Osama bin Laden's phone number, revealing a George W. Bush assassination plot and more: Inside the long road to redemption for Felix Sater, Trump's man in Moscow by alexnazaryan
NEW YORK — The most astonishing thing about Felix Sater is that he’s alive. If, after all, even a fifth of what he says about himself is true, he would still have a considerable number of enemies among the members of the Russian mafia in the United States, the Russian mafia in Russia, what remains of the Italian mafia, what remains of al-Qaida and any number of other decently armed entities.
Story continuesAnd although it details his own financial crimes, the 5K letter is about as good a professional recommendation as one could hope for. “Without exception,” it reads, “every one of these agents has told the government that Sater was an exemplary cooperator who worked diligently to further the aims of the mission to which he was assigned.”
Despite its cinematic detail, the 5K letter, with its maddeningly vague allusions to “the details of an assassination plot against President [George W.] Bush,” does not explain everything about the stubbornly inexplicable career of Felix Sater. But the letter does suggest that he has a Zelig-like ability to insert himself into clandestine places and organizations highly hostile to outsiders — and then to escape unscathed with information he should have never been granted access to.
Pretty much everything Sater says is really f***ing wild. He grew up wealthy in the Lenin Hills section of Moscow, the son of a successful meat store manager. Sater’s family, which was Jewish and solidly anti-Communist, left the Soviet Union in 1972. There was a short stint in Italy, a longer stint in Israel, and then a very short stint in Baltimore. They finally settled in Brighton Beach, a faded seaside neighborhood in Brooklyn.
That fight involved Friedman hitting Sater with a beer bottle, and in response, Sater hit Friedman with a margarita glass. Sater says that, contrary to most press reports, he did not assault Friedman with the jagged stem of the glass but, rather, with the glass intact. “That’s to ... show that Donald Trump hangs out with violent, bad guys,” he says of the broken-glass narrative.
“Firm” might be a generous description. White Rock was, as the government’s 5K letter describes, a front for “securities fraud in connection with the fraudulent offerings and after-market manipulation” of stocks. Sater and his associates ran a pump-and-dump scheme that netted them some $40 million, which the 5K letter says “was then carefully laundered through off-shore nominee bank accounts.”
He continues in a mock Bensonhurst accent: “Hey yo, Vinny. Hey, how you doin’? How you doin’?” The accent stops. “Come on. You know some of these people from growing up. Any one of them strike you as financially very savvy?”Sater lost his appeal on the 1991 assault charge and went to a New York State prison in Otisville . He was released in 1996, and the following year, White Rock collapsed, though Sater says he was no longer involved in the scheme by then.
Sater says that Blane — who is also dead and unable to confirm this account — was astonished by the ease with which Sater had gained access to the upper reaches of the Kremlin. “You’re sitting drinking with him,” Sater recalls Blane telling him of one Russian general of interest to American intelligence. Just getting the general’s license plate number would have been an accomplishment for American intelligence in years past, Blane supposedly told Sater.
New: Photos of Evgeny Shmykov, the former Russian GRU general who worked with Felix Sater in the failed 2015-16 Trump Tower Moscow project and other ventures, help explain why Sater was such a valuable counter-terrorist source to the FBI and CIA. pic.twitter.com/LgOYyMdFW2Sater says that through Schmikov, he developed contacts to Khalil, an Afghan national who Sater says was a “senior intel operative” for Massoud, with sources deep in al-Qaida.
As the convoy plowed south, Shmikov announced that he knew where bin Laden was. “We're going to pick up about 30 fighters and we're marching on Tora Bora,” Sater says Shmikov told him. “We know the camp he's in right now. We're going to attack under cover of darkness and kill everybody in the camp.” Sater — who now claims the locker was not his — returned to the United States, where he began telling federal authorities everything he knew. In addition to the information about al-Qaida, he gave the federal government copious information on Italian organized crime in New York. In fact, Sater claims to have singlehanded ended the reign of La Cosa Nostra. “I gave up Frank Coppa,” he says of the high-ranking Bonnano crime family captain.
Much as he would in later years, Trump attempted to distance himself from Sater in that article. Then, as now, the avowals of unfamiliarity were not entirely convincing. “It seemed that Mr. Trump relied heavily on Mr. Sater’s opinion on certain markets,” a Denver-based developer told the Times.
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