Thread by @blmohr

1/ [Thread]
Chicago's Hollywood

2/ Before Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras met with Trump at the White House in October 2017, he spent the weekend in Chicago.
bit.ly/windycitygreek…

3/ While here, he toured the Cinespace Chicago Film Studios.

https://twitter.com/tsipras_eu/status/919680255790592001

4/ His guide was studio President Alex Pissios and members of the Mirkopoulos family. They own and run Cinespace in Toronto and Chicago. It will soon have a total of 37 sound stages in Chicago—making it the largest film studio in America.
bit.ly/2ZBL5mv

5/ It's generated almost $3 billion in economic activity for Chicago over the last eight years. The last two years, account for almost one third of that.
bit.ly/2ZiTY10

6/ Tsipras was in town to discuss Greece's growing TV and film production industry. Plans are under way for a $6 million film school and Hollywood-style studio on the Greek island of Syros, in the Aegean Sea.
bit.ly/2KtdTEm

7/ Syros saw 200k tourists in 2018. It's estimated a million Russians will travel to Greece this yr. They visit for vacation & investment. During Greece's financial crisis, the price for Syros' luxury villas dropped by half. The oligarchs invested heavily.
bit.ly/2z4qDvw

8/ Ivan Savvidis is a Greek-Russian tobacco tycoon who sold his Greek tobacco company SEKAP to Japan Tobacco for $1.6B last year. He's a former member of the Ru parliament & Putin friend who's working w/ the Kremlin to sow discontent in the Aegean region.
bit.ly/2ZFlDwp

9/ He's spent hundreds of million$ in Greece on a football club, a water-bottling company, a luxury hotel, beach resorts, coastal land & the port of Salonika. A few yrs ago, his Dimera Media company paid $61.5M for Greece's 4th nat. TV station's license.
bit.ly/2P4cWb1

10/ He and Tsipras have a history. He's previously said Tsipras reminded him of a young Vladimir Putin.
bit.ly/2z89Mbw

11/ Tsipras has been the leader of the Syriza party for almost a decade. In the months prior to his 2015 election, leaked e-mails revealed Syriza officials had close ties to Aleksandr Dugin and Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev.
bit.ly/30Ra6HX

12/ They allegedly worked to develop relationships with Greek politicians and other public figures sympathetic to Russia.

13/ They are also a direct link with Russia and American white supremacist figures like Richard Spencer and anti-LGBTQ groups like the World Congress of Families (WCF), which was founded in Rockford, IL.
bit.ly/30DJg5M

14/ Tsipras and Trump also have much in common. Under Tsipras, Greece sold weapons to Saudi Arabia; ran overcrowded and dangerous migrant camps and privatized various public entities.
nyti.ms/2yUzTm5

15/ More than a decade ago, Trump tried to sway Greek officials into letting him build a luxury town on 2.5 acres of seaside property near its Ellinikon airport. The plans called for skyscrapers, luxury homes, a hotel and a casino. He was denied.
bit.ly/2yReeey

16/ Trump's Hotel Tower in Chicago is five miles from Cinespace. A decade ago, Pissios and his uncle Nikolaos Mirkopoulos paid $18 million for the closed Ryerson steel mill in Chicago's North Lawndale neighborhood.
bit.ly/2ZGFj2S

17/ Almost 1/3 of that was a grant from former IL Gov. Pat Quinn's admin. It was one of the five grants worth $27.3 million that it got from Quinn. (It later returned the last grant worth $10 million and is currently suing the state over the matter.)
bit.ly/2OTBVO0

18/ Cinespace used the Belmont Bank & Trust to deposit four of the grants. Since 2011, Belmont's given Cinespace nine loans worth $24M. James Banks is the bank chairman and also Pissios' zoning attorney. His uncle is former Alderman William Banks, 36th.
bit.ly/2z4FUMT

19/ Pissios was introduced to Quinn, Rahm Emanuel, Richard M. Daley & other pols thru union boss John T. Coli. He was a key player in bringing Cinespace to Chicago & getting the funding. Mirkopoulos considered Coli necessary for getting the studio built.
bit.ly/2yJhske

20/ Coli was the Secretary-Treasurer for Local 727. He was also the president of the Teamsters Joint Council 25, which represents more than 100,000 workers. Motion picture workers are one of the groups Local 727 represents.

21/ A prior investigation of the Teamsters Union during Coli's tenure revealed mob influence, bribes and kickback schemes. He's the son of Eco James Coli, a Chicago Outfit member who was Local 727's secretary-treasurer for 20 years.
bit.ly/2OOrzz5

22/ Coli's said his dad was a hit man for the mob.
bit.ly/2ZxREGB

23/ Before Emanuel decided against running for a third term, a dozen unions had already donated close to a million dollars to his campaign. When Quinn was governor, he received more than $11 million in union donations.
bit.ly/2yR3pJj

24/ Last month, Coli plead guilty to extorting Pissios for $325,000. The payments started the same year the studio opened. Pissios said he was paying Coli because of a deal his uncle had made before he died.

25/ "We'll shut it down tomorrow," Coli told Pissios. "We'll shut it down within an hour…I will fucking have a picket line up here and everything will stop."

26/ Pissios was wearing a wire. It was part of the 2016 agreement he made with federal officials after being arrested for bankruptcy fraud for not paying taxes on a $100,000 loan he got from his uncle Nick.
bit.ly/30Nofph

27/ Dimitrios Jim Mirkopoulos is Pissios' cousin. He's vice president of Cinespace. He represents Cinespace with the major Hollywood production companies.
bit.ly/2ZD0gvQ

28/ Six years ago, he became an owner, content advisor and a director of 3doo, a Virtual Reality 3D company that claims to have created the first of its kind marketplace for 3DVR content.
bit.ly/2OCps17

29/ The Video on Demand platform is accessed on the 3doo Player app which is available in 190 countries. It comes pre-installed or downloadable on more than 100 million devices, including Android and 3D-capable TV sets sold by LG, Panasonic and Samsung.
bit.ly/2z8ifLz

30/ 3doo has some other interesting directors.

31/ Peter J. Pappas, Sr. was the Chairman of the Board for 3doo and P.J.M. Holding Group before he died in 2017. P.J.M. companies have renovated the Chrysler Building, Citicorp Building, AOL Time Warner Center, GM Building, Yankee Stadium, Citifield and Morgan Stanley Properties.

32/ It did the mechanical contracting work for the World Trade Center-Building No. 4 at Ground Zero and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
bit.ly/2ORMvFp

33/ In 2011, P.J. Mechanical, one of the companies owned by Pappas, was one of six subcontractors indicted by Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance, Jr. for overbilling clients. It colluded with Lehr Construction to pad billing by at least 10%.
nyti.ms/30ONxU3

34/ James Pappas, President and COO of P.J. Mechanical and son of Pappas Sr., was charged with Grand Larceny in the Third Degree. The arrests were part of a larger investigation into fraud and corruption in New York City's construction industry.
bit.ly/2OR0SJZ

35/ Pappas Sr. also developed real estate in Palm Beach, FL; hosted fundraisers for Gov. George Pataki and Sen. Alfonse D'Amato; was anti-Obama; was president of the Greek Americans New York Republicans; and was longtime friends with Telly Savalas.
bit.ly/2OSjysK

36/ John Sitilides is a 3doo board member. He has a govt. contract to manage the State Dept.'s professional development program for senior US diplomats in Greece & Cyprus. He's also a Washington, D.C.-based geopolitical strategist and diplomacy consultant.
bit.ly/2yScTnD

37/ Last May, he appeared on RT to discuss Trump's North Korea summit & influence of China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. He's a member of the Federalist Society.
bit.ly/2YMdS7k

38/ Seven years ago—while 3doo was providing its app on millions of TV sets in Germany, Great Britain, Russia, Poland and France—it signed an agreement with Bernard Salzman to supply its 3D content.
prn.to/2LqHyAJ

39/ Salzman is an Emmy nominated filmmaker who has worked for more than 30 years with studios like Disney, HBO, Showtime, CBS, PBS, Fox, Paramount and MGM. He's located in Miami.

40/ A few months before the deal, Salzman opened 3D Global Content Solutions. The plan was to work w/ 3doo to "reach deep into the global film & TV distribution arena to secure the rights to short and long form 3D content..." It was dissolved a year later.
bit.ly/2yOtN6B

41/ Salzman's (2nd from left) business partner is Oleg Prudius (far right), a.k.a. Vladimir Kozlov. He's an Uzbek-born Ukrainian-American producer and retired professional WWE wrestler. He won the 2010 WWE Tag Team Championship with Santino Marella.

42/ Salzman is registered w/ at least 20 inactive or active companies in the Miami area. 3 of those are w/ Prudius: Tag Team Entertainment, 3D Global Content Solutions & Quasar Entertainment. All are less than 8 miles from Trump's Sunny Isles Beach towers.
bit.ly/2YqkZDh

43/ Quasar has collaborated on 150+ TV & movie productions. In 2014—the same yr Salzman signed w/ 3doo—it produced & released Russian pop-singer Vera Brezhneva's "Luna" music video. 7 yrs earlier, Maxim magazine readers voted her "Sexiest Woman of Russia."
bit.ly/2OW76rU

44/ Brezhneva is married to Mikhail Kiperman, who works for Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky. In 2016, Kolomoisky and his business partner were accused of defrauding Ukraine's PrivatBank of $5.5 billion.
nyti.ms/31OQqV3

45/ Kolomoisky's being investigated by the FBI for financial crimes. He's also a known funder of the far-right Azov battalion, a group of Ukrainian fighters believed to have "have participated in training and radicalizing U.S.-based white supremacy orgs."
bit.ly/2Zu9aYa

46/ Prudius is also an advisor at KrypNet, a "cryptocurrency exchange banking system for regular people." Founded in 2017, consumers can use its KrypATM to convert currencies into crypto assets, withdraw deposits and buy and sell Bitcoin.
bit.ly/2YwcaaU

47/ Sergey Zivenko is CEO and co-founder of KrypNet. He's the former head of Rosspirtprom, Russia's Ministry of Alcohol. Since 2002, he's owned the rights to popular Russian vodka brand Gzhelka. He's a longtime Putin associate.
bit.ly/2P3eUIH

48/ KrypNet's headquarters is located in Nevis, the Caribbean island of 11,000 considered to be one of the world's most secretive tax havens.
bit.ly/2YwcaaU

49/ The COO of KrypNet is Ilya Shurygin, the co-founder of Quickpay, a Russian financial services company that specializes in micro-payments, money transfers, banking software and payment terminals.
bit.ly/2OXxTnP

50/ It allows buyers to pay for their goods and services using cash remittances made at its terminals. Users don't use plastic cards or bank accounts for the service.

51/ Quickpay has offices in and/or is operating machines in Panama, UAE, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Its U.S headquarters is six miles from Trump's towers in Sunny Isles.
bit.ly/2zajcmy

52/ In 2013, Quickpay was bought by Net Element International, a tech group with headquarters in Miami and Moscow. Oleg Firer, the company's CEO, is also Grenada's ambassador to Russia. He has a long history of criminal activity in Miami.
bwnews.pr/2YLdciM

53/ Net Element has been heavily funded by Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakhstan oligarch, who is also its chairman. Rakishev is the son-in-law of Kazakhstan's Amb. to Russia. Net Element's Miami office is less than two miles west of Trump's Sunny Isle's towers.
bit.ly/2ZFGkIC

54/ Salzman started Gold Diggers Enterprises w/ Nikolay Parkhomenko in 2012. The next yr, Episode 1 for the TV reality series "Gold Diggers" was released online. Parkhomenko is listed w/ seven companies in the Miami area. He lives two miles from Trump Towers Sunny Isles' towers.

55/ bit.ly/2yPjRJY

56/ Salzman's currently filming "Capone: The Man that Knew Too Much." A documentary he's directing and wrote with Deirdre Marie Capone, Al Capone's niece.
imdb.to/2ZO36ei

57/ Frank Nitti was promoted by Capone to be "finance minister" for the Chicago Outfit. He's considered the brains behind the millions of dollars the Mob has made off of film studios for more than a half century.
bit.ly/2yRioD3

58/ By getting its mobsters hired on as motion picture workers or paying off mob-friendly union members and officials, the gangsters gained measurable control over the TV and movie industry.

59/ One of the studios it extorted was 20th Century Fox. It's been operating in Chicago for a half century.
bit.ly/30OSyMi

60/ Fox has been filming "Empire" at Cinespace for the last five years. It's where Jussie Smollett and two TV extras were working when they allegedly agreed to carry out a MAGA-themed hate crime.
bit.ly/2yQav0J

61/ The Chicago Police believe the entire attack was staged by Smollett and that he did it because he was 'dissatisfied' with his salary. His PR team deny those allegations. The incident happened a half of a mile east from Trump's Chicago Tower.
bit.ly/30MNuIq

62/ Last week, Dan Webb was named the special prosecutor to review the initial Smollett investigation. He and Lanny Davis are currently the two attorneys representing Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash in his fight against extradition to the U.S.
bloom.bg/30T3E3a

63/ Incidentally, the 6-part miniseries "Surviving R. Kelly" debuted the same month of Smollett's alleged assault. Accused rapist R. Kelly was walking his dog outside his condo in that same Trump Tower when he was arrested in July.
bit.ly/2OxlK9c

64/ Kelly's more than 40 federal charges include child pornography, enticement of a minor, obstruction of justice, racketeering, kidnapping, forced labor and sexual exploitation of a child.
bit.ly/2P0zb1B

65/ The two females formerly living with Kelly recently hired local attorney Gloria Schmidt to represent them. She also represents the two brothers involved in Smollett's attack and has filed a civil suit against Smollett's lawyers.
yhoo.it/2Oxzn8m

66/ Cinespace also has various Chicago real estate investments. After declaring bankruptcy during the 2009 housing bust, last year Pissios and his partners invested $3.8 million in nine city properties.

67/ He's an owner of Lawndale Real Estate, which owns properties on the south & west sides, including The Herbal Care Center cannabis dispensary. It's operated by Perry Mandera, a trucking company owner who also owns VIP's Gentlemen Club. The dispensary is a mile from Cinespace.

68/ Last November, the Chicago Plan Commission approved a $200 million mixed-used development in North Lawndale. Cinespace is a neighbor and a partner on the project. It plans on occupying a "significant portion of the commercial space."
bit.ly/2P3Nnqx

69/ In August, Pritzker extended the state's film tax credit to 2026. At the signing was "Law & Order" creator Dick Wolf who's three shows "Chicago Fire," "Chicago P.D." and "Chicago Med" are all filmed at Cinespace.
bit.ly/2H0pU2R

70/ When asked about the Coli indictment, Wolf said "he knew little about the matter and financial arrangements for shooting there are handled by someone else, not him."

This story can be read in long form here:
medium.com/@brianmohr/chi…