Sater is a Russian emigrant who was jailed for assault in the mid-90s and then pulled together a major securities fraud scheme in which investors lost some $40 million. He clearly did something for the US government which the feds found highly valuable. It seems likely, though not certain, that it involved working with the CIA on something tied to the post-Soviet criminal underworld. Now Bayrock and Trump come into the mix.
According to Sater’s Linkedin profile, Sater joined up with Bayrock in 1999 – in other words, shortly after he became involved with the FBI and CIA. (The Times article says he started up with Bayrock in 2003.) In a deposition, Trump said he first came into contact with Sater and Bayrock in the early 2000s. The Trump SoHo project was announced in 2006 and broke ground in November of that year. In other words, Sater’s involvement with Bayrock started soon after he started working with the FBI and (allegedly) the CIA. Almost the entire period of his work with Trump took place during this period when he was working for the federal government as at least an informant and had his eventual sentencing hanging over his head.
What about Salvatore Lauria, Sater’s accomplice in the securities swindle?
He went to work with Bayrock too and was also closely involved with managing and securing financing for the Trump SoHo project. The Times article I mentioned in my earlier post on Trump SoHo contains this …
Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.
All sounds totally legit, doesn’t it?
But there’s more!, as they say.
Sater’s stint as a “Senior Advisor” to Donald Trump at the Trump Organization began in January of January 2010 and lasted roughly a year. What significance that has in all of this I’m not sure. But here’s the final morsel of information that’s worth knowing for this installment of the story.
How exactly did all of Sater’s secret work and the federal government’s efforts to keep his crimes secret come to light?
During the time Sater was working for Bayrock and Trump he organized what was supposed to be Trump Tower Ft Lauderdale. The project was announced in 2004. People paid in lots of money but the whole thing went bust and Trump finally pulled out of the deal in 2009. Lots of people who’d bought units in the building lost everything. And they sued.
So far it’s your typical Trump story of small investors screwed out of their money and winding up in court. But this time there was a key difference. Someone leaked documents to the plaintiffs detailing Sater’s criminal record and his conviction for securities fraud. The investors argued, quite reasonably, that they never would have invested in Trump Tower Fort Lauderdale if they had known that the key executive organizing the project had been convicted of cheating investors out of $40 million. The federal government had prevented them from learning this information by keeping the securities fraud case secret. This sparked a highly complex and dramatic legal case in which the federal government used all the full force of its need to protect national security in defense of keeping Sater’s crimes secret. For this part of the story, the plaintiffs efforts to loop the federal government into their suit against the organizers of the Florida building project, see this article from The Miami Herald.
No comments:
Post a Comment