Since there’s absolutely no point in doing otherwise, I want to make one thing clear right from the start: this piece is not about sharing my personal opinions on Trump. It’s the result of an extensive research process grounded in deep-level OSINT. So if you thought you already knew everything there was to know about Trump, there’s a good chance you’re about to see a lot of facts in a whole new light. And quite possibly facts you’d never even heard of. This investigation is the direct follow-up to the relatively calm opening piece I wrote to lay the groundwork. Now that’s done, we can get into the real meat of the matter and talk about the despicable individual Americans elected as their president. Buckle up, because this is going to hit hard. You won’t be disappointed 🙂

My writing is grounded in serious research. I almost never react to breaking news in real time. And that distance is precisely what allowed me to see Trump’s game with total clarity. Because in reality, his method for wriggling out of every single one of his problems is always the same. It all comes down to the smokescreen technique.

To give you a concrete example, France once had an interior minister named Charles Pasqua who was every bit as corrupt as Trump. He’s still fairly well known for developing a theorem about the art of political distraction: “When you’re in trouble over one scandal, you have to stir up a scandal within the scandal, and if necessary another scandal within the scandal of the scandal, until nobody can make heads or tails of anything anymore.” And if you pay close attention, that’s exactly what happens with Trump. The only difference is that he’s taken this technique to stratospheric levels.

So if you want to understand exactly who Trump is and how to knock him off his pedestal, you absolutely have to start by clearing away the thick layer of small-time crap that’s covering up the real heavy-duty crap. In other words, you can’t play his game by letting yourself get distracted by red herrings flying in every direction. Spoiler alert! Trump is clearly a major-league mobster and that’s exactly what I’m going to prove from A to Z throughout this piece. To start, it’s really important to establish context. So let’s revisit the family background of this orange-tanned piece of work. And you’ll see how perfectly everything slots into place with everything that follows.

Friedrich Trump, the grandfather who built his fortune running brothels

Friedrich Trump arrived in the United States in 1902 after leaving his native Bavaria at 16 without completing his mandatory military service. In plain English, he was a deserter. He first settled in New York. But when word of the Yukon Gold Rush started spreading, he smelled opportunity and headed north into Canada.

There in British Columbia, he opened the Arctic Restaurant & Hotel in Bennett. On paper, it was a hotel and restaurant. Except that in reality, a journalist of the era explicitly warned respectable women not to sleep there. The establishment offered “private boxes for ladies,” a period euphemism about as subtle as a sledgehammer for what was essentially prostitution. In other words, good old Friedrich was running brothels.

He then left Canada right around the time authorities started cleaning the region of outlaws like him. He returned to Germany with the equivalent of $582,000 in today’s money. But the Bavarian authorities hadn’t forgotten his desertion. In 1905, a royal decree officially expelled him from the territory. The document was found in the Bavarian archives by historian Roland Paul and authenticated by Harper’s Magazine.

In the end, Friedrich headed back to the United States with the fortune he’d built on dirty money and laid the foundations of the Trump dynasty. Doesn’t that already smell a lot like the mob?

Fred Trump proves the apple never falls far from the tree

Fred Trump, Donald’s father, picked up the family torch with the same natural talent for shady arrangements, just in a much more structured setting. He launched into real estate in New York in the 1930s and quickly became a major player in housing construction in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island.

The trouble started fast! In 1954, Fred was summoned before a Senate Banking Committee because investigators had discovered he’d obtained FHA federal loans inflated by $3.5 million above the actual construction costs. Long story short, American taxpayer money had found its way into his pocket. Under oath, he also admitted that Willie Tomasello, an associate well known to the Gambino and Genovese crime families, held a 25% stake in one of his flagship buildings. So Trump Sr. and the mob were far from strangers.

In 1966, a New York State investigation caught him red-handed billing the state $21,000 for the rental of a dump truck worth $3,600. In 1973, the federal Justice Department sued him for systematic racial discrimination across 39 of his properties. Black Americans were being denied housing outright or offered deliberately discouraging terms. The defense was handled by attorney Roy Cohn, who turned the prosecution into a full-blown media circus. Sound familiar? Does that playbook remind you of anyone currently in the news? But the underlying facts never changed.

The New York Times investigation published in 2018, awarded the Pulitzer Prize and based on more than 100,000 confidential documents, exposed the true scale of the family operation. Fred and his children created a shell company called All County Building Supply and Maintenance. Its logic was disarmingly simple. Rather than paying his suppliers directly, Fred Trump routed everything through All County, which marked up invoices by 20 to 50% before billing him back. The difference landed in the Trump children’s pockets, disguised as business expenses to evade gift taxes. In total, the family transferred more than a billion dollars to the children through 295 separate revenue streams while paying only $52 million in taxes on an amount that should have generated a tax bill exceeding $550 million. Tax experts consulted by the Times described the scheme as potentially criminal tax fraud.

Donald Trump himself received at least $413 million from his father through these schemes, starting from the age of three. Doesn’t that already smell a lot like the mob?

The American mob is a far more complex world than Hollywood ever showed us

Before going further, it’s essential to take a brief detour into the world of the American mob. Because if you don’t understand this world, you won’t be able to make sense of what follows. And trust me, it’s absolutely worth it.

When people talk about the mob in the United States, most immediately picture the Corleones, Al Pacino, and well-dressed guys gathering in the back rooms of Italian restaurants. That’s completely understandable. Hollywood has done a remarkable PR job for the Italo-American crime family. But the reality is both simpler and infinitely more complex.

It starts with the Italian mob. The Five Families of New York genuinely did dominate American organized crime for much of the twentieth century. Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese, and Colombo. These families controlled the construction unions, concrete, trucking, the docks, and a wide swath of New York’s underground economy. Their power was real and thoroughly documented. But starting in the 1980s, the major RICO prosecutions decimated them. Bosses were falling one after another and the organization weakened considerably.

That’s precisely when another criminal world began gaining serious traction on American soil. Because with the first waves of Soviet emigration in the 1970s, thousands of citizens from the USSR arrived in the United States. Among them, a significant number of hardened criminals. The KGB had actually deliberately facilitated their departure, using Jewish emigrant status as a convenient cover to rid itself of inconvenient individuals while keeping them available as assets they could activate abroad.

But what’s conveniently called the “Russian mob” is in reality neither truly Russian nor truly Jewish. It’s a blend of Georgians, Ukrainians, Muscovites, Azerbaijanis, and other Soviet nationalities who settled in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and rapidly expanded their operations with a brutality and financial sophistication that impressed even the FBI. Their playing field was prostitution, drugs, financial fraud, money laundering through real estate, fuel tax schemes. Their methods were honed by years of hustling through the Soviet underground economy.

These two worlds, Italian and Russo-Soviet, didn’t ignore each other. They clashed at times but regularly joined forces when there was money to be made. The line between them was never as clean as the movies want us to believe. Lawyers worked for both sides. Buildings served both sides. Bribes flowed in both directions. The bottom line is simple: Donald Trump sat at the crossroads of all of it and was one of its active participants. And for the record, he never stopped being one.

Donald Trump in the 1970s: the daddy’s boy who wanted to conquer Manhattan

Donald Trump grew up in Queens, in the shadow of a powerful and wealthy father who ran his real estate empire with an iron fist. Fred Trump was a shark in his field. His territory was Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. Working-class neighborhoods, public housing, plain brick. Not exactly glamorous.

But Donald wanted something else. He thought much bigger. He dreamed of bling. He wanted Manhattan! He wanted skyscrapers, gold trim, front pages. He wanted to be bigger than daddy. And that outsized ambition was going to lead him exactly where anyone paying attention would have expected, given the family environment he’d been steeped in since birth. Straight to the mob!

In 1971, he took the reins of the family company and started eyeing Manhattan. But Manhattan was a different world entirely. A world where projects ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars, where the construction unions were locked up tight by the Italian mob, and where you needed the right contacts just to get any project off the ground.

The trouble came fast. In 1973, the federal Justice Department sued the Trump Organization for systematic racial discrimination across 39 properties. Black Americans were being turned away or offered deliberately discouraging terms. It was a serious case that could have done real damage. And that’s when the notorious Roy Cohn stepped back into the picture.

Cohn was the most feared attorney in New York. A former right-hand man to Senator McCarthy during the anticommunist witch hunts of the 1950s, he had since become the house lawyer for the Five Families of the New York mob, with clients including Fat Tony Salerno for the Genovese, Paul Castellano for the Gambino, and Carmine Galante for the Bonanno. He also represented Rupert Murdoch, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, and a handful of corrupt politicians for good measure. Roy Cohn was the kind of guy who knew everybody and whom everybody feared.

His strategy for defending Trump was the same one he applied systematically to every client: attack rather than defend. He immediately filed a $100 million counter-suit against the federal government, denounced the charges as reckless and baseless, and staged a thunderous press conference. The case was settled out of court in 1975 with Trump admitting no wrongdoing. And in 1978, the Trump Organization violated the terms of the agreement. Cohn went back into battle, same arrogance as always.

Trump remained forever fascinated by this man. In his toilet-paper roll “The Art of the Deal” published in 1987, he wrote in black and white: “What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he did exactly the opposite of people who boasted about their integrity.” A strikingly candid statement about his own values.

But Cohn didn’t just give him a method. Above all, he gave him a mob network of the highest order. Including an introduction to Fat Tony Salerno himself, boss of the Genovese family, whom Trump met personally at Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse in 1983. A meeting with very real and very profitable consequences for Trump and his new friends.

Donald Trump in the 1980s: when the mob moved right into Trump Tower

Trump Tower opened its doors in 1983. A glass tower in the heart of Manhattan, a monument to success and future ambition. Except the tower wasn’t built in steel. It was built in concrete.

That technical detail was in reality a highly political decision. Because in 1980s New York, concrete meant the mob! S&A Concrete, secretly controlled by Fat Tony Salerno of the Genovese and Paul Castellano of the Gambino, held a near-monopoly on concrete in Manhattan. Any developer who wanted to put up a building worth more than two million dollars was strongly encouraged to go through S&A, at inflated prices of course. Refusing their offer automatically meant strikes, sabotage, and work stoppages.

As a result, most New York developers chose steel precisely to avoid that dependency. But Trump chose concrete. And not just for Trump Tower. For Trump Plaza too. Investigative journalist Wayne Barrett, who had been tracking Trump since the beginning, documented that Trump had “gone much further in that relationship than the situation required.” This wasn’t coercion. It was a deliberate choice.

The personal meeting with Fat Tony Salerno at Roy Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse in 1983 puts that choice in context. You don’t sit down at a table with the boss of the Genovese family to talk about the weather. Trump knew exactly who he was doing business with. And he was still calling S&A “excellent contractors” and describing them as “phenomenal” in 2015 in the Wall Street Journal.

And while the Italian mob was pouring the concrete for his towers, another kind of clientele was eyeing his apartments with great interest. A clientele from Brighton Beach and Brooklyn, where a particularly prosperous criminal community of Soviet origin had been putting down roots since the 1970s.

In 1984, David Bogatin, a significant figure in Russo-American organized crime, bought five apartments in Trump Tower for six million dollars in cash. Trump personally attended the signing. Bogatin was later convicted for his role in a massive fuel tax fraud scheme. Before fleeing the United States, he handed the mortgages on his five apartments to an associate of the Genovese family. The funds were transferred through a mob-controlled bank in Chelsea. The government subsequently seized the apartments, declaring they had been purchased to launder money.

And that was just the beginning. Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the key lieutenants of Semion Mogilevich, the godfather of international Russian organized crime, also set up shop in Trump Tower while the FBI was actively searching for him. When agents finally tracked him down, they found the private phone and fax numbers of the Trump Organization in his personal address book.

The pinnacle came on the 51st floor of the tower. A large-scale illegal gambling operation of international reach was quietly running from there, directed by Anatoly Golubchik and Vadim Trincher, a dual American-Israeli citizen. The network was connected to Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, known as “Taiwanchik,” one of the world’s most notorious Russian mob bosses whose organization was linked to Mogilevich according to Interpol. In 2008, Forbes ranked him the third most wanted man in the world after Osama bin Laden and El Chapo. The American prosecutor handling the case described the operation as “the apex of the apex of organized crime in Russia.” And Tokhtakhounov was operating from Trump Tower just three floors below Trump’s own penthouse.

This was precisely the case being prosecuted by Preet Bharara, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan, renowned as one of the country’s most formidable prosecutors in financial crime and corruption. In January 2017, just days after his inauguration, Trump fired him. Go figure! Bharara had received Trump’s personal assurance that he would keep his job.

The connection between the Russo-Soviet mob and Israel was no accident. The Russian-Jewish mob operated simultaneously from three bases: Brighton Beach in New York, Moscow, and Tel Aviv, because Israel offered a particularly welcoming haven thanks to the absence of an extradition treaty for its nationals and a banking system opaque enough to facilitate money laundering. That’s why criminals like Tokhtakhounov held dual Russian-Israeli nationality and moved freely between these three worlds. That same ecosystem was also home to young ambitious operators like Felix Sater, a Brighton Beach kid born in Moscow, who would become a central figure in the Trump story just a few years later.

In that same 1980s New York, another young ambitious man was trying to make his name in high society. Jeffrey Epstein moved in the same social circles as Trump, the same parties and the same trendy clubs. He was a slick and charming grifter who knew how to make himself useful to powerful people. At that stage, he was simply the party buddy. Nothing more. His real story belongs to another decade.

Meanwhile, in that same New York real estate world, a certain Steve Witkoff was also building his career. Same milieu, same networks, same opportunities. And the paths of these various characters would eventually cross in ways nobody could have imagined at the time.

Donald Trump in the 1990s: bankruptcies, survival, and Russian money

The 1990s started very badly for Donald Trump. Very badly indeed! Between 1991 and 1994, his companies racked up six successive bankruptcies. Casinos, hotels, and buildings. They all collapsed one after another. The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, financed with $675 million in junk bonds at 14% interest, filed for bankruptcy just sixteen months after opening. In total, his companies lost $1.17 billion between 1985 and 1994. A figure so staggering that the New York Times estimated he had lost more money than virtually any other American taxpayer over that period.

No major American bank wanted to lend to him anymore. Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs had all slammed their doors shut. His father Fred quietly kept bailing him out through All County Building Supply, the family shell company, funneling tens of millions more disguised as business expenses. But that wasn’t enough for the projects Trump had in mind.

It was in this context of near-personal bankruptcy that salvation appeared out of nowhere. In 1998, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend him what no one else would touch. The German bank was looking to gain a firm foothold in the United States and was willing to take on risks its competitors refused. What wasn’t yet public knowledge at the time was that this same Deutsche Bank was simultaneously at the center of a massive Russian money laundering operation. As would later be proven, between 2011 and 2015, its Moscow and London branches would execute “mirror trades” moving approximately $10 billion out of Russia on behalf of Putin associates. And the division managing Trump’s accounts was the same one involved in those operations. Funny how that works!

While Trump was desperately scrambling for cash to survive, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 had triggered a phenomenon of staggering scale. Hundreds of billions of dollars in dirty money were looking to flee Russia and the former Soviet republics for safe harbor in the West. American real estate, and New York real estate in particular, was at the time the ideal destination. No mandatory identity verification for buyers through shell companies, no questions about the source of funds, and cash payments accepted without batting an eye.

The Trump towers were perfectly positioned to absorb those flows. Bloomberg Businessweek documented that a third of the units sold on the upper floors of Trump World Tower between 1996 and 2004 involved individuals or companies tied to Russia or the former Soviet republics. Beyond that, broker Dolly Lenz stated she had personally sold around 65 units to Russian buyers in Trump properties. Donald Trump Jr. summed up the situation with striking candor at a real estate conference in 2008: “Russians make up a disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

It was also in this decade that Felix Sater, the Brighton Beach kid born in Moscow whose name we’ve already come across, began building his own criminal track record. In 1998, he was convicted for participating in a $40 million stock fraud operation run with the Genovese and Bonanno crime families. But rather than go to prison, he chose to become an informant for the FBI and the CIA, providing intelligence on the Russian-American mob and intelligence-linked networks. This dual status as a convicted criminal and government informant would allow him to resurface a few years later in Trump’s immediate orbit through Bayrock Group, whose offices were installed two floors below the Trump Organization inside Trump Tower. Purely by chance, obviously!

The structural link between the Russo-Soviet mob, New York, and Israel solidified considerably during this decade. The fall of the USSR had accelerated the back-and-forth between Brighton Beach, Moscow, and Tel Aviv. Figures like Semion Mogilevich, considered by the FBI to be the godfather of international Russian organized crime, operated out of Budapest while coordinating networks spanning three continents simultaneously. Meanwhile, Israel continued to serve as a particularly welcoming haven, again thanks to the absence of an extradition treaty and an accommodating banking system. Criminals who routinely held dual or triple Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli nationality could move freely between these worlds.

Steve Witkoff, for his part, continued building his New York real estate empire in that same environment. In 2010, he would write a character reference letter for Anatoly Golubchik, identified by investigators as a senior figure in the Russian-American mob connected to Mogilevich through the shell company Lytton Ventures. Golubchik, it’s worth remembering, was tied to the illegal gambling operation based inside Trump Tower. All these people were constantly crossing paths. Coincidence, always coincidence…

Jeffrey Epstein, meanwhile, was steadily rising through New York’s social circles and beginning to extend his international network. He moved in Trump’s orbit, shared his parties and his social spheres. But at this point in the story, he remained what he had always been: a smooth and well-connected grifter who knew how to make himself indispensable to powerful people. The party buddy, and why not the orgy buddy too. But once again, that’s a whole separate story.

In the 2000s, Putin enters the picture and Russian money flows freely

Before continuing, we need to stop and take a closer look at a figure the Western media long portrayed in a romantic and fantasized light. I’m talking about Vladimir Putin! The former KGB agent, the man of shadows, the cold and calculating strategist who emerged from the bowels of the Soviet intelligence services, seemingly some kind of Russian James Bond in all his glory. Except that the reality is far more prosaic. And far more illuminating for understanding what comes next.

In reality, Putin was no great spy. He was just a mid-level KGB agent, stationed in Dresden in East Germany, whose primary job was recruiting informants among the local population. Not exactly the master spy the legend has attached to him. And when the USSR collapsed in 1991, he returned to Saint Petersburg empty-handed and landed a job as a municipal adviser to Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.

But it’s in Saint Petersburg in the 1990s that the real Putin emerged. The city was then one of the most active hubs of the post-Soviet Russo-Soviet mob. The Tambovskaya and Malyshevskaya, two of Russia’s most powerful criminal organizations, ruled the roost there. Putin managed the city’s export licenses, and multiple investigations documented his direct connections to these criminal organizations. A municipal investigative commission even recommended his resignation in 1992 for corruption. Sobchak quietly buried it.

So this wasn’t an intelligence officer climbing the rungs of power. This was a Saint Petersburg mobster using his political connections to consolidate his position. So when he was elected president in 2000, this wasn’t the Russian state taking control of the mob. It was the mob taking control of the Russian state. And the subsequent “bringing to heel” of the oligarchs had nothing to do with economic policy. It was simply a mob boss consolidating his territory by eliminating rivals who refused to fall in line. With Berezovsky exiled in London and Khodorkovsky in prison, the others quickly got the message.

That clarification is fundamental to understanding the relationship between Putin and Trump. We are absolutely not looking at some complicated spy story involving agent recruitment and coded messages. We’re looking at a straightforward mob story where two men from two not-so-different criminal worlds ended up doing each other favors because their interests converged.

And while Putin was consolidating his empire in Moscow, Trump was also going through a pivotal period. His repeated bankruptcies had closed the doors of every major American bank. Deutsche Bank remained his only lifeline. In 2004, he defaulted on a $640 million loan and had the nerve to sue the bank for $3 billion, arguing that it was the bank’s own fault the financial crisis had happened. But Deutsche Bank lent to him again anyway, through its Private Wealth Management division managed by his personal banker Rosemary Vrablic. It’s also worth noting that Justin Kennedy, son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, had smoothed the way for those early dealings with the division. This was the same division simultaneously managing the accounts of Russian oligarchs and that would later end up at the center of the Russian mirror trades scandal.

2004 also saw NBC launch The Apprentice. This reality trash TV show was a genuine lifeline for Trump. Without it, a seventh bankruptcy was inevitable. But thanks to it, between 2004 and 2018, Trump collected $427 million from the show and the licensing deals it generated. For the first time in years, he could breathe financially. Which never stopped his connections to the Russo-Soviet mob networks from continuing in parallel, as if nothing had changed.

Sure enough, Felix Sater, the Brighton Beach kid convicted of mob fraud turned FBI informant, reappeared in the picture through Bayrock Group, whose offices were installed two floors below the Trump Organization inside Trump Tower. Bayrock developed the Trump SoHo project with Trump, a hotel he didn’t actually own. Just his name on the facade in exchange for royalties. The OCCRP, the international consortium of investigative journalists, traced $440 million linked to the massive Kazakhstani fraud of Ablyazov flowing through Trump SoHo via FBME Bank, sanctioned for money laundering. Sater himself summarized the project’s ambitions in an email to Michael Cohen in November 2015: “Our boy can become President of the United States and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.”

Despite the TV success, Russian money kept flooding into Trump’s properties. In 2008, Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertilizer billionaire, bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for $95 million through an anonymous shell company. Trump had paid $41 million for it four years earlier. Rybolovlev never lived there and the property was demolished in 2016. Intrigued by this fact, Senator Ron Wyden requested a Treasury investigation. Mueller’s team examined the transaction. And no public conclusions were ever released. Just one of those things…

The Chabad-Lubavitch network served as a discreet but ever-present thread running through all of these connections. Putin maintained a close relationship with Rabbi Berel Lazar, nicknamed “Putin’s rabbi.” This American citizen of Italian origin had become Chief Rabbi of Russia through a Jewish organization created entirely from scratch by Putin with the backing of Abramovich and Lev Leviev.

Felix Sater was also affiliated with the Chabad movement. Born in Moscow, raised in Brighton Beach by a father who was a lieutenant in the Russian-American mob directly connected to Mogilevich, convicted in 1998 for a $40 million stock fraud operation run with the Genovese and Bonanno families, and then turned FBI and CIA informant to avoid prison. He’s a figure who single-handedly ties together every thread in this story. With Chabad on top.

Just like Jared Kushner, who would become Trump’s son-in-law. A devout Chabad practitioner whose Harvard rabbi testified that Israel was for him his family, his life, and his people. Worth noting that Netanyahu slept in his bedroom when visiting New York. Yes, you read that right! The same Kushner who would years later negotiate the most sensitive dossiers of the Trump presidency alongside Witkoff. Small world, isn’t it! Same transnational network flowing simultaneously through Moscow, Tel Aviv, and New York with remarkable ease. Purely coincidental, of course!

Jeffrey Epstein, for his part, continued his rise through social circles. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that he was “a terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s primary victims, was recruited as an employee at the Mar-a-Lago spa at age 16. In 2004, Epstein allegedly assaulted a minor at a party hosted by Trump. But in the story we’re following, Epstein remained at this stage what he had always been: a smooth and well-connected grifter who knew how to make himself indispensable to powerful people. The party buddy, and why not the orgy buddy. But once again, that’s a whole other subject.

Steve Witkoff, for his part, continued building his real estate empire in that same New York ecosystem. Same milieu, same networks, same opportunities. And his path would cross Trump’s in increasingly close ways in the years that followed.

2010-2017: How the mob put its man in the White House

In 2010, Steve Witkoff signed a character reference letter for Anatoly Golubchik, identified by federal investigators as a senior figure in the Russian-American mob connected to Semion Mogilevich through the shell company Lytton Ventures. The same Golubchik, linked to the illegal gambling network operating from the 51st floor of Trump Tower.

Witkoff and Trump had been moving in the same circles for years. Their respective real estate empires had been built in the same ecosystem, with the same backers and the same networks. This detail, which went completely unnoticed at the time, would take on considerable importance a few years later.

Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank kept playing its role as a massive laundering machine. Between 2011 and 2015, its Moscow and London branches executed “mirror trades” that moved approximately $10 billion out of Russia on behalf of Putin associates. The mechanism was brutally simple: a client would buy Russian stocks in rubles in Moscow while a linked entity sold the same stocks in dollars in London. Dirty money entered Russia and came out clean in the West.

The bank paid $630 million in fines in 2017. What was never established publicly was that this money flowed through the same American legal entity that managed Trump’s accounts. The same division, the same bankers!

Tammy McFadden, a compliance officer at the Jacksonville branch, discovered that suspicious transactions involving Trump and Kushner had been flagged internally and then deliberately blocked by management. She was fired in 2018. Thomas Bowers, the director of the Private Wealth Management division who had signed the Trump loans and managed Epstein’s accounts, was found dead, hanged in his Malibu home in November 2019. The FBI was seeking to question him about Epstein’s banking connections. His death was ruled a suicide. Sometimes coincidence has impeccable timing…

In November 2013, Trump traveled to Moscow for the Miss Universe finals. The event was financed by Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire whose Kremlin connections were well documented. Flight records proved Trump spent exactly 45 hours and 43 minutes in Moscow, contradicting what he later told James Comey when he insisted he had never spent the night in Moscow. His hotel expenses at the Ritz-Carlton included $720 at the rooftop bar, $306 in shisha, and $146 from the minibar. His head of security Keith Schiller testified under oath that a Russian intermediary had offered to send five women to Trump’s suite. He stated he had declined the offer on Trump’s behalf and stood outside the suite door for a while before heading to his own room.

What happened next in that suite remains one of the most burning questions in this entire story. The Steele dossier, written by Christopher Steele, former head of the Russia desk at British MI6 after a 22-year career including four years undercover in Moscow, mentions a compromising episode in that very same Ritz-Carlton suite.

Steele was a serious professional whose information on Russia had been deemed credible enough by the FBI to open a formal investigation. But his specific claims about that November 2013 night have never been proven. They have also never been genuinely disproven.

What is certain, however, is Donald Trump’s psychological and behavioral profile. His taste for prostitutes is documented. Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, the repeated accusations of predatory behavior. In a country as puritanical as the United States, a compromising video is a nuclear political weapon. Trump knew it. And anyone who might have held such a document knew it too.

But the concept of kompromat needs to be reframed here. Trump is not a victim in this story. He’s just a massive creep who repeatedly put himself in compromising situations throughout his entire life. That’s how the mob has always worked. It doesn’t force anyone. It just creates the conditions. It waits. And it collects. The FSB didn’t need to arrange anything sophisticated with Trump. All it had to do was let him be himself.

Melania Knauss made her appearance in this picture in the late 1990s. Originally from Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic, she had arrived in New York via Milan through modeling agencies connected to Eastern European circuits. Her “Einstein” work visa, reserved for people with “extraordinary abilities,” was obtained under circumstances her lawyers never really clarified. She moved in the same social circles as Trump and Epstein. The same parties, the same clubs. Trump married her in 2005. Epstein was invited to the wedding. Another coincidence, naturally.

In March 2016, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign for free. Yes, you read that right: for free! To run the presidential campaign of the Republican candidate. Manafort had spent the previous decade working for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president ousted by the Maidan revolution, pocketing more than $60 million in the process without ever registering as a foreign agent. He also held a $10 million annual contract with Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch described in U.S. diplomatic cables as “one of the two or three oligarchs Putin turns to regularly.” The contract explicitly stated he would work to “influence politics, business dealings, and media coverage in favor of the Putin government.”

Why would a man of that caliber agree to work for Trump for free? The answer, well beyond coincidence, lies in the conclusions of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report published in August 2020: Manafort regularly shared internal Trump campaign polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik, officially a Ukrainian political consultant, officially identified by the U.S. Senate as a “Russian intelligence officer.” That data included detailed voter analyses for Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. Those four states were precisely the ones that flipped to Trump by razor-thin margins in November 2016. In April 2021, the U.S. Treasury confirmed that Kilimnik had passed the data on to Russian intelligence services. Manafort was convicted. Trump pardoned him. What more is there to say?

While Manafort was operating inside the campaign, a massive digital manipulation infrastructure was being deployed on the outside. The Internet Research Agency out of Saint Petersburg, financed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef,” employed between 400 and 1,000 people with a monthly budget reaching $1.25 million. Its operations reached 126 million American Facebook users through fake accounts, fake groups, and targeted advertising. Black Matters, Being Patriotic, Secured Borders. Hundreds of fictitious groups carefully crafted to amplify racial, political, and social divisions across America.

Cambridge Analytica, funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and run by Steve Bannon, operated in parallel using different but complementary methods. The company had stolen the psychographic data of 87 million Facebook users through an application developed by researcher Aleksandr Kogan. That data made it possible to model the personalities of 230 million Americans according to the OCEAN model and surgically target “persuadable” voters in key states.

WikiLeaks completed the apparatus. Julian Assange’s organization published the stolen emails of the Democratic Party and John Podesta at the most opportune moment for the Trump campaign. Mueller established that Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks’ purported source, was in reality a Russian military intelligence officer. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, was in direct contact with Guccifer 2.0 via Twitter during the campaign. On October 7, 2016, two hours after the release of the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about committing sexual assault, WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails. Why? Because Stone had asked WikiLeaks to publish immediately to create a diversion. Stone was convicted. Trump pardoned him. What more is there to say?

October 2015. Right in the middle of the presidential campaign, Trump signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Michael Cohen contacted Putin’s press office directly by email to ask for help. Negotiations continued until June 2016, while Trump publicly denied having any business interests in Russia. Cohen lied to Congress about the timeline of those negotiations. He pleaded guilty. But unfortunately for him, with the mob there’s no pardon for those it considers traitors.

On July 16, 2018, three days after Mueller had indicted by name 12 GRU officers for the 2016 election interference, Trump stood face to face with Putin in Helsinki. In front of the world’s cameras, he declared: “My intelligence people came to me and said they think it’s Russia. President Putin just told me it’s not Russia. I don’t see why it would be Russia.” Former CIA Director John Brennan called the statement “nothing short of treasonous.” Former CIA officer and Republican congressman Will Hurd wrote: “I never thought I would see the day where an American president would be one of them,” referring to people manipulated by Russian intelligence.

The one-on-one between Trump and Putin lasted two hours and eleven minutes. No American aide was present. No official record exists. Trump confiscated the interpreter’s notes after their Hamburg meeting in 2017 and ordered him not to speak about what was said. Five private meetings with Putin. No official paper trail. Kind of strange, don’t you think?

Let’s come back now to November 2016 and the election of Donald Trump. Son of a family corrupt across three generations. Mentored by the most feared mob lawyer in New York. Builder of towers financed by Salerno’s concrete and the dirty cash of the Brighton Beach Russo-Soviet mob. Client of a bank simultaneously implicated in the largest Russian laundering scandal in modern history. Owner of towers that served as laundering machines for post-Soviet oligarchs. Head of a campaign whose manager was sharing strategic data with Russian intelligence. Potential target of sexual kompromat made possible by his own thoroughly documented predatory behavior.

In the end, this guy is not a spy recruited by the KGB. He’s not a puppet being remote-controlled from the Kremlin either. He’s something far simpler and far more terrifying. He is the natural and logical product of forty years of organic corruption. The end result of a man so deeply embedded in the Russo-American mob networks that he no longer even needs to be controlled. He just naturally does what benefits his creditors. Because it’s in his own interest. Because it’s in his nature. Because it’s all he has ever known.

Pasqua theorized the smokescreen. Steve Bannon industrialized it. Trump elevated it to a system of government. And while the whole world was getting lost in the scandals within the scandals within the scandals, the mob had quietly put its man in the White House while another one was already sitting in the Kremlin. That’s the whole story.

How to nail Trump? The serious leads that haven’t been pursued yet

How do you bring Trump down? That’s the real question! Because after everything we’ve just read, it’s fair to ask how someone this obviously corrupt managed not only to stay out of prison for years but to reach the highest office in the land. The honest answer is that there are powerful levers that simply haven’t been pulled yet, for lack of sufficient pressure. If the opposition that claims to be the Democratic Party would actually do its job instead of running around like headless chickens every time Trump opens his mouth, we wouldn’t be stuck in this intolerable situation.

Deutsche Bank: A German problem first and foremost

This is probably the most promising lead and paradoxically the least pursued one. Deutsche Bank is a German institution subject to German law and the supervision of BaFin, Germany’s federal financial regulator. And what the bank did with Trump and Kushner’s accounts constitutes documented and serious violations of German anti-money laundering legislation.

The facts are established! Here’s the recap: Internal compliance officers prepared Suspicious Activity Reports flagging transactions involving Trump and Kushner. Those reports were deliberately blocked by bank management. Tammy McFadden, one of those compliance officers, publicly testified to these facts. That same banking division simultaneously managed Trump’s accounts, Epstein’s accounts, and the Russian mirror trading operations that moved $10 billion out of Russia. Thomas Bowers, the director who had signed the Trump loans and set up Epstein’s accounts, died before the FBI could question him. Pressure needs to be applied at the German level to reopen this investigation!

We’re not talking about bank secrecy here. We’re talking about large-scale money laundering and the active complicity of a major financial institution. BaFin has the power and the legal obligation to open a thorough investigation into all Trump and Epstein transactions. Such an investigation would not only allow investigators to trace the money flows back to their origin but also identify other accounts linked to the same networks. German citizens have every right to demand that their financial regulator do its job. Organizations defending financial integrity like Finanzwende in Germany could bring that demand forward. European parliamentarians could refer the question of European banking supervision to the European Commission. This is a concrete, legally sound, and politically difficult-to-bury angle of attack.

The Mueller Report: A democratic scandal in its own right

The Mueller Report is 448 pages long. Huge chunks of it are redacted! William Barr, appointed by Trump, published a deliberately misleading four-page summary that Mueller himself challenged in writing, stating that the summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his work. In other words, the Attorney General of the United States lied to the American people about the contents of a major criminal investigation.

The 12 sealed criminal referrals contained in that report have never been publicly explained. To which courts were they sent? What is their current status? Were they buried under political pressure? These questions have no public answers. Organizations like the ACLU or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have the legal tools to petition federal courts for the unsealing of those documents. Investigative journalists can also file targeted FOIA requests. Alongside that, coordinated citizen pressure on members of Congress demanding the full release of the report is entirely legitimate and democratically justified, because it is the report of an investigation funded by public money into matters of major public interest. The American people have the right to read all of it.

Jack Smith’s Volume 2: Sealed but not buried

Jack Smith told Congress that his investigation had “developed sufficient evidence for a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.” His Volume 2 on the classified documents case was sealed indefinitely by Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, naturally. But legal avenues exist. Democracy defense organizations can petition appellate courts to challenge that sealing. The constitutional question is clear: Can a judge appointed by the defendant legitimately seal indefinitely a report of an investigation into that same defendant?

The interpreters’ notes from five meetings with no witnesses

Trump confiscated the American interpreter’s notes after his Hamburg meeting with Putin in 2017 and ordered him not to speak about what was discussed. Five private meetings with Putin and no official American record of any of them. The organization American Oversight has already filed lawsuits to obtain these documents. Those proceedings deserve support and amplification. The interpreters themselves, now free from any professional constraints, could testify before a congressional investigative committee if the political composition of Congress were ever to allow it.

The FinCEN Files and the Panama Papers: A crosscheck that’s never been done exhaustively

The ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, holds the databases of the Panama Papers, the FinCEN Files, and the Pandora Papers. A systematic crosscheck of that data against the full set of Trump Organization entities has never been carried out comprehensively and publicly. It’s a massive investigative undertaking but it’s doable. Filing formal FOIA requests to FinCEN for the Trump and Kushner SARs that were internally blocked at Deutsche Bank is a legally solid avenue.

Preet Bharara and the buried Trump Tower investigation

Preet Bharara was running an active investigation into the illegal gambling network on the 51st floor of Trump Tower when Trump fired him in January 2017 after personally promising he would keep his job. That investigation concerned documented connections to the top levels of Russo-American organized crime, just three floors below Trump’s penthouse. A New York State prosecutor, who doesn’t answer to federal authority, could theoretically reopen that file based on the evidence already gathered.

What’s missing is simply political will and citizen pressure

All of these leads have one thing in common. They all require either a political will that American institutions currently seem incapable of generating, or citizen pressure strong and coordinated enough to force these investigations open in spite of every obstacle. Europe, and Germany in particular through Deutsche Bank, may represent the most fertile ground because it falls outside American jurisdiction and beyond the reach of Trump’s political pressure.

What is certain is that the evidence exists. It’s in databases, in archival boxes, in the minds of interpreters, in Deutsche Bank’s servers, and in the sealed files of American federal courts. It’s simply waiting for someone with the courage and the means to bring it to light. And what if that someone is you? I’m not joking. History is full of examples of ordinary citizens who managed to bring down the powerful by acting with method and persistence. And maybe one or more investigative journalists will finally decide to do their job without fear of the consequences. And what consequences exactly? Trump is nothing but a paper tiger. There’s nothing to fear. As for anti-corruption and pro-democracy organizations, they have every means necessary to help get those skeletons out of the closet.

Conclusion: Information is our most powerful weapon

There you have it! King Trump has no clothes! Strip away all the layers of crap and all that’s left is a big-time mobster from a family of mobsters. And also a pathetic loser who used criminal networks to paper over his failures and feed his megalomaniac personal ambitions. Beyond that, the undeniable sex scandals he’s tied to are matters that need to be handled separately, or you fall straight into the obvious trap of the scandal within the scandal. But above all, you have to fully grasp that the daily provocations of the traitor occupying the U.S. president’s chair are nothing but diversions to keep us away from what actually matters.

What surprises me most in this whole sorry story is seeing how millions of Americans let themselves be conned by someone this shabby and this crude. When you think about it, it would almost be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Because when you see all these Americans who call themselves patriots while the majority of them elected as president the biggest traitor to their nation since its founding, you genuinely don’t know whether to laugh or cry. In any case, as for Republican Party supporters, you can all put your star-spangled banners away. Because that flag you’re so proud of, aside from yourselves, there aren’t many people left who still see it as a symbol of freedom and democracy. And on that point, you have to give Trump some credit. By single-handedly blowing up all the soft power propaganda his predecessors built up, he has finally made it internationally clear that the United States is nothing but a fascist and imperialist country that causes mayhem everywhere it goes. It’s not complicated: there isn’t a single country on this planet that doesn’t have deaths to mourn because of American foreign policy. That’s the reality! So please, Americans, stay home and deal with your own internal affairs and leave the rest of the world in peace! Your grand lectures on democracy and respect for the international order, start by applying them to yourselves, and maybe after that we can eventually reconsider our judgment.

If you’ve read this far, I’m pretty sure it’s because you were already outraged by everything Donald Trump has done and you didn’t need me to get you there. On that front, there’s nothing more I can do. But what I can actually do is play my small part in pushing back against the defeatism and resignation weighing down so many people who still give a damn.

Because no! Nothing is set in stone! Together, like ants, we can move things that are far too heavy for any one person to carry alone. And it starts with sharing information and pushing it as far as it can go. Because a 100% independent media outlet like NovaFuture isn’t built for passively consuming news the way you do with mainstream media. Quite the opposite: it’s an invitation to become an active participant by sharing and expanding what’s possible. For my part, I put an enormous number of hours into this piece. And I did it solely because I was genuinely stunned to find that virtually nobody had yet dug seriously into what is the most credible hypothesis about Trump: that he is clearly the link between two mob worlds that propelled him all the way to the White House.

So on your end, all I’m asking in exchange for this work is at minimum that you share it on your networks. You’re even welcome to republish it or print it out and pass it around, it’s actively encouraged and no permission is needed. And if you happen to be a journalist with some courage, or a member of an organization that can finally push for transparency on everything mentioned in this piece, you have our most genuine respect and admiration. Either way, thank you for being here on my NovaFuture blog, and see you very soon for more adventures.