Miss Universe winner in 2012, ended up starring in Emin’s music video for a song called “Amor.”
By the time the video was released in May, Emin had become friendly with Paula Shugart, president of the Miss Universe Organization. He told Forbes, “And having had a few dinners and conversations with her, she said, ‘We’re always considering taking the contest to Russia and never really succeeded. And in the current year we have a lot of debts.’”
(A spokesperson for the Miss Universe Organization told the magazine that the issue of debt was not discussed.)70
And so, discussions began about presenting the next Miss Universe pageant in Moscow, specifically at Crocus City Hall, the Agalarov-owned theater.71
Finally, on June 15, 2013, the Agalarovs met with Trump in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, where Trump’s Miss USA pageant would be held in a few days. Trump greeted them warmly, chatted for ten minutes or so, and then shouted out to onlookers.72 “Look who came to me!” Trump said. “This is the richest man in Russia!”73
That wasn’t true, of course. The Agalarov fortune was less than $2 billion—not chump change, to be sure, but not good enough to break into Russia’s top fifty oligarchs.74
None of which mattered to Trump. He was smitten. The Agalarovs were his new best friends. On the evening of June 15, he joined the Agalarov party of about twenty people in a private dining room at CUT, a restaurant in the Palazzo on the Strip, accompanied by Olivia Culpo; Nana Meriwether, the outgoing Miss USA; and his personal attorney, Michael Cohen.75
In addition to publicist Rob Goldstone, the Agalarovs brought another interesting figure to their party, Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze,76 vice president of Aras’s Crocus International, who had been working with Agalarov for nearly thirty years.
Born in 1965 in Soviet Georgia, Kaveladze had been classmates at the prestigious Moscow Finance Institute in the late eighties with Mikhail Prokhorov, now an owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, and formed a partnership with him selling customized blue jeans while they were students.77
While he was in the US, Kaveladze had set up a company called International Business Creations, which established more than two thousand Delaware-based shell companies and hundreds of bank accounts for anonymous Russian clients. According to a congressional investigation, between 1991 and 2000, more than $1.4 billion in cash from Russia and Eastern Europe was laundered through accounts opened by Kaveladze.78
According to US officials, Kaveladze partnered in that operation with Boris Goldstein, a banker whose ties to the KGB attracted the attention of US officials, in a little-noticed footnote to a report by the General Accounting Office on Russian money laundering.79 “We have obtained information that indicates that this individual has had a close relationship with companies associated with members of the former Soviet Union’s intelligence agency,” it read.80
Whether Trump was aware of such details or not, they did not seem to present an obstacle to him, and before long, the Agalarovs agreed to put up $20 million to produce the next Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in November.81
But the night was young, and there was still time for more fun. Trump’s party moved on to the Act, a nightclub in the Palazzo mall. According to the Las Vegas Sun, acts “performed at the club were aggressively adult in nature,”82 and were said to include simulated sex acts and naked girls pretending to urinate.83
* * *
—
On June 16, during the live telecast of the Miss USA pageant, Trump was joined onstage by Aras Agalarov and said he was thrilled to announce that the Miss Universe pageant would be staged in Moscow. “This will be one of the biggest and most beautiful Miss Universe events ever,” Trump said.84 “It is only fitting that the world’s most iconic and premier beauty contest will take place in Russia’s most premier venue, Crocus City Hall.”
In fact, Trump was so excited that the next day he tweeted about the upcoming pageant. “Do you think Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow - if so, will he become my new best friend?” he wrote.85
But that wasn’t enough. Trump Tower Moscow had not gotten off the ground in twenty-seven years of trying. Trump Vodka had flopped. Yet he still wanted to expand his brand into Russia, and that meant Putin had to be on board. Later that month, Trump typed a personal letter to the Russian president inviting him to attend. People familiar with the document said it showed how eager Trump was to win over Putin.86
According to the Washington Post, at the bottom, Trump added a postscript saying that he looked forward to seeing “beautiful” women during his trip.87
* * *
—
It was an interesting time for Trump to go back to Russia. For one thing, now that he was back on his feet again, his entire approach to money had done a 180. For years he had described himself as the “king of debt.” He bragged about his ability to use it to his advantage. Trump had always loved debt. But suddenly, he had begun paying cash for almost everything.88 Starting in 2006, he paid $12.6 million for an estate in Scotland, the Washington Post reported. Cash. Then came two homes in Beverly Hills. Cash again. Five golf courses on the East Coast. A winery in Virginia. All cash.
And so it went over the next few years. In 2014, he paid nearly $80 million for two golf courses, one in Ireland and one in Scotland. Where was that money coming from—at a time when no one in banking in the West would touch golf construction? Later that year, sportswriter and author James Dodson found out when he played with Donald and Eric Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Well aware that financing for new golf courses had been dead in the water since the 2008 recession, Dodson asked Eric where the Trumps were getting their money from.
“Well, we don’t rely on American banks,” Eric replied, according to Dodson.89 “We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
Thanks to the Russians, Trump was very much back in business. In fact, things were going so well that he was once again considering running for president, in 2016. Indeed, not long after the gambling ring bust, lawyer Michael Cohen told the New York Post that Trump spent $1 million to research a run for the presidency. “At this point Mr. Trump has not made any decision on a political run, but what I would say is that he is exactly what this country needs,” Cohen said.90
Trump could not have agreed more. “I made a speech in Michigan the other day, and they set their all-time record,” he told Fox News. “It was a great, great event. It was an amazing event. And people in this country are just desperate for leadership. So, whether it’s me or frankly let it be somebody, but somebody has to come along and straighten out this country.”91
Every once in a while, however, Trump was apprised of the dark waters in which he was swimming. In July, Trump, who was developing a highly controversial golf resort in Scotland, was stunned when John Sweeney, interviewing him for the BBC’s Panorama, asked about Felix Sater and his ties to the Mafia.
“Why didn’t you go to Felix Sater and say: ‘You’re connected with the Mafia. You’re fired’?” Sweeney asked.
Clearly startled by the question, Trump lashed out. “John, maybe you’re thick,” he told Sweeney, “but when you have a signed contract, you can’t in this country just break it. And by the way, I hate to do this but I do have that big group of people waiting, so I have to leave. I have to leave.”
And so, with the camera still rolling, Trump walked out.
* * *
—
As his trip to Moscow approached, Trump became increasingly outspoken. In September, Putin wrote an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US to stay out of the Syria conflict and attacking the idea of American exceptionalism. Trump adored Putin’s patronizing put-down of Obama. “The way it was crafted was very, very interesting,” Trump told Fox News.92 “And it really is talking down to the president. Th
ere’s no question about that. Well, absolutely amazing that he did that. And certainly, it’s getting play all over the world. And it really makes him look like a great leader, frankly.”
Trump couldn’t wait to get to Moscow. He went on MSNBC to promote the Miss Universe pageant there, and said, “We have invited Vladimir Putin, and I know for a fact that he wants very much to come.”
* * *
—
At 9:15 p.m. on Thursday, November 7, 2013, Donald Trump took a seat on a private jet owned by his friend Phil Ruffin,93 who had married a former Miss Ukraine from the pageant.94 They took off from Asheville, North Carolina, for Moscow and the Miss Universe pageant, and landed at Vnukovo International Airport in Moscow the next day, according to Bloomberg News.
Shortly after he landed, there was a brief business meeting.95 Then Trump went to Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton and was given the same presidential suite Barack and Michelle Obama had stayed in back in 2009. Meanwhile, a Russian approached Keith Schiller, Trump’s longtime bodyguard, and offered to send five women to Trump’s hotel room. Schiller, who later testified about it before Congress, said he viewed it as a joke, according to sources who were present at the interview. “We don’t do that type of stuff,” he responded.96
Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called to express regrets that Putin’s schedule would not allow the two men to meet and Putin later sent a note and a decorative lacquered box as a gift, which was delivered by Aras Agalarov’s daughter. Disappointed that Putin couldn’t attend, Trump made much of the gift. “Putin even sent me a present, beautiful present, with a beautiful note,” he said. “I spoke to all of his people.”97
Sometime Friday, as shown by a photo posted by the restaurant to Facebook,98 Trump and the Agalarovs went to a private dinner at Nobu Moscow, the famous Japanese restaurant co-owned by Emin’s father and actor Robert De Niro. It was Aras Agalarov’s birthday99—he was turning fifty-eight—but he had also organized the dinner for Trump to meet more than a dozen Russian oligarchs, including Herman Gref, the chief executive officer of state-controlled Sberbank of Russia, the nation’s biggest bank.100 Gref would be important if Sberbank were to finance any Trump-branded development with Crocus. No such project could possibly move forward without having the approval of the Russian government.