More TPM must read - "Follow The Money, Donald Trump Edition"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/follow-the-money--4

By JOSH MARSHALL Published MARCH 16, 2017, 3:00 PM EDT

There's a very good story out today from Bloomberg chronicling the flow of money from the former Soviet Union into real estate ventures built by or licensed with the name of Donald Trump. In this case most of what we are talking about is not investment in projects or loans to fund them but the purchase of individual apartments units - though sometimes in bulk - in Trump branded or owned buildings. This is a story we and others have told you. But this new article firms the story up considerably with a new level of detail.

If you think about the luxury apartment business it works something like this. You need to get together a substantial sum of money to fund the construction of your building. Then you sell the individual units which are probably part of a condo or coop. If you're lucky, you make a tidy profit on the difference between the cost of the building and the proceeds from the sales. (You might also choose to retain ownership of the building and rent the units.) For Trump, in many cases he also has the contract to manage the building indefinitely. For our purposes the key point is that both the investment side of the equation and the purchase of the units are critical parts of the business equation. If you can't sell the units quickly enough or for enough money, the whole business enterprise can fall apart.

As we've discussed before, at some point in the earliest years of the new century Trump properties became a go-to place for people from the former Soviet Union to buy real estate. Some were citizens of those countries, others were American immigrants. We've already noted how Trump lawyer Michael Cohen first came to Trump's attention because he and his extended family from Ukraine was buying up a lot of units in Trump properties in New York and Florida. What this article makes clear is that there were a lot of Michael Cohen type families buying Trump properties in bulk. At least for this part of the tale, Cohen's is a microcosm of this larger story.

A few nuggets.

“We had big buyers from Russia and Ukraine and Kazakhstan,” says Debra Stotts, a sales agent who filled up the tower. The very top floors went unsold for years, but a third of units sold on floors 76 through 83 by 2004 involved people or limited liability companies connected to Russia and neighboring states, a Bloomberg investigation shows.

Then there's this ...

Sam Kislin, a Ukrainian immigrant, issued mortgages to buyers of multimillion-dollar apartments in World Tower. It’s highly unusual for individuals to issue formal mortgages for U.S. luxury real estate, and the tower loans are the only ones Kislin ever made in New York, public records show.
Almost two decades earlier, Kislin had sold Trump about 200 televisions on credit. “I gave him 30 days, and in exactly 30 days he paid me back,” says Kislin, now 82. “He never gave me any trouble.” He says the televisions were for the Commodore Hotel, which Trump had bought in 1976 with Hyatt Corp.

SNIP - LOTS more

last paragraph

I don't deny that we may eventually find a needle in this haystack. There are parts of the story which remain difficult to piece together based on what I've called this "innocent explanation." There are so many sleazy characters, so many connections to figures in the Russian criminal underworld that I'm sure there are at least a few sub-needles there. But haystack itself is a very, very big story.