The Plot to Hack America

He landed in New York in 1976, where he drove a cab for three years before borrowing $10,000 against his taxi medallion to open a small electronics store. The store, at 200 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron neighborhood, became a wholesale outlet for Soviet diplomats, K.G.B. agents and Politburo members.²⁰

Tamir Sapir’s son-in-law, Rotem Rosen, was also involved in the SoHo project. Ben Schreckinger wrote in Politico:

During the Cold War, Tamir Sapir, an émigré from the Soviet Union, sold electronics to KGB agents from a storefront in Manhattan. Alex Sapir’s business partner Rotem Rosen is a former lieutenant of the Soviet-born Israeli billionaire Lev Leviev, an oligarch with longstanding ties to Vladimir Putin who counts the Russian president as a “true friend.”²¹

From the start, Trump SoHo had a hard time attracting buyers, in part because zoning laws restricted owners to living in the units 120 days of the year. When the owners weren’t there, units would be used as hotel rooms and owners would share part of the profit. It was soon revealed, however, that potential buyers were told inflated estimates of the number of units sold. Within months of the opening, a group of condo buyers filed a lawsuit alleging fraud against Trump, the Bayrock Group, and the Sapir Organization. According to Reuters:

The complaint said the defendants in sales pitches and to the media during the first eighteen months of marketing advertised that the building was “30, 40, 50, 60 percent or more sold.” Instead, when the offering plan went effective, buyers learned that just 62 of the 391 units, or 16 percent, had been sold, the complaint said. A minimum of 15 percent was needed for the plan to be effective.²² Then, in November 2011, Trump agreed to a settlement, without admitting wrongdoing. The buyers received 90 percent of their deposits. Mike McIntire of The New York Times writes:

The backdrop to that unusual denouement was a gathering legal storm that threatened to cast a harsh light on how he did business. Besides the fraud accusations, a separate lawsuit claimed that Trump SoHo was developed with the undisclosed involvement of convicted felons and financing from questionable sources in Russia and Kazakhstan. And hovering over it all was a criminal investigation, previously unreported, by the Manhattan district attorney into whether the fraud alleged by the condo buyers broke any laws, according to documents and interviews with five people familiar with it. The buyers initially helped in the investigation, but as part of their lawsuit settlement, they had to notify prosecutors that they no longer wished to do so. The criminal case was eventually closed.²³

The property was foreclosed on and put up for sale in 2014.²⁴

The Americans in the Pocket

Once Trump took on the Presidential campaign he also managed to acquire the most controversial of all the Putin-associated characters: Paul Manafort.

Before becoming Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort was known as the leader of the “Torturer’s lobby” while working for the law firm of Black, Manafort Stone & Kelly.²⁵ They represented some of the worst dictators in the world including Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, The Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos, and the brutal Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi. Manafort has also been an advisor to the Trump kingdom since the mid-1980s.