Thread by @OldSovetolog

The Two Towers

1. Given @SethAbramson response to @DavidCornDC book excerpt this morning, I'd like to lay out an argument about Trump's Moscow dealings that may help that discussion.

2. The Trump Organization always had multiple projects going on. Felix Satter with MIchael Cohen, Trump Jr., and Trump himself pursued deals in Russia. The talks overlapped. None came to fruition because of the financial crisis (2008) and sanctions (2012).

3. Donald Trump Jr. pursued deals for the Trump Organization in Central Europe in the 2000s. But although he spoke at seminars and famously said the company had lots of money from Russia. But he does not seem to have done development deals in Russia.

4. Trump oversaw everything, but Felix Satter and Michael Cohen made one set of attempts to build a Moscow tower. Trump himself, with the Agalarov family, made another. Trump's talks seem to have been much more serious, and much closer to President Putin.

5. Trump's style is very like that of Russian oligarchs of the 1990s - flashy, promiscuous, self-promoting. Although a full, authorized translation of The Art of the Deal seems to have been published only in 2013, Trump's books were read in partial translations much earlier.

6. His luxury business model and his brand had limited attraction within Russia. Pavel Fuchs negotiated to license the Trump name for a Moskva-citi tower in 2004, but Trump wanted too much money. Fuchs' second try in 2008 also failed.
kommersant.ru/doc/899538

7. The Satter-Cohen Tower. The way in which Trump saved his business in the 2000s with money from former Soviet countries, particularly Tevfik Arif (whose family funded Bayrock), Tamir Sapir, and other Russian/emigre "biznesmen" is now familiar.

8. Arif hired the Russian-American small-time hood and con artist Felix Satter as his "fixer" in the US. Satter would have known of Trump since Satter's stock swindle in the 1990s rented office space in Trump's building at 40 Wall Street.

9. Supposedly, Bayrock then rented office space in Trump Tower and got to know Trump Organization staff by showing off their attractive female staff. One woman who later accused Trump of harrassment was a Bayrock secretary who said it happened outside the Bayrock office in TT.

10. Bayrock and Trump announced a joint deal in November 2003, the failed Phoenix Hotel and Tower. Others followed (Denver, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Trump SoHo -- all messy failures, but potentially able to launder a lot of cash.)

11. Trump gave Bayrock a one-year deal to develop a Moscow Trump Tower in 2005. This was Satter's baby, but although he identified a location he couldn't get the deal done. It's not clear he really had rights to the location, and it seems Russians did not take him seriously.

12. Satter may have been responsible for bringing Michael Cohen to Trump's attention in 2006. Reputedly, Satter and Cohen have known each other since their teens.

13. Satter left Bayrock at the end of 2007 following public reports of his shady past. (He was also a confidential source for the FBI and Department of Justice starting in 1999 or 2000, and remained so until at least 2009.)

14. But he and Cohen worked together to identify possible deals for the Trump Organization after that date. Satter also is said to have been on the board of Russian real estate developer Sergei Polonskii's Mirax Group from 2008-2011.

15. Polonskii was one of many Moscow developers involved in the enormous, and marginal, Moskva-citi development. In 2011, the Trump Organization looked at two possible sites for building or branding a Trump Tower Moscow in Moskva-citi. capitalgroup.ru/press/media/20…

16. So it seems Satter was the intermediary in this negotiation. (Oleg Deripaska has also had a very major role in the Moskva-citi development, BTW.) The Trump side was not happy with the costs or style of the offer sites, according to the press release on the negotiation.

17. Cohen and Satter kept trying, and by 2015 Trump had signed a letter of intent to put the Trump name on a tower to be built by the Moscow builders IC-Expert. (As @ScottMStedman has shown, this firm is connected to Deripaska.)

18. This is the deal that Satter claimed "would make Trump President." But Cohen claimed it couldn't be financed. Cohen sent an email to Putin spokesman Dmitrii Peskov's general email in January 2016 before, he has said, supposedly giving up on the project.

19. The Agalarov (Trump) Tower. Aras Agalarov established his business, whcih became the Crocus Group, in 1989. At that time, anyone with a little capital and a plane ticket could make money in Russia by going abroad and bringing back consumer goods.

20. Good, let alone stylish, shoes were always very hard to find in the USSR, and Agalarov's business began with shoe imports. From there he expanded into running retail kiosks, then stores, and eventually building his own locations.

21. In 1997 he opened his own luxury apartment building, Agalarov House, in Moscow. moskvadeluxe.ru/zhk-agalarov-h…

22. Given the vagaries of taxes, inflation, and the endemic crime and corruption of Moscow in the 1990s, any Russian who made money wanted to send some of it abroad, and also wanted a foreign education for their children.

23. By 2000, Agalarov had become the best customer of Ike Kaveladze's company-creating business in Delaware, exporting large amounts of money through shell firms. The Agalarovs bought property in New Jersey, and Aras' son and daughter went to school there.

24. It seems likely that the Agalarovs first learned of Trump through this Jersey connection. But Agalarov's Crocus City complex also hosted an annual "millionaires' fair" in Moscow in the 2000s, where Trump Vodka was introduced in 2007. (continued in next thread)