House of Trump, House of Putin2
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Sergei Polonsky
A flamboyant six-foot-four Russian real estate oligarch, Polonsky was convicted of fraud in 2017. While still associated with Donald Trump, Felix Sater served as an adviser to Polonsky in Mirax Group, which partnered with Sistema, a conglomerate tied to Mogilevich. Polonsky also partnered with Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a Mogilevich crony.
Vadim Rabinovich
A pro-Russia Ukrainian oligarch and Mogilevich lieutenant who spent seven years in jail for embezzlement, Rabinovich attended the famous 1995 Russian Mafia summit in Tel Aviv at which Mogilevich was granted a generous share of the Ukraine energy trade. A year later, in 1996, Rabinovich hung around with his partners Howard Lorber and Bennett LeBow as they showed Trump around town.
Vladimir Rezin
In 1996, Trump began negotiations with Rezin, the first deputy mayor of Moscow, to build a $300 million luxury residential complex. Like all of Trump’s proposed projects in Moscow, it never came to fruition.
Rotem Rosen
Chief lieutenant of real estate magnate Lev “King of Diamonds” Leviev, Rosen married Zina Sapir, daughter of Tamir Sapir, who founded the Sapir Organization, which backed Trump SoHo. Attended Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in hopes of negotiating a Trump Tower Moscow. His son’s 2008 bris was touted by New York magazine as “the best bris invite ever.” Attendees included Donald Trump, daughter Ivanka, and her husband-to-be, Jared Kushner.
Dmitry Rybolovlev
Russia’s “fertilizer king,” Rybolovlev owns a 3.3 percent stake in the Bank of Cyprus, alleged to be a haven for money laundering. In 2008, he purchased a mega-mansion from Trump in Palm Beach for $95 million, which Trump had purchased four years earlier for $40 million.
Tamir Sapir
An impoverished immigrant turned billionaire, Sapir partnered with Semyon Kislin, who, according to the FBI, was a “member or associate” of Vyacheslav Ivankov’s mob in Brighton Beach. Like Kislin, Sapir likely made his money through ties to Uzbek oligarch Mikhail Chernoy. Lived in Trump Tower, and partnered with Bayrock and Trump on Trump SoHo. Sapir denied having any mob ties. Died in 2014.
Felix Sater
Bayrock’s international man of mystery, Sater was born in the Soviet Union in 1966. As managing director of Bayrock Group, he partnered with Trump and made various stabs at developing Trump Tower Moscow. Cooperated with the government after pleading guilty to racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme in 1998. His father was said to be a lieutenant in Mogilevich’s organization and did business with the Italian Mafia in New York. Childhood friend of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Served as a government asset who helped the US track terrorists and mobsters, but is also alleged to be working with Mogilevich. Accompanied Ivanka Trump and Donald Jr. on a 2006 Russia trip, in which he said he arranged for Ivanka to spin around in Putin’s chair in the Kremlin.
Alex Shnaider
In the early 2000s, he began to develop the tallest building in Canada, the sixty-five-story Trump Tower and Hotel in Toronto. When it came to financing the skyscraper, Shnaider, a billionaire of Russian extraction, turned to Raiffeisen Bank International AG in Vienna,18 whose affiliate company was said to be a front for RosUkrEnergo. Shnaider is also the son-in-law of Boris Birshtein and worked at Birshtein’s KGB-tied company, Seabeco.
Eric Sitarchuk
As an attorney, Sitarchuk represented Mogilevich lieutenant Jacob Bogatin during the YBM Magnex scandal and, many years later, Donald Trump himself as owner of the Trump International Hotel in DC, when a wine bar argued that the president’s ownership of the hotel constituted an unfair competitive advantage.19
Roger Stone
A close Trump ally for decades, Stone represented Trump when he moved into the gambling industry in the eighties. Served as adviser to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. Communicated directly and indirectly with WikiLeaks in order to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton and hacked emails before the election.
Gennady Timchenko
Yet another judoka pal of Putin’s who ended up a billionaire, in this case as chairman of the Gunvor oil-trading firm, with a net worth of $15.6 billion.20 Cited as a member of Putin’s inner circle, Timchenko has been subject to sanctions. As an owner of Sibur, a large gas company, he is one of the biggest clients of Navigator Holdings, a shipping firm partly owned by Trump’s commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.21
Vadim Trincher
Along with Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, Anatoly Golubchik, and Hillel Nahmad, Trincher was a leader of two Russian-American organized crime families—the Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization and the Nahmad-Trincher Organization—which ran “international sports books” that laundered more than $100 million out of the former Soviet Union. They operated out of the sixty-third floor of Trump Tower until they were busted in 2013.
Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov
Another ringleader of the Taiwanchik-Trincher Organization, Tokhtakhounov has allegedly spent more than three decades working with Mogilevich and the Solntsevo Organization, dating back to the early eighties, when he hung out with Mogilevich and Mikhailov at the Legendary Hotel Sovietsky in the Moscow suburb of Solntsevo. He was indicted for conspiring to fix the ice-skating competition at the 2002 Winter Olympics. After the bust of the gambling ring in Trump Tower in April 2013, he surfaced in November at the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow near Donald Trump.
Viktor Vekselberg
A member of Putin’s inner circle, Vekselberg is the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus,22 investing in it at a time when Wilbur Ross, who has since become Trump’s secretary of commerce, was the bank’s vice chairman.
Natalia Veselnitskaya
A Russian attorney for Denis Katsys’s Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings, Veselnitskaya set up the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, among others. Veselnitskaya has been an informant to Yuri Chaika, the prosecutor general of Russia. The meeting held forth the promise of handing over damaging information on Hillary Clinton to the Trump campaign, as well as addressing the possibility of lifting sanctions against Russia. Closely aligned with the Agalarovs.
Viktor Yanukovych
Elected president of Ukraine after being completely remade as a candidate by Paul Manafort. Earned a reputation as a “Putin puppet,” and was ousted in 2014, and exiled to Russia. Manafort, Rick Gates, and Konstantin Kilimnik all worked for Yanukovych for more than a decade—in return for tens of millions of dollars.
Vladimir Putin (left) and Donald Trump (right) during the G8 meeting. Putin has denied interference in the 2016 US presidential election, while the state media he controls has claimed, “Trump is ours.” (Evan Vucci/AP)
Donald Trump and his late mentor Roy Cohn in 1984. “I don’t want to know what the law is,” Cohn famously said, “I want to know who the judge is.” (Bettmann/Getty Images)
The Torturers’ Lobby: Back in 1985, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone were young political operatives who reveled in taking on dictators as clients. Trump was an early client for the duo. Many years later, Stone advised Trump during the 2016 campaign while Manafort became Trump’s campaign manager. (Harry Naltchayan/The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Political operative Roger Stone split with the Donald Trump campaign but allegedly played a major role in WikiLeaks’ leaking of the DNC’s hacked emails during the presidential election. (Jesse Dittmar/The New York Times/Redux Pictures)
Brighton Beach Russian mobster Boris Nayfeld, one of the last of the old-time vory, provided muscle for both Evsei Agron, who was murdered, and his successor, Marat Balagula, in the eighties. (Seth Wenig/AP)
Brutal mobster Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov was a high-level associate of Semion Mogilevich, a “thief-in-law,” and a Trump Tower resident. Ivankov made frequent visits to Trump’s Taj Mahal. (TASS/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Left to right: Semion Mogilevich, Sergei Mikhailov, and Viktor Averin. According to Interpol, Mikhailov and Averin ran the huge Solntsevo crime
gang, but Mogilevich was the “Brainy Don” who introduced sophisticated finance to the Russian Mafia. (Courtesy of The Insider)
Russian president Vladimir Putin on the cover of a judo book he coauthored in 2014. Putin uses the principles of judo as a political philosophy. “Judo teaches self-control, the ability to feel the moment, to see the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, to strive for the best results.” (Sergey Ponomarev/The New York Times/Redux Pictures)
Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) and billionaire Arkady Rotenberg (right) at the funeral of Putin’s former judo trainer Anatoly Rakhlin in August 2009. Rotenberg and his brother Boris were childhood judo sparring partners of Putin’s who became billionaire oligarchs. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
Mayor Anatoly Sobchak (right) and his assistant Vladimir Putin (left) attend a meeting of the St. Petersburg city legislature in 1993. At a time when billions of dollars’ worth of Russia’s natural resources were being privatized, Putin had a low-profile but powerful position. (Mikhail Razuvaev/Kommersant/Sipa USA)
Oleg Kalugin, former head of foreign counter-intelligence for the KGB and Putin’s former boss, says Russian intelligence probably had kompromat on Donald Trump from Trump’s visit to Russia in 1987. (© RIA Novosti/The Image Works)
Donald Trump and his ex-wife Ivana Trump in Leningrad in 1987, during Trump’s first trip to the Soviet Union. The trip was arranged by Soviet ambassador Yuri Dubinin through Intourist, a Soviet travel agency said to have had KGB ties. (Maxim Blokhin/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Putin assumed power in 2000 and has tightened his grip on Russia by rewarding his inner circle and eliminating anyone who poses a threat to him. (Sergei Ilnitsky/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) and Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar at a flower-laying ceremony at Red Square, November 4, 2015. Lazar’s Chabad-dominated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, which was funded in part by two Putin confidantes, Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, also had direct ties to Trump. (© RIA Novosti/The Image Works)
President Donald J. Trump meets with a delegation organized by the American Friends of Lubavitch (Chabad), March 27, 2018. Jared Kushner, Felix Sater, and many other Trump associates provide a link to Putin via Chabad. (SMG/ZUMA Press/Newscom)
Russian president Vladimir Putin hands over a medal to singer Iosif Kobzon, aka “the Russian Sinatra,” during an awards ceremony in the Kremlin in Moscow, August 29, 2012. Kobzon is said to be a longtime favorite of Russian mobsters, often providing entertainment at events attended by members affiliated with the Russian Mafia. (Misha Japaridze/AFP/Getty Images)
Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin (center) with two of his closest confidantes, aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska (left) and finance minister Viktor Vekselberg. Deripaska was promised Trump campaign briefings during the 2016 US presidential election by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. Vekselberg met Trump lawyer Michael Cohen after the election, and made a large contribution to Trump’s inaugural fund shortly thereafter. (Konstantin Zavrazhin/Getty Images)
Alexander Litvinenko in the intensive care unit of University College Hospital in London, England, on November 20, 2006, three days before his death. The 43-year-old former KGB spy exposed Russian president Putin’s ties to Semion Mogilevich and was poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 shortly afterward. He accused Putin of involvement in poisoning him. (Natasja Weitsz/Getty Images)
The tombstone of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was hired by Hermitage Capital’s Bill Browder to investigate a $230 million tax fraud. For his efforts, Magnitsky was jailed, tortured, and killed while in a Russian prison—leading the US Congress and European Union to pass sanctions that targeted Russian human rights abusers. (Andrey Smirnov/AFP/Getty Images)
Paul Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes magazine’s Russian edition and author of a book about tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Klebnikov was shot to death in Moscow in 2004. Despite pressure from the US government, Russia has failed to fully investigate the murder. (Misha Japaridze/AP)
People light candles next to a portrait of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya during a rally in St. Petersburg on October 8, 2006. Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead at her apartment block in central Moscow. (Alexander Demianchuk/Reuters)
Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (left) speaks with his Ukrainian counterpart, Viktor Yanukovych, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on September 24, 2011. Paul Manafort helped get the pro-Putin Yanukovych elected and remained with him for years. (Sergei Karpukhin/AFP/Getty Images)
Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko listens to Prime Minister Tymoshenko during a meeting with representatives of local governments in Kiev. President Yushchenko suffered dioxin poisoning while running against Yanukovych during the presidential election of 2004. (Mykhailo Markiv/Reuters)
Police officers lead former Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko out of the courtroom after a court upheld her conviction, which was condemned as politically motivated by the West. Tymoshenko was found guilty of abuse of office and overstepping her authority while negotiating a natural gas contract with Russia in 2009. (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)
Ukrainians mark the second anniversary of the Euromaidan Revolution, which resulted in President Yanukovych’s fleeing Ukraine to Russia under the protection of the Kremlin. One hundred thirty civilians and eighteen police officers were killed during the protests. (NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Dmitry Firtash (right), one of Ukraine’s richest men, with Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (left). Allegedly associated with Semion Mogilevich, Firtash made millions off the Ukraine energy trade, some of which went to Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. (Mykhailo Markiv/Reuters)
Former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked for Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych and the pro-Putin Party of Regions for nearly a decade to help implement Russian interests. (Yuri Gripas/Reuters)
Donald Trump, Tevfik Arif, and Felix Sater attend the Trump SoHo launch party on September 19, 2007, in New York. Bayrock Group, the developer of Trump SoHo, was cofounded by Arif and Sater. The latter was a convicted felon who was involved in a money-laundering scam with the Mafia prior to Bayrock. (Mark Von Holden/WireImage/Getty Images)
Left to right: Eric Trump, Tevfik Arif, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump, Tamir Sapir, Alex Sapir, Julius Schwarz, and Zina Sapir attend a press conference at the Trump SoHo construction site on September 19, 2007. Trump SoHo was involved in a lawsuit claiming it was partly funded from “questionable sources” in Russia and Kazakhstan. (Clint Spaulding/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images)
In September 2012, Russian president Vladimir Putin (left) meets with Russian real estate billionaire Aras Agalarov (right), head of the Crocus Group. Agalarov hosted the 2013 Miss Universe pageant with Trump in Russia and allegedly is an old drinking buddy of Sergei Mikhailov, head of the Solntsevo crime gang. (RIA-Novosti, Mikhail Klimentyev, Presidential Press Service/AP)
Russian president Vladimir Putin (center); Putin’s favorite comedian, Vladimir Vinokur (right); and billionaire Aras Agalarov (left) during an awards ceremony in the Kremlin in Moscow on October 29, 2013. Vladimir Vinokur was pro-Trump during the 2016 US presidential election and posted on Instagram, “We won, Congratulations,” on November 9, 2016. (Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
Crocus Group president Aras Agalarov (right) and vice president Emin Agalarov (left) arrive with Donald Trump (center) for the 2013 Miss Universe beauty pageant final at Moscow’s Crocus City Hall on November 9, 2013. (Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Itar-Tass/Abaca Press/Newscom)
Left to right: Crocus Group president Aras Agalarov; Gabriela Isler of Venezuela, Miss Universe 2013; and Donald Trump at the pageant’s awards ceremony in Crocus City Hall on November 9, 2013. (© RIA Novosti/The Image Works)
Allegedly a longtime associate of Semion Mogilevich and Sergei Mikhailov, Alimzhan “Taiwanchik” Tokhtakhounov is accused of running an international gambling ring with Vadim Trincher out of Trump Tower in 2013
. Shortly after he fled the US to avoid prosecution, he appeared as a VIP guest at the 2013 Miss Universe pageant. (Oksana Yushko/The New York Times/Redux)