OSINT Investigation: Did the American Mob Put Trump in the White House?
Let me get this out of the way up front, because there’s no point otherwise: this piece isn’t me unpacking my personal opinions about Trump. It’s a long research job built on serious OSINT work. So if you thought you knew everything about Trump, odds are good you’re about to see a lot of facts in a whole new light. Or even facts you had no idea existed. With this investigation we can finally get into the real substance about the vile individual Americans elected president. And buckle up, because this one hits hard! You won’t be disappointed by the ride 🙂
My writing rests on real groundwork. I almost never react to the news in the heat of the moment. And that distance is exactly what let me see Trump’s game clearly. Because his method for wriggling out of every problem is always the same. It all runs on the backfire technique.
Take a concrete example. In France we had an interior minister named Charles Pasqua who was every bit as rotten as Trump. He’s still known for coming up with a theorem on the art of political diversion: “When a scandal is giving you trouble, you create a scandal inside the scandal, and if you have to, another scandal inside the scandal of the scandal, until nobody can make sense of anything.” And if you look closely, that’s exactly what’s happening with Trump. Except he’s pushed the technique to stratospheric levels.
So if you want to understand exactly who Trump is and how to knock him off his pedestal, you have to start by clearing away the thick layer of small shit that hides the real big shit. Meaning: don’t play his game, don’t let yourself get pulled off course by false trails firing in every direction. Spoiler alert! Trump is clearly a big-time mobster, and I’m going to prove it from A to Z across this whole piece. First, setting the context really matters. So we’re going back over the family environment of the orange-skinned scumbag. And you’ll see how perfectly it slots into everything that follows.
Friedrich Trump, the grandfather who built his fortune on whorehouses
Friedrich Trump lands in the United States in 1902, after leaving his native Bavaria at 16 without doing his mandatory military service. In plain English, he’s a deserter. He drops his bags in New York first. But when the Yukon gold rush starts making noise, he smells the opportunity and heads for the Canadian far north.
Up there in British Columbia, he opens the Arctic Restaurant & Hotel in Bennett. On paper it’s a hotel and a restaurant. In reality, a reporter of the day explicitly warns respectable women not to sleep there. Then again, the place offered “private boxes for ladies,” a period euphemism about as subtle as a sledgehammer for prostitution. Which is to say, good old Friedrich runs whorehouses.
He leaves Canada right when the authorities start cleaning crooks like him out of the region. And he goes home to Germany with the equivalent of $582,000 in today’s money. But Bavarian officials hadn’t forgotten his desertion. So in 1905 a royal decree formally expels him from the territory. The document turned up in the Bavarian archives thanks to historian Roland Paul and was authenticated by Harper’s Magazine.
In the end Friedrich heads back to the United States with the pile he built on immoral business and lays the foundation of the Trump dynasty…. Don’t you think there’s already a heavy whiff of mafia?
Fred Trump proves the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
Fred Trump, Donald’s father, picks up the family torch with the same natural gift for shady arrangements. Just in a much more structured setting. He gets into New York real estate in the 1930s and quickly becomes a major builder of housing in the working-class neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
The first trouble comes fast! In 1954, Fred gets hauled before a congressional banking committee because investigators found he’d taken federal FHA loans padded $3.5 million above actual construction costs. Short version: American taxpayer money vanished into his pocket. Under oath, he also admits that Willie Tomasello, a known associate of the Gambino and Genovese crime families, owns 25% of one of his flagship buildings. So Trump senior and the mob aren’t exactly strangers.
In 1966, a New York State investigation catches him red-handed billing the state $21,000 to rent a dump truck worth $3,600. In 1973, the federal Justice Department sues him for systematic racial discrimination across 39 of his properties. Black applicants were refused apartments or offered different terms. The lawyer who handled the defense was Roy Cohn, and he turned the charge into a media circus. Well, well! A method that maybe reminds you of someone around today? But the substance of the case never changed.
The New York Times investigation published in 2018, a Pulitzer winner built on more than 100,000 confidential documents, exposed the real scale of the family system. Fred and his kids set up a shell company called All County Building Supply and Maintenance. The principle was disarmingly simple: instead of paying his suppliers directly, Fred Trump went through All County, which marked the invoices up 20 to 50% before billing him back. The difference landed in the Trump children’s pockets, dressed up as business expenses to dodge gift tax. All told, the family moved more than a billion dollars to the children through 295 separate revenue streams while paying only $52 million in taxes where the bill should have topped $550 million. Experts the Times consulted called the setup potentially criminal tax fraud.
Donald Trump himself took at least $413 million from his father this way, starting at age three. Don’t you think there’s already a heavy whiff of mafia?
The American mafia is a far more tangled world than Hollywood showed us
Before we go further, we need a quick detour into the world of the American mafia. Because if you don’t understand that world, you won’t understand what comes next. And trust me, it’s worth it.
Say mafia in the United States and most people instantly picture the Corleones, Al Pacino and guys in sharp suits meeting in the back rooms of Italian restaurants. That’s fair enough. Hollywood did remarkable PR work for the Italian-American family. But the reality is both simpler and infinitely more tangled.
It starts with the Italian mafia. New York’s Five Families really did run American organized crime for most of the 20th century. Gambino, Genovese, Bonanno, Lucchese and Colombo. Those families controlled the construction unions, the concrete, the truckers, the docks and a big share of New York’s underground economy. Their power was real and well documented. But starting in the 1980s, the big RICO trials gutted them. Bosses fell one after another and the organization weakened.
That’s exactly when another criminal world started gaining ground on American soil. With the first waves of Soviet emigration in the 1970s, thousands of USSR nationals landed in the United States. Among them, a significant number of hardened criminals. The KGB had deliberately smoothed their exit, using Jewish emigrant status as a handy cover to unload inconvenient people while keeping them as assets it could switch on abroad.
But what we call the “Russian mafia” for convenience isn’t really Russian or really Jewish. It’s a mix of Georgians, Ukrainians, Muscovites, Azerbaijanis and other Soviet nationalities who gathered in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, and who built out their operations fast, with a brutality and a financial sophistication that impressed even the FBI. Their playground was prostitution, drugs, financial fraud, laundering through real estate, the fuel rackets… Their methods had been honed by years of working the angles in the Soviet economy.
These two worlds, the Italian and the Russo-Soviet, didn’t ignore each other. They clashed sometimes, and they teamed up regularly whenever there was profit in it. The border between them was never as watertight as the movies want you to believe. Lawyers worked for both. Buildings served both. Bribes flowed both ways… The takeaway is simple: Donald Trump ended up at the crossroads of all of it, and he was one of the players. And he’s never stopped being one.
Donald Trump in the 1970s, the trust-fund kid who wanted to conquer Manhattan
Donald Trump grows up in Queens, in the shadow of a rich, powerful father who rules his real estate empire with an iron fist. Fred Trump is a shark in his world. His turf is Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Working-class neighborhoods, public housing and ordinary brick. Not exactly glamorous.
But Donald wants something else. He’s thinking a lot bigger. He dreams of bling. He wants Manhattan! He wants the skyscrapers, the gold trim, the front pages… He wants to be bigger than daddy. And that oversized ambition takes him exactly where you’d expect, given the family environment he’d been soaking in since birth. Namely: the mob!
In 1971 he takes the reins of the family business and starts eyeing Manhattan. But Manhattan is another world. A world where projects run into the hundreds of millions, where the construction unions are locked down by the Italian mafia and where you need the right contacts to get anything out of the ground.
So the trouble comes very fast. In 1973 the federal Justice Department sues the Trump Organization for systematic racial discrimination across 39 properties. Black applicants were refused apartments or offered deliberately discouraging terms. It was a serious case that could have hurt badly. And that’s when the sulfurous Roy Cohn steps back onto the stage.
Cohn is the most feared lawyer in New York. Once Senator McCarthy’s right hand during the anticommunist witch hunt of the 1950s, he went on to become the house lawyer for New York’s Five Families, with clients like Fat Tony Salerno for the Genovese, Paul Castellano for the Gambinos and Carmine Galante for the Bonannos. He also represented Rupert Murdoch, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and a few crooked politicians for good measure. Roy Cohn was the kind of guy who knew everybody and who everybody feared.
His strategy for defending Trump was the one he used on every client: attack instead of defend. So he immediately filed a $100 million countersuit against the federal government. Then he called the charges irresponsible and baseless, and staged a thunderous press conference. The case settled in 1975 with Trump admitting no wrongdoing. Well, well! In 1978 the Trump Organization did it again and violated the terms of the deal. Cohn went back to war, same arrogance as ever.
Trump stayed permanently fascinated by the man. In his toilet paper roll of a book “The Art of the Deal,” published in 1987, he wrote it in black and white: “What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he did the exact opposite of people who brag about their integrity.” A stunningly frank statement about his own values.
But Cohn didn’t just hand him a method. He handed him a mob network at a whole new level. Including an introduction to Fat Tony Salerno, the Genovese boss, who he met in person at Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse in 1983. A meeting with very concrete and very profitable consequences for Trump and his new friends…
Donald Trump in the 1980s: when the mob moves right into Trump Tower
Trump Tower opened in 1983. A glass tower in the heart of Manhattan, built to reflect success and future ambition. Except the tower wasn’t built with steel. It was built with concrete.
That technical detail was actually a deeply political decision. Because in 1980s New York, concrete was the mob! S&A Concrete, secretly controlled by Fat Tony Salerno of the Genovese and Paul Castellano of the Gambinos, held a near monopoly on concrete in Manhattan. So any developer who wanted to put up a building worth more than $2 million was strongly encouraged to go through S&A, at inflated prices of course. Turning down their offer meant automatic strikes, sabotage and stalled job sites.
That’s why most New York developers picked steel, precisely to avoid that dependence. But Trump picked concrete. And not just for Trump Tower. For Trump Plaza too. Investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who’d been following Trump since the beginning, documented that Trump “had gone much further in that relationship than the situation required.” It wasn’t coercion. It was a deliberate choice.
The meeting with Fat Tony Salerno himself at Roy Cohn’s Manhattan townhouse in 1983 puts that choice in perspective. You don’t sit down with the Genovese boss to talk about the weather. Trump knew exactly who he was doing business with. And he was still calling S&A “excellent contractors” and “phenomenal” in 2015 in the Wall Street Journal.
And while the Italian mafia poured the concrete for his towers, another clientele was taking a very close interest in his apartments. A clientele out of Brighton Beach and Brooklyn, where a Soviet-born criminal community had been settling in since the 1970s and doing very well for itself.
In 1984, David Bogatin, a major figure in Russian-American organized crime, bought five apartments in Trump Tower for $6 million in cash. Trump attended the signing in person. Bogatin was later convicted for his part in a massive fuel scam. Before fleeing the United States, he handed the mortgages on his five apartments to a Genovese associate. The funds moved through a mob-controlled bank in Chelsea. The government then managed to seize the apartments, declaring they’d been bought to launder money.
That was only the start. Vyacheslav Ivankov, one of the key lieutenants of Semion Mogilevich, godfather of the international Russian mafia, moved into Trump Tower too while the FBI was actively hunting him. When agents finally tracked him down, they found the Trump Organization’s private phone and fax numbers in his personal address book.
The peak came on the tower’s 51st floor. An international-scale illegal gambling operation sat quietly up there. It was run by Anatoly Golubchik and Vadim Trincher, a dual American and Israeli citizen. The network was wired to Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, nicknamed “Little Taiwanese,” one of the most notorious Russian mob bosses on the planet, whose organization Interpol tied to Mogilevich. In 2008, Forbes ranked him the third most wanted man in the world, behind Osama bin Laden and El Chapo. The U.S. attorney handling the file described the operation as “the top of the top of Russian organized crime.” And Tokhtakhounov was working out of Trump Tower, three floors below Trump’s penthouse.
That’s the exact case Preet Bharara was prosecuting as U.S. attorney in Manhattan, a man known as one of the country’s toughest prosecutors on financial crime and corruption. In January 2017, days after his inauguration, Trump fired him. What a coincidence! Bharara had gotten Trump’s personal assurance that he’d keep his job.
That link between the Russo-Soviet mafia and Israel wasn’t incidental. The Russian-Jewish mob ran out of three bases at once: Brighton Beach in New York, Moscow and Tel Aviv, because Israel was a prized safe harbor for the mafia thanks to the lack of an extradition treaty for its own citizens and a banking system opaque enough to make laundering easy. That’s why criminals like Tokhtakhounov held dual Russian-Israeli citizenship and moved freely between those three worlds. That ecosystem is also where ambitious young men like Felix Sater were circulating, a Brighton Beach kid born in Moscow who’d become a central character in the Trump story a few years later.
In that same 1980s New York, another ambitious young man was trying to buy his way into high society. Jeffrey Epstein moved in the same social circles as Trump, the same parties and the same hot clubs. He was a slick, charming con artist who knew how to make himself useful to powerful people. Back then he was just the party buddy. Nothing more. His real story belongs to another decade.
Meanwhile, in that same New York real estate world, a guy named Steve Witkoff was building his own career. Same milieu, same networks, same opportunities… And these men’s paths would end up crossing in a way nobody could have imagined at the time.
The Donald Trump of the 1990s: bankruptcies, survival and Russian money
The 1990s started badly for Donald Trump. Really badly! Between 1991 and 1994 his companies racked up six straight bankruptcies. Casinos, hotels and buildings. All collapsing one after another. The Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, financed with $675 million in junk bonds at 14% interest, filed for bankruptcy sixteen months after opening. All told, his companies lost $1.17 billion between 1985 and 1994. A number so huge the New York Times figured he’d lost more money than just about any other American taxpayer over that stretch.
No big American bank would lend to him anymore. Chase, Citibank and Goldman Sachs had all shut their doors. His father Fred quietly kept bailing him out through All County Building Supply, the family shell company, moving tens of millions more to him disguised as business expenses. But it wasn’t enough for what Trump had in mind.
With him personally near bankruptcy, a providential solution showed up. In 1998, Deutsche Bank agreed to lend him what nobody else would. The German bank wanted a solid foothold in the United States and was willing to take risks its competitors wouldn’t. What the public didn’t know yet was that this same Deutsche Bank sat at the center of a huge Russian laundering system. Proof: between 2011 and 2015 its Moscow and London branches would run “mirror trades” moving roughly $10 billion out of Russia for Putin associates. And the division handling Trump’s accounts was the same one involved in those operations. What a coincidence!
While Trump scrambled for money to survive, the fall of the USSR in 1991 had set off something enormous. Hundreds of billions of dollars in dirty money were looking to leave Russia and the former Soviet republics for shelter in the West. American real estate, New York’s especially, was the ideal destination back then. No mandatory ID checks on buyers using shell companies, no questions about where the funds came from and cash payments taken without a blink.
The Trump towers were perfectly placed to soak up 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 people or companies tied to Russia or the former Soviet republics. Broker Dolly Lenz said she’d personally sold about 65 units to Russian buyers in Trump properties. Donald Trump Jr. summed it up with disarming candor at a 2008 real estate conference: “Russians make up a disproportionate share of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”
That decade is also when Felix Sater, the Brighton Beach kid born in Moscow whose name we’ve already run into, started building his own criminal career. In 1998 he was convicted for his part in a $40 million stock fraud run with the Genovese and Bonanno crime families. But instead of going to prison, he chose to become an FBI and CIA informant, feeding intelligence on the Russian-American mob and on networks tied to the intelligence services. That double life as convicted criminal and government informant would let him resurface a few years later in Trump’s immediate circle through Bayrock Group, whose offices moved in two floors below the Trump Organization in Trump Tower. What a coincidence!
The structural link between the Russo-Soviet mafia, New York and Israel got much stronger that decade. The fall of the USSR had sped up the back-and-forth between Brighton Beach, Moscow and Tel Aviv. Figures like Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considered the godfather of the international Russian mafia, worked out of Budapest but coordinated networks spanning three continents at once. All the while, Israel stayed a prized haven, still thanks to the lack of an extradition treaty for its citizens and a banking system accommodating to the mob. Criminals routinely holding dual or triple Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli citizenship could move freely between those worlds.
Steve Witkoff, for his part, kept building his New York real estate empire in that same environment. In 2010 he’d write a letter of recommendation for Anatoly Golubchik, identified by investigators as a senior figure in the Russian-American mafia connected to Mogilevich through the shell company Lytton Ventures. As a reminder, Golubchik was tied to an illegal gambling ring based in Trump Tower. So this whole little crowd kept running into each other. Coincidence, always coincidence…
Jeffrey Epstein, meanwhile, was climbing steadily in New York society and starting to spread his international network. He hung around Trump, shared his parties and moved in the same spheres. But at this stage of the story he was still the party buddy. Nothing more.
In the 2000s, Putin comes onstage and the Russian money floods in
Before we go on, we need to stop on a man Western media kept a romantic, fantasized image of for a long time. I’m talking about Vladimir Putin! The former KGB agent, the man in the shadows, the cold calculating strategist out of the belly of the Soviet secret services, a kind of Russian James Bond in all his glory… Except reality is a lot more mundane. And a lot more useful for what follows.
Putin wasn’t a great spy. He was a mid-level KGB agent posted in Dresden, East Germany, whose main job was recruiting informants among the locals. Not exactly the master spy profile the legend stuck on him. And when the USSR collapsed in 1991, he went back to Saint Petersburg empty-handed and landed a city adviser job under Mayor Anatoly Sobchak.
But Saint Petersburg in the 1990s is where the real Putin showed himself. The city was one of the busiest hubs of the post-Soviet Russian mob. The Tambovskaya and the Malyshevskaya, two of the most powerful criminal organizations in Russia, ruled it. Putin handled the city’s export licenses, and several investigations documented his direct connections to those criminal organizations. A city commission even recommended he resign for corruption in 1992. Sobchak quietly buried it.
So this wasn’t a secret service man climbing the rungs of power. It was a Saint Petersburg mobster using his political connections to lock in his position. Which means that when he was elected president in 2000, it wasn’t the Russian state taking control of the mafia. It was the mafia taking control of the Russian state. And the “bringing to heel” of the oligarchs that followed had nothing to do with economic policy. It was just a boss consolidating his territory by taking out the competitors who wouldn’t obey. With Berezovsky exiled in London and Khodorkovsky in prison, the rest fell in line fast.
This distinction matters enormously for understanding the Putin-Trump relationship. We’re not in some complicated spy story with recruited agents and coded messages. We’re in a simple mob story where two men out of two not-so-different criminal worlds ended up doing each other favors because their interests lined up.
And while Putin consolidated his empire in Moscow, Trump was going through his own turning point. His serial bankruptcies had closed every major American bank to him. Deutsche Bank was his last resort. In 2004 he defaulted on a $640 million loan and had the nerve to sue the bank for $3 billion, arguing that the bank had caused the financial crisis. Deutsche Bank lent to him anyway, through its Private Wealth Management division, run by his personal banker Rosemary Vrablic. Justin Kennedy, son of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, had smoothed the early relationship with that division. It was the same division handling Russian oligarchs’ accounts at the same time, the one that would land at the heart of the Russian mirror trades scandal a few years later.
2004 is also when NBC launched The Apprentice. That piece of trash TV was a providential lifeline for Trump. Without it, a seventh bankruptcy was unavoidable. Thanks to it, between 2004 and 2018 Trump pulled in $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 with the Russo-Soviet mob networks from rolling on in parallel like nothing had changed.
Speaking of which, Felix Sater, the Brighton Beach kid convicted of mob fraud who’d become an FBI informant, reappeared through Bayrock Group, whose offices moved in two floors below the Trump Organization in Trump Tower. Bayrock developed Trump SoHo with Trump, a hotel Trump owned nothing of. Just his name on the front in exchange for royalties. The OCCRP, the international investigative journalism consortium, traced $440 million tied to the Ablyazov mega-fraud in Kazakhstan running through Trump SoHo via FBME, a bank sanctioned for laundering. Sater summed up the ambition himself in an email to Michael Cohen in November 2015: “Our boy can become president of the United States and we can engineer it. I’m going to get Putin’s whole team behind us.”
Despite the TV success, Russian money kept pouring 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 torn down in 2016. Intrigued by all this, Senator Ron Wyden asked Treasury for an investigation. So Mueller’s team looked at the transaction… And no public conclusion was ever released! Coincidence again…
The Chabad-Lubavitch network ran as a quiet but constant thread through all these connections. Putin kept a close relationship with Rabbi Berel Lazar, nicknamed “Putin’s rabbi.” This American citizen of Italian descent had become chief rabbi of Russia through a Jewish body Putin created from scratch with backing from Abramovich and Lev Leviev.
Felix Sater was affiliated with the Chabad movement too. Born in Moscow, raised in Brighton Beach by a father who was a lieutenant in the Russian-American mob and directly connected to Mogilevich, he was convicted in 1998 for a $40 million stock fraud run with the Genovese and Bonanno families. Then he became an FBI and CIA informant to stay out of prison. He’s a character who ties together every thread of this story on his own. With Chabad on top.
Same goes for Jared Kushner who’d become Trump’s son-in-law. A devout Chabad practitioner, whose Harvard rabbi said Israel was his family, his life and his people. And Netanyahu slept in his bedroom when he came to New York. Yep! This is the same Kushner who years later would negotiate the most sensitive files of the Trump presidency alongside Witkoff. What a small world! Always that same transnational network running through Moscow, Tel Aviv and New York at once, with remarkable fluidity. More coincidence!
Jeffrey Epstein, for his part, kept climbing socially. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine he was “a terrific guy” who “liked very young women, a lot of them very young.” Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s main victims, was recruited as a spa employee at Mar-a-Lago at 16. In 2004, Epstein allegedly assaulted a minor at a party Trump threw. But in the story we’re following here, Epstein was still what he’d always been at that point. A slick society con man trying to make himself indispensable to the powerful. The party buddy, and why not the orgy buddy? Once again, that’s a whole other subject.
Steve Witkoff kept building his own real estate empire in that same New York ecosystem. Same milieu, same networks, same opportunities. And his path would cross Trump’s more and more closely in the years that followed.
2010-2017: how did the mob put its man in the White House?
In 2010, Steve Witkoff signed a letter of recommendation for Anatoly Golubchik, identified by federal investigators as a senior figure in the Russian-American mafia connected to Semion Mogilevich through the shell company Lytton Ventures. Golubchik is still the same guy tied to the illegal gambling ring running out of the 51st floor of Trump Tower.
Witkoff and Trump had been moving in the same circles for years. Their real estate empires had been built in the same ecosystem, with the same financiers and the same networks. That detail, completely unnoticed at the time, would matter enormously a few years later.
Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank kept playing its role as a giant washing machine. Between 2011 and 2015 its Moscow and London branches ran “mirror trades” that moved about $10 billion out of Russia for Putin associates. The mechanism was devastatingly simple: a client bought Russian stocks in rubles in Moscow while a related entity sold the same stocks in dollars in London. Dirty money went into Russia and came out clean in the West.
The bank paid a $630 million fine in 2017. Nobody ever established publicly that this money moved through the same American legal entity that handled Trump’s accounts. Same division and same bankers!
Tammy McFadden, a compliance officer in the Jacksonville office, found that suspicious transactions involving Trump and Kushner had been flagged internally and then deliberately killed by management. She was fired in 2018. Thomas Bowers, the head of the Private Wealth Management division who’d signed the Trump loans and managed the Epstein accounts, was found hanged in his Malibu home in November 2019. The FBI wanted to question him about Epstein’s banking connections. His death was ruled a suicide. Sometimes coincidence makes things complicated…
In November 2013, Trump went to Moscow for the Miss Universe finals. The event was funded by Aras Agalarov, an Azerbaijani billionaire with documented Kremlin connections. Flight records proved Trump spent exactly 45 hours and 43 minutes in Moscow, contrary to what he later told James Comey when he assured him he’d never spent the night in Russia. His Ritz-Carlton bill included $720 at the rooftop bar, $306 of hookah and $146 from the minibar. Keith Schiller, his security chief, testified under oath that a Russian go-between had offered to send five women up to Trump’s suite. He said he turned the offer down on Trump’s behalf and stood outside the suite door for a while before leaving.
What happened next in that suite is one of the hottest questions in this whole story. The Steele dossier, written by Christopher Steele, former head of the British MI6 Russia desk after a 22-year career including four years undercover in Moscow, mentions a compromising episode in that same Ritz-Carlton suite.
Steele was a serious professional whose Russia intelligence the FBI found credible enough to open a formal investigation. But his specific claims about that November 2013 night have never been proven… and never really been disproven either.
Donald Trump’s psychological and behavioral profile, though, isn’t in doubt. 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 political nuclear weapon. Trump knew it. And anybody who might have held such a thing knew it too.
But we need to reframe the whole kompromat idea here. Trump isn’t a victim in this story. He’s just a fat pig who put himself in position to get trapped, over and over, 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. So the FSB didn’t need to arrange anything sophisticated with Trump. All it had to do was let him be himself.
Melania Knauss showed up in this picture at the end of the 1990s. From Slovenia, a former Yugoslav republic, she’d come to New York by way of Milan, through modeling agencies tied to Eastern European circuits. She got her “Einstein” work visa, reserved for people with “extraordinary ability,” under conditions her lawyers have never really cleared up. She moved in the same social circles as Trump and Epstein. Same parties and same clubs. Trump married her in 2005. Epstein was invited to the wedding. Another product of pure chance.
In March 2016, Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign for free. Yes, you read that right: free! To run the Republican candidate’s presidential campaign. Manafort had spent the previous decade working for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president driven out by the Maidan revolution, pocketing more than $60 million along the way without ever registering as a foreign agent. He also held a $10 million a year contract with Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch described in American diplomatic cables as “one of the two or three oligarchs Putin turns to on a regular basis.” That contract explicitly stated he’d work to “influence politics, business dealings and media coverage to benefit the Putin government.”
Why would a man of that stature agree to work for Trump for nothing? Beyond coincidence, the answer sits in the conclusions of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report published in August 2020: Manafort was regularly sharing the Trump campaign’s internal 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 breakdowns of voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Those four states were exactly 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 that data to Russian intelligence. Manafort was convicted. Trump pardoned him. What else is there to say?
While Manafort worked inside the campaign, a massive digital manipulation operation was running outside it. The Internet Research Agency in Saint Petersburg, funded 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 as many as 126 million American Facebook users through fake accounts, fake groups and targeted ads. Black Matters, Being Patriotic, Secured Borders… Hundreds of fictional groups carefully built to amplify American racial, political and social divisions.
Cambridge Analytica, funded by billionaire Robert Mercer and run by Steve Bannon, worked in parallel with different but complementary methods. The company had stolen psychographic data on 87 million Facebook users through an app built by researcher Aleksandr Kogan. That data let them model the personalities of 230 million Americans on the OCEAN scale and target “persuadable” voters in key states with surgical precision.
WikiLeaks completed the setup. Julian Assange’s organization published the emails stolen from the Democratic Party and John Podesta at the most convenient moment for the Trump campaign. Mueller established that Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks’ supposed source, was actually a Russian military intelligence officer. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, was talking directly with Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter during the campaign. On October 7, 2016, two hours after the Access Hollywood video dropped, the one where Trump bragged about his sexual assaults, WikiLeaks published the Podesta emails. Why? Because Stone had asked WikiLeaks to publish right away to light a backfire. Stone was convicted. Trump pardoned him. What else is there to say?
October 2015. In the middle of the presidential campaign, Trump signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Michael Cohen emailed Putin’s press office directly to ask for help. The talks ran into June 2016… while Trump publicly denied having the slightest business interest in Russia. Cohen lied to Congress about the timing of those talks. He pleaded guilty. But unfortunately for him, the mob doesn’t pardon anyone it considers a traitor.
On July 16, 2018, three days after Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers by name for the 2016 election interference, Trump stood face to face with Putin in Helsinki. In front of the world’s cameras he said: “My intelligence people came to me and told me it was Russia. President Putin just told me it isn’t Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Former CIA director John Brennan called that statement “nothing short of treasonous.” Former CIA officer and Republican congressman Will Hurd wrote: “I never thought I’d see the day an American president would be one of them,” referring to people manipulated by Russian intelligence.
The one-on-one between Trump and Putin ran two hours and eleven minutes. No American aide was present. No official notes exist. Trump confiscated the interpreter’s notes after their Hamburg meeting in 2017 and forbade her from talking about what was said. Five private meetings with Putin. No official record. Kind of strange, right?
Now back to November 2016 and the election of Donald Trump. Son of a family corrupt for three generations. Trained by the most feared Italian mafia lawyer in New York. Builder of towers financed by Salerno’s concrete and cash dollars from the Russo-Soviet mob of Brighton Beach. Client of a bank simultaneously involved in the biggest Russian laundering scandal in modern history. Owner of towers that worked as washing machines for post-Soviet oligarchs. Head of a campaign whose manager was sharing strategic data with Russian intelligence. Potential target of sexual kompromat made easy by his own documented predator behavior…
Bottom line, this guy isn’t a spy the KGB recruited. He isn’t a puppet worked by strings from the Kremlin either. He’s something much simpler and much more terrifying. He’s the natural, logical result of forty years of organic corruption. The bottom line on a man so tangled up in Russian-American mob networks that he doesn’t even need handling anymore. He just naturally does what suits his creditors. Because it’s in his own interest. Because it’s his nature. Because it’s all he’s ever known.
Charles Pasqua theorized the backfire. Steve Bannon industrialized it. Trump raised it to a system of government. And while the whole world got lost in the scandals inside the scandals inside the scandals… the mob had quietly put its man in the White House while another one already sat in the Kremlin. That’s the whole story.
How do you nail Trump? Here are the serious leads nobody has used yet
How do you bring Trump down? That’s the real question! Because after everything you’ve just read, you’re entitled to wonder how someone this obviously corrupt not only stayed out of prison for years but climbed to the highest office. The honest answer is that powerful levers exist and simply haven’t been pulled, for lack of pressure. For a start, if the opposition the Democratic Party is supposed to be did 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 case first and foremost
This is probably the most promising lead and, oddly enough, the least used. Deutsche Bank is a German institution under German law and under the supervision of BaFin, the federal German financial regulator. And what the bank did with the Trump and Kushner accounts amounts to documented, serious violations of German anti-laundering law.
The facts are established! Quick recap: internal compliance officers prepared Suspicious Activity Reports flagging suspect transactions involving Trump and Kushner. Those reports were deliberately blocked by bank management. Tammy McFadden, one of those compliance officers, testified publicly about it. The same banking division handled the Trump accounts, the Epstein accounts and the Russian mirror trading that pulled $10 billion out of Russia, all at the same time. Thomas Bowers, the executive who signed the Trump loans and set up the Epstein accounts, died before the FBI could question him. Germany has to be pushed hard to reopen this investigation!
We’re not talking about banking secrecy here. We’re talking about large-scale laundering and active complicity by a major financial institution. BaFin has the power and the legal duty to open a thorough investigation into every Trump and Epstein transaction. An investigation like that would trace the money back to its source and also turn up other accounts tied to the same networks. German citizens have every right to demand that their financial regulator do its job. Financial rights groups like Finanzwende in Germany could carry that demand. European lawmakers could take the question of European banking supervision to the Commission. It’s a concrete angle of attack, legally grounded and politically hard to bury.
The Mueller report: a scandal for democracy in itself
The Mueller report runs 448 pages. Whole sections of it are blacked out! William Barr, appointed by Trump, released a deliberately misleading four-page summary that Mueller himself challenged in writing, saying it “did not fully capture the context, nature and substance” of his work. Meaning 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 in that report have never been explained publicly. Which courts were they sent to? Where do they stand? Were they buried under political pressure? There are no public answers. Organizations like the ACLU or Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have the legal tools to ask the relevant federal courts to unseal them. Investigative reporters can also file targeted FOIA requests. And coordinated citizen pressure on members of Congress to demand full publication of the report is perfectly legitimate and democratically justified, because it’s the report of a publicly funded investigation into facts of major public interest. So the American people have the right to know 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 permanently by Judge Aileen Cannon, appointed by Trump, what a coincidence. But legal remedies exist. Pro-democracy organizations can take the sealing to appeals courts. The constitutional question is clear: can a judge appointed by the defendant legitimately seal an investigative report on that same defendant, indefinitely?
The interpreters’ notes from the five meetings with no witnesses
Trump confiscated the American interpreter’s notes after his Hamburg meeting with Putin in 2017 and forbade her from talking about what was said. Five private meetings with Putin and no official American record. American Oversight has already gone to court to get those documents. Those cases deserve backing and a lot more noise. The interpreters themselves, now free of any professional constraint, could testify before a congressional investigative committee if its political makeup ever allowed it.
The FinCEN Files and the Panama Papers: a cross-check nobody has done in full
The ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, holds the Panama Papers, FinCEN Files and Pandora Papers databases. A systematic cross-check of that data against every Trump Organization entity has never been done exhaustively and publicly. It’s a colossal investigative job, but a doable one. Formal FOIA requests to FinCEN for the Trump and Kushner SARs that got blocked inside Deutsche Bank are a legally solid lead.
Preet Bharara and the buried Trump Tower investigation
Preet Bharara had an active investigation running on the illegal gambling ring on the 51st floor of Trump Tower when Trump fired him in January 2017, after personally promising him he’d keep his job. That investigation covered documented connections to the top of Russian-American organized crime, three floors below Trump’s penthouse. A New York State prosecutor, who doesn’t answer to federal power, could in theory reopen the file on the evidence already gathered.
All that’s missing is political will and citizen pressure
All these leads have one thing in common. They need either political will that American institutions don’t currently seem able to produce, or citizen pressure strong and coordinated enough to force these investigations open despite the obstacles. Europe, and Germany in particular through Deutsche Bank, may be the most fertile ground, because it sits outside American jurisdiction and outside Trump’s political pressure.
The evidence exists, that much is certain. It’s in databases, in archive boxes, in interpreters’ memories, in Deutsche Bank’s servers and in the sealed files of American federal courts. It’s just waiting for somebody with the guts and the means to make it talk. And what if that somebody was you? I’m not kidding. History is full of ordinary citizens who brought down powerful people by working methodically and refusing to quit. And maybe one or several investigative reporters will finally decide to do their jobs without fearing the consequences. And what consequences, exactly? Trump is a paper tiger. There’s nothing to be scared of. As for the anti-corruption and pro-democracy groups, they absolutely have the means to help drag the skeletons out of the closet.
Conclusion: information is our most fearsome weapon
There you go! King Trump has no clothes! Scrape off the thick layer of shit and all that’s left is a big mobster from a family of mobsters. Plus a big pathetic loser who used criminal networks to paper over his failures and feed his megalomaniac ambitions. The undeniable sex scandals he’s tied to are a separate matter that has to be handled separately, or you fall straight into the crude trap of the scandals inside the scandal. Above all, you have to realize that the daily provocations of the traitor sitting in the president’s chair in the USA are nothing but diversions to pull us away from what matters.
What surprises me most in this whole sorry story is seeing millions of Americans get taken in by a guy this pathetic and this crude. It would be flat-out laughable if it weren’t so tragic. Because when you see all these Americans calling themselves patriots while most of them elected the biggest traitor to their nation since it was founded, you really don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Either way, Republican supporters, you can all put your star-spangled banner away. Because outside of you, there aren’t many people left who see that flag you’re so proud of as a symbol of freedom and democracy. And on that score, you have to admit Trump did good work. By sabotaging all the soft power propaganda of his predecessors, he finally got the United States recognized worldwide for what it is: a fascist, imperialist country that fucks shit up all over the planet. It’s simple: there isn’t a single country on this earth that doesn’t have deaths to mourn because of American foreign policy. That’s the reality! So please, Americans, stay home, mind your own internal business and leave the rest of the world in peace! Your big lectures on democracy and respect for the international order, start by applying them to yourselves, and maybe then we’ll think about revising our judgment.
If you’ve read this far, I figure it’s because you were already disgusted by everything Donald Trump has done and you didn’t need me to get there. On that front, there’s nothing more I can do. What I can do concretely is do my small part to help clear away the defeatism and resignation that hit so many humanists.
Because no! Nothing is set in stone! Together, like ants, we can move things far too heavy for one person to carry. And that starts with circulating information to give it maximum impact. Because a 100% independent outlet like NovaFuture isn’t built for passive news consumption the way mainstream media is. Quite the opposite, it’s an invitation to become a player, by sharing and by opening up fields of possibility. On my end, I put a lot of hours into this piece. And I did it only because I was more than surprised to find that almost nobody had dug deep into the most credible theory about Trump. Namely that he’s clearly the link between two mafias that pushed him all the way to the White House.
So on your end, all I ask in exchange for this work is that you share it on your networks, at minimum. You can even republish it or print it out to pass around, that’s encouraged, no need to ask. And if you happen to be a journalist with a little courage, or a member of an organization that can finally demand transparency on all the cases mentioned in this piece, you’ll have our most sincere congratulations. Either way, thanks for being here on the NovaFuture blog and see you very soon for more adventures.
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