The Receipts: How Russia Bought an American President | #4 Brighton Beach

The Russian mob didn’t take over New York in some cinematic gunfight. They just walked in. Through the same door as Soviet Jewish refugees. And nobody stopped them.

In 1974, Congress passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.[1] It tied U.S. trade with the Soviet Union to their willingness to let Jews and other persecuted citizens emigrate to the United States. Noble cause, right? Open the gates for people fleeing oppression. And it worked. About 600,000 Soviet citizens came through that door between 1975 and the 1990s.[1] Most of them were genuinely good people looking for a fresh start. They settled in Brooklyn, particularly in a neighborhood called Brighton Beach. “Little Odessa.”

But the KGB wasn’t done with them yet.

Intelligence reports from the era suggest that as the Soviets were opening the doors to let Jews out, they were also emptying their prisons.[2]

Wait. Where have I heard this before?

Hard-core criminals got passage to America hidden in the wave of legitimate refugees. It’s the perfect cover. Who questions a Jewish refugee? The paperwork says you’re fleeing persecution. Nobody digs deeper. Nobody thinks “wait, this guy might be a Soviet intelligence plant or a career mobster.”

By the early 1980s, Brighton Beach wasn’t a community anymore. It was a criminal headquarters.

The first real boss was a guy named Evsei Agron.[3] He started running an extortion racket in the emigre community, squeezing money from business owners who had no idea who they could trust or where to go for help. By 1980, he was pulling in 50 grand a week.[3] Just from extortion. His enforcers were the Nayfeld brothers, Boris and Benjamin.[2] They were brutal. People called Agron the “Godfather” of the Russian mob in America.[3] They meant it as a description of what he was willing to do.

Then in May 1985, someone put two bullets in Agron’s head while he was waiting for an elevator in his Brooklyn apartment building.[3] Who ordered it is still debated. Some sources point to Agron’s successor, a guy named Marat Balagula. Others point to a rival named Vladimir Reznikov.[5] What’s not debated is that Boris Nayfeld, Agron’s own bodyguard and chauffeur, was the NYPD’s prime suspect. He knew the routine. He knew when Agron would be vulnerable.

Balagula took over and decided that extortion was small time. He wanted to think bigger.

So he created a scheme. Gas tax evasion.

Here’s how it worked: he’d buy gasoline at wholesale, sell it with fake documents claiming it had been exported (so no taxes), then rebrand it and resell it.[5] Every time, the state and federal government lost the tax revenue. Every time, his operation made a fortune. By some estimates, Balagula and his crew were moving 150 million dollars worth of fuel per month through New York.[5] And they were pocketing an additional 30 to 40 million dollars a month in unpaid taxes.[5] All of it was flowing back into the organization, and a lot of it was flowing into their legitimate-looking businesses and real estate.

The scale was insane. And it was just the beginning.

While Balagula was running the gas scam, another Russian figure was getting embedded in New York’s legitimate economy. His name was Semyon Kislin.[8] He ran an electronics store in Manhattan, Joy-Lud Electronics, near the Flatiron Building. Sounds innocent enough. But his store was a magnet for Soviet diplomats and KGB officers looking to buy American consumer electronics they couldn’t get back home.[8] He was moving merchandise for intelligence operatives.

Then Kislin pivoted. By the 1990s, he’d moved to Brooklyn and started making connections in the real estate world.[8] Legitimate real estate. The kind with politics attached. He became an economic adviser to Rudy Giuliani during his 1997 re-election campaign.[14] He hosted fundraisers. He was a Trump contact.[6]

This is where it gets specific.

The FBI had a 1994 intelligence report on the Russian mob organization headed by a guy named Vyacheslav Ivankov.[14] The report listed Kislin as a “member/associate.”[8] Not someone who did business with them. Not a casual contact. An associate. In their criminal network.

The report also alleged that Kislin’s company had co-sponsored a Russian crime boss for a US visa.[8] That he was a close associate of an arms smuggler.[8] That he was connected to money laundering operations.[8]

Kislin denied all of it. Said he’d been thoroughly investigated and never charged. Fair enough. But the fact remains that the FBI thought he was connected enough to list him in an official intelligence report on the Russian mafia.[8] That’s not nothing.

And Kislin wasn’t alone. There was a whole network of Russian organized crime figures embedding themselves in New York’s neighborhoods and businesses.

There was a social club in Brooklyn called El Caribe. It wasn’t much to look at. Just a place where people gathered. But from the 1970s through the 1990s, it was the actual headquarters of the Russian mafia in America.[4] Both Evsei Agron and Marat Balagula ran their operations out of an office there.[4] Every major Russian organized crime boss in the United States literally ran their criminal organization from El Caribe.[4]

Who owned El Caribe? A doctor named Morton Levine. And who had a stake in it? All his nieces and nephews.[9] Including one named Michael Cohen.[9]

Michael Cohen. Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.[6] His “fixer.” The guy who would later go to jail for campaign violations and tax crimes.[10] His family owned a piece of the building where the Russian mafia headquarters operated.

By the 1980s, the Russian mob had spread across the United States, with operations established in major cities from New York to Los Angeles.[2] They were organized. They were ruthless. And they were looking for a way to legitimize their money.

Real estate.

Specifically, high-end real estate in Manhattan.

You can launder money through real estate in ways that are almost impossible to trace. You buy a property using a shell corporation with a fake name. You pay more than it’s worth. The extra money is the dirty cash you’re cleaning. The property gets sold again, sometimes multiple times. Each transaction adds another layer of obfuscation. By the time anyone looks at the paper trail, it’s hopelessly complex. Estimates suggest that something like 100 to 300 billion dollars gets laundered through the US real estate market every year.[17] The Treasury Department has flagged Russian illicit finance as a major driver.[16] That’s not just Russian money. That’s global criminal activity. But Russia is a major player.[15]

Trump Tower was perfect for this. In the early 1980s, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in Manhattan that would sell units to anonymous shell corporations.[15] Anonymous. No questions asked about who actually owned the apartment. Just sign the papers and move in.

In 1984, a guy named David Bogatin bought five luxury condominiums in Trump Tower for six million dollars.[15] Bogatin was a Soviet Army pilot who’d arrived from Russia seven years earlier.[15] He was also a leading member of the New York Russian mob.[15]

A few years later, in 1987, it turned out those five condos had been used for money laundering.[15] Bogatin had used them to hide profits from gasoline sales.[15] From the same gas tax scam. The same Marat Balagula operation. When the government figured it out, they seized the condos.[15] The court said they were used to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.”[15]

This wasn’t an anomaly. Since the 1980s, at least 13 people with proven or suspected Russian mafia links have owned or lived in Trump Tower or other Trump properties.[15] Some of them ran actual criminal operations out of their apartments. And Trump himself had sold them the properties. That’s how money laundering works. You find a seller. You give them cash. They move the money through the banking system in a way that looks legal. The buyer gets a building. The criminal gets clean cash.

Meanwhile, in Russia, another figure was rising. His name was Semion Mogilevich.[11] He was a Ukrainian-born mathematical genius who’d figured out how to run a multi-billion dollar criminal empire. The FBI called him “the most dangerous mobster in the world.”[12] Other agencies called him the “boss of all bosses.”[13] He had 300 criminal associates operating in more than 30 countries.[11] He was involved in everything: murder, extortion, sex trafficking, weapons trafficking, money laundering, bank fraud, corruption of public officials.[11]

By some assessments, Mogilevich’s net worth was in the billions.[11] He ran a Bulgarian bank for money laundering.[11] He obtained Israeli citizenship through the Law of Return.[11] Countless Russian mobsters did the same.[7] According to Jonathan Winer, who was Clinton’s State Department money laundering czar, “There is not a major Russian organized crime figure who we are tracking who does not also carry an Israeli passport.”[7]

Career criminals. Murderers. Extortionists. All getting Israeli passports. Many of them fraudulently claimed Jewish heritage to qualify under the Law of Return.[7] They became Israeli citizens. Which meant they could travel to the US, do business, move money, and have the protection of another country’s diplomatic infrastructure if things got too hot.[7]

It was brilliant. And it was working.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brighton Beach wasn’t just a neighborhood anymore. It was an operational base for an international criminal organization. The murders, the extortion, the money laundering, the real estate deals. It was all connected. It was all feeding into something bigger.

And that something bigger had found its way into Trump’s buildings.

In the next essay, I’m going to follow the money through something even more perfect for laundering than real estate. Something Trump built specifically for people with no questions to ask. Casinos.

SOURCES:
[1] Jackson-Vanik Amendment
[2] Russian Crime in America
[3] Evsei Agron
[4] Family Business: The Russian Mob in New York
[5] Marat Balagula
[6] Donald Trump, Russian Intelligence, and Eurasian Organized Crime Convergence in Brighton Beach
[7] How Trump Was Lured Into the KGB’s Web
[8] Sam Kislin – LittleSis
[9] Michael Cohen Owned Piece of Mobbed-Up Brooklyn Social Club
[10] A Brief History of Michael Cohen’s Criminal Ties
[11] Semion Mogilevich
[12] FBI Wanted – Semion Mogilevich
[13] State Department – Semion Mogilevich
[14] FBI Tracked Alleged Russian Mob Ties of Giuliani Campaign Supporter
[15] Trump’s Russian Laundromat
[16] Treasury NDAA Report on Russian Illicit Finance
[17] Russian Money Flows Into U.S. Real Estate