Eighth Person in Trump, Jr., Meeting Linked to Money Laundering

For years Donald Trump, Sr., has skirted the edge of the law and cut deals with both domestic and Russian mobsters, often in connection with his real estate projects.  The latter have for years provided a means for dirty Russian money to be used to acquire real estate in America - the USA, unlike many other nations has few restrictions on foreigners buying property - which when sold effective launders the money and makes it "clean."  Hence it should be no surprise that the now identified 8th person in the June, 2016, meeting with Trump, Jr., at Trump Tower had ties to money laundering. Literally, with every passing day some new sleazy and/or questionable detail of the meeting unfolds which further underscores the lies that were first used to explain the meeting which sought to collude with Russian operatives.  Here are details from Politico on this new information (Note Senator Mark Warner's pointed comment): 

The eighth attendee at a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between top Trump associates and a politically connected Russian lawyer is a business associate of a top Moscow oligarch and was once the focus of a congressional money-laundering probe.

Irakly "Ike" Kaveladze, until now the mysterious eighth person in the room, attended the meeting on behalf of Aras Agalarov, a billionaire real estate magnate with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and a Trump family friend. A lawyer for Agalarov has confirmed Kaveladze’s attendance to other news outlets, though he did not respond to requests for comment from POLITICO.

Business filings list Kaveladze as founder of a company called IBC Group, which shares a New Jersey address — 333 Sylvan Ave. in Englewood Cliffs — with several shell companies connected to Aras Agalarov.

One of those firms is Saffron Property Management, which Agalarov reportedly used to purchase an $11 million condo in Florida last year.

A POLITICO reporter visiting the nondescript office building where all of these companies are based found that the suite linked to Agalarov and Kaveladze was empty, with unopened mail by the door. A sign in the lobby indicated that the suite belonged to IBC and Russian Art Mall, which was founded in 2000 and registered to Emin Agalarov, who is a partner in his father's business.

"They're current on the rent. They're on our rent roll, they're just quiet," said George Sayrafe, who said he has managed the building for 20 years. "I hadn't heard anything. Some tenants bother you, you know what I mean? These people, I haven't seen them in a long time."

Kaveladze’s identity is among many facts about the 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. has failed to disclose in multiple public statements. And his background may add to the questions members of Congress and investigators have about the meeting, which Trump officials say was brief and inconsequential but which Democrats call evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

“I doubt if this individual who had a history of setting up thousands of fake accounts in Delaware was really there to talk about Russian adoptions,” Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told reporters on Tuesday.

Kaveladze was named in a round of news stories in November 2000, after the General Accounting Office issued a report on Russian money laundering through U.S. financial institutions.

At the time, Kaveladze was identified in contemporaneous news reports as the originator of thousands of Delaware-based shell corporations.

Through his company, which was at the time called International Business Creations, Kaveladze formed 2,000 corporations for Russian brokers, which helped steer more than $1.4 billion in wire transactions through U.S. banks, according to the congressional inquiry.

The Agalarovs and Kaveladze are represented by Scott Balber, a New York white-collar defense attorney and former legal partner with Abbe Lowell, an attorney handling Russia matters for Kushner. Balber told The Washington Post on Tuesday he got a call this weekend from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office seeking an interview with Kaveladze — an ask that marks the first public signal the special counsel is investigating the Russia meeting.

Trump Has Deep Ties to Organized Crime - Are Americans Finally Waking Up?

One of the reasons I have been inclined to believe claims that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian hackers and perhaps even the Kremlin during the 2016 presidential campaign is because of Donald Trump's long history of cutting deals with organized crime, including Russian crime figures, to further his own financial interests and real estate projects.  Moreover, real estate investments provide a wonderful means to launder dirty money and walk away with "clean" funds one the real estate investment is sold.  As an added bonus, for Russian crime figures, foreign real estate investments provide a means to set aside a "safe nest egg" should things go down the toilet on the home front.  A piece at Raw Story looks at Trump's ugly history of dealing with crime figures and how it has helped fuel the investigations into possible collusion - and treason - with Russian figures and the Kremlin.  Here are excerpts:

As President Trump discovers the prerogative of unilaterally making war, the media gaze has turned away from the ongoing FBI, House and Senate investigation of his Russia ties to the simpler dramas of cruise missiles, big bombs, and tough but loose talk on North Korea.

Yet even “the mother of all bombs” cannot obliterate the accumulating body of evidence about his relationship with Russian organized crime figures and the not unrelated question about whether he and his entourage colluded with Russian officials in the 2016 presidential election. The story, notes Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, is “Hiding in plain sight.”

The evidence of pre-election collusion between Trump and the Russians, while growing, is far from definitive. The evidence on Trump’s organized crime ties is stronger. Says Marshall:

“If we’d never heard about Russian intelligence hacking of the 2016 election or Carter Page or Paul Manafort or Sergei Kislyak this [Trump’s organized crime connections] would seem like an extraordinarily big deal. And indeed it is an extraordinarily big deal.”

Chronologically speaking, Trump’s ties to organized crime figures came first. Mutually beneficial transactions dating back to the 1990s led to closer relations in the 2000s and culminated in the contacts during the 2016 campaign. It all began with Russians who wanted to get their money out of the country.

As Donald Trump Jr., executive vice president of development and acquisitions for the Trump Organization, told the “Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate” conference in September 2008 (on the basis, he said, of his own “half dozen trips to Russia in 18 months”):

“[I]n terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets; say in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

A lot of this Russian organized crime money flowed through Cyprus, and one of its largest banks, the Bank of Cyprus. The bank’s chairman, Wilbur Ross, is now secretary of commerce. When senators considering Ross’ nomination asked about Cyprus, Ross said Trump had forbidden him from answering questions on the subject.

Not coincidentally, Illinois congressman Mike Quigley, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, recently traveled to Cyprus to investigate, according to the Daily Beast. . . . . the fact that Russians launder their money there to avoid sanctions, and the fact that key U.S. and Russia players were there—all make it really important for the Russia investigation,” Quigley explained in an interview.

According to the Associated Press, the records of Manafort’s Cypriot transactions were requested by the U.S. Treasury Department Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which works internationally with agencies to track money laundering and the movement of illicit funds around the globe.

The sheer proliferation of such contact indicates, at a minimum, that Russian organized crime figures felt comfortable in the Trump milieu.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says that he was investigating Semion Mogilevich 20 years ago when “the brainy don” (as he was known) pioneered the laundering criminal proceeds through quasi-legitimate companies in the United States, especially in high-end real estate. . . . “These ties link up, coalesce, organize and resolve,” Winer says. These are “relationships that make some sense. So we need to get below what we can see on the surface and see what actually happened. … I don’t know who’s going to be indicted, but boy, do I know this: the American people needs to be to get the facts, and then justice can be done.”

Personally, I wonder when and what will be enough o force some of our  "friends" who voted for Trump to finally pull their heads out of their asses and open their eyes to reality. 

New York State Sues Donald Trump and "Trump University" for Fraud

In my opinion, Donald Trump is among the most detestable, ego-maniacal, blow hard s one will ever find.  He is in a tempestuous love affair with himself and knows no limits in pomposity.  And, now New York State has accused him of marketing a fraudulent scheme called "Trump University" that defrauded the gullible out of money.  I sincerely hope that the State of New York wins the case.  Trump, not surprisingly, claims that the lawsuit is politically motivated.  Anything to distract and blow a smoke screen.  Here are highlights from a piece in the Washington Post:

New York’s attorney general sued Donald Trump for $40 million Saturday, saying the real estate mogul helped run a phony “Trump University” that promised to make students rich but instead steered them into expensive and mostly useless seminars, and even failed to deliver promised apprenticeships.

Trump shot back that the Democrat’s lawsuit is false and politically motivated.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says many of the 5,000 students who paid up to $35,000 thought they would at least meet Trump but instead all they got was their picture taken in front of a life-size picture of “The Apprentice” TV star.

“Trump University engaged in deception at every stage of consumers’ advancement through costly programs and caused real financial harm,” Schneiderman said. “Trump University, with Donald Trump’s knowledge and participation, relied on Trump’s name recognition and celebrity status to take advantage of consumers who believed in the Trump brand.”

The lawsuit says many of the wannabe moguls were unable to land even one real estate deal and were left far worse off than before the lessons, facing thousands of dollars in debt for the seminar program once billed as a top quality university with Trump’s “hand-picked” instructors.

Schneiderman is suing the program, Trump as the university chairman, and the former president of the university in a case to be handled in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. He accuses them of engaging in persistent fraud, illegal and deceptive conduct and violating federal consumer protection law. The $40 million he seeks is mostly to pay restitution to consumers.  He dismissed Trump’s claim of a political motive.

Schneiderman’s lawsuit covers complaints dating to 2005 through 2011. Students paid between $1,495 and $35,000 to learn from the Manhattan mogul who wrote the best seller, “Art of the Deal” a decade ago followed by “How to Get Rich” and “Think Like a Billionaire.”
 
At the seminars, consumers were told about “Trump Elite” mentorships that cost $10,000 to $35,000. Students were promised individual instruction until they made their first deal. Schneiderman said participants were urged to extend the limit on their credit cards for real estate deals, but then used the credit to pay for the Trump Elite programs. The attorney general said the program also failed to promptly cancel memberships as promised.

While Trump's program is higher profile than many of these real estate "universities" and "boot camps," there are a plethora of these programs that charge thousands of dollars but deliver little or nothing of substance and disseminate "expert prepared" forms that are mediocre at best.    The only one who gets rich from these programs are those putting on the supposedly educational programs.

 

Lawlessness Continues Under City of Norfolk's Misplaced Priorities

Mayor Paul Fraim

I previously wrote about the problems that have gone on in the neighborhood around Old Dominion University and the residence I own in Norfolk.  Yesterday evening an 11 year old boy was shot - thankfully not fatally - while walking down the street not too many blocks from the ODU campus on Colley Avenue.   Sadly, it is symptomatic of the lawlessness that is taking over the area.   And things are not improving.  The result?  My family members are moving out of my house and I've decided to sell the property and invest whatever I make on the place somewhere where law abiding citizens and their receive adequate police protection.   Here's coverage on yesterday's shooting incident from the Virginian Pilot:

A 11-year-old boy was taken to the hospital after being shot Tuesday night, police said.

The shooting happened at 31st Street and Colley Avenue, police said in a news release. The boy was shot while walking outside, then ran home after being shot. The boy’s mother told police about 9:10 p.m., that she was taking him to Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters.

The boy’s injuries are not life-threatening, the release said.  Police did not immediately have a motive or information about the shooter.

Given what has been occurring, no motive may have been involved - just random punks and/or gang members getting liquored up and firing guns (which odds on they have in their possession illegally).  Unfortunately, until someone is killed - if even then - Mayor Paul Fraim (pictured above left) and his cronies on City Council will probably not take the situation.  They'd rather pour millions of dollars into a new downtown hotel development rather than provide meaningful law enforcement protection to city residents and property owners.  Oh, and they focus on harassing small business owners in response to what are miniscule problems compared to what I and the 11 year old boy have suffered. For city residents in other areas of the city outside of downtown, under the current City Council regime, they are on their own. Two photos of my property are set out below.

Photo before new front railing and new front door completed