Trump, Russia and a Illegal Traitorous Business Partnership.

Trump, Russia and a Shadowy Business Partnership

An insider describes the Bayrock Group, its links to the Trump family and 
its mysterious access to funds. It isn't pretty.
By Timothy L. O'Brien

The special counsel’s investigation of the White House has come more 
sharply into focus.

Robert Mueller is examining whether President Donald Trump obstructed 
justice when he fired James Comey as director of the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation, the Washington Post recently reported. As we've heard for 
months now, there is also a probe of possible collusion between Trump's 
campaign team and the Kremlin to tilt the 2016 election in the president's 
favor.

But the Justice Department inquiry led by Mueller now has added flavors. 
The Post noted that the investigation also includes "suspicious financial 
activity" involving "Russian operatives." The New York Times was more 
specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump 
associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by 
channeling them through offshore accounts.


Trump has repeatedly labeled Comey's and Mueller's investigations "witch 
hunts," and his lawyers have said that the last decade of his tax returns 
(which the president has declined to release) would show that he had no 
income or loans from Russian sources. In May, Trump told NBC that he has 
no property or investments in Russia. "I am not involved in Russia," he 
said.

But that doesn't address national security and other problems that might 
arise for the president if Russia is involved in Trump, either through 
potentially compromising U.S. business relationships or through funds that 
flowed into his wallet years ago. In that context, a troubling history of 
Trump's dealings with Russians exists outside of Russia: in a dormant 
real-estate development firm, the Bayrock Group, which once operated just 
two floors beneath the president's own office in Trump Tower.

Bayrock partnered with the future president and his two eldest children, 
Donald Jr. and Ivanka, on a series of real-estate deals between 2002 and 
about 2011, the most prominent being the troubled Trump Soho hotel and 
condominium in Manhattan.

During the years that Bayrock and Trump did deals together, the company 
was also a bridge between murky European funding and a number of projects 
in the U.S. to which the president once lent his name in exchange for 
handsome fees. Icelandic banks that dealt with Bayrock, for example, were 
easy marks for money launderers and foreign influence, according to 
interviews with government investigators, legislators, and others in 
Reykjavik, Brussels, Paris and London. Trump testified under oath in a 
2007 deposition that Bayrock brought Russian investors to his Trump Tower 
office to discuss deals in Moscow, and said he was pondering investing 
there.

"It's ridiculous that I wouldn't be investing in Russia," Trump said in 
that deposition. "Russia is one of the hottest places in the world for 
investment."

One of Bayrock's principals was a career criminal named Felix Sater who 
had ties to Russian and American organized crime groups. Before linking up 
with the company and with Trump, he had worked as a mob informant for the 
U.S. government, fled to Moscow to avoid criminal charges while boasting 
of his KGB and Kremlin contacts there, and had gone to prison for slashing 
apart another man’s face with a broken cocktail glass.

In a series of interviews and a lawsuit, a former Bayrock insider, Jody 
Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became 
convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering.

Kriss has sued Bayrock, alleging that in addition to laundering money, the 
Bayrock team also skimmed cash from the operation, dodged taxes and 
cheated him out of millions of dollars. Sater and others at Bayrock would 
not comment for this column; in court documents they have contested 
Kriss's charges and describe him, essentially, as a disgruntled employee 
trying to shake them down.


Jody Kriss in a luxury unit in a building he is developing in New 
YorkPhotographer: Jeff Brown for Bloomberg
But Kriss's assertion that Bayrock was a criminal operation during the 
years it partnered with Trump has been deemed plausible enough to earn him 
a court victory: In December, a federal judge in New York said Kriss's 
lawsuit against Bayrock, which he first filed nine years ago, could 
proceed as a racketeering case.

(I have my own history in court with the president. Trump sued me in 2006 
when I worked at the New York Times, alleging that my biography, 
“TrumpNation,” had misrepresented his business record and his wealth. 
Trump lost the suit in 2011; my lawyers deposed him and Sater during the 
litigation. Trump's representatives didn't respond to repeated interview 
requests for this column.)

Trump has said over the years that he barely knows Sater. In fact, Sater — 
who former Bayrock employees say met frequently with Trump in the Trump 
Organization's New York headquarters, once shepherded the president's 
children around Moscow and carried a Trump Organization business card — 
apparently has remained firmly in the orbit of the president and his 
closest advisers.

Sater made the front page of the New York Times in February for his role 
in a failed effort — along with Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen — 
to lobby former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn on a Ukrainian 
peace proposal.

Comey was still Trump's FBI director when he testified before the House 
Intelligence Committee in March about Russian interference in the 2016 
election. During that hearing, Comey was asked if he was "aware of" Felix 
Sater, his criminal history and his business dealings with the Trump 
Organization. Comey declined to comment.

It's unclear whether Sater and Bayrock are part of Mueller's 
investigation. But Mueller has populated his investigative team with 
veteran prosecutors expert in white-collar fraud and Russian-organized-
crime probes. One of them, Andrew Weissmann, once led an FBI team that 
examined financial fraud leading to the demise of Enron. Before that, 
Weissmann was a prosecutor with the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn and 
part of a team that prosecuted Sater and mob associates for investment 
scams in the late 1990s.

However the Mueller probe unfolds, a tour of Trump's partnership with 
Bayrock exposes a number of uncomfortable truths about the president's 
business history, his judgment, and the possible vulnerabilities that his 
past as a freewheeling dealmaker — and his involvement with figures like 
Sater — have visited upon his present as the nation's chief executive.

Zegna Suits and Luxury Cars

Sater was born in the Soviet Union in 1966 and emigrated with his parents 
to the heavily Russian enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, when he was 
about eight years old. He attended Pace University before dropping out 
when he was 18, then found his way to Wall Street where he worked as a 
stockbroker.

His early years on Wall Street, according to the recollections of his one-
time business partner, Salvatore Lauria, were flush. By his mid-20s, Sater 
was collecting expensive watches, spending thousands of dollars on Zegna 
suits and buying luxury cars. That all came to a brief halt in 1993 when 
he was sent to prison for using the stem of a broken margarita glass 
during a bar fight two years earlier to attack another stockbroker; 
Sater’s victim needed 110 stitches to hold his face together.

When Sater emerged from prison 15 months later, he found his way back into 
trouble. With a group that included Lauria (who admits to having had ties 
to organized crime figures and grew up in New York as a close friend of a 
prominent Mafia boss), Sater opened an investment firm on the penthouse 
floor of 40 Wall Street, a Trump-owned building in Manhattan. From there, 
according to federal prosecutors, Sater and his team set about laundering 
money for the mob and fleecing about $40 million from unwitting and 
largely elderly investors, a number of whom were Holocaust survivors.

By the time law enforcement authorities eventually caught on to the 40 
Wall Street operation, Sater had fled to Russia. Lauria visited him there.

Sater "was always hustling and scheming, and his contacts in Russia were 
the same kind of contacts he had in the United States," Lauria wrote in a 
2003 memoir, "The Scorpion and the Frog." "The difference was that in 
Russia his crooked contacts were links between Russian organized crime, 
the Russian military, the KGB, and operatives who played both ways, or 
sometimes three ways."

Sater, who had been charged with racketeering and money laundering by the 
U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn in connection with the 40 Wall Street 
scam, eventually decided to return to America and face those charges. He 
had a card to play, however: his knowledge, gleaned from contacts in 
Russia, about a small stock of Stinger antiaircraft missiles loose on the 
black market in Afghanistan that were of interest to U.S. intelligence 
officials.


"We were hoping for a free ride or a get-out-of-jail-free card for our 
crimes on Wall Street," Lauria wrote of Sater's maneuvering with U.S. 
officials.

Sater told authorities that he could use his Russian contacts to buy the 
Stingers and, according to court filings in Kriss's lawsuit and other 
accounts, a deal was struck in December 1998. Sater pleaded guilty to 
federal fraud charges and then entered into a cooperation agreement with 
the government that sealed court records in the case and allowed his 
sentencing to be postponed for 11 years. (Sater would ultimately only pay 
a $25,000 fine and never go to prison.)

Many years later, as part of her confirmation hearings to become President 
Barack Obama's attorney general, Loretta Lynch would note that the 
cooperation deal she made with Sater when she was the U.S. attorney in 
Brooklyn lasted for a decade — from 1998 to 2008 — and that Sater gave the 
government "information crucial to national security and the conviction of 
over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive 
financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra."

At some point after becoming an informant, Sater also recast himself as a 
real-estate savant. He made his way to a Manhattan real-estate investment 
firm, APC Realty, where he raised money for deals and where he met Kriss 
in 2000.

Kriss, a native of Miami and a business graduate of the Wharton School at 
the University of Pennsylvania, was an aspiring real-estate developer who 
was in his early 20s when they met. He says he was initially captivated by 
Sater.

“Felix knew how to be charming and he knew how to be brutally nasty,” says 
Kriss. “He has a talent for drawing people in. He has charm and charisma. 
But that’s what con men do.”

After APC began to fall apart in 2002, Kriss decided to strike out on his 
own back home in Miami, doing real-estate deals. Sater made his way to a 
small Hong Kong investment bank that used him as a New York-based 
rainmaker for real-estate deals.

In addition to his new life as a real-estate investor and government 
informant, Sater owned a comfortable home in Sands Point, Long Island, a 
toney New York suburb that was a setting for “The Great Gatsby.” He also 
had a wife and three daughters and was a member of an Orthodox synagogue 
in neighboring Port Washington. On one occasion Sater brought his rabbi 
with him to meet U.S. intelligence officials in New York, where, the rabbi 
said, agents praised Sater's service to the country.

When Sater received a community service award at his synagogue on another 
occasion, a band played "Hail to the Chief." Sater gave an acceptance 
speech in which he noted that he was "not a very religious person" but 
that his goal in life was to "repair the world or make it a better place."

'Air of Success'

About a year after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Sater joined 
Bayrock, a company that marketed itself as a property developer and had 
opened Manhattan offices on the 24th floor of a well-known building at 725 
Fifth Avenue: Trump Tower.

In late 2002, Sater phoned Kriss and invited him to consult at Bayrock, 
bragging about a deep-pocketed investor, Tevfik Arif, who was partnering 
with him in search of bigger deals.

Arif, born in Kazakhstan, was a former Soviet official who had relocated 
to Turkey to make his fortune. He ran several upscale, seaside hotels 
there that catered almost exclusively to Russians, according to Kriss, and 
he had also redeveloped a shopping center in Brooklyn. At one point in his 
post-Soviet years, Arif also reportedly took over a former Kazakh state-
owned chromium producer with his brother.

Like Sater, Arif had a home in Sands Point and Kriss says that Arif 
brought his children there from Turkey to learn English. (Arif's 
representatives declined to respond to a list of questions about his 
business history, including how he met Sater and brought him to Bayrock, 
citing ongoing litigation.)

Bayrock was initially funded, in part, with a $10 million investment 
transferred to the firm by Arif's brother in Russia, who, according to 
Kriss's lawsuit, was able to tap into the cash reserves of a Kazakh 
chromium refinery. (A spokeswoman for Arif declined to comment on that 
allegation.)

A marketing document Bayrock once circulated to prospective investors 
noted that Alexander Mashkevich, an oligarch born in the former Soviet 
Union, was one of Bayrock's primary sources of funding. Mashkevich's firm, 
the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation, was based in Kazakhstan and 
elsewhere and had interests in chromium, aluminum, coal, construction, and 
banking. (A person close to Mashkevich, who requested anonymity because of 
the Kriss-Bayrock litigation, said Mashkevich never invested in Bayrock.)

Bayrock never seemed to be short of money, however. According to Kriss’s 
lawsuit, the team running the little development firm in Trump Tower could 
locate funds "month after month, for two years, in fact more frequently, 
whenever Bayrock ran out of cash." If times got tight, Bayrock's owners 
would "magically show up with a wire from 'somewhere' just large enough to 
keep the company going."

Kriss says that Sater and Arif wooed him to Bayrock by offering him 10 
percent of the firm's profits. Bayrock’s Trump Tower offices gave “an air 
of success to it,” Kriss says. Bayrock also gave Kriss, then 28 years old, 
the opportunity to work with Trump.

It was Sater who initially developed the relationship with Trump, 
according to Kriss and court records from Trump's lawsuit against me. 
Sater had made the acquaintance of three Trump Organization executives who 
then introduced him to their boss. When the Bayrock team met Trump in 
2002, the future president was enduring a long stretch in the financial 
wilderness, having narrowly escaped personal bankruptcy in the early 
1990s.

He eventually emerged from that mess as a pariah among big banks. He was 
also a determined survivor and tireless self-promoter and he parlayed 
those skills into recreating himself as a branding machine and golf course 
developer in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Kriss says that it was Arif and Sater who pitched the future president on 
the idea of launching an international chain of Trump-branded, mixed-use 
hotels and condominiums. And Bayrock got to Trump at a time when his 
“brand” could help get a little extra attention for a condo project, but 
didn’t amount to much more than that.

“Trump was trying to build his brand and Bayrock was trying to market it,” 
Kriss recalls. “It wasn’t clear who needed each other more. This was 
before the show, remember.”

The “show,” of course, was “The Apprentice.” It aired for the first time 
on Jan. 8, 2004, and became a sensation that vaulted Trump into reality TV 
stardom. In the real world, Trump's casinos were faltering. But on reality 
TV, Trump posed as a successful leader and dealmaker who embodied a 
certain kind of entrepreneurial flair and over-the-top billionairedom — an 
impression that stuck with tens of millions of TV viewers.

The popularity of "The Apprentice" also gave the Bayrock-Trump partnership 
added zing.

“That put Bayrock in a great position once the show debuted,” Kriss says. 
“The show did it for Trump, man. Nobody was interested in licensing his 
name before that.”

The hook at Bayrock, for Trump, was an 18 percent equity stake in what 
became the Trump Soho hotel, a steady stream of management fees on all 
Bayrock projects and the ability to plaster his name on properties without 
having to invest a single dollar of his own.


The Trump SoHoPhotographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
It’s not clear how carefully Trump vetted his Bayrock partners. But his 
lack of concern about their backgrounds — and the potential risk to his 
own reputation from dealing with them — was part of a pattern. In Atlantic 
City, he had partnered with men with organized crime ties. Later, he and 
his children struck deals in Brazil and Azerbaijan with partners who had 
murky backgrounds or unusual legal entanglements.

Sater said in court filings that he disclosed his securities fraud 
conviction to members of the Trump Organization. He assumed they had told 
Trump, but he wasn't sure.

"It's not very hard to get connected to Donald if you make it known that 
you have a lot of money and you want to do deals and you want to put his 
name on it," Abe Wallach, who was the future president's right-hand man at 
the Trump Organization from 1990 to about 2002, told me in an interview. 
"Donald doesn't do due diligence. He relies on his gut and whether he 
thinks you have good genes."

Given Arif's halting English, it was Sater and Kriss who interacted most 
frequently with the Trump family—and Sater the most often with Trump 
himself. Kriss says that most of his own contacts were with the elder 
Trump children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, and included drafting contracts and 
occasional nights on the town.

While Trump’s kids were involved in the back-and-forth with Bayrock, it 
was Trump himself who always had the final say.

“Donald was always in charge,” says Kriss. “Donald had to agree to every 
term of every deal and had to sign off on everything. Nothing happened 
unless he said it was okay to do it. Even if Donald Jr., shook your hand 
on a deal, he came back downstairs to renegotiate if his father told him 
to.”

The Trumps, Kriss says, saw Sater "frequently" and valued the relationship 
because “Felix demonstrated that he was loyal to them.” He says that at 
one point Sater was meeting with the future president in his Trump Tower 
office multiple times a week. Sater, according to a later court 
deposition, said that his business conversations with Trump in that office 
were wide-ranging and frequent — “on a constant basis."

The pair had what Sater described as "real-estate conversations," and they 
talked about "gathering intelligence, gathering know-how, general market 
discussions," and also chatted about using Sater's Russian connections to 
build a "high-rise, center of Moscow” that would be a “great opportunity, 
megafinancial home run."

Although Sater socialized with Trump, "I wouldn't call him my friend," he 
said in the 2008 deposition. Still, Sater said he traveled with Trump to 
look at deals and was proud of Bayrock's relationship with the famous 
developer. "Anybody can come in and build a tower," he said. "I can build 
a Trump Tower because of my relationship with Trump."

Bayrock and the Trumps then began laying the groundwork for domestic and 
international hotel-condo projects, eventually exploring deals in Turkey, 
Poland and Ukraine. Sater escorted Ivanka and Don Jr. on a trip to Moscow, 
where they looked at land for a Trump-branded hotel.

None of those overseas projects got past the planning stages. In the U.S., 
Bayrock and Trump projects moved forward haltingly.

In Phoenix, a one-story mall that Bayrock bought out of bankruptcy was 
meant to be the site of a Trump-branded tower. It became ensnared in 
zoning debates and then the national real-estate downturn and never got 
built.

Sater's dealings in Phoenix later landed him in court with a local 
developer who had invested in the Phoenix project, Ernest Mennes. Mennes 
said in a lawsuit that when he threatened to reveal Sater's criminal 
record, Sater told him that he would have a cousin "electrically shock Mr. 
Mennes’ testicles, cut off Mr. Mennes’ legs, and leave Mr. Mennes dead in 
the trunk of his car."

In Mennes's suit against Bayrock and Sater, he alleged that Sater also 
skimmed money from the Phoenix development. Bayrock and Sater settled the 
suit (which was later sealed and its terms left undisclosed; Sater's 
lawyer, in an interview with ABC News, denied Mennes's allegations).

The next project Trump and Bayrock pursued was the Trump International 
Hotel and Tower, a mixed-use hotel and condominium in Fort Lauderdale, 
Florida. Announced in 2005, it later went into foreclosure.

The third and final major project Bayrock and Trump worked on together was 
their most high-profile effort, the 46-story Trump Soho hotel in lower 
Manhattan.

Trump, Sater and Arif were all photographed together at a splashy launch 
party for the Trump Soho in 2007. Trump also pitched the Trump Soho on an 
episode of "The Apprentice," promising that "this brilliant, $370 million 
work of art will be an awe-inspiring masterpiece."

Helping Trump and Bayrock fund that masterpiece was a fresh influx of 
money from an Icelandic investment bank called the FL Group. Sater and 
Lauria, his longtime mob associate, had jointly recruited FL, introducing 
the firm to Bayrock and the Trump Organization. (I’ll have more on the FL 
Group and Bayrock in a future column; the firm's former leaders, one of 
whom was later convicted of tax and accounting fraud, declined to comment 
or did not respond to interview requests for this column.)

Yet again, the Trump Organization — even though it signed off on the FL 
investment — appeared to care little about vetting a firm that came into 
the partnership through Sater. FL operated in a country with a porous, 
vulnerable banking system, and some investigators who scrutinized other 
Icelandic banks at the time said they suspected those banks of being 
conduits — unwitting or otherwise — for dirty funds from outside Iceland. 
(The FL Group collapsed a little over a year after it invested in Bayrock. 
The firm itself was never prosecuted; the leaders of a number of other 
Icelandic banks were prosecuted or jailed for crimes including money 
laundering). 

Kriss said in an interview that an Icelandic competitor of the FL Group 
also contacted him to invest in Bayrock. When he took that offer to Sater 
and Arif they told him, he says, that the money behind Icelandic banks 
“was mostly Russian” — and that they had to take FL’s funds for deals they 
were doing with Trump because the investment firm was “closer to Putin."

“I thought it was a lie or a joke when they said Putin,” Kriss recalls. “I 
didn’t know how to make sense of it at all.”

(Kriss says he doesn't have financial records showing that Russian 
President Vladimir Putin had a connection to the FL Group and that his own 
knowledge is purely anecdotal. A Kremlin spokesman said via email that 
Putin had no connection to the FL Group or Bayrock.)

'Somebody Said That He Is in the Mafia'

Kriss says that in the wake of the FL deal he was owed a payout that could 
have ranged from about $4 million to $10 million, but that Bayrock 
reneged. When he persisted, he claims, Sater threatened him.

So Kriss says he accepted a $500,000 payment instead and then eventually 
quit. Sater, as it turns out, didn’t have much time left at Bayrock 
either.

In December 2007, the New York Times published an article detailing some 
of Sater’s past run-ins with the law and some of his ties to organized 
crime (the article also noted that Sater had begun using “Satter” as an 
alternate spelling for his last name so he could try to “distance himself 
from his past” if people Googled him).

Two days after the Times story ran, Trump sat for a deposition with my 
attorneys as part of the libel lawsuit he had filed against me for 
“TrumpNation.” They asked him whether he planned to sever his relationship 
with Sater because of Sater's organized crime ties. Trump said he hadn't 
made up his mind.

"Have you previously associated with people you knew were members of 
organized crime?" one of my lawyers asked.

"No, I haven't," Trump responded. "And it's hard to overly blame Bayrock. 
Things like that can happen. But I want to see what action Bayrock takes 
before I make a decision." (In fact, Trump had partnered in the past in 
Atlantic City's real-estate business with men he knew were mobbed up.)

Whenever he was asked in later years about his relationship with Sater, 
Trump routinely misrepresented it as distant. In a 2013 deposition taken 
as part of litigation surrounding Trump and Bayrock’s failed Fort 
Lauderdale project, Trump was asked again about his partnership with 
Sater.

"He was supposedly very close to the government of the United States as a 
witness or something," Trump said. "I don't think he was connected to the 
Mafia. He got into trouble because he got into a barroom fight."

"I don't know him very well," Trump added, saying that he hadn't conversed 
very often with Sater. "If he were sitting in the room right now I really 
wouldn't know what he looked like."

Trump also said that he didn't think that questions about Sater’s 
background meant that he should have ended his business partnership with 
him: “Somebody said that he is in the Mafia. What am I going to do?”

Shortly after my lawyers asked Trump about Sater, Bayrock began discussing 
the best way for him to resign, according to company email and court 
records. By 2008, Sater had left the firm.

The Trump Soho ended in failure. It opened in 2010, but many units failed 
to sell and early condo purchasers sued Bayrock and the Trumps. Three 
years later, the Trump Soho went into foreclosure with most of its units 
still unsold, and a new company took control of the property. Bayrock 
hasn’t done another deal since then. (A spokeswoman for Bayrock attributed 
the failures of the Trump partnerships to fallout from the 2008 financial 
meltdown.)

'He Seems to Have Unlimited Funds'

After Kriss left Bayrock, he set up his own development firm in New York 
and then sued Sater, Arif, Trump and Bayrock in Delaware in 2008, alleging 
that Bayrock was a criminal enterprise and demanding to be paid in full 
for his work there.

When the case moved to New York in 2010, it came with a twist. Sater had 
left a copy of his cooperation deal with the government – the one dating 
back to his Stinger missile and mob informant days – on the hard drive of 
his Bayrock computer. A Bayrock employee leaked it to Kriss’s attorney, 
who promptly filed it as an exhibit in court.

Trump was eventually dropped from the case and Sater began carpet-bombing 
Kriss with his own lawsuits, ultimately filing several separate actions 
that claimed, among other things, that Kriss has used the courts to 
prosecute him maliciously.

Sater also apparently kept busy outside of the courtroom.

Kriss says that about three years ago he started receiving threatening 
email from websites carrying versions of his name (“JKrissInfo.com,” for 
example). He soon discovered there were hundreds of other new websites 
that also contained false, disparaging information about him.

Kriss sued the anonymous authors of the websites for defamation and when 
the court ruled in his favor he was able to get a large portion of the 
sites delisted from Google. He says he also was able to use the court 
order to untangle the provenance of the websites, discovering that their 
registration tracked back to Sater’s home address in Sands Point.

Kriss says that goons once showed up at real-estate developments he was 
overseeing in Brooklyn, asking his employees if they knew the true story 
about their boss. Waves of letters questioning his bona fides have arrived 
at his office and in the mailboxes of every resident in two separate 
buildings where Kriss kept apartments.

Kriss says investors in his new company, East River Partners, have stood 
by him, but he's worried that Sater's digital vendetta may be hard to 
overcome. His new lawyer, Bradley D. Simon, says that he's mystified by 
how Sater has managed to stay afloat all these years.

“Sater was a cooperating witness for the Eastern District of New York and 
he continued going on a crime rampage,” says Simon. “He’s filed all kinds 
of frivolous lawsuits, but that’s what he does. He seems to have unlimited 
funds.”


MuellerPhotographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images
For his part, Sater continues to wear many hats. A couple of years after 
he left Bayrock, the Trump Organization hired him briefly as a consultant 
to prospect for real-estate deals, giving him company business cards with 
his name engraved on them.

More recently, Sater got enmeshed in litigation again, this time around 
the sale of an Ohio shopping mall — and the alleged disappearance of tens 
of millions of dollars — in a court case that was settled in 2013.


Sater has also entered into a war of words with his former Bayrock 
partner, Tevfik Arif. Sater claims, according to a recent article in the 
Wall Street Journal, that Arif owes him money — and that if he isn't paid 
he'll publicize what he describes as Arif's ties to organized crime and to 
tainted dealings in Kazakhstan’s metals business. (A Bayrock spokeswoman 
says that Sater's claims about Arif are baseless.)

Meanwhile, Trump is mired in a probe that now pivots off sensitive topics 
for him and his family: their money, their deals and Russia – all of which 
will test his promise to testify under oath to Mueller and his 
investigators.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial 
board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.