Donald Trump, Russian Intelligence, and Eurasian Organized Crime: Convergence in Brighton Beach(1974–1994)
This article covers Donald Trump’s introduction to Eurasian organized crime in New York and Atlantic City. It is the fourth entry in the series “Donald Trump, Corruption, and the Insidious Influence of Organized Crime.” While it is not necessary to read the earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article examined Donald Trump’s early real estate career in Manhattan and his involvement in civic corruption and with organized crime.
The second article covered Trump’s connections to organized crime and civic corruption as a casino magnate in Atlantic City.
The third article dealt with the death of Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, Trump’s purchase of Resorts International, and his financial downfall.
This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.
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There are legitimate concerns about the use of guilt-by-association and confirmation bias to support ill-founded conspiracy theories and politically motivated allegations. The purpose of this piece is to show that, in their totality, Trump’s business relationships, interactions, and associations with individuals with a criminal background provide overwhelming circumstantial evidence of pervasive corruption and criminality involving the former President and individuals from the former Soviet Union.
Donald Trump’s relationship with Eurasian organized crime and Russia’s government and intelligence services stretches back decades.
Many of the individuals from the former Soviet Union who did business with Trump, ranging from purchasing units in his buildings to engaging in multi-million dollar branding deals, are alleged to have been involved in KGB money laundering schemes and have links to Semyon Mogilevich, as well as the Solntsevskaya and Izmailovskaya criminal syndicates.
Read my in-depth description of Semyon Mogilevich and his sophisticated financial crimes here.
The use of offshore secrecy jurisdictions, opaque corporate ownership structures and all cash real estate transactions often effectively obscure the provenance of international money flows. The weight of decades of circumstantial evidence suggests that Trump must have had some level of awareness regarding the men he was dealing with.
As President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the US military, with access to the full scope of the American intelligence, Trump could have easily found out that a disturbing number of the individuals he and his children have done business with are linked to some of the wealthiest and most dangerous criminal organizations on Earth.
Many individuals covered in the chapter are not Russians, but are from countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that were once part of the Russian Empire and later the Soviet Union. The Eurasian mafia largely consists of minority groups within the former Soviet Union, including Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, Uzbeks and Jews, among others.
Uzbekistan, for example, was a hotbed of organized crime during Soviet times, with local criminals establishing ties to the government in Moscow, including with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev and his son-in-law.
Many of the individuals from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to the United States and ended up in business relationships with Trump, though certainly not all, were Jewish. This was due to a quirk of America’s trade and immigration policy with the Soviet Union that led to a subset of its Jewish residents moving to New York City.
Antisemitism in the Soviet Union, as well as the outlawing of traditional commercial activities, precluded many Soviet Jews from the traditional ladders of success, driving a minority into the criminal underworld.
Little Odessa and Trump’s Introduction to Eurasian Organized Crime
Trump’s rise in Manhattan coincided with the birth of “Little Odessa,” the largest Russian immigrant enclave in the United States located in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.
This was due to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, a 1974 change in US trade policy that economically coerced the Soviet Union to allow its Jewish residents to immigrate to the United States or Israel.
The introduction of economic penalties to punish human rights abuses had profound consequences for the Russian-American relationship and continued to be an important issue in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.
While the overwhelming majority of new arrivals to the U.S. following the passage of Jackson-Vanik were law abiding citizens, one of the unintended consequences of the policy was the introduction of Eurasian organized crime into the United States.
The KGB used the opportunity to empty out its prisons of dangerous criminals, some of whom would become KGB informants after re-establishing themselves in Brooklyn.
Trump came to the attention of Eastern Bloc intelligence agency’s shortly thereafter. His 1977 marriage to Czech foreign national Ivana Zelníčková was followed by the Státní bezpečnost (StB), Czechoslovakia’s state intelligence service.
The StB was known to cooperate with the KGB, though it is unclear whether it shared any information about the Trump’s. Czech intelligence started a file on the Trump’s soon after they were married, as part of their mission to keep tabs on Czech émigrés abroad.
Ivana’s correspondence with her father, Miloš Zelníčková, was monitored and he was forced to provide the StB with information regarding his daughter and son-in-law’s visits to Czechoslovakia as well as information about Trump’s business career.
“Trump was of course a very interesting person for us. He was a businessman, he had a lot of contacts, even in US politics,” former StB official Vlastimil Daněk told The Guardian. “We were focusing on him, we knew he was influential. We had information that he wanted to be president in future.”
Trump’s earliest known interactions with Eurasian organized crime date back to his first Manhattan real estate project.
In 1976, he purchased 200 televisions for the Grand Hyatt from Joy-Lud Electronics, which was known to cater to Soviet diplomats, KGB agents and Politburo members.
Among Joy-Lud’s customers were the Soviet Foreign Ministers Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze, the future Russian intelligence chief Yevgeny Primakov and Kremlin media spokesman Georgy Arbatov.
The Manhattan-based Joy Lud was operated by two Jewish Soviet émigrés, a Ukrainian from Odessa named Semyon “Sam” Kislin and a Georgian named Tamir Sapir (AKA Temur Sepiashvili).
For Kislin and Sapir, both of whom later became billionaires, it was the beginning of a decades-long relationship with Trump.
As late as 2018, Kislin referred to himself in correspondence with the US Embassy in Kyiv as Trump’s “advisor.”
Former KGB Major Yuri Shvets, who once worked for the Washington, DC Rezidentura, told author Craig Unger that Joy-Lud was a regular destination for Soviet espionage agents based in the United States looking to purchase electronic goods unavailable in the Soviet Union for either their own enjoyment or resale.
This parallels Vladimir Putin’s activities in Dresden as a young KGB Officer, where he reportedly had members of the Red Brigade purchase Western electronic goods for his own use.
Shvets further claimed that in 1972 Kilsin had been recruited by a KGB field office in Odessa to establish contacts with Soviet Jews hoping to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
Kislin later became a successful commodities trader through a partnership with the alleged Izmailovskaya criminal syndicate senior leader Mikhail Chernoy. In the 1990s, Mikhail and his brother Lev were involved in the violent privatization of the Russian aluminum industry.
Kislin and Chernoy’s company, Trans World Commodities, assisted in KGB efforts to launder money out of the former Soviet Union and into the United States. This same network of private businessmen operating in partnership with the KGB included the Eurasian organized crime and Russian intelligence linked Boris Birshtein and Grigori Luchansky.
Read my descriptions of Birshstein and Luchansky and the network of global corruption they inhabit here.
Chernoy acted as mentor to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who later seized control of the Russian aluminum industry and played a key role in the 2016 U.S. election interference operation.
Read my extensive description of Kislin, Deripaska, and Chernoy’s involvement in the privatization of the Russian aluminum industry here.
In 1994, Kislin sponsored a visa for the contract killer and Izmailovskaya head, Anton Malevsky, to enter the United States. Malevsky was a veteran of the Soviet Afghan war with connections to the FSB, which supported his efforts in the 90s to prevent Chechen gangs from overrunning Moscow.
A confidential FBI report listed Kislin as a “member/associate” of the mafia organization led by Vyacheslav Ivankov, a notorious Russian vor with close ties to Semyon Mogilevich and the Solntsevskaya.
Kislin used his newfound wealth to purchase political influence in New York, contributing $46,250 and hosting fundraisers for Rudy Giuliani’s 1994 and 1997 mayoral campaigns.
In return, Giuliani twice appointed Kislin to be a member of New York City’s Economic Board of Development.
When Giuliani was preparing to run for the U.S. Senate seat in New York against Hillary Clinton, Kislin co-chaired a fundraiser that netted the former Mayor of New York $2.1 million.
Kislin is an influential supporter of Israel, and was involved with an effort in 1995 to raise $3 million for the famous Soviet refusenik Natan Sharasky. Sharansky, a political figure in Israel, has also received donations from Eurasian organize crime-linked Grigori Luchansky and Gregory Lerner.
The other owner of Joy Lud Electonics who would have an enduring business relationship with Trump was Tamir Sapir.
Sapir immigrated to New York in 1975 from the then-Soviet Republic of Georgia via Israel and sold electronic goods to Soviet officials in exchange for the rights to sell commodity goods onto the international market.
Sapir used the profits from these lucrative transactions to purchase Manhattan real estate.
Sapir was also involved in some of the earliest KGB oil-trading operations between the USSR and the West, which sold domestic oil from the USSR, the price of which was artificially lowered by the state, at a massive markup on the international market.
Recently declassified documents show that in 1998 the FBI was investigating Sapir for money laundering and extortion and believed that “Sapir is used as a front for Russian organized crime money.”
In the early 80’s, Eurasian gangsters working with American organized crime implemented what was known as Daisy Chain Scams, defrauding the State of New York out of nearly a billion dollars in fuel taxes.
In late 1984, Trump met personally with David Bogatin, a diminutive but brilliant Soviet army veteran and one of the chief Russian masterminds behind the scam.
Bogatin was born on June 2nd, 1945 in Saratov, a Soviet technological center located on the Volga river. Conflict with authority and the prison experience had deep roots in Bogatin’s family.
His grandfather was a Talmudic scholar who was sent to prison in 1937 on religious grounds, where he was murdered by his fellow inmates within the year. His father was imprisoned in a Siberian gulag for 18 years after an informant told the authorities that he had defaced a picture of Stalin.
After serving as a Soviet military advisor for three years in North Vietnam, Bogatin returned to Russia where he worked as a printer. He immigrated to the United States in 1977 where he worked his way up to owning a gas station.
From there, Bogatin played the oil spot market, using borrowed money to purchase oil in transit to the United States and then sell upon its arrival at immense profit as the price of oil in the Northeast was spiking at this time.
In 1982, Bogatin identified the criminal opportunity of a lifetime when New York State changed the way it collected gasoline taxes. In an attempt to simplify the system, a new law shifted the burden of tax collection away from gas stations to fuel wholesalers.
Bogatin and two associates from the Brighton Beach Russian mafia, Michael Markowitz and Lev Persits, devised a gasoline bootlegging scam by which they shifted the tax money owed through a series of shell corporations, creating a byzantine paper trail, before declaring bankruptcy and pocketing the money for themselves.
As the tax on gasoline at the time had reached nearly 30 cents per gallon, the profits were enormous.
Bogatin and his Russian partners approached Colombo crime family caporegime Michael Franzese to help them with muscle and to use his connections to obtain certain state licenses.
In September of 1983, a meeting was held between representatives of the Columbo Crime Family, as well as Russian and Israeli racketeers to devise a system of dividing the spoils.
Franzese cut a deal in which the Colombo’s would collect 75% of the illicit earnings and the Russians, who were still relatively new to organized crime in New York City, would receive 25%.
Another Franzese associate, a 400-pound Long Island merchant named Lawrence Iorizzo, had a similar scan running simultaneously. They decided to streamline their efforts.
IRS officials estimated that the scammers skimmed over a billion dollars in Federal taxes. At the height of the scam, Bogatin faced the same problem Al Capone faced decades earlier. What to do with all the cash?
One way he laundered his ill-gotten gains was through purchasing units at Trump Tower.
Trump, in what would come to be a definitive business practice over his entire career, engaged in no due diligence whatsoever and asked no questions. As far as he was concerned, cash, dirty or not, was king.
The gas tax scam eventually became a victim of its own success. The FBI caught wind of it and opened an investigation into the gas bootleggers, code named Red Daisy Chain.
Iorizzo was arrested on separate charges and eventually fingered Bogatin and Markowitz, both of whom were charged in New York and Florida with tax evasion, conspiracy and fraud. Markowitz was suspected of becoming a government informant and shot to death in his Rolls Royce.
Franzese cut a deal with the government, quit the mob and wrote a book about the experience.
Iorizzo was brought before the United States Congress and in sworn testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee claimed that one of his former partners had been a man named Martin Carey, and that Carey had skimmed off millions of dollars through the scam and had donated the money the political campaign of his brother Hugh Carey, then the Governor of New York. His allegations were never investigated.
In an unpublished book seen by the author (it can be found at the Rutgers Law Library), the late criminologist Alan A. Block reveals that in at least one instance involving a Prosecutor from the Eastern District of New York, the Central Intelligence Agency pressured him to refrain from charging certain Russian/Israeli gangsters involved in the gasoline scams.
While trying to avoid US prison in Poland, David Bogatin claimed to have worked for the CIA. Interestingly, Bogatin’s attorney Mitchell Rogovin was a former senior counsel for both the CIA and the IRS.
Before his arrest, Bogatin paid Trump $5.8 million in cash for five luxury condos in his signature new building Trump Tower. Trump was personally present at the closing of the Bogatin deal.
Trump Tower was one of only two buildings in Manhattan at the time that sold units to anonymous shell corporations, making it an ideal money laundering sink.
According to the FBI, Bogatin was a member of the Semyon Mogilevich organization.
His brother, Jacob Bogatin, was later indicted alongside Mogilevich for stock fraud and money laundering.
In 2021, Michael Franzese claimed that he had recently spoken to Federal investigators who asked him about Trump’s relationship with Bogatin.
1987: Trump’s First Visit to Moscow
In March of 1986, the newly arrived Soviet Ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin and his daughter Natalia Dubinina paid an unannounced visit to Trump Tower and met with Trump privately in his office. Notably, this was a time in which the KGB was redoubling its efforts to make contacts with Western businessmen.
Trump was charmed by the ego-stroking Soviet diplomat, who a few weeks later was promoted to be the Soviet ambassador to Washington.
Around this time, Trump began making bizarre claims to individuals like Nobel Prize-winning nuclear activist Bernard Lown that he wanted to Ronald Reagan to appoint him to be the plenipotentiary ambassador for the United States with Gorbachev and that within one hour of sitting down with the Soviet Premier he could end the Cold War.
In January 1987, Trump and Dubinin sat next to one another at a luncheon held by Leonard Lauder, heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune.
Later that month, Trump received a letter from Dubinin inviting him on behalf of the KGB-operated Goscomintourist, the Soviet state tourist agency, to visit Moscow and explore the possibility of constructing a hotel.
Much of the above version of events comes from an interview of Natalia Dubinina released a day after Trump’s election.
Yuri Shvets told Craig Unger that Dubinina was likely a KGB agent and that inconsistencies in her story, including the easily disprovable claim that her father spoke English, and the timing of its release following Trump’s surprise election, indicated an attempt to cover-up details of early KGB approaches to Trump.
On July 4th, 1987, Donald and Ivana Trump flew to Moscow where they stayed in the Lenin suite at the National Hotel near Red Square. Their room would likely have been bugged.
Interestingly, Trump’s visit to Moscow occured during the same month he purchased the organized crime-linked Resorts International.
During the visit, Trump was taken to see several potential hotel sites. Upon his return, a July 24th, 1987 edition of Executive Intelligence Review, the private intelligence publication of the cultish and conspiratorial Lyndon LaRouche Movement, which has itself been suspected of links to Russian intelligence, reported that the Soviets were looking favorably on a Trump presidential bid.
On September 1st, 1987, on the advice of Roger Stone, Trump paid $94,801 to run full page newspaper ads that read: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”
The ads further stated, echoing Kremlin propaganda at the time and Trump’s later “America First” mantra, that America “should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.”
Yuri Shvet’s told both Catherine Belton and Craig Unger that, by the late 1980s, the KGB considered Trump to be an asset. He made no claim to have any insight into Trump’s mindset on the matter.
The Trump Taj Mahal, Shalva Tchigirinsky and Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov
According to Catherine Belton, in November 1990 Trump met Shalva Tchigirinsky (AKA Chigirinsky), a Soviet-born, Georgian businessman connected to Eurasian organized crime who also enjoyed high-level links to both Soviet foreign and military intelligence.
Tchigirinsky, at the time wealthy enough to be considered a high roller, met Trump at his Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City in the days shortly before a string of bankruptcies upended Trump’s life and business.
Over the course of several nights, Trump showed Tchigirinsky around the Taj Mahal, even giving him a tour of the casino’s vault.
Tchigirinsky was an associate of both Sam Kislin and Tamir Sapir, as well as another future oligarch who would become a Trump business partner, an Azerbaijani named Aras Agalarov.
According to Belton, Tchigirinsky, Kislin, Sapir and Agalarov were all on the vanguard of a partnership between organized crime and Russian intelligence to move money from the former Soviet Union into the West. Reports in the Russian press claim Tchigirinsky is an associate of the Solntsevskaya, and he has admitted that he knows Semyon Mogilevich.
Tchigirinsky met Trump through Martin Greenberg, an attorney who wrote Atlantic City’s gambling laws and later became the president of the Golden Nugget casino.
A year earlier, in 1989, Greenberg and Alfred Luciani, a New Jersey assistant attorney general who also worked on the gambling laws and later became a vice president at the Golden Nugget, met with Tchigirinsky in Yalta on the Crimean coast to discuss potential investments which included possibly building a casino in the Soviet Union as well as looking into Russian investment into Atlantic City.
Greenberg introduced Tchigirinsky to Trump during a visit to the Taj.
At the time Tchigirinsky was partnered with Vadim Milshtein, whose father was a veteran of Russian military intelligence. Vadim had also established a “translation agency” that employed a former member of the KGB’s special forces and a former Soviet diplomat to the UN.
A year after meeting Tchigirinsky, Trump’s business empire went belly-up and he experienced his first of six business bankruptcies.
Carl Icahn and Wilbur Ross, the latter of whom later became President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, oversaw a bankruptcy process that proved remarkably generous to Trump.
Martin Greenberg, the man who introduced Trump to Tchigirinsky, represented the bondholders during the restructuring.
While it is unknown if Tchigirinsky played any part in the restructuring of Trump’s debt, he has admitted that he knew Carl Icahn.
Tchigirinsky told Catherine Belton that he was never financially involved in the Trump Taj Mahal. She noted, however, that he discussed its business in terms that would indicate he did in fact have some level of involvement.
The Trump Taj Mahal was later fined $10 million by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for violating anti-money laundering laws.
Tchigirinsky fled Russia in 2009 due to a tax evasion investigation and currently resides in Israel. In 2015, Tchigirinsky’s 12-year old daughter accused him of sexual assault.
1991 was an inauspicious year for both the Soviet Union and Donald Trump. While Trump was plunged into the first of his six bankruptcies, the USSR ceased to exist.
The collapse of the Soviet Union unleashed a flood of Russian flight capital and émigrés Westward, which would come at an opportune moment for the financially desperate Trump.
On March 8th, 1992, one of those new arrivals to New York was the sadistically violent vor Vyacheslav “Yaponchik” Ivankov.
Ivankov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1980, he was involved in the formation of the Solntsevskaya criminal syndicate.
Two years later, he was arrested for robbery, possession of firearms, forgery and drug trafficking and was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor in a Siberian gulag. During his stint in prison the copiously tattooed Ivankov was officially crowned a vor y zakone, or thief-in-law.
According to US Court records and FBI documents, in 1991 Semyon Mogilevich paid off a judge to secure Ivankov’s early release from prison.
In December 1991 at a gathering of vor y zakone at Vedentsovo, outside of Moscow, Ivankov had been chosen to ruthlessly prosecute a war on behalf of the Slavic gangs against increasingly powerful criminals from the Caucuses, in particular from Chechnya.
He was later sent to the United States to establish control over the burgeoning Russian criminal enterprises in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Ivankov’s criminal comrades may also have sent him out of Russia to prevent any violations of the shaky peace that had been established with the Chechens and other gangs from the Caucuses.
Ivankov arrived at JFK airport in New York City on March 8th, 1992, where he was met by an Armenian vor who handed him a suitcase containing $1.5 million cash.
He hit the ground running, and quickly established two “combat brigades” consisting of 250 members, some of whom were special forces veterans from the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The brigades, which were on a $20,000 monthly retainer to extort legitimate businesses and when necessary kill Ivankov’s enemies, were led by a former member of the KGB. The newly Americanized gangsters in Brooklyn had little choice but to fall in line.
In May of 1994, the FBI established C-24, the first squad wholly dedicated to fighting Russian organized crime in New York.
Ivankov, who FBI agents had learned about on some of the first and last trips ever made by FBI agents to Russia in the early days of the Yeltsin administration, was target number one.
The FBI had a problem. They had no idea where Ivankov was. Despite his reputation, he had simply vanished upon arriving in America.
“At first all we had was a name,” said FBI Agent James Moody. “We were looking around, looking around, looking around, and had to go out and really beat the bushes. And then we found out that he was in a luxury condo in Trump Towers.”
Ivankov not only lived in Trump Tower, he enjoyed the perks of being a high roller at the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which had become the go-to destination for Russian mobsters across the East Coast.
Casinos, especially those in tough financial straits like the Taj Mahal, keep close tabs and detailed files on their high rollers to ensure they know everything they need to keep them at the tables.
While under FBI surveillance, Ivankov visited the Trump Taj Mahal nineteen times between March and April of 1993, gambling over $250,000 in the space of a month.
When Ivankov was finally arrested by the FBI on June 8th, 1995 for extorting and threatening to murder two Russian bankers, he was found to be in possession of two fire arms, a lock pick set, a bug detector, an electronic voice changer and a passport kit not dissimilar to the one’s used by the KGB.
He was also found with a phone book that contained working phone and fax numbers for the Trump Organization, including a number for the Trump Organization’s Trump Tower residence.
The next installment of the series will cover potential Russian money laundering in Trump Organization developments and his second visit to Moscow.