From Rybolovlev with Love: How Trump's DHS Funnels Cash to Russian Oligarchs
As DHS overpays for concentration camp shells, it's worth revisiting the failures of US intelligence agencies who were supposed to protect us from organized crime, and why we need to push on
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As the world falls under the spell of sleazy glitz delirium — the Russian-backed boogeyman Jeffrey Epstein smirking at you from every news kiosk — the theft of a nation continues.
Lurking under the headlines of horror-sleaze is the fact that the US Department of Homeland Security just overpaid by a hundred million dollars for a concentration camp shell to a Russian-based group, in the City of Social Circle, Georgia, about 45 miles from Atlanta. Two years ago, the same warehouse sold for $29 million. The DHS bought it from PNK, for $128.5 million, according to multiple reports. PNK is a Russian-based real estate developer that specializes in large-scale industrial, logistics, and data center projects, primarily in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk. And apparently, tiny towns in metro Atlanta.
Surprise
In an all cash deal, DHS paid $70 million for a large warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, according to Maricopa County records. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is also named on the deed of the 418,000-square-foot property.
The city of Surprise released the following statement on Friday:
The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the intended use of the building. It’s important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such as zoning.
The recipient of the cash was the Rockefeller Group, a real estate developer owned by the Mitsubishi Group, which has a Russian-based LLC that deals in energy, chemicals, minerals, infrastructure and industrial projects, among other holdings.
Last week, ICE confirmed the $66 million purchase of another building in San Antonio, Texas, valued at $37 million; in January, ICE bought a a facility in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, for $87.4 million; In Williamsport, Maryland, ICE paid $102 million for a 54-acre plot — money coming from the $75 billion in funding from the Orwellian named, ‘big, beautiful bill.’
The overpayment to Russian-linked real estate companies forces me to revisit the overpayment Trump received from Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who paid $95 million in 2008 for a Trump-owned Palm Beach property — a $54 million mark up over what Trump paid four years earlier. This, at a time that Trump owed Deutsche Bank $40 million in a loan default.
Where were our enforcement agencies then? Why did flagged transactions like these not result in prosecutions?
Well, let’s take a minute to look back to that time we learned the leaders of our intelligence agencies went to work for the Russian mob. As I wrote in a thread five years ago, citing a Wall Street Journal article from 2007:
Former FBI director William Sessions once condemned Russia’s mafia. ‘We can beat organized crime,’ he told a Moscow conference in 1997. Today, Sessions is a lawyer for Semyon Mogilevich… one of Russia’s most powerful organized-crime figures.”
Of course, it was Craig Unger who told me where to look. In one of RadPod’s first interviews, he tipped me off to the slew of ex-Soviets who hired US lobbying firms to disappear their criminal cases.
Among the prominent intelligence leaders, politicians, lawyers and lobbyists who took Big Russian Mob Money were Sessions, who worked for Mogilevich; Bob Dole, who worked for Russian billionaire and industrialist Oleg Deripaska; Haley Barbour’s firm worked for Alfa; Paul Manafort worked for Deripaska; Mike Flynn took money for Russian appearances; Louie Freeh was paid by Russian real estate firm Prevezon; Christopher Wray’s law firm King & Spalding represented Russian state-owned oil giants Gazprom and Rosneft; and Charles McGonigal, one of the highest-ranking FBI agents to ever be charged with a crime, was tasked with investigating Russian oligarchs but instead provided services to Deripaska.
Krysha
With all of Trump’s DHS/ICE overpayments sloshing around, I invite you to review retired IRS criminal investigator Martin Sheil’s Letter to Bette, which explains the Russian concept of protection known as krysha, or roof.
As Marty wrote:
Krysha is basically a protection racket — illicit and often informal, a kind of patronage and contract enforcement.
Therefore, while the literal meaning of “krysha” is roof, it also carries the connotation of an influential protector or a criminal organization providing protection from legal or criminal issues in a system where the legal framework may not function effectively.
I first learned about the concept of krysha in the 2015 PBS Frontline documentary, Putin’s Way, which I threaded in detail here six years ago.
That’s where I learned Putin was stealing from the very beginning, how money meant to save starving people ended up in bank accounts of the bandits from St. Petersburg; how he went from unemployed spy to the richest man in the world by ‘gifting schemes.’ As exiled Russian businessman Sergei Kolesnikov explained: “Russian businesses depend entirely on protection. It is called having a roof, or in Russian, ‘krysha.’” He said his company, Petromed, “took money to buy medical equipment.. the profit margin was huge, around 40 percent. That money was funneled through myriad other companies, ending up in ‘Rosinvest.’ Kolesnikov owned 2 percent of Rosinvest, but he says 94 percent was owned by Putin.”
Among the most important things Putin and Trump have in common: the destruction of the judiciary. When Putin first came into power, he made it impossible to prosecute a sitting president, and then changed the constitution to extend his time in power. Thanks to the criminals on the US Supreme Court, Trump functions as if he will never be held accountable, which is why I look to the international courts for signs of life.
Prison Bound
In a footnote to a 2019 thread where I mapped out the ties to Putin and Robert Mercer, the tweaker billionaire who injected Trump, Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica, Parler, and Steve Bannon with cash in repeated efforts to overthrow democracy, I spotted the fact that Mercer benefits financially from the burgeoning industry of “detaining brown people and stoking fear,” and “how inflaming hatred toward immigrants was profitable for his hedge fund.”
In a 2018 investigation by my friend Ken Silverstein, he wrote:
On Aug. 18, 2016, the share price of Corrections Corporation of America, one of the main operators of private prisons and immigrant detention centers, fell by 50 percent to $13.04 after the Obama-era Justice Department directed the phaseout of federal private prisons. The company’s stock floundered for the next few months. On Nov. 7, the day before Donald Trump’s historic election — and by which point the company had rebranded as CoreCivic — it closed at $14.36.
But with Trump’s unexpected victory, CoreCivic stock rose meteorically. By Inauguration Day on Jan. 20, 2017, it had doubled, and it climbed higher when the new administration began implementing its hard-line immigration and law and order policies. On Feb. 24 — a day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions reversed the Obama ban on private prisons — CoreCivic’s share price hit $35.03. That was a potential windfall for investors, including Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund then headed by billionaire Robert Mercer. According to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, between Trump’s election and inauguration, Renaissance unloaded 645,586 CoreCivic shares for a big profit.
Few people backed Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign with as much cash as Mercer. He donated $15.5 million to a pro-Trump PAC called Make America Number 1, making him the group’s largest donor, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. He and his daughter Rebekah…reportedly worried that the Republican establishment was too soft on immigration. The Mercers had unique insight into and influence on the new administration’s hard-line approach to crime and immigration.
At the same time, Robert Mercer promoted a tougher national stand on immigration by funding politicians and organizations — including Breitbart News — that have fueled hysteria about immigrants by claiming that their entry into the U.S. would directly lead to crime, terrorism and job losses.
Since Trump’s election, the policies the Mercers had promoted have taken off — and paid off, according to an investigation by Yahoo News supported by the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. With Trump ratcheting up anti-immigrant rhetoric and enforcement, Renaissance Technologies — where Mercer was co-CEO until last fall and where he continues to be active — invested in corporations directly involved in the president’s immigration crackdown and the administration’s embrace of private prisons.
These include CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two biggest Department of Homeland Security contractors operating immigrant detention centers. In the last two years, Renaissance has purchased millions of dollars worth of shares in CoreCivic and GEO Group, which have seen their stock prices soar.
Meanwhile, a number of recipients of the Mercer family’s largesse stoked the flames of the immigration Fear Factory. They included nonprofits like Secure America Now, which received $2 million from Robert Mercer and which produced videos released in the last weeks before the election, warning that Muslims were poised to take over the United States, France and Germany…
You get the picture.
If Robert Mercer is new to you, read more here:
It is natural to be focused on the human costs, the fact that Trump’s actions are paving the way for genocide.
I’ve never sugarcoated any of this — marching with a sign that read, “In the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America” on the first Saturday after the 2016 election.
But along with the human costs, it’s important to also see how the rich are planning to get richer off of our pain and our suffering and the suffering of our neighbors — the immigrants who are the life’s blood of America.
With the media and law broken in America, I beg my readers to apply pressure to the international courts. We are witnessing possible money laundering in real time, with evidence that some of the money is going to Russian, US and other foreign oligarchs.
We learned on Tuesday from Slavenka Drukolić, a Croatian journalist who covered the trials of war criminals of the former Yugoslavia, that we have to push on, for the good of the world. She discovered in her reporting that ordinary men could commit terrible crimes when given the right circumstances.
Can ordinary people stop them before then worst of it? That’s where we are.
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My head is swimming at the scope of it.
How are readers supposed to apply pressure to international courts?