Donald Trump
To all evidence, Donald Trump was the Manchurian Candidate. Trump has a variety of prior connections with Russian interests. He has said strangely friendly things about Russia, and early on in 2015 the Russians had clearly endorsed him as their preferred candidate.
The term “Manchurian Candidate” has evolved into common day political usage to refer to someone who was secretly working for an opposing hostile interest. Salman Rushdie proposed on the HBO show “Real Time with Bill Maher” a theory he had heard that Republican campaigner Donald Trump was in fact a manchurian candidate, planted by the Democrats to split apart the Republican Party. A number of other pundits and think-piece artists have minded the same vein of pop-culture reference, but none agree precisely how Trump fulfilled that role.
Starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, Janet Leigh, and Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate [United Artists, 1962] was a bleak, mordant spy thriller. A US Army platoon, captured in the Korean conflict, was whisked to Manchuria for three nightmarish days of brainwashing. Returned to the United States as war heroes, one of them - Raymond Shaw, with a Medal of Honor - was used by his mother and the Communists to promote her Joe McCarthy-like husband's political career. Raymond’s trigger mechanism was the Queen of Diamonds. The Denzel Washington version of the Manchurian Candidate [Paramount, c2004] was an homage to the first verion. During the first Gulf War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw saves his fellow soldiers. Using the incident for political gain, Shaw eventually becomes a vice-presidential nominee, for the the Manchurian Global corporation.
Human rights lawyer Scott Horton reported "Among the powerful facts that DNI missed were a series of very deep studies published in the [Financial Times] that examined the structure and history of several major Trump real estate projects from the last decade—the period after his seventh bankruptcy and the cancellation of all his bank lines of credit. ... The money to build these projects flowed almost entirely from Russian sources. In other words, after his business crashed, Trump was floated and made to appear to operate a successful business enterprise through the infusion of hundreds in millions of cash from dark Russian sources. He was their man.
"... his real estate deals were used to hide not just an infusion of capital from Russia and former Soviet states, but to launder hundreds of millions looted by oligarchs. All Trump had to do was close his eyes to the source of the money, and suddenly empty apartments were going for top dollar.... real estate has an arbitrary value. was that apartment worth $1 million? Two million? Why not $3 million for a buyer who really wants it? When the whole transaction was just one LLC with undisclosed ownership paying another LLC with undisclosed ownership, it’s even neater than hiding the money in an offshore account."
Donald Trump used the mob-controlled concrete company S&A Concrete to build Trump Plaza condos. The company used underpaid undocumented Polish workers, most of whom entered the country illegally, lacked hard hats, and slept on the site. Trump avoided labor troubles, like picketing and strikes, and job safety inspections. But Trump and his associates were found guilty in 1991 of conspiring to avoid paying pension and welfare fund contributions.
Michael Cohen joined the Trump Organization in 2006, and eventually became Trump's personal lawyer, a role once occupied by Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy's heavy-lidded hatchet man. Glenn Simpson, the private investigator who was hired to examine Trump's Russia connections during the 2016 election, testified in November 2017 before the House Intelligence Committee that Cohen "had a lot of connections to the former Soviet Union, and that he seemed to have associations with organized crime figures in New York and Florida – Russian organized crime figures". During the 2016 campaign, "One of the things that we learned that caught my interest," Simpson testified, "serious questions about Donald Trump's activities in Russia and the former Soviet Union went to Michael Cohen, and that he was the only person who had information on that subject or was in a position to answer those questions." Cohen was involved in the negotiation of Trump Organization business deals with oligarchs in Russia and Kazakhstan. Before he connected with Trump, Cohen had family ties to the Russian underworld. His uncle, Morton Levine, ran the El Caribe Country Club, a Brooklyn "social club" that was a popular watering hole for Italian and Russian gangsters in the 1980s and 1990s. Cohen and his siblings all had ownership stakes in the club. The club also served as the headquarters of Boris Nayfeld, once the most feared Russian crime boss in the US (though Levine himself was never accused of wrongdoing.) Cohen was a longtime friend of Trump business associate Felix Sater, who pleaded guilty to his involvement in a money-laundering scheme with the Russian mob before helping develop the Trump SoHo hotel. According to the FBI, Sater’s father was a right-hand man of Russian mafia chieftain Semion Mogilevich, considered to be the “boss of bosses” overseeing Russian organized crime worldwide.
The relationship beteen Donald Trump and Felix Sater represented a rather direct link between the presidential candidate and Russian Organized Crime. The Russian émigré — a twice-convicted felon with ties to the Mafia — appeared in photos with Trump, and carried a Trump Organization business card with the title “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.” Trump confused when asked under oath in a 2013 about his relationship to the Russian émigré.
Sater served prison time for a grisly 1991 assault at the El Rio Grande restaurant and bar in New York. According to court documents, Sater allegedly told a man at the bar, “I’ll kill you. I’ll rip your f****** head off and stick it down your throat.” Sater then allegedly grabbed a frozen margarita from the bar, flung the contents in the air, smashed the glass on the bar, and stabbed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, lacerating face and neck and severing nerves. He was convicted of first degree assault.
Sater emailed Cohen in November 2015. "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected. We both know no one else knows how to pull this off without stupidity or greed getting in the way. I know how to play it and we will get this done. Buddy our boy can become President of the USA and we can engineer. I will get all of Putins team to buy in on this."
Bayrock Group LLC was a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. Sater was a top Bayrock executive in the Bayrock Group, which was headquartered in Trump Tower. The founding chairman of Bayrock was Tevfik Arif, who has reputed Russian organized crime ties. In 2010 he was charged in Turkey for smuggling underage girls into the country for prostitution. Another principal in the deal was Russian émigré Tamir Sapir, who also lives in Trump Tower. Sapir’s executive vice president and top aide, Fred Contini, pled guilty in 2004 to “participating in a racketeering conspiracy with the Gambino crime family for 13 years.”
Sater pled guilty in 1998 to one count of racketeering for his role in a $40 million stock fraud scheme involving the Genovese and Bonanno crime families. The connection to Felix Sater dated to the early 2000s. After Sater's criminal history and past ties to organized crime came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater. Less than three years later, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role that came with the title of senior adviser to Donald Trump.
Donald J. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, FL, describes itself as “one of the most highly regarded private clubs in the world”. In all but a handful of cases, Mar-a-Lago sought to fill the jobs with hundreds of foreign guest workers from Romania and other countries. Trump uses a recruiter based in upstate New York, Peter Petrina, to find foreign workers for his resorts, golf clubs and vineyard. Petrina was of Romanian descent and has an office in Romania.
Trump pursued more than 500 visas for foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago since 2010, while hundreds of domestic applicants failed to get the same jobs. Guest workers can be attractive to employers because they are essentially a captive work force, since they can work only for the company that sponsored the visa.
Louise I. Shelley presciently noted in 1999 that " ... the increasing wealth and power of transnational organized crime groups has the potential to undermine even the strongest democracies and impede the transition to democracy in transitional countries. The coordinated international effort needed to combat transnational organized crime does not presently exist. This situation may usher in a new form of authoritarianism with severe long-term consequences for much of the world's citizenry."
In an interview Sunday with ABC’s This Week, Trump commended campaign manager Corey Lewandowski for his “spirit” after the aide was caught on camera grabbing a protester by the collar at a weekend rally in Arizona. In Redstate, streiff wrote on 22 March 2016 that "This kind of vicious, suck-up-kick-down toady was attracted to Trump the way lint was attracted to Velcro. ... This was a warning about the people a Trump administration would attract and the way a Trump administration would operate. This was your preview of a Trump administration."
Sunny Isles Beach condominium towers drew in new moneyed Russians all too eager to pay millions. Kenneth McCallion, a former prosecutor who tracked the flows of Russian criminal money into Trump's properties, told Seth Hettena, "Trump's genius – or evil genius – was, instead of Russian criminal money being passive, incidental income, it became a central part of his business plan." McCallion continued, "It's not called 'Little Moscow' for nothing. The street signs are in Russian. But his towers there were built specifically for the Russian middle-class criminal."
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