Nazi bankers, Russian mobsters, money laundering, fraud & "active measures": Trump mob expo$ed, have always been crooked
'Dark Towers' Exposes Chaos And Corruption At The Bank That Holds Trump's Secrets
In the 1990s, long before he became president, Donald Trump was known as a cash-strapped New York City businessman with shaky credit.
"His record of defaulting on loans and stiffing his business partners was very long and very well-documented," New York Times finance editor David Enrich says. "Any mainstream financial institution that had competent risk management systems in place — there is no way they were going to do business with Donald Trump."
Enter Deutsche Bank, which Enrich says was a "second-tier player" in the banking world in the 1990s. Seeking to make a name for itself, the bank was willing to work with Trump when others would not.
"The bank was so hungry for profits, for short-term profits, and so hungry to make a name for itself in the United States that it was really eager to just disregard any red flags that presented themselves with clients," Enrich says. "Trump would default on a bond offering. He would default on a loan. He would sue the bank. And yet, time after time, Deutsche Bank executives kept going back to him for more business."
All told, Enrich estimates that Deutsche Bank loaned Trump some $2 billion — which helped pave the way for his political rise.
"I think that's a big part of the reason that Donald Trump is president today, because of the financial support he received over many years from his lender of last resort," Enrich says.
Enrich has spent years reporting on Deutsche Bank, which, in 2007, was the world's largest, with $3 trillion in assets. He traces the bank's shadowy practices — which range from laundering money for Russian oligarchs to violating international sanctions — in the new book, Dark Towers.
On Deutsche Bank's concerns about Trump holding political office
As a leading candidate for the president of the United States, he is what's called, in banking terms, a "politically exposed person," which means there is heightened risk of corruption ... that this person could be involved in bribery or that their money could be from ill-gotten means. The bank was very wary of doing business with Trump as the election neared and, in fact, rejected [a] requested loan that he made in early 2016. ...
Inside the bank, compliance officers had been looking at some of the transactions that were going in and out of Donald Trump's bank accounts, and Jared Kushner's bank accounts, too. Kushner was also a big client of Deutsche Bank. And what they were seeing was that money, in some cases, was flowing to international sources, in some cases wealthy Russians — that raised a lot of concerns from a money-laundering perspective. So compliance officers within the bank essentially blew the whistle and said: These transactions are troubling. We need to report them as suspicious to the federal government. And these concerns were kind of elevated up the flagpole within Deutsche Bank, and managers and executives at a higher-level ultimately decided that, no, these concerns did not need to be escalated to the government or even reported to the government. But within the bank, there was a big concern that something weird was going on in the Trump bank accounts.
On Deutsche Bank's ties to the Nazi regime
This was the bank that helped do everything from finance the construction of concentration camps. It helped with the financing for the company that manufactured poison gas. It participated in the "Aryanization" of businesses all over Europe, including in countries that Germany had conquered. It was selling gold that the Nazis had extracted from the teeth of Jews, selling that internationally to raise hard currency for the Nazis. So this was a bank that was really an important part of the Nazi military machine. Now, in fairness to the bank, that is true for most large German companies that existed at the time, and still exist to this day. So it's not that Deutsche Bank was uniquely evil during this period — but I don't think there's any sanitizing of this basic fact: The reality is that they were a party to genocide.
On Deutsche Bank violating American sanctions
This is an international bank and it has a presence, a headquarters in Germany and presences all over the world, but because it has a big American operation, it has to adhere to American law, and American law at the time imposed very strict sanctions on Iran, Syria, Myanmar and Libya, among other places. But Deutsche Bank wanted to do business in those countries. The fact that they were under sanction, in some ways, increased the value of the services the bank could provide, because there weren't all that many banks that were willing to provide financial services in those countries.
So they just went ahead and did the business and they took extraordinary lengths to conceal what they were doing. They [engaged] in a practice that was known as "stripping," where they would remove any references to, for example, the Syrian counterparties they were working with in order to avoid triggering any alerts in their American computer systems or with American regulators. And over a period of several years, they engaged in billions of dollars of business with entities that, in Iran's case in particular, were very closely tied to the Iranian military and were later blamed for really helping finance a lot of terrorism that was going on in Iraq after the Iraq war.
On Deutsche Bank laundering money for Russian customers
The money laundering business was very lucrative for Deutsche Bank and it did it really all over the world. The biggest places it was doing it were with Russian customers. And Deutsche Bank has a long, proud history of being one of the few Western banks [that has], more or less without interruption, been operating in Russia for a very long time. And Russia in the early 2000s was a place where there were a lot of people getting very rich very quickly, often through suspicious means. It became very important for them to have a way to get their money out of Russia and converted from rubles into euros or dollars or pounds. ... Many Western banks were very wary of doing business with these Russians because there were a lot of suspicions. And, in fact, it was true that a lot of this money came through corruption or kleptocracy, things like that. Deutsche Bank was very happy to fill that void. It arranged for a number of workarounds for Russians where they could either move their money to a country like Latvia, for example, and then have it wired into the U.S.
Listen to story:
Why Did Deutsche Bank Keep Lending to Donald Trump? — “Trump, Inc.”
Whispers of money laundering have swirled around Donald Trump’s businesses for years. One of his casinos, for example, was fined $10 million for not trying hard enough to prevent such machinations. Investors with shady financial histories sometimes popped up in his foreign ventures. And on Sunday, The New York Times reported that anti-money-laundering specialists at Deutsche Bank internally flagged multiple transactions by Trump companies as suspicious.
The remarkably troubled recent history of Deutsche Bank, its past money-laundering woes — and the bank’s striking relationship with Trump — are the subjects of this week’s episode of the “Trump, Inc.” podcast. The German bank loaned a cumulative total of around $2.5 billion to Trump projects over the past two decades, and the bank continued writing him nine-figure checks even after he defaulted on a $640 million obligation and sued the bank, blaming it for his failure to pay back the debt.
The podcast explores some eyebrow-raising Trump-related moves by the bank:
Deutsche Bank’s private wealth unit loaned Trump $48 million — after he had defaulted on his $640 million loan and the bank’s commercial unit didn’t want to lend him any further funds — so that Trump could pay back another unit of Deutsche Bank. “No one has ever seen anything like it,” said David Enrich, finance editor of The New York Times, who is writing a book about the bank and spoke to “Trump, Inc.”
Deutsche Bank loaned Trump’s company $125 million as part of the overall $150 million purchase of the ailing Doral golf resort in Miami in 2012. The loans’ primary collateral was land and buildings that he paid only $105 million for, county land records show. The apparent favorable terms raise questions about whether the bank’s loan was unusually risky.
To widespread alarm, and at least one protest that Trump would not be able to pay his lease obligations, Deutsche Bank’s private wealth group loaned the Trump Organization an additional $175 million to renovate the Old Post Office Building in Washington and turn it into a luxury hotel.
Like Trump, Deutsche Bank has been scrutinized for its dealings in Russia. The bank paid more than $600 million to regulators in 2017 and agreed to a consent order that cited “serious compliance deficiencies” that “spanned Deutsche Bank’s global empire.” The case focused on “mirror trades,” which Deutsche Bank facilitated between 2011 and 2015. The trades were sham transactions whose sole purpose appeared to be to illicitly convert rubles into pounds and dollars — some $10 billion worth.
The bank was “laundering money for wealthy Russians and people connected to Putin and the Kremlin in a variety of ways for almost the exact time period that they were doing business with Donald Trump,” Enrich said. “And all of that money through Deutsche Bank was being channeled through the same exact legal entity in the U.S. that was handling the Donald Trump relationship in the U.S. And so there are a lot of coincidences here.”
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/trumpinc/episodes/trump-inc-trump-deutsche-bank-its-complicated
Trump, Inc episode:
How Russian Money Helped Save Trump’s Business
After his financial disasters two decades ago, no U.S. bank would touch him. Then foreign money began flowing in.
In the fall of 1992, after he cut a deal with U.S. banks to work off nearly a billion dollars in personal debt, Donald Trump put on a big gala for himself in Atlantic City to announce his comeback. Party guests were given sticks with a picture of Trump’s face glued to them so they could be photographed posing as the famous real-estate mogul. As the theme music from the movie Rocky filled the room, an emcee shouted, “Let’s hear it for the king!” and Trump, wearing red boxing gloves and a robe, burst through a paper screen. One of his casino executives announced that his boss had returned as a “winner,” according to Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio.
But it was mainly an act, D’Antonio told Foreign Policy. In truth Trump was all but finished as a major real-estate developer, in the eyes of many in the business, and that’s because the U.S. banking industry was pretty much finished with him. By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times. When would-be borrowers repeatedly file for protection from their creditors, they become poison to most major lenders and, according to financial experts interviewed for this story, such was Trump’s reputation in the U.S. financial industry at that juncture.
For the rest of the ’90s a chastened Trump launched little in the way of major new business ventures (with a few exceptions, such as the Trump World Tower across from the United Nations, which began construction in 1999 and was financed by two German lenders, Deutsche Bank and Bayerische Hypo- und Vereinsbank). “He took about 10 years off, and really sort of licked his wounds and tried to recover,” D’Antonio said. As late as 2003, Trump was in such desperate financial trouble that at a meeting with his siblings following his father’s death he pressed them to hurriedly sell his father’s estate off, against the late Fred Trump’s wishes, the New York Times reported in an investigation of Trump family finances in October. And his businesses kept failing: In 2004, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy with $1.8 billion dollars of debt.
But Trump eventually made a comeback, and according to several sources with knowledge of Trump’s business, foreign money played a large role in reviving his fortunes, in particular investment by wealthy people from Russia and the former Soviet republics. This conclusion is buttressed by a growing body of evidence amassed by news organizations, as well as what is reportedly being investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Southern District of New York. It is a conclusion that even Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., has appeared to confirm, saying in 2008—after the Trump Organization was prospering again—that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”
Trump’s former longtime architect, Alan Lapidus, echoed this view in an interview with FP this month. Lapidus said that based on what he knew from the internal workings of the organization, in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”
The overseas money came initially in the form of new real-estate partnerships and the purchase of numerous Trump condos, said a former real-estate partner of Trump’s who witnessed the transformation of those years and later soured on Trump. “I think part of it was he was toxic to the banks. I think he also probably learned that personal guarantees [on loans] weren’t a brilliant idea either,” said the former business associate, who would speak to FP only on condition of anonymity. “So he was saying to himself, ‘What else could I do in the world? I’ll just convince people to buy my brand.’ And the only people who were willing to buy it were tasteless Russians, people who like the absurd, ostentatious gold-leaf lifestyle he has. You’re not going to sell that brand to blue bloods in Greenwich, Connecticut.”
Or as another Trump biographer, Gwenda Blair, put it: “Trump was on the Titanic heading down. Everyone’s drowning around him. … Suddenly he gets saved. It’s almost like a spaceship landed right next to where he was in the water.”
All this history helps put into context some recent developments in the investigations by Mueller and the Southern District of New York, which have focused on supposed Trump collusion or conspiracy with the Russians. It may have seemed odd at first that during the presidential campaign the people in Trump’s orbit—including Trump’s son, daughter, and son-in-law—were contacted by at least 14 Russians, according to information emerging from the federal investigations. Or that in November 2015, according to a sentencing memo published recently, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was approached by a Russian who offered “political synergy” between the Trump campaign and Russia (adding that a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would have “phenomenal” impact “not only in political but in a business dimension as well”).
But in fact at least some of these encounters appear to have sprung from business contacts Trump had developed over nearly two decades.
According to Trump’s former real-estate partner and other sources who are familiar with the internal workings of the Trump Organization, his post-’90s revival may have really begun in the early 2000s with the Bayrock Group, which rented offices two floors down from Trump’s in Trump Tower. Bayrock was run by two investors who would help to change Trump’s trajectory: Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who drew on seemingly bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic; and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.
With Bayrock’s help, Trump began his broad transformation from a builder to a brander. He reinvented himself and his business model—going from being a force in real estate to a nearly bankrupt but brazen self-promoter who had mainly his name to sell. In lieu of the big banks, Bayrock helped to bring Trump back into real estate by supplying him with the equity stake he needed to entice new lenders for big projects, according to a former Bayrock official. The biggest of those projects was the Trump SoHo, the troubled 46-story condominium and hotel that has been a target of lawsuits since it opened in 2010 and is reportedly being investigated by Mueller over whether it was financed partly by Russian money. That deal gave Trump 18 percent of the equity just for licensing his name. (In addition to Bayrock, the other partner was the Sapir family from the former Soviet republic of Georgia.)
The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment for this article. But in a deposition related to Trump SoHo litigation, Trump said he was drawn to Bayrock because he was impressed with Kazakh-born Arif’s connections, and that Arif had brought potential Russian investors to meet him. “Bayrock knew the people, knew the investors,” Trump said.
By the time he ran for president, Trump had been enmeshed in this mysterious overseas flow of capital—which various investigators believe could have included money launderers from Russia and former Soviet republics who bought up dozens of his condos—for a decade and a half. And Felix Sater was pitching Cohen on a Moscow deal as recently as mid-2016—as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination, according to a sentencing memo recently unveiled by the Mueller probe.
As a result, some recent reports indicate that federal and congressional investigators are now focused on the Trump Organization as much as the president himself in probing alleged Russian influence. This is especially true of Democratic House members getting set to take over key committees in January. According to two Democratic staffers involved in Trump probes who spoke to FP on condition of anonymity, Democratic Senate staffers plan to work with their House colleagues—who will have subpoena power—in investigating the president’s business dealings going back to the Bayrock-Trump partnership and Trump’s other overseas sources of investment. They say another primary focus will be the Trump Organization’s more recent all-cash purchases overseas, “largely of golf courses,” in order to probe whether some of that investment may have involved money laundering.
“Our broader concern is the extent to which the Trump Organization has received an influx of foreign sources of money over the years, and if that continues to compromise the president,” said one Capitol Hill staffer. He added that this wouldn’t be an issue if Trump had followed precedent and divested himself of his business holdings, as previous presidents have.
“Russian efforts either to recruit somebody as an asset or effectively coerce them into becoming an asset historically typically rely on compromise of either a financial nature or a sexual nature,” said David Kris, a former assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s National Security Division. “Or some other nature by which they can gain leverage. Either induce somebody voluntarily to cooperate or blackmail them.” Kris added that “there is long history of that kind of activity, including in the context of presidential elections,” going back to Soviet efforts to offer money to Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 election.
Ever since his presidential campaign, Trump’s critics in Washington have questioned his unwillingness to criticize Putin directly and his push to ease sanctions against Russia. Most recently, the U.S. president appeared to blame both sides for Putin’s violent intervention in Ukraine, when Russian ships fired upon, wounded, and seized Ukrainian sailors, saying: “Either way, we don’t like what’s happening, and hopefully, it will get straightened out.” Trump at first called off a meeting with Putin at the G-20 summit at the end of last month, then held one anyway. And he recently appeared to let both Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman off the hook for political murder, which both leaders are accused of. “The world is a very dangerous place!” Trump said.
Bayrock’s money sometimes came from sources outside Russia and the former Soviet republics, according to one of the firm’s former employees, including an obscure Icelandic investment bank called the FL Group. But those roads too sometimes appeared to lead back to Russia. In 2017, real-estate developer Jody Kriss, whom Sater hired to help him run Bayrock, told Timothy O’Brien of Bloomberg what happened after an Icelandic competitor of the FL Group contacted him to invest in Bayrock. When Kriss brought that offer to Sater and Arif, they told him that the money behind Icelandic banks “was mostly Russian”—and they had to take FL’s funds for deals with Trump because FL was “closer to [Vladimir] Putin,” according to O’Brien.
Kriss told Bloomberg’s O’Brien that he eventually left Bayrock because he became convinced that the firm was a front for money laundering.
Precisely where Bayrock’s other money came from remains unclear. Some of it was allegedly taken out of the Arif family chromium business in Kazakhstan, according to a lawsuit that Kriss later filed against Bayrock, which was settled for an undisclosed amount. The little development firm in Trump Tower managed to somehow locate funds “month after month, for two years, in fact more frequently, whenever Bayrock ran out of cash,” the lawsuit said. Bayrock’s owners would “magically show up with a wire from ‘somewhere’ just large enough to keep the company going.”
According to Trump’s 2015 Federal Election Commission disclosure form, one major bank that did continue to lend money to the Trump Organization—in the hundreds of millions of dollars—was Deutsche Bank, Germany’s largest. It was the lead lender on one of the few new real-estate developments that Trump did manage to build after his debt experience of the ’90s: the 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, which opened in 2008. But Deutsche Bank Trust Co. Americas later sued Trump for nonpayment of loans on the project (Trump countersued, and the matter was settled). And here too Russian money may have been involved, though it may not have gone directly to Trump: Federal investigators are looking into whether Deutsche Bank sold some of Trump’s mortgage or other loans to Vnesheconombank, the Russian state development bank, or other Russian banks, Reuters reported in late 2017. Since the 2000s, Deutsche Bank has worked closely with Russian state institutions, and in 2015 the bank’s Russian arm was implicated in a $10 billion Russian money-laundering scheme; Deutsche Bank later signed a consent order and agreed to pay $630 million in fines.
“There have long been credible allegations as to the use of Trump properties to launder money by Russian oligarchs, criminals, and regime cronies,” the lawmakers said in a letter to the Department of Justice on March 13. Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a former federal prosecutor, said in recent interviews with The New Yorker and Meet the Press that he planned to issue subpoenas to Deutsche Bank as part of his own committee’s investigation.
“We’re going to be looking at the issue of possible money laundering by the Trump Organization, and Deutsche Bank is one obvious place to start,” he said. A 2017 report by Reuters, citing public documents, interviews and corporate records, also found that at least 63 Russians or people with Russian addresses bought nearly $100 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded Florida luxury buildings.
In a 2016 interview with ABC News, Trump did allow that he’d done one Russian deal. “The primary thing I did with Russia, I bought a house in Palm Beach at a bankruptcy,” Trump said. “I bought it for about $40 million. I sold it for $100 million to a Russian.” That 2008 sale of a six-acre Palm Beach estate to Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev is also reportedly being reviewed by Mueller’s team. At the time, Trump claimed that he was able to flip the house for such a high price in only four years because of renovations. But so huge was the differential in price—especially since by the time Trump sold the property to Rybolovlev in 2008, real-estate prices were plummeting in the financial crisis—that the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden, has asked for an investigation into the sale.
“That deal delivered so much cash to Trump, it almost has to be seen as a campaign contribution, or the purchase of Donald Trump,” said D’Antonio. Earlier this year the buyer, Rybolovlev, appeared on a U.S. Treasury Department unclassified list of Russian oligarchs, or influential politicians and business professionals who are considered close to Putin.
Even Trump’s sons, Donald Jr. and Eric, have admitted that Russians supplied the Trump Organization much of its capital needs.
In September 2008, at the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in New York, the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., said: “In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” In 2014, his younger brother Eric—also an executive in the Trump Organization—told a well-known sports writer, James Dodson, after the latter asked him where the organization was getting the money to buy up so many golf courses: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”
What remains unclear is whether Trump was compromised or being blackmailed by the Russian government. It is also not clear whether businessmen such as Sater were exaggerating their relations with Putin, and what precisely the Russian president’s role might have been in any of these business contacts with Trump. In November 2015 Sater promised Cohen in an email he could get “all of Putin’s team to buy in” on the Moscow deal, and that in turn would highlight Trump’s business skills and get him elected. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote. “I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/21/how-russian-money-helped-save-trumps-business/
"As has been pointed out by psychologists, psychiatrists & intelligence officials: the fact the mainstream media went along with a criminal psychopath & his transparent idiotic abusive lying, threatening, monstrous bullying, normalizing it for 5 years now… has endangered our society & the world. More unforgivable is that he was a mobster money-laundering criminal abuser before he came down that escalator & they gave him a free pass, allowing the charade to proceed to where we are now."
Inmate P01135809 is the ultimate manchurian candidate malware
"We have to take him seriously, but he's not a serious person. Would you trust Donald Trump to babysit your kids? Would you trust Donald Trump to do your taxes for you? Would you trust Donald Trump to cook a dinner? He doesn't pass the trust test for anything, let alone having his finger on the nuclear trigger. He is just not a responsible person & it's insane that we're thinking about giving him access to power." ~ Dan Barkhuff, former Navy SEAL, Veterans for Responsible Leadership