Thread by @ragepath

If you cover financial crimes, campaign finance, political corruption or just want to be better equipped to understand Trump-related criminal indictments, I highly recommend John Madinger's textbook: Money Laundering: A Guide for Criminal Investigators.
crcpress.com/Money-Launderi…

One passage of the book contains a list of countries that, due to various secrecy laws, should generally raise red flags of potential money laundering when one finds business transactions. I'm gonna run through each of these jurisdictions where I've found Trump, so THREAD.

Let's start in Antigua, a Caribbean money-laundering haven where Trump appeared in 1989. At the time, Trump was sitting high on $3.1 billion of borrowed money that would disappear within a year. Trump was involved in brokering a hotel deal with a dying dictator's corrupt son.

How'd that story turn out? I don't know! I'm not aware of anyone who's ever chased down and reported out the story. Trump was there in 1989 and then... well, who can say, really?

Next in the list is Aruba. Also in 1989, reporter Harry Berkowitz spotted a photograph of a casino in Aruba on the desk of one of Trump's top advisers. The snapshot below is from the Allentown Morning Call (10/8/89) Trump was flush with borrowed cash in 1989 but not in 1990!

A casino in Aruba shows up again a few years later, when a Trump exec founded a company to buys casinos in the former Soviet Union and Caribbean. A casino in Aruba was one of its first purchases. The excerpt below is from Chicago Tribune 5/9/94.

And to round out Trump business endeavors in Aruba, he tried to host his Miss Universe pageant there in 1997 - the second year he owned the pageant. For unknown reasons, the plan was dropped and the pageant moved to Florida instead. From S. Florida Sun-Sentinal, 2/28/97

Austria. Oh, boy... So it turns out that Austria is a money-laundering center favored by many Russians. During the Cold War the country was a frequent crossing point of the Iron Curtain. Trump's first wife escaped to the West by marrying an Austrian.
washingtonpost.com/world/europe/a…

But to keep it simple, let's just focus on Trump's tower in Toronto. This deal was run by Russians of Trump's acquaintance but it was financed by a $310 million construction loan from an Austrian bank - Raffeisen Zentralbank. (Montreal Gazette, 2/1/12)

One can quibble whether HypoVereinsbank should be considered Austrian or German, but in the late 90s/early aughts it acquired Bank Austria Creditanstalt. It also loaned $300 million to Trump World Tower near the UN. (NY Daily News, 10/16/98)

Hypovereinsbank has one of the craziest stories I've ever come across. The bank imprisoned a German man in a psychiatric hospital for years after he tried to implicate his wife, who worked for the bank, in an illegal money laundering scheme.
theguardian.com/world/2012/nov…

B is for Bahamas, where Trump owned a money-losing casino and airline for a few years. He ultimately sold the Caribbean casino to Merv Griffin in a mob-tainted transaction financed by hundreds of millions in publicly-traded bonds both sides would default on. (Miami News, 3/10/87)

C is for Channel Islands, which include "Guernsey" - the home-state of Midland Resources, the oddball financial entity that financed development of Trump Tower Toronto. From the Montreal Gazette (6/19/06). Trump owns 25% of Midland Associates, set up by his dad in 1968.

Oddly enough, Midland Parkway is the name of the street where Donald Trump's childhood home can be found, in a development constructed by his father, Fred. I'm sure there's no relationship to the Midland Resources involved in the purchase of Trump's first casino.

Cyprus is not a tax haven where Trump has direct financial ties, to my knowledge. It is the tax haven where Russian oligarch Dmitri Rybolovlev established his family trust that may have spent $95 million buying a house from Trump.

And, of course, one of Trump's Cabinet Secretaries - Wilbur Ross - sat on the Board of Directors of a bank in Cyprus that handled the finances of several Russian oligarchs who have been mixed up in the whole Trump-Moscow money scandal. Trump and Ross go back decades together.

Now we've reached Hong Kong. Which is a particularly perplexing tax haven, when it comes to Trump. There's been a Trump Tower in Hong Kong since 1990, but contemporary reports denied that it was affiliated with Donald Trump.
(South Florida Sun Sentinel, 2/26/90)

In the 90s, shortly after Trump vanished billions in borrowed money, Hong Kong became a mystifying source of investment in his American properties. Investors from Hong Kong financed his mega development at Riverside South, his Taj Mahal casino, and practically gave him 40 Wall.

And there's something about Hong Kong that's always bothered me. Former Trump exec Abe Wallach claims Trump offered to transfer him to Hong Kong rather than serve jail time in the US back in 2003. But... what were Trump's business interests in Hong Kong? (Boston Globe, 9/25/16)

Moving along, our next haven is Netherlands Antilles. Trump used to own an estate on the French island of St. Martin. The other half of the island is controlled by the Netherlands. Trump bought an estate there from a man accused of embezzling and giving the money to Melania.

The transaction in question, which I had to hunt through several federal lawsuits to resolve, turned out to be an insurance payment on the St. Martin estate before it was sold to Trump. But the State Dept identified real estate on French St. Martin as a money laundering concern.

Now we come to Panama, which is one of the worst jurisdictions for international money laundering because it allows totally anonymous ownership of corporations through something called "bearer shares" - like the "bearer bonds" Hans Gruber wanted in Die Hard - but for companies.

Trumps's all over Panama, going back decades. Trump's name appears 3,450 times in the "Panama Papers," leaked financial documents detailing secret transactions run through Panama by a local law firm named Mossack Fonseca.
newsweek.com/donald-trumps-…

Trump built a tower in Panama that was the site of an ownership contest during his Presidency. At one point, Trump Org officials barricaded themselves inside the offices and shredded "boxes" of documents. Totally normal, I'm sure!
apnews.com/ce4dbdd4446c48…

Investigations have found that many of the units in Trump's Panamanian tower were owned by figures linked to organized crime. Not just Russians! Trump buyers included figures linked to international drug cartels. 🤔Surely just a coincidence.
theguardian.com/us-news/2017/n…

The Seychelles are another money-laundering haven on this list that I don't know of direct Trump-related financial links to. But, it has been the source of on particularly notorious bit of corrupt dealing between Trump and Russia, brokered by the Emiratis.
abcnews.go.com/Politics/putin…

As for Switzerland, a notorious center for international money laundering. Trump boasted to the NYT in 1983 that he owned a condominium in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The paper was wrong about almost everything Trump boasted of owning, so who knows? Not me.
nytimes.com/1983/08/07/bus…

I don't care if the article is 36 years old, I think the New York Times has a duty to correct it and inform readers that most of the crap Trump claimed to own, he didn't really. But for whatever reason, St. Moritz is apparently real popular with Russians.
thelocal.ch/20150118/free-…

Ah, it's obscure and I don't know much about it other than that it exists, but Trump's financial disclosures list a company called "DJT Aerospace (Bermuda)." It was incorporated in 1994.
royalgazette.com/business/artic…

There are other countries where Trump was active and almost certainly laundering money that aren't on Madinger's list. Check out @adamdavidson 's great reporting on Baku and Batumi, for example. And Trump's former unmonitored casino on Canouan Island: