Last November, I wrote The Odd Chabad Connection Between Putin and Trump and it’s time to revisit the piece in light of recent events. Presumably you’ve seen the hilarious video of Michael Cohen smoking cigars with sketchy looking gangster types that was set to the theme song of The Sopranos.
omg this is amazing pic.twitter.com/TOlAIKvPl5
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) April 14, 2018
While that video is funny, it’s also real. The man in the blue suit is Rotem Rosen, who was the main character in my November piece. While Cohen and Rosen were commiserating over cigars, Cohen was supposed to be in court. Judge Kimba Wood was reportedly displeased by his absence.
On an obvious level, it should surprise no one that Rosen and Cohen are friends. Both of them are honorary members of the Trump family. But, on a different level, the media really should be reporting on the significance of this relationship.
I am going to cite from my previous article on this rather than write it all out again, but you should also reference this article from Ben Schreckinger on how Putin enlisted two Jewish oligarchs back in 1999 to help him build up his political power.
Let’s begin here:
Starting in 1999, [Vladimir] Putin enlisted two of his closest confidants, the oligarchs Lev Leviev and Roman Abramovich, who would go on to become Chabad’s biggest patrons worldwide, to create the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as “Putin’s rabbi.”
There’s a good chance that if you know of Roman Abramovich, you know him as the owner of the Chelsea Football Club of the English Premier League. You may not know that he was a victor (along with Paul Manafort’s patron Oleg Deripaska) in the bloody aluminum wars of the 1990s, or that he was reportedly the person who convinced Boris Yeltsin that Putin would be a proper successor. You probably are not aware that Ivanka Trump is very close friends with Abramovich’s wife, Dasha Zhukova, with whom she recently attended the U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens. Zhukova reportedly attended the inauguration as Ivanka’s personal guest.
It takes a little more doing to understand the Trump family’s connections to Lev Leviev. To begin with, we need to go back to Bayrock, the company that Donald Trump teamed up with to build his Trump Soho project. There were three main actors in that enterprise. One was convicted mob associate and murky FBI informant Felix Sater. Another was Tevfik Arif, a shady man with likely Russian intelligence connections who was once was arrested by the Turks on Mustafa Kamal Ataturk’s yacht and “charged with running an international underage prostitution ring.” The third was the late Tamir Sapir, another man with ties to Russian intelligence. If you’re interested in this aspect of the story, I refer you to my Trump’s Soho Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence article and also Mike Lofgren’s piece: Mobbed Up, both written in late February.
Interestingly, all these men have connections to the Chabad movement. Felix Sater was honored as Man of the Year in 2014 by the Port Washington, Long Island Chabad house. The same Chabad house’s website lists Tevfik Arif, who is not Jewish, “among its top 13 benefactors.”
But it’s Tamir Sapir who links Trump back directly to Lev Leviev.
Pay close attention to this:
…the late billionaire Tamir Sapir, was born in the Soviet state of Georgia and arrived in 1976 in New York, where he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district that, according to the New York Times, catered largely to KGB agents.
Trump has called Sapir “a great friend.” In December 2007, he hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter, Zina, at Mar-a-Lago. The event featured performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls. The groom, Rotem Rosen, was the CEO of the American branch of Africa Israel, the Putin oligarch Leviev’s holding company.
Five months later, in early June 2008, Zina Sapir and Rosen held a bris for their newborn son. Invitations to the bris described Rosen as Leviev’s “right-hand man.” By then, Leviev had become the single largest funder of Chabad worldwide, and he personally arranged for the bris to take place at Schneerson’s grave, Chabad’s most holy site.
The man I want to focus on is Rotem Rosen. He is described here as the CEO of Leviev’s American holding company and his “right hand man.” Now, remember that Leviev was described at the top as one of two oligarch’s who Putin tapped to establish the “Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia under the leadership of Chabad rabbi Berel Lazar, who would come to be known as ‘Putin’s rabbi.’”
Now, let’s flash ahead to Trump’s trip to Moscow to host the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.
After the contest, Trump attended a vodka-infused 1 a.m. afterparty at which ticket holders were promised a meeting with the New Yorker, along with the pageant contestants.
He also met with the Agalarovs to talk business…
…Joining Trump’s November 2013 meeting with the Agalarovs were Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen, a pair of New York-based Russian developers who helped to develop the Trump Soho hotel and condominium project in Manhattan.
You should know the Agalarovs because they initiated the undisclosed June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Kushner, Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. and a brood of Kremlin-connected conspirators offering dirt on Hillary Clinton in return for sanctions relief.
Alex Sapir is the son of Tamir Sapir, brother of Zina, and brother-in-law of Rotem Rosen.
Just so we’re clear, Trump hosted the wedding of Lev Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago. Lev Leviev is so close to Putin that he was one of two oligarchs tapped to help him gain control of the leadership of the Russian Jewish community back when he assumed power.
Two decades ago, as the Russian president set about consolidating power on one side of the world, he embarked on a project to supplant his country’s existing Jewish civil society and replace it with a parallel structure loyal to him…
…In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society, the Russian Jewish Congress, led by oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, a potential threat to Putin and President Boris Yeltsin. A year later, Gusinsky was arrested by Putin’s government and forced into exile.
At the time, Russia already had a chief rabbi as recognized by the Russian Jewish Congress, Adolf Shayevich. But Abramovich and Leviev installed Chabad rabbi Lazar at the head of their rival organization. The Kremlin removed Shayevich from its religious affairs council, and ever since it has instead recognized Lazar as Russia’s chief rabbi, leaving the country with two rival claimants to the title.
These are extraordinarily close ties between Putin and Trump and that also connect Trump’s business discussions in 2013 about Moscow real estate projects with the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower that has become one of the strongest pieces of evidence of collusion in the election.
Now, in that November piece, I made a big deal out of the fact that “Trump hosted the wedding of Lev Leviev’s right-hand man at Mar-a-Lago.” This was because Lev Leviev is so close to Vladimir Putin. But it’s even more noteworthy that Lev Leviev’s right-hand man is the man in the blue suit who made sure to visit with Michael Cohen while he was supposed to be in court.
If Vladimir Putin wanted to send a message to Cohen, this was one way to do it. If you are familiar with The Godfather trilogy, you’ll remember the scene where Michael Corleone has Vincenzo Pentangeli flown in from Sicily to appear while his brother Frank is testifying before Congress. Seeing his brother in the grandstands (in the custody of Michael), Frank realizes that he needs to recant his prior sworn deposition to save his brother’s life.
The video with The Sopranos score got a lot of laughs, but this is actually a sinister bit of business, especially when you account for all the people who have dropped dead recently in the United Kingdom when they ran afoul of the Kremlin. Michael Cohen is part of a large criminal enterprise with close ties to Putin. In a way, that’s what the Russia investigation is about and has always been about.
Totally where I went with that video. It’s odd to me that no one who posted the still shot from that little bit of theater even once made note of the fear on Cohen’s face. He was petrified of the whole scenario. The mob delivered their message but good.
Cohen has a wife and daughter.
He’s not going to flip.
Oh, interesting. I guess we get to learn how his desire to see his family, weighs against his desire to …. see his family live unharmed.
I feel sad for his family. I don’t feel sad for him.
Are you thinking he’ll receive threats against them in order to keep him from flipping?
That certainly seems to be the gist of Dunwoody’s comment. I’ve never been able to read faces. So I can’t judge whether in fact he was scared in that cigars-and-mobsters meeting. But if so, yeah, it makes sense.
You don’t need to read the tea leaves here. Just know he is meeting with Rosen, a fixer for Putin’s man. What sort of message is he delivering here?
Yes, he will.
By the time the prosecutors get done, he will be looking at 50 years, no parole.
To use Booman’s analogy, except using The Godfather….The Don asks Tom Hagan about Jack Woltz…’Is He tough?’ and Hagan responds…’no, he is not Sicilian’, meaning will he risk everything on a point of honor. Look at Cohen….he will take the easy way.
He will flip.
.
Only if he gets into the witness protection program.
Could be. He walked out of the courtroom to the chagrin of the judge to meet with Rosen. There was a message delivered there I would bet right from Putin himself. Whether or not you see the fear, it’s there. First thing Mueller needs to do is offer him the protection program. What a world we live in. A criminal from halfway around the world uses an ostensible religious organization to peddle his ware. Sopranos theme song fits.
Russian reporter Borodin dead after mystery fall
they toss people out of windows like confetti over there.
They’re with us on the issues that matter.
Can’t
smash US hegemonymake an omelette…Capital and fascism are globalized, the fascists have an opportunity to rip up the global world order, and we should rightly align with regimes who are anti-communist and anti-US in order to be a blunt instrument. For communism, or something.
For all the talk from these people that “The Cold War is over” they sure have lots of Cold war nostalgia.
So it’s Russia, and they’re a little….tainted. Sub-optimal.
But it’s not-the-US, isn’t it? And isn’t that what really matters?
Some things aren’t complicated. We’re that evil.
(There’s more than one kind of American exceptionalism.)
One more time this reminds me of how much of this story of influence and corruption has been played out right in front of public eyes.
Ok, all I can say is ‘holy shit!’
Yup.
Lots of dots connected here, Booman. Excellent work.
Josh Marshall too — but I have one factual correction. He seems to imply (at the end) that El Caribe Country Club is in Brighton Beach, apparently because of the Russian mob connection. But it’s actually in Mill Basin. And Mill Basin is NOT “worlds away culturally” from the Five Towns of Long Island. Actually it is culturally more like the Five Towns than it is like any other part of Brooklyn — and just across Jamaica Bay from the Five Towns. Here take a look:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/26/realestate/mill-basin-brooklyn-house-proud-but-not-too-accessible
.html
By the way, this Times article also contains an error. It says the section has been called Mill Basin since the 1960s. My aunt and uncle moved there in the very early 1950s when it was brand new and much less wealthy, and it was already called Mill Basin.
Finally, if you were writing a story with a Soviet-era mobster in it, you couldn’t make up a better name for him than “Marat Balagula.” “Marat” I don’t need to explain. “Balagula” is the Yiddish word for wagon driver or teamster (except they usually had only one horse). Typically the balagula was a big, strong, tough Jew with no education.
I second the motion.
. . . it would be a real shame if he missed this and its implications for him.
A real shame.
I bet Cohen knows what is in store for him. He desperately wants this special master or such to get the documents so he has a chance to hide them or something, Otherwise, he can start to run, maybe to Russia and set up shop with Snowden. On second thought that may not help.
Indictments of Russian oligarchs by Mueller may have been just first group? We tend to think of this ending in the WH but Putin may have left more breadcrumbs behind than he knows. Will Trump flip on Putin when the time comes?
Putin left a trail of whole bakeries because he knows he’s untouchable.
He’s the richest man on earth and can answer the question “You and what army?” Yet he likely couldn’t care less about Russia as a nation state, so he’s free sacrifice any of it in the service of his own power.
Add to that 63 million Americans admire him as a model of The Great White Avenging Strong Man that they want in President Stupid.
Yes. Of course Putin has made his own fortune and his power by using the oligarchs who made their billions by buying into his strategies. If the oligarchs are sanctioned, assets seized globally and even brought to justice in a court who will be there to do his bidding? (just enjoying the moment)
And following along your thought, the way to bring down Putin, is to impoverish those oligarchs. The minute they see their ill-gotten gains vaporize b/c of Putin’s overseas actions, is the moment they start sharpening their knives for his back.
Maybe but their wealth may be sustained in Russia by Putin. Or some sizable portion of it and the Kremlin is not shy about spreading around a little poison if you go off the rails.
I’m still trying to understand where you’re going with the Chabad connection, Booman. In the United States, at least, Chabad sets itself the mission of outreach to unaffiliated Jews (like yours truly). I don’t see a lot of scope for corruption in this, but feel free to correct me.
I’m also wondering about the point of this excerpt from your post: “In 1999, soon after he became prime minister, Putin enlisted Abramovich and Leviev to create the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities. Its purpose was to undermine the existing umbrella for Russia’s Jewish civil society….” I’m wholly unsurprised that Putin would want to undermine any civil society organizations, Jewish or otherwise; I mean, his whole modus operandi is a continuation of methods from the Soviet era, when independent civil-society groups were crushed. And remember what the Soviet perspective of the “Jewish problem” was going back to Lenin: Jews were to have a minimal space for a communal life, but were expected to abandon their identity in favor of a Soviet identity. Opportunities for religious expression were severely constrained, and the Yiddish language, the main medium of transmitting Jewish culture in the European part of the USSR, was suppressed. About the best thing you can say for Soviet treatment of the Jewish population is that they abandoned the Tsarist policy of kidnapping Jewish boys and forcing them into military service for 25-year terms.
Those Jewish oligarchs who aligned themselves with Putin are no friends to Russian Jews who don’t happen to be oligarchs.
Joel, the situation is more complicated than you make it out to be. Putin’s policy towards Jewish organizations is very different from that of the Soviet era. Putin is neither anticlerical nor antisemitic. He has not undermined Jewish organizations, but he has got a certain control, not through force but just the opposite, which wins loyalty or at least passive cooperation. Chabad plays a major role in this through its mutually beneficial relationship with te government. You might say Putin to some extent undermined Jewish organizations that are NOT aligned with him, simply by favoring those that are in his camp. Harsh measures were used mainly against certain oligarchs that supported these rival organizations, but that was for political rather than religious reasons.
Many Jewish oligarchs, whether aligned with or opposed to Putin, have been patrons of the Jewish community, donating large sums to communal, cultural, and religious organizations. So actually, Jewish life in Russia is flourishing, but Putin has a lot of control over it, “friendly” control, through Chabad and affiliated organizations. The other organizations are not suppressed, they just don’t enjoy Putin’s favor.
As to where Booman is going with the Chabad connection, well what can you say? — it is what it is. The corruption has nothing to do with the Chabad mission of outreach — except that this outreach is a worldwide activity requiring lots of funding from many sources. And as the saying goes, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Here’s a good article on the subject from Moment magazine, 2015.
If you haven’t read the full article, as opposed to the excerpt I provided here, and if you haven’t read the whole Shreckinger article, please check them both out and then come back to have a conversation.
I’m not dodging your question, but I also don’t want to explain what’s in that material before having a conversation.
Trust me, elements of this make uncomfortable because I know very well how it can be misused. But this is a key element of understanding the connection between Trump, Kushner, Cohen and Russia, as well as organized crime.