Investigative journalist Craig Unger holds nothing back in his new book House of Putin, House of Trump. In the book, Unger finds that Trump was targeted by the Russian mob long ago, as far back as 1984. This is not the first time I have heard these allegations, having seen them in Vanity Fair and New York magazine. It seems difficult to argue that these allegations aren’t based on solid fact. Transcript per Rawstory
“I go back nearly 40 years, and I see essentially the greatest intelligence operation of our times,” Unger said. “It started off in 1984 with a man who has ties to the Russian mafia, and he meets with Donald Trump in the Trump Tower, the supreme moment of Donald Trump becoming a master of real estate in the United States — and what we end up seeing is Trump Tower become sort of a cathedral of money laundering.”
The mob associate paid $6 Million in cash for five units. Paying cash for real estate ought to have been a giant tip that something is wrong. Any one time payment on real estate is usually one of the worst investments one can make, most of the time it is far better to pay the interest on a bank note and leave the lump sum making a better rate invested elsewhere. It is a mob move, because often they cannot “invest” their money in anything that would involve a bank. Unger tracked hundreds of similar transactions over the decades.
Not only did Trump get cash payments up front, but he was one of the first two high-end developers to allow anonymous purchases:
“That sets off a pattern that goes on for the next 30 years or so, in which over 1,300 condos are sold in what appears to be money laundering,” Unger said. “They have two characteristics. One, they are all cash purchases. Two, they are shell purchases, they’re anonymous purchases. The records don’t show who the true owners are.”
To make things worse, Unger notes that for all practical purposes, there’s no functional difference between the original Russian mob/oligarchs and Putin’s intelligence services. They are now essentially one in the same.
“I can’t get inside Donald Trump’s mind, but he’s meeting with this guy,” Unger said. “We know there are about 1,300 other operations in which he’s profiting heavily from that. If he can go through that and doesn’t figure that out, he’s either inexplicably stupid or there is a legal concept of willful blindness, and perhaps that’s what’s going on.”
I don’t think Trump is so naive or stupid as to not know exactly what was happening. I suspect it is obvious that when it comes to money, Trump simply doesn’t care about the origin, only that it ends up with him.
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