The Receipts: How Russia Bought an American President | #8 The International Pipeline

So here’s the thing about the network behind Trump’s real estate empire: it didn’t stay domestic.

By 2006, the Bayrock model was working. Russian money was flowing into Trump-branded properties. Felix Sater was handling the deals. The machine was humming. But the people running the money had bigger plans than Manhattan.

The same network – the same families, the same banks, the same oligarchs – started building Trump-branded towers in other countries. Different continents, same cast of characters. Same money moving the same way. It was like franchising a laundromat.

You can literally draw lines between them. One developer in Toronto is the son-in-law of a guy whose company was called a KGB front. The broker in Panama admitted half his buyers were Russian mafia. The oligarch selling real estate to Kushner in New York was handpicked by Putin to run Russia’s Jewish community. Different countries, different buildings, same network. It’s not random. It’s a template.

Let’s start with Toronto.

Trump International Hotel and Tower Toronto opened in 2012.[1] A gleaming 65-story building in the middle of a major North American city. Legitimacy wrapped in glass. The developer was a guy named Alexander Shnaider.

Shnaider came into the Trump world through his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein.[2]

Now, Birshtein is important because he shows you how the whole network has been operating for decades. Like a blueprint for everything that comes later.

Birshtein founded a company called Seabeco in the early 1990s.[2] Made about $500 million a year. Bought raw materials from the Soviet Union and Russia, sold them abroad at huge markups. On paper it looked like normal business. But Belgian intelligence described it as a front for KGB-linked operations.[1] A former Soviet intelligence officer straight up alleged that Seabeco was used to hide Communist Party money in Western countries before the Soviet Union collapsed.[2]

Nobody could prove it in court. But European law enforcement watched him anyway. And for good reason. Seabeco employed a bunch of ex-KGB guys.[2] It had offices in Zurich, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv – the same cities where Russian organized crime was setting up shop in the 1990s. And it predated the entire Russia-Trump pipeline by a decade. It’s like the prototype.

Birshtein’s son-in-law, Shnaider, inherited the playbook.

So in 2006, Shnaider is looking to build Trump Toronto and he needs financing. A lot of it. Like hundreds of millions. Guess where it comes from?

Nope – not Deutsche Bank – this time.

The Austrian bank Raiffeisen Bank International. If you haven’t heard of Raiffeisen, it’s the bank that kept popping up in Russian oligarch deals throughout the 2000s. One of its biggest clients was Oleg Deripaska – Putin’s aluminum oligarch, the same guy Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort owed millions to and offered private campaign briefings to settle the debt. Manafort was also sharing campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Manafort associate identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian intelligence officer connected to Deripaska. The US eventually sanctioned Deripaska for acting on behalf of the Russian government. And this is the bank that loaned $310 million Canadian to build Trump Toronto. But here’s where it gets good.

The project faced cost overruns and investor pressure. Then in 2010, Shnaider got a windfall. An investor bought an $850 million stake in his steel company, Zaporizhstal. So, where’d that money come from?

VEB. Vnesheconombank. Russia’s state development bank.[1]

And who chaired the supervisory board of VEB? Vladimir Putin. He was serving as Prime Minister at the time, and by Russian law, the PM personally chairs VEB’s board.[3] Any major deal needed his approval. This wasn’t some minor state institution. This was Putin’s bank.

The Wall Street Journal reported that approximately $15 million from that VEB deal went directly into the Trump Toronto project.[1]

So, to be clear, just so you’re smelling what I’m cooking: The Russian state development bank, chaired by Vladimir Putin, pumped money into a Trump-branded building in Canada through a complex chain of companies.

And the whole thing was connected through Birshtein and Shnaider, guys whose company was allegedly a KGB front.

But that’s not even the jaw-dropping part of the operation.

VEB is where an SVR spy named Evgeny Buryakov was stationed.[4] The SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the successor to the KGB. Buryakov was working out of VEB’s New York City office, posing as a banker while actually collecting economic intelligence for Russian intelligence.[5] The FBI had been surveilling him and two other SVR officers operating out of the Russian UN mission. In January 2015, the FBI arrested Buryakov in the Bronx. The other two had diplomatic immunity and were expelled – but Buryakov was posing as a civilian, so he had no protection. He pleaded guilty in March 2016 to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. He got out early and was deported back to Russia in April 2017. An active Russian spy, operating out of the same bank that was financing Trump Toronto, arrested by the FBI in New York City.

Wait a minute. So, the FBI was actively surveilling VEB for espionage? So, they knew Russian intelligence was using the bank as cover? And at the same time, money from that bank was flowing into a building with Trump’s name on it? The FBI was watching the spy ring and the money pipeline at the same time – and somehow never connected the two? Or maybe they did, and we just don’t know what happened next.

So, a Trump-branded building was being financed by money that traced back to the same bank where Russia was running active intelligence collection operations against the United States. Trump didn’t build it. Trump didn’t finance it. Trump just licensed his name and collected fees. But Putin’s bank was funding the building with his name on it – and nobody asked any questions about that?

It’s basically the same model as a Super PAC. A Super PAC can spend unlimited money to help elect a candidate – as long as they don’t “coordinate” directly. The candidate gets the benefit, the money flows, and everyone maintains plausible deniability because technically the candidate had nothing to do with it. That’s what the Trump licensing model was. Other people took the Russian money, other people built the buildings, other people sold the units to oligarchs and organized crime – and Trump just happened to collect fees while his name went on every single one of them. No coordination. No fingerprints. Just a brand on a building and a check in the mail.

This is why it was so hard for Mueller to prove conspiracy.

And Toronto was just one node. Panama was another.

Trump Ocean Club Panama was a luxury high-rise in Panama City built with Trump’s brand on it.[7] The pre-construction sales started in 2006, right when Toronto was getting going. The broker handling a huge chunk of the sales was a guy named Alexandre Nogueira.

Nogueira worked with the Trump organization and brokered nearly a third of all pre-construction unit sales – claiming 350 to 400 units total.[7] He told NBC and Reuters that 50 percent of his customers were Russian. Some, he admitted, turned out to be Russian mafia. Nogueira later came under investigation in Brazil for international money laundering. Tens of millions were flowing through his accounts from Panama to Brazil. He’s now a fugitive.

The report that came out, done by Global Witness, was titled “Narco-a-Lago.”[6][8] That’s what they called it. A money laundering tower for drug cartels and Russian organized crime.

Of course, the Trump organization did almost no due diligence. They didn’t check who Nogueira’s customers were. They didn’t ask questions about the cash. They didn’t verify where the money came from. Half of their buyer pool was Russian organized crime and they just… let it happen.

US Congresswoman Norma Torres from California looked into it and basically said the same thing: the Trump organization had to have known what was happening and didn’t care. The profits were too good.

One building in Toronto with VEB money and Putin-aligned oligarchs. One building in Panama with Russian mob cash. And both buildings eventually went south – Trump Toronto went into receivership and his name was stripped off in 2017. It’s the St. Regis now. Sound familiar? Same thing happened to Trump SoHo. When the money dries up, the name comes off.

It’s the same model he’d later use with his meme coin. Build hype around the Trump brand, let other people pour money in, take your cut, and walk away when it collapses. The buildings were the original pump and dump – except instead of crypto tokens, it was luxury condos. The investors lost everything. The buyers got stuck with overpriced units in buildings that couldn’t sustain themselves. And Trump walked away with his licensing fees every single time. The only difference between Trump Tower Toronto and $TRUMP coin is the number of zeros.

But the real story isn’t Toronto or Panama. It’s how the whole operation is held together by this weird, tight-knit community of oligarchs and their families.

That’s where Lev Leviev comes in.

Leviev is an Uzbek-born Israeli billionaire and diamond dealer. And he’s apparently pretty tight with Putin.[9]

Now, most people assume Russia and Israel are on opposite sides because of Iran. But the reality is way more complicated. After the Soviet Union collapsed, roughly a million Russian Jews emigrated to Israel. That created a massive cultural and economic bridge between the two countries that still exists today. Putin and Netanyahu met over 15 times between 2015 and 2021 – more than two face-to-face meetings per year – and had nearly 50 phone calls. They coordinated military operations in Syria. They had a deal where Israel could bomb Iranian targets as long as they didn’t threaten Russian assets. Dozens of Russian oligarchs hold Israeli citizenship – including Roman Abramovich, who became the second-richest person in Israel after his British visa got pulled for being too close to Putin. Israel’s Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to anyone of Jewish descent, which made it a safe harbor for sanctioned oligarchs who needed somewhere to park themselves and their money. Does anyone think that these guys are living in Israel now and aren’t just as intertwined in their government as American billionaires are in ours?

So when I say Putin tapped Leviev personally in 1999 to help restructure the Russian Jewish community, understand the context. Putin picked two oligarchs – Leviev and Abramovich – to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under a Chabad rabbi named Berel Lazar, who became known as “Putin’s rabbi.”[10] But, none of this was about religion. This was about building a power network that spanned both countries – one that gave Putin influence inside Israel and gave Russian oligarchs a legitimate institutional framework for moving money, building relationships, and maintaining access across borders.

Now, ready for the big reveal? Leviev, one of two guys picked for that job, sold his company, which owned $295 million in Manhattan real estate, to Jared Kushner.

In May 2015, Jared Kushner bought the retail floors of the old New York Times building at 229 West 43rd Street in Manhattan from Leviev’s company, Africa Israel Investments.[9] And here’s a fun detail: Kushner later used that property to secure a $285 million loan from Deutsche Bank.[13] The same Deutsche Bank from Essay 6.

And that deal got scrutinized by Robert Mueller during his investigation.[9] Mueller’s team flagged it as relevant to their inquiry into foreign interference in the 2016 election.

Leviev also tried to get into business with Trump directly. He wanted to develop hotels in Moscow with the Trump organization. But those deals never happened. Instead, the connection came through Kushner – and through Leviev’s business partner Rotem Rosen, who was CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel and who married Tamir Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago in 2007. The network always finds another way in.

But look at who else is connected to Leviev: the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

Chabad is a Jewish religious movement based out of Brooklyn.[10] And again, none of this is about the religion. Chabad does a lot of good work around the world. What I’m talking about is how specific individuals within the Chabad network became the connecting tissue between Putin’s oligarchs and Trump’s inner circle. It’s about the people and the money, not the faith.

Anyway, Trump’s inner circle had tight ties to Chabad. Tamir Sapir, who was key to the Bayrock-Sater operations, had Chabad ties. Felix Sater had Chabad ties. Kushner’s family has deep, long-standing connections to Chabad.[10] And Leviev was a major donor to Chabad.[11]

So you’ve got this network where specific individuals connected to the religious institution are also connected to oligarchs who are connected to Putin, who are doing real estate deals with Trump’s team, who are moving money through multiple countries.

It’s not like they were hiding it. They were all at the same events. They knew each other. They did business together. But the public had no idea it was even happening.

Because each deal looked legitimate on its own. A trophy building in Toronto. A luxury development in Panama. A real estate purchase in New York. They’re not illegal, right? Rich people do these deals all the time.

Except when you draw the lines, you see the pattern.

The same names showing up. The same families. The same sources of funding. Money coming from a bank chaired by Putin. Money flowing through Russian organized crime figures. Money from oligarchs who were Putin’s personal picks.

Each building attracted exactly the same kind of buyer. Russian oligarchs. Russian organized crime. Money that needed to be cleaned.

And Trump’s organization accepted it all without asking questions.

Or maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe they weren’t asking no questions. Maybe they were asking exactly the right questions – the ones that helped the operation work. What’s the legal structure that keeps things private? Which banks don’t ask too many questions? How do we keep the buyer anonymous?

Trump didn’t ask, “Where did this money come from?” They didn’t ask, “Can you help me launder my mafia money?”

The Trump brand became international shorthand for a certain kind of transaction. You want to move dirty money? You want to own real estate without showing your actual identity? You want to launder cash through luxury developments? Trump’s got a building for you. And Toronto and Panama aren’t even the only ones. Trump has licensing deals all over the world – Istanbul, Dubai, Manila, Pune, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bali. Every single one follows the same model: Trump doesn’t build anything, doesn’t invest anything, doesn’t do any due diligence on who’s financing the project. He just lets developers put his name on a building and collects a check. Not all of them have documented Russian money trails like Toronto and Panama do. But the template is always the same – foreign developers with their own corruption problems, using the Trump brand to attract buyers and add legitimacy to projects that might not survive scrutiny on their own. The brand is the product. The plausible deniability is the feature. It’s a Super PAC that doesn’t have to follow any of those pesky campaign finance rules.

Toronto was funded via Putin’s bank. In Panama, via the Russian mob. In New York, via oligarchs with Kremlin connections.

And the beautiful part from the money launderer’s perspective is plausible deniability. Trump could say he was just a businessman licensing his name. The developers could say they were just doing business with banks. The oligarchs could say they were just buying real estate. The money could flow and flow and flow, and at every point, someone could claim they didn’t know what was happening.

But when you see the pattern across three continents, you stop believing in coincidence.

By 2016, when Trump ran for president, he wasn’t just getting access to cash from oligarchs. He was connected to an operating international pipeline. His properties weren’t just buildings. They were nodes in a network. His brand wasn’t just a luxury marker. It was a specific signal to a specific group of people: bring your money here.

And that network didn’t disappear when he got elected.

It became his administration.

Next up: the deal. Trump Tower Moscow, the 2016 campaign, and the moment the real estate pipeline became a political operation. The deal that was supposed to make Trump half a billion dollars – negotiated while he was running for president.

SOURCES:
[1] NewsTRACS: Trump Toronto and Seabeco
[2] Globe and Mail: Boris Birshtein Investigation
[3] Craig Unger: Trump Toronto Tower
[4] BuzzFeed: VEB Russia Bank Spy Ring
[5] CNN: VEB-Kushner Meeting with SVR Connection
[6] Global Witness: Narco-a-Lago Panama Investigation
[7] NBC: Panama Tower and Organized Crime
[8] Craig Unger: Trump Ocean Club Panama
[9] Times of Israel: Kushner-Leviev Real Estate Scrutiny
[10] Washington Monthly: Chabad Connection Between Putin and Trump
[11] Politico: Chabad Group Connecting Trump and Putin
[12] Wikipedia: Boris Birshtein
[13] Foreign Policy: Putin’s Slush Fund Courting Kushner