House of Trump, House of Putin2 by Craig Unger

Author:Craig Unger [Unger, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

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On April 16, 2013, about two months after Mikhailov’s fete in Moscow, police burst into an apartment on the sixty-third floor of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, just three floors below Donald Trump’s penthouse, and rounded up suspects who were part of two gambling rings46 that were allegedly run by Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, a longtime associate of Mogilevich, Mikhailov, and other leaders of Solntsevo, from Uzbekistan.

Widely known as Taiwanchik, a diminutive that referred to his Asian facial features, Tokhtakhounov, according to a racketeering and money-laundering indictment before the Southern District of New York, had been designated as a vor, and, “as a Vor, Tokhtakhounov had substantial influence in the criminal underworld and offered assistance to and protection” to the Russian Mafia.47 In 2011, Tokhtakhounov had made the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list—at number five, he was two slots behind Semion Mogilevich.

But Tokhtakhounov told the New York Times that he was innocent of all wrongdoing.48 “I am not bad, like you think,” he said. “I am not the Mafia, I am not a bandit.”

Tokhtakhounov likely first developed ties to key figures in the Russian underworld when he was just a young boy growing up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, through Mikhail Chernoy,49 the metals-oligarch-in-waiting, who was a classmate of his younger brother and bestowed the nickname “Taiwanchik” on Tokhtakhounov. By the eighties, he had established good relations with Sergei Mikhailov, Vyacheslav Ivankov, and Anton Malevsky, leader of the Izmaylovskaya Organized Crime Group,50 who appears to have been the source of the mysterious $350,000 check to Michael Cohen from Russian hockey player Vladimir Malakhov.51

In the early nineties, Tokhtakhounov represented Ivankov’s interests in Germany, lived the high life with a spectacular nine-million-euro apartment in Paris’s chic Sixteenth Arrondissement,52 and had four villas in Italy,53 all the while traveling the world as a cardsharp engaging in high-stakes gambling and money laundering. Then, in 2002, Tokhtakhounov allegedly fixed an ice-dancing competition at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.54

And now, in 2013, Tokhtakhounov was named as the ringleader in an indictment charging thirty-four members and associates of two Russian-American organized crime families—the Taiwanchik-Trincher organization, based in New York, Kiev, and Moscow, and the Nahmad-Trincher organization, based in Los Angeles and New York—with operating international sports books that laundered more than $100 million out of the former Soviet Union, through shell companies in Cyprus, and funneled it into investments in the United States in an enterprise that was based in Trump Tower. The entire operation, prosecutors say, was working under the protection of Tokhtakhounov. In a single two-month stretch, according to the federal indictment, the money launderers paid Tokhtakhounov $10 million.55

This was no ordinary gambling bust. First of all, the apartment in question, 63A-B, was one of the most sought-after units in the building and was so highly prized that Trump himself had bought it when the building was completed in 1983.56 In 1994, however, he personally sold it to Oleg Boyko, an oligarch who was sometimes described as Yeltsin’s personal banker.57

In May 2009, Boyko sold his Trump

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