#8 The International Pipeline: How the Network Took Trump’s Brand Global

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 was the son-in-law of a guy whose company was called a KGB front. The broker in Panama admitted half his buyers were Russian - and some of them turned out to be 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 up in business working for Boris Birshtein - the man who became his father-in-law.[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 built a company called Seabeco in the 1980s.[2] Its revenue reportedly hit about $500 million a year. It traded oil, gold, diamonds and chemicals. On paper it looked like normal business. But some diplomats and intelligence agents described it as a front for KGB-linked operations.[2] 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.[12]

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] Birshtein kept an office in Tel Aviv and family homes in Zurich and Antwerp - 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.

Shnaider’s own lawyer told the Wall Street Journal that $15 million from that VEB deal went directly into the Trump Toronto project - then tried to take it back.[2]

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 - one working as Russia’s trade representative in New York and one at its UN mission. In January 2015, the FBI arrested Buryakov in the Bronx. The other two had diplomatic immunity and had already left the country - 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 whose money reached Trump Toronto through that steel-mill sale, 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. Brazil’s financial crimes unit flagged several transfers of more than 1 million reais - about $300,000 - from accounts in Panama to his accounts in Brazil. As of 2018, he was a fugitive and nobody knew where he was.

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, Global Witness says the Trump organization did little to nothing to stop it. Nogueira says they didn’t ask who his customers were. They didn’t ask where the money came from. Half of his buyers were Russian - some of them mafia, by his own account - and they just… let it happen.

US Congresswoman Norma Torres from California looked into it too - in 2018 she and Congressman Eliot Engel wrote to the Trump organization demanding to know what it knew about the money laundering and drug trafficking tied to the tower. The profits were too good.

One building in Toronto with VEB money and Putin-aligned oligarchs. One building in Panama with Russian mob buyers and Colombian drug money. 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 so their militaries wouldn’t clash over Syria. And Russia let Israel keep bombing pro-Iranian targets there. Dozens of Russian oligarchs hold Israeli citizenship - including Roman Abramovich, who became an Israeli citizen in 2018 after Britain stalled his visa renewal following the Skripal poisoning. Israel’s Law of Return grants citizenship to almost anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, which made it a safe harbor for 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 part of a Manhattan building to Jared Kushner for $295 million.

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.[9] The same Deutsche Bank from Essay 6.

And in 2017 the Guardian reported the deal had been identified “as of possible interest” to Robert Mueller’s investigation.[9]

Leviev also tried to get into business with Trump directly. In 2008 he met with Trump to talk about possible real estate projects in Moscow. 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 had licensing deals all over the world - Istanbul, Dubai, Manila, Pune, Bali, and at one point Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. Every single one follows the same model: Trump doesn’t build anything, usually doesn’t invest anything, and - Global Witness says - does little 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 keeps showing up - 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 in part via Putin’s bank. In Panama, via buyers that included 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 Robert Mueller’s team later said could have brought the Trump Organization hundreds of millions of dollars - negotiated while he was running for president.

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Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said Alexander Shnaider came into Trump’s world through his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein - Trump’s first Toronto partner brought Shnaider in, and Shnaider had worked for Birshtein at Seabeco. It said Belgian intelligence called Seabeco a KGB front - some diplomats and intelligence agents did. It said Robert Mueller’s team flagged Kushner’s deal with Leviev’s company as relevant to its inquiry - the Guardian reported the deal had been identified as of possible interest to Mueller. It said Leviev sold Kushner his company - his company sold Kushner part of a Manhattan building. It said Congresswoman Norma Torres said the Trump organization had to have known and didn’t care - she and Congressman Eliot Engel wrote asking what it knew. It said the Panama broker admitted half his buyers were Russian mafia - he said half were Russian and some turned out to be mafia. It said Roman Abramovich became Israel’s second-richest person after his British visa got pulled for being too close to Putin - Britain stalled his visa renewal after the Skripal poisoning, and he became an Israeli citizen in 2018. It said Birshtein founded Seabeco in the early 1990s and made $500 million a year buying Soviet raw materials and selling them at huge markups - Seabeco was already trading in the 1980s, the $500 million was yearly revenue, and that buy-cheap, sell-abroad model belonged to a later Ukrainian company he ran. It said the spy Evgeny Buryakov’s two partners both worked out of Russia’s UN mission and were expelled - one was Russia’s trade representative in New York, and both had already left the country. It said Putin’s bank was financing Trump Toronto - that bank’s money reached the tower through a steel-mill sale, and the construction loan came from an Austrian bank. It said tens of millions moved through the Panama broker’s accounts - Brazil flagged transfers of more than 1 million reais, about $300,000. It listed Trump deals in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires as current - both had ended by 2017. And it said the Moscow deal was supposed to make Trump half a billion dollars - Mueller’s team said it could have brought the Trump Organization hundreds of millions.

Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so - Global Witness on the Trump organization’s due diligence, the Panama broker on what nobody asked, and Shnaider’s lawyer, who told the Wall Street Journal about the $15 million and then tried to take it back - and a few now say when things happened, where Birshtein kept his office and homes, how Russia and Israel worked together in Syria, who Israel’s Law of Return covers, and which source backs each point.