Trump’s 1996 Trip to Moscow and Russian Investments in Trump Organization Properties
This article covers Donald Trump’s introduction to Eurasian organized crime in New York and Atlantic City. It is the fifth 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.
The fourth article covered Trump’s early links with Eurasian Organized Crime in New York and Atlantic City.
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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In November of 1996 Trump traveled to Moscow with Howard Lorber, CEO of Vector Group, a holding company with tobacco and real estate interests that held a lease on a site near the Kremlin that Trump had his eyes on as the potential location for a Trump Tower Moscow.
Ducat Place, as the site was known, was controlled by a Russian cigarette company called Liggett-Ducat, a subsidiary of the Vector Group.
Lorber, who Trump has described as his “best friend,” later served on candidate Trump’s economic advisory team. Trump told The New Yorker in a 1997 profile that Lorber had “major investments in Russia.”
With Lorber by his side, Trump met with Moscow’s mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Luzhkov oversaw a vast system of corruption and criminality and was a friend of the notorious Russian organized criminal Vyacheslav Ivankov.
Luzkhov was believed to be connected to Semyon Mogilevich, the United States’ top Russian organized crime target, through Sistema, a business conglomerate that supported Luzhkov’s political machine. Luzhkov was also close friends with, yet another Russian businessman with ties to both Trump and Russian organized crime, Shalva Tchigirinsky.
His wife, Yelena Baturina, was a business partner of Tchigirinsky’s.
Trump and Lorber were accompanied by their mutual friend Bennett LeBow, a tobacco executive who had founded the Vector Group.
A year earlier, LeBow attended a Clinton-Gore fundraiser and brought as his guest a Ukrainian businessman and organized criminal named Vadim Rabinovich.
Rabinovich once served as the Ukrainian representative of Nordex, the Vienna-based commodities trading firm established by the KGB and believed to be involved in money laundering, drug smuggling and nuclear proliferation.
Nordex was operated by a Latvian spook-turned-mobster named Grigori Luchansky, who himself had met Bill Clinton at a 1993 fundraiser.
Luchansky was sprung from prison in 1993 with the help of the KGB and then used Nordex to launder Communist Party funds into the West.
In 1995, Luchansky and Rabinovich had attended a meeting in Tel Aviv with, among others, Semyon Mogilevich and Sergei Mikhailov, head of the Solntsevskaya, to discuss their holdings in Ukraine.
Trump, Lorber and LeBow were joined by several other Americans during their 1996 trip to Moscow.
One in particular was David Geovanis, a Moscow-based American businessman who served as the Vector Group’s Moscow real estate developer. Geovanis holds a Russian passport and may be a dual Russian-American citizen.
Several witnesses testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that Geovanis possesses potentially compromising information about Trump’s relationships with women in Moscow and has suggested that the Russian government is likely aware of this.
The Committee further assessed that Geovanis’ pattern of conduct with women in Moscow had made him and those around him vulnerable to Russian intelligence kompromat operations.
Photographs exist of Geovanis standing with scantily clad Russian women in front of a portrait of Joseph Stalin.
In Moscow at the time, international businessmen were regularly taken out to nightclubs or parties where prostitutes were present and Russian intelligence eagerly took advantage of these opportunities.
Leon Black, founder of the multi-billion dollar investment management firm Apollo Global Management, also joined Trump on his 1996 trip to Moscow.
Black had worked with Geovanis in the Beverly Hills office of the investment firm Drexel Burnham Lambert, which invented the Junk Bond market and later collapsed after its founder, the “Junk Bond King” Michael Milken, was arrested and convicted of securities and tax violations.
Black was Milken’s right-hand man at Drexel.
LeBow was a major investor with Drexel and often flew it’s executives on private jets to parties costing millions of dollars.
While Trump never worked directly with Drexel, he had used the kind of Junk Bonds they pioneered to fund his debt-fueled purchases in the late 1980s, including pouring $675 million worth of Junk Bonds into the Taj Mahal Casino.
Years later as President, Trump issued an executive pardon to Milken.
In 2021, Leon Black resigned from Apollo Global Management after news leaked that he had maintained a relationship with the wealthy financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein long after it had been known that he had been involved in the sexual grooming and rape of multiple underage girls. Black wired Epstein $50 million after he was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl.
Between 2012 and 2017, Black paid Epstein $158 million for “financial services.”
Trump was also a friend and associate of Epstein’s from at least 1987 until a falling out occurred between them in 2004.
As of this writing, a former Russian model is suing Black, alleging that he raped and harassed her. Black admits that the two were in a consensual relationship, but claims she is now extorting him.
Geovanis was assigned to show Trump around Moscow during his 1996 visit. Trump was also joined on the trip by Matthew Calamari, his former bodyguard and later Chief Operating Officer at the Trump Organization, a Goldman Sachs executive named Ron Bernstein, and the architect Theodore Liebman.
On one of their first evenings in Moscow, the Vector Group threw a party for Trump in a room called “The Library” at the five-star Baltschug Kempinski hotel in Moscow, where Trump and his entourage likely stayed the evening.
According to a 1996 FBI confidential report, the Baltschug Kampinsky was owned by Semyon Mogilevich.
During the party, Trump may have initiated a romantic relationship with a Russian woman, possibly a former Miss Moscow, whose name is redacted from the Senate Counterintelligence report. Trump was married to his second wife Marla Maples at the time.
As of this writing, Trump has been accused by over 26 women since the 1970s of various sexual abuse charges ranging from harassment to rape.
David Geovanis has made suggestive comments to friends about Trump and the unnamed Russian.
In communications seen by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Robert Curran, a photographer and close friend of Geovanis, wrote to him in 2017 inquiring about Trump’s activities with the unnamed Russian woman that evening, asking, “What exactly happened… Did they hook up, or whatever?”
“I saw them again the next day and they were together so…” Geovanis replied.
Leon Black told the Senate Intelligence Committee that he “did not recall” Trump engaging in any compromising behavior during the trip. He did remember attending a concert with Trump followed by a “discotheque” where they possibly met up with Geovanis, though his memory was hazy on that part.
Black also admitted that while they were in Moscow he and Trump “might have been in a strip club together.”
In December of 2015, Geovanis attended a holiday party thrown by the former Chief Financial Officer of Rosneft, Peter O’Brien.
Jokes were exchanged among the twenty or so businessmen in attendance and Geovanis was encouraged to tell a story about his 1996 trip to Moscow with Trump. Some had heard Geovanis tell such stories before.
O’Brien testified that Geovanis spoke of “spending time with [Trump] during that trip, and the mention of Trump being with younger women, including in official meetings, which some people in Russia thought was weird.”
O’Brien continued, “[Geovanis] told a little bit about how [Trump] had spent time going around to some different meetings in Moscow to talk about potential real estate deals. And the culmination of the story was that [Trump] had a meeting in the Moscow mayor’s [Luzhkov] office and he showed up with two beautiful young women on his arm, and people thought that was kind of strange. A, that he was with them, and B, that he hadn’t just left them wherever he met them.”
“The implication of his story,” O’Brien maintained, “was that [Trump] had spent the night with these two women and showed up at this first meeting the next day.”
O’Brien further explained, “For years in Russia there were a number of Russian government officials or others who were exposed in these strip clubs doing not very nice things that their wives, if they have wives, probably didn’t know about. I think most of us appreciated that there was that risk in these types of clubs. So, I think once David told that story, we were all concerned about that.”
Geovanis’ and Black’s connections to Russia deepened in the years that followed the 1996 trip to Moscow.
Between 1997 and 2001, Geovanis worked in the Moscow and London offices of Soros Private Equity Partners, the investment fund operated by George Soros.
After that, Geovanis worked as a real estate manager for Oleg Deripaska’s holding company Basic Element. After leaving Basic Element, Geovanis joined a real estate investment group closely associated with Arkady Rotenberg, a billionaire Russian oligarch and close personal friend of Putin’s.
Geovanis claimed that he sometimes plays hockey with veterans of the FSB and the Federal Protection Office (FSO), Russia’s equivalent to the Secret Service, and that relationships he maintains are good for business.
Following the 2016 election, Geovanis was hired by Bennet LeBow to open a Moscow office for his coal processing company Somerset International.
Somerset’s sales materials advertise its relationships with the Kremlin-connected oligarchs Oleg Deripaska, Roman Abramovich, Viktor Vekselberg and Arkady Rotenberg. Geovanis’ deputy at the company was a former member of the Russian security services.
Neither Geovanis nor LeBow made themselves available to the Senate Intelligence Committee during its investigation.
Leon Black is an associate of Allan Vine, an American investor living in Russia known as a “consigliere” to the sanctioned oligarch Suleiman Kerimov.
In 2011, Black met privately with Vladimir Putin.
That same year, Black was named as an advisor to the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which is owned by the Russian state bank Vnesheconombank (VEB).
The New York Times has described VEB as being “intertwined” with Russian intelligence, and the bank has been used as cover for Russian intelligence officers operating in the United States.
Following the invasion of Crimea, Black was quietly removed from the list.
After Trump’s 2016 victory, Putin sent the RDIF’s CEO Kirill Dmitriev to a secret meeting with the conservative billionaire, Trump supporter and former Navy SEAL Erik Prince on the Seychelles islands to discuss opening a Trump-Putin back channel.
Black’s Apollo Global Management loaned Jared Kushner’s real estate company $184 million during Trump’s presidency, roughly three times the size of average loan given out by the company’s real estate arm.
Trump World Tower, Deutsche Bank and “Little Russia” the Trump Sunny Isles Towers
In October of 1998, Trump broke ground on Trump World Tower located near the United Nations building.
A third of the units sold on floors 76–83 were purchased by individuals or LLC’s connected to former Soviet states.
Sam Kislin issued multi-million dollar mortgages to buyers of Trump World condos, including to Vasily Salygin, who later became an official in the Ukrainian Party of Regions at the time Trump’s future campaign chairman Paul Manafort advised its leader.
An Uzbek diamond dealer named Eduard Nektalov purchased a 79th-floor unit for $1.6 million. At the time, he was being investigated for a money laundering scheme involving diamonds and Columbian drug cartels. He was later murdered on 6th Avenue for cooperating with authorities.
Nektalov, a member of the ancient Central Asian Bukharan Jewish community, was the third cousin of the Uzbek-Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev, whose interlocking relationships with Putin, Trump and Jared Kushner will be explored shortly.
Trump World Tower was made possible by a total of $425 million in loans from Deutsche Bank, made at a time when no other bank would touch Trump.
Over the next two decades, Deutsche lent Trump upwards of $2 billion.
Deutsche has a close relationship with Russia’s government controlled VTB bank, known for its past financing of intelligence agencies and operations.
In 2008, VTB’s CEO Andrey Kostin hired over 100 Deutsche employees to start a VTB investment bank. Kostin’s son had been working at Deutsche since 2000, but later died in a motorcycle accident.
Deutsche Bank has participated in a variety of multi-billion dollar money laundering operations funneling dirty Russian money into the Western financial system.
Using a method known as “Mirror Trading,” Deutsche employees whisked $10 billion out of Russia and into the offshore financial system.
Deutsche Bank was also involved in a $20 billion money laundering scheme that funneled Russian money through Moldova and into the European financial system.
In the early 2000s, Trump’s business model transitioned from owning buildings outright to licensing the Trump brand and receiving sales fees. A confluence of events occurring at the turn of the century made the Trump Organization an appealing money laundering sink.
News of the multi-billion dollar Bank of New York money laundering scandal, partially masterminded by Semyon Mogilevich, spilled out into public in 1999. While there was no serious criminal investigation into the matter, it did require that new money laundering avenues be explored.
The passage of the Patriot Act following September 11th terrorist attacks led to significantly more banking regulations to combat money laundering. A loophole allowed real estate to be exempted from these protections, making it a more appealing option for launderers operating out of the former Soviet Union.
In 2001, Trump signed an agreement with developers Michael and Gil Dezer which led to six buildings bearing Trump’s name in Sunny Isles, Florida, which goes by the nickname “Little Russia,” due to its high density of Russian residents.
Reuters found that Russian buyers spent $98.4 million at Trump’s six Sunny Isles towers, plus one located in Hollywood, FL. As up to a third of all units sold were purchased by anonymous shell corporations, that number is likely higher.
The exclusive sales agent for three of the Trump-branded towers was an Uzbek immigrant with an office in the Trump International Beach Resort named Elena Baranoff, who first arrived in the US as a Soviet cultural attaché in public diplomacy.
Baranoff traveled with the Trump children on a trip to Russia in the winter of 2007–2008, and was allegedly friends with Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister under Putin.
She was also personal friends with a Ukrainian lobbyist named Dmitri “David” Zaikin, who later worked with former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Zaikin was described by ProPublica-POLITICO as having numerous connections to “powerful Russian businesspeople and government officials, mostly involving energy and mining deals.”
Baranoff was also involved in Manhattan real estate deals with the son of Turkish President Recep Erdoğan. She died of cancer in 2015.