The Receipts: How Russia Bought an American President | #2 The Test

Trump Tower opened in early 1983.[1]

Fifty-eight stories of black glass on Fifth Avenue – though Trump told everyone it was 68. He skipped floor numbers to make the building seem taller than it actually was.[2] Within months, the building became the most popular place in New York City to hide dirty money. And nobody hid it better than Trump’s buyers.

Here’s how it worked: Trump Tower was one of the only buildings in the city that would let you buy a condo through a shell company and pay entirely in cash.[3] No name on the deed. No proof of income. No questions about where the money came from. He’d built the perfect machine for making money disappear – and the people who needed that service found him fast.

On August 22, 1983 – months after the building opened – a shell company called “Lasa Trade and Finance” bought apartment 54-K in Trump Tower.[4] Public records show different prices depending on the source – one filing lists $446,875, another lists $1.65 million – but the buyer behind the shell company was the same: Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictator of Haiti.[4] Not former dictator. Current dictator. A man who was, at that very moment, looting his country’s treasury while his people starved.

Now, the Snopes fact-check on this sale adds an important qualifier: there’s no evidence Trump personally knew that Duvalier was the man behind the shell company.[4] That’s how shell companies work – they hide the real buyer. But that’s also the point. Trump built a system where he didn’t have to know. He sold luxury condos to anonymous shell companies paying cash, and he never had to ask who was really writing the check. Whether he knew it was a dictator or not, he’d built the machine that made it possible.

Three years later, in February 1986, Duvalier fled Haiti hours before a popular revolution would have overthrown him.[5] He took an estimated $500 to $800 million of Haiti’s money with him. Some of it was already parked in Trump Tower. The Haitian people’s money, sitting in a Manhattan penthouse under a shell company name.

Then came the transaction that would set the pattern for the next four decades.

In 1984, a man named David Bogatin walked into Trump Tower and bought five luxury condos for roughly $4.9 million.[6] All cash. No mortgage. No verifiable income. No explanation for where the money came from. Trump reportedly attended the closing personally.[6]

Bogatin bought every unit in the names of shell companies.[6] The actual owner – invisible. The source of the money – invisible. Millions of dollars in cash from a man with no legitimate way to earn it, and nobody in Trump’s organization asked a single question.

Here’s what Trump would have known if he’d bothered to look: Bogatin was a Russian emigre with deep ties to organized crime. He was partnered with Michael Franzese of the Colombo crime family in a massive gasoline bootlegging scheme – buying fuel, moving it across state lines to dodge taxes, and pocketing millions on each transaction.[7] The operation was generating hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal proceeds that needed to be laundered.

Trump Tower condos were perfect for that. Buy with cash through a shell company, and dirty money becomes Manhattan real estate. Clean. Legitimate. Untraceable.

In 1987, federal prosecutors caught up with Bogatin. He pleaded guilty to charges related to the gasoline bootlegging scheme.[6] Two months later, instead of showing up for sentencing, he fled the country.[7] When the feds finally seized his Trump Tower apartments, they stated explicitly that Bogatin had purchased them to launder money and hide criminal assets.[6]

This was the mid-1980s, and something was shifting in New York’s criminal underworld. The Italian families that had dominated organized crime for decades were getting hit hard by federal RICO prosecutions. The Russians were moving in – not replacing the Italians, but filling the gaps they left. Real estate was the first place the money went. And Trump Tower, with its anonymous shell company purchases and no-questions-asked closings, was the front door.

But by then, the money had already done its work. Criminal cash had been transformed into Trump Tower equity. And Trump had facilitated every step of it.

The question the Bogatin deal answered was simple: would Trump ask where the money came from? Would he care? Would he demand to know?

No. He wouldn’t. He didn’t.

And that opened a door that would never close.

That same year – 1984 – a mob-connected gambling kingpin named Robert Hopkins showed up at a Trump Tower closing with a briefcase containing $200,000 in cash.[8] Hopkins ran New York’s largest illegal gambling ring. He had no legitimate income and no way to borrow money legally. He counted the cash out on the table. A Trump limousine ferried the cash to a New Jersey bank that did business with his casino.[8] Deal closed.

This has every hallmark of money laundering. You take money that came from crime, feed it through a legitimate-looking real estate transaction, and it comes out looking clean. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has literally published advisories saying that shell company purchases combined with all-cash deals are the single biggest red flag for real estate money laundering.[9]

Trump didn’t just ignore these red flags. He built a business model around them.

A BuzzFeed News investigation later found that between 1980 and 2017, more than 1,300 Trump condos across his branded properties were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies.[3] That’s one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos ever sold. The total value: roughly $1.5 billion in transactions that hit Treasury Department red flags for money laundering.[3]

One thousand three hundred condos. $1.5 billion. One-fifth of everything he sold.

These weren’t a few bad apples slipping through the cracks. This was the business. From the moment Trump Tower opened, anonymous buyers with unexplained cash were Trump’s bread and butter. Dictators. Mob bosses. Russian organized crime. Anyone with money they couldn’t explain and a need to make it disappear – Trump was open for business.

And he never asked where it came from. Not once.

The test was whether Donald Trump could be useful. Whether he would look the other way when dirty money showed up at his door. Whether he could be relied upon to take the cash, close the deal, and never ask questions.

He passed. Every time.

By the mid-1980s, everyone who mattered knew it. Russian organized crime knew it. The American mafia knew it. Foreign kleptocrats knew it. And the KGB – which had been watching Trump since the late 1970s, as I showed in Essay 1 – knew it too.

Trump Tower wasn’t just a building anymore. It was a laundromat. You brought your dirty money, you left with a deed and property records that showed nothing but a shell company name. Trump got his cut. And nobody ever had to explain anything to anyone.

Which is exactly why, in 1987, a Soviet ambassador named Yuri Dubinin would pick up the phone and make Donald Trump an offer he’d been groomed to accept.

That’s the next essay.

SOURCES:
[1] First Mention – Donald Trump Unveils Trump Tower in 1983
[2] 10 Floors Are Missing from Trump Tower
[3] Secret Money – How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos to Unknown Buyers
[4] Trump’s First Kleptocrat / Trump Sold Apartment to Haitian Dictator
[5] Jean-Claude Duvalier
[6] Trump Tower Money Laundering – Bogatin
[7] Russian Criminal Purchases Trump Condos / Investigators Probed Trump’s 40-Year Mob Ties
[8] Investigators Probed Trump’s 40-Year Mob Ties
[9] Trump’s Dirty Money / Cracking the Shell