Cohen And Trump-- The Unbreakable Bond Of Third Rate Scumbags

I have to admit... it's fun to beat up on a puffed up bully like Michael Cohen-- Trump's bargain basement Roy Cohn wannabe. Since childhood, Cohen has been a Mob-connected asshole and his Mob connection helped acquire a once valuable collection of New York and Chicago taxi medallions-- once but no longer. 70% of business travelers now use Uber or Lyft instead of taxis. Taxis now get just 6% of ground transportation. Cohen's 32 leveraged medallions were once worth about a million dollars each. The value is around $160,000 each now-- and falling. In other words, he owes millions of dollars on the medallions.

And it's not like Cohen is going to make up for his bankrupt taxi companies with income from his "law practice." He's a laughing stock as an attorney. In fact Rolling Stone's Seth Hettena looked back into Cohen's past practice and it's as completely predictive of his current predicament as you could possible imagine. Cohen met his pre-Trump/pre-Hannity clientele by roaming NYC courthouses "filing lawsuits on behalf of people with little means who were seeking compensation for the injuries they suffered in car collisions. Many personal-injury lawyers make their living this way, but there was something striking about Cohen's cases: Some of the crashes at issue didn't appear to be accidents at all... [but] deliberate, planned car crashes as part of an attempt to cheat insurance companies."

[I]nvestigations by insurers showed that several of Cohen's clients were affiliated with insurance fraud rings that repeatedly staged "accidents." And at least one person Cohen represented was indicted on criminal charges of insurance fraud while the lawsuit he had filed on her behalf was pending. Cohen also did legal work for a medical clinic whose principal was a doctor later convicted of insurance fraud for filing phony medical claims on purported "accident" victims. Taken together, a picture emerges that the personal attorney to the president of the United States was connected to a shadowy underworld of New York insurance fraud, a pervasive problem dominated by Russian organized crime that was costing the state's drivers an estimated $1 billion a year.

...In one case, Cohen filed a bodily injury lawsuit on behalf of a woman named Tara Pizzingrillo, who was a passenger in a car that was struck by a rented vehicle in 1999 in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn. In the 2002 complaint Cohen drafted and filed, Pizzingrillo sued the driver of the rental, Brian McFarland, claiming that she suffered bulging discs, and demanding $1 million from Enterprise Rent-A-Car's parent company, ELRAC Inc.

While the case was making its way through the courts, however, both Pizzingrillo and McFarland were indicted for their roles in a criminal ring that staged accidents using rented U-Haul trucks. Pizzingrillo, McFarland and others took turns renting U-Hauls, and, after obtaining insurance coverage, plowed them into vehicles occupied by friends in order to file bogus injury claims. Damian S. Jackson, who prosecuted the case when he worked at the New York Attorney General's office, did not recall Cohen's lawsuit, but said the events it described were typical of the ring's scheme. "They were basically being crash test dummies in each collision," Jackson says. The U-Haul ring submitted more than $350,000 in fraudulent personal injury claims before they were caught. Both Pizzingrillo and McFarland pleaded guilty to third degree insurance fraud, and Cohen's lawsuit was withdrawn. Pizzingrillo did not respond to a message seeking comment.

I used to live in Sheepshead Bay. It and the surrounding neighborhoods are now Russian Mafia-controlled hellholes-- and, though Brooklyn went overwhelmingly for Clinton (79.7% to 17.9%), these Russian neighborhoods went for Trump. Sheepshead Bay voted 66.75% to 29.47% for Trump. Neighboring Brighton Beach, basically all Russian, went 68.79 to 26.92 for Trump. Avenue U in Brooklyn used to be part of the liberal Democratic heartland; now it's like Moscow-- and filled with crooked people who are not friends of America and who make a living by stealing whatever isn't nailed down-- perfect little Trumpists. Rolling Stone reported that "Not only did Cohen represent clients in staged accidents, but some of his clients may not have been in the vehicle when the phony crash occurred. Another of his clients, a Haitian immigrant named Marie Pierre, was sued by State Farm in 2001, after an investigation determined she was involved in another fraud ring that used stolen identities. "Her account of the accident is [so] completely contradicted by the police report that it must be questioned whether she was present at the event," a lawyer for State Farm wrote. Pierre testified that the black 1988 Chevrolet Caprice she was riding in was being driven by a man; the police report listed the driver as a woman. Pierre identified the driver of the other car involved in the crash as black; he was white. Pierre said the vehicle she was riding in was stopped when it was struck in 1999 on Avenue U in Brooklyn; it was moving."

Basically all of Cohen's clients were crooks. They still are-- just on a higher level.

Cohen's work on behalf of accident victims was, if nothing else, prolific. In Cohen's challenge to the April 9th raid, his attorneys told a Manhattan judge that Cohen had "hundreds of different clients" from 1996 to 2006, when he ran his own private legal practice. "Negligence," which likely included the bodily injury claims filed on behalf of accident victims, then represented 90 percent of his legal work, Cohen said in a unrelated deposition obtained by Rolling Stone. Much of this work consisted of filing private arbitration claims, which are typically not a matter of public record. However, auto insurers dragged Cohen into court nearly 100 times between 1998 and 2003, asking judges to halt numerous claims he had filed for a variety of reasons, including fraud.

It's not clear how the "hundreds of different clients" Cohen represented found him. While many personal injury lawyers take out ads on TV or plaster their faces on highway billboards, Cohen kept a relatively low profile; one of the addresses he used on accident cases was a remote taxi garage in Long Island City, Queens, where he managed a fleet of yellow cabs with his Ukrainian-born business partner, Simon Garber. Investigations from the same period by insurers and the FBI found other lawyers worked within sophisticated insurance-fraud networks that could have been cooked up by Saul Goodman, the ethically compromised lawyer on the hit TV series Breaking Bad, though there is no evidence that Cohen ever knew that any of his clients were involved in these schemes. Some unethical lawyers paid "runners" or "steerers" who staged accidents or monitored the police radio, and then raced to the scene of a crash to drum up business before the ambulance arrived. Neighborhood medical clinics, often established for the sole purpose of billing insurance companies for unnecessary tests and medical services, would refer clients to lawyers in exchange for kickbacks. A 2006 report on auto insurance fraud by the New York Attorney General's office noted that "crooked lawyers are necessary to advance fraudulent lawsuits based on feigned injuries."

Incidentally, Cohen also did legal work for Life Quality Medical P.C., whose principal, according to a ProPublica/WNYC investigation, was Dr. Zhanna Kanevsky. Kanevsky was indicted in 2005 by the New York Attorney General's office on charges of insurance fraud, grand larceny and falsifying business records for her role in a fraud ring that was secretly run by a Ukrainian émigré and his wife. According to the indictment, all clinic patients were given three expensive MRI scans, kidney sonograms and nerve testing, and all received the same medical treatment, regardless of injury: physical therapy, chiropractic care and acupuncture treatments several times a week. Kanevsky pleaded guilty and lost her medical license for three years. Cohen, who was the contact attorney for any lawsuits against the clinic, was not implicated in the case. However, an attorney named Albert Rudgayzer was indicted; according to prosecutors, Rudgayzer paid the clinic owners for referring clients and then shared a part of the proceeds from settlements of bodily injury claims. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was ordered to pay about $120,000 in restitution and fines.

Several investigations have also found that Russian organized criminals were behind what turned out to be massive insurance fraud operations. A sprawling investigation in Suffolk County, New York that indicted hundreds of people involved in more than 1,000 phony accidents in the early 2000s was known as "Operation BORIS"-- an acronym for Big Organized Russian Insurance Scam. The frauds have only grown in subsequent years. A 2012 investigation by the FBI found a Russian organized crime ring (which involved three attorneys) was behind a $275 million auto insurance fraud ring, the largest in history. (One of the defendants in that case, Michael Barukhin, moved into a Trump-branded tower in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida while his case was pending.) "Back in the Soviet days, ripping off the government may have been the single largest industry outside the military in the entire country," says James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, a not-for-profit group funded by insurers. "What developed was an entire generation of hoods with very good criminal skills."

My first knowledge of Trump was when I used to visit my pre-high school girlfriend on Ave Z and Trump worked for his crooked KKK father developing a property nearby. The Trumps were looked at as racist, rich trash by everyone in the neighborhood. No one wanted them around. Woody Guthrie lived in the development, Beach Haven-- and wrote a song about it, "Old Man Trump."

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project...

Russian Immigrants Deny Their Love For Trump Has Anything To Do With Putin

Because I grew up in south Brooklyn, I've watched with special dismay as the old neighborhoods around here I lived-- hard core, deep Blue neighborhoods-- have continued supporting Trump. Although Brooklyn went for Clinton 595,086 (79.25%) to 133,653 (17.8%), the neighborhoods I grew up in and near where i grew up in-- which are filled with Russian Jewish immigrants now-- went for Trump:

• Ocean Parkway South- Trump- 71.15%
• West Brighton- Trump- 68.77%
• Homecrest- Trump- 66.56%
• Midwood- Trump- 60.62%
• Brighton Beach- Trump- 59.35%
• Lindenwood-Howard Beach- Trump- 58.99%
• Madison- Trump- 56.35%
• Sheepshead Bay- Trump- 50.53%

Sickening. And this isn't the only part of the country that made this kind of flip. There are also significant concentrations of relatively recent Russian immigrants in other Democratic areas where there were neighborhoods that bizarrely went for Trump: Bergen County, New Jersey, as well as West Hollwood, Miami, Chicago, Alaska, Dallas, Houston, Philly, Baltimore and the Silicon Valley area. Yesterday, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Oliver Bilger, on loan from Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel, took a stab at explaining the phenomenon, since it is also uncomfortably noticeable in Northeast Philly, home to a large number of Russian immigrants.

Along Bustleton Avenue, caviar and pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings) are sold in the supermarkets. Signs in Cyrillic letters advertise shoe stores, pharmacies, and hairdressers... “Everything will be OK” is the common refrain among saleswomen in local stores when asked about Trump. “He can change the country for the benefit of the people.”

The word Russian for this community is not entirely correct. Many immigrants and their families came from Russia, but even more from Ukraine, or Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and other former Soviet republics. Some began arriving in the 1970s, when Moscow lifted the Iron Curtain a little bit and allowed Jews to emigrate. What connects the immigrants from all the former Soviet republics is their common history and language.

Many of them voted for Trump and continue to support him despite his low approval ratings and the turmoil of his first six months in office. As for the allegations of collusion, many Russian Americans dismiss them as part of a conspiracy, disruptive actions by Democrats and the media.

“Trump was presumed guilty and now they are trying to find proof,” says Diane Glikman, 45, host of a Russian-language program on the internet. She represents a view among many along Bustleton that Trump could succeed politically if only given a chance.

I lived in Moscow for a few years and I also know the views of many immigrants from the former Soviet Union in Germany, my home country. There, conservative views predominate among the immigrants, especially among older citizens. More than a few praise Putin as a strong leader and a counterweight to the West, a person who represents their conservative views.

None of the people I spoke to in Philadelphia praised Putin. Gary Vulakh, 57, who came from Ukraine almost 40 years ago and runs a small jewelry repair shop, calls the Russian leader a “terrorist.” Others said the ongoing Russia hacking investigation makes Putin seem stronger than he is. “He is not so powerful,” says Malvina Yakobi, 57, the editorial director of the Russian-English newspaper Philadelphia News. Few believe the Kremlin could meddle in a U.S. election. “Could they do anything like that?” Vulakh wonders. “Everything is done by the Democrats to impeach Trump.”

The Russians in Philadelphia may not fully support Trump’s friendliness toward Putin, but they still back the U.S. president overall, roughly for four reasons.

First, they wish for good relations between the United States and Russia, which they believe will promote peaceful cohabitation and bring more stability to the world.

Second, many separate Trump’s admiration for Putin from his promises on domestic issues. Russian Americans, Yakobi explains, are “the biggest American patriots.” Having escaped the repressive Soviet Union, U.S. values such as freedom and justice are of the utmost importance. So, naturally, they want their new country to succeed.

Third, they like having a successful businessman in the White House instead of just another politician. They want to see a break from politics as usual and an establishment-- what Yakobi calls the “corrupted” administration of President Barack Obama-- that they see as ignoring the needs of too many in the country.

Fourth, though many themselves were newcomers to the United States, they like a president who promises to stop uncontrolled and illegal immigration. “We waited five or six years to get citizenship,” says Glikman. They earned their blue passports by learning the language and working hard, even in jobs that were far below their education level. They believe, as Glikman says, that Trump “is not against immigrants when they work hard.”

Though the community often leans Republican at election time-- Democrats are seen as too “socialist,” like the government many Russian Americans fled-- it is not monolithic in its support for the current president. In some cases, a vote for Trump was more a vote against Hillary Clinton. As Yakobi, who came to the United States from Georgia, says, last November’s election did not leave “a great choice.” And even though the president may be a role model for achieving the American dream, not all are on board. “Even within families, there are very different opinions,” Glikman notes. “The Russian community is split up … like the rest of the country.”

A Right Wing Fifth Column In Brighton Beach? West Hollywood? Bustleton?

Growing up in Brooklyn I had never met a Republican. And they didn't run for office where I lived either. Republicans were sleaze-ball used car salesmen like Nixon. They were in other parts of the country, not anywhere near Kings Highway. When Senator John Kennedy needed to demonstrate the enthusiasm hard core liberal communities had for him-- he was a kind of conservative senator for a Democrat-- he showed up during the 1960 campaign at Dubrow's on Kings Highway, a couple blocks from my house on 17th Street and Avenue P. My mother took me to see him. The crowd was adulatory. (Just 12 years old, I got stepped on by a police horse and got carried into Dubrows, a casualty of war, to be fussed over by the future president. There were no cell phones then, let alone cell phones that could have captured the moment for a then non-existent Facebook page.) I don't know how my old neighborhood voted in November but it wouldn't be out-of-bounds to speculate that Kennedy beat Nixon in the realm of 80-20%, maybe better. Kennedy only won New York state by 5 points. But he won NYC 62.62% to 37.04%. Brooklyn was his second biggest county in the state (after the Bronx)-- 66.16% to 33.51%. And my part of Brooklyn-- Homecrest, Madison, Midwood, Ocean Parkway South, West Brighton, Sheepshead Bay, Brighton Beach-- was way more Democratic, way more liberal, than the rest of the borough.

Jesus, has that changed! I did a post about it a few weeks ago. Russians started moving into Brighton Beach while I was still, more or less, living in New York, just a trickle at first, but they eventually took over the area and spread out from there. Bye-bye, heart of liberal Brooklyn. My old stomping ground all went for Trump. Brooklyn was the heart of Clinton-territory. The borough gave her a solid 595,086 (79.25%) win over Trump's sad 133,653 (17.8%). Not so my ancestral-- now Russian-dominated-- part of Brooklyn:

• Ocean Parkway South- Trump- 71.15%
• West Brighton- Trump- 68.77%
• Homecrest- Trump- 66.56%
• Midwood- Trump- 60.62%
• Brighton Beach- Trump- 59.35%
• Madison- Trump- 56.35%
• Sheepshead Bay- Trump- 50.53%

Makes me want to barf. And, by the way, although he had come to America (the Bronx) 5 decades earlier, my grandfather was a Russian too-- a Russian socialist, like many of the Russian immigrants who came to America at the turn of the century (the 20th century, not this one). These weren't conservatives; they were the ones who powered the labor movement in New York. The biggest concentrations of Russians in America today still live in Brooklyn, but have spread out to Bergen County, New Jersey, as well as to West Hollwood, Miami, Chicago, Alaska, Dallas, Houston, Philly, Baltimore and the Silicon Valley area.

Olga Khazan, writing for The Atlantic in April of 2016, long before Trump was president, penned an article about how specifically the Russian Jewish community is, Why Soviet Refugees Aren't Buying Sanders' Socialism. My grandfather's experience in Czarist Russia-- a fascist dictatorship-- colored his American politics. Khazan write soft Russians who's bitter experience of the Soviet Union-- which they foolishly imagine is what Bernie or the Democrats are advocating-- colors their American politics. They hate big government-- just wait til they figure out what Señor Trumpanzee has in mind-- and loath the idea of a workers revolution. Surprising that Jews are too incapable of critical thought as it be unable to differentiate between authoritarianism and socialism. But... that's their sad life's experience. Recent Russian Jewish immigrants voted overwhelming for Trump. In the primaries, the ones who didn't like Trump were hung ho on Cruz. They don't grok the Trump-Putin connection.

I found a degree of comfort of sorts-- from the changing voted patterns of my old neighborhood-- Monday when I read a piece in Politico by Malcolm Burnley, Why Philly's Russians Are Crazy For Trump. Turns out, like Brooklyn's Brighton Beach, they've got their own "Little Odessa" (Bustleton and Somerto) too.

Not since the end of the Cold War has there been quite such a miasma of suspicion and intrigue about Russia and Russians. The news brims with murky allegations of computer hacking, election meddling and influence peddling, all of which seems to demand assertions of allegiance to one side or the other. But for many of the estimated 26,000 Russian-speaking people in Philadelphia (not to mention the more than 900,000 across the country) the us-and-them nature of the political debate in Washington doesn’t really apply. Here, in a self-created cocoon of familiar cultural touchstones, I detected a kind of dual nationalism among the residents-- a manifest love for countries that once were home and an equal adoration for the populist president many of them voted for.

“Trump is a fighter, a negotiator, a successful businessman. Four times he go through the bankruptcy. He understand how the world works from a business perspective,” says Alexander Shapiro, who came to the states in the early-1990s from what’s now Ukraine. “During the campaign, he ran against governors and senators. He beat everybody like babies.”

Hearing how jazzed residents sounded about Trump’s first 60 days in office, I half expected to find shelves laden with Russian nesting dolls featuring Barron, Ivanka, Don Jr. and the whole gang. There was nothing so brazen inside the Knizhnik gift store, a mom-and-pop-looking place where I was repeatedly reminded that the inventory was “all Russian-- all.” There was, however, a Russian biography of Trump prominently displayed. It was the same book that became a popular giveaway at Trump-friendly election watch parties in Moscow, the one whose title has been dubbed in English as “The Black Swan.”

It’s an apt metaphor for how Bustleton and Somerton fit into Philadelphia writ large. Meaning, hardly at all. In a city where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans seven to one, and the local GOP has become something of a joke, these neighborhoods are as close to a conservative bastion as you’ll find. It’s been that way for decades. The Far Northeast, as it’s known in local parlance, which borders on the swing-state suburbs of Bucks County, has a long history of opposition to progressivism, on everything from taxation to school desegregation. In 1983, a Pennsylvania state senator representing the area introduced a bill to have Northeast Philadelphia secede from the city. In part, this was perceived to be retribution against the city’s first African-American mayor, a dynamic that evokes the subtext to Trump’s Make America Great American movement. “Whether they are Russian newcomers or older generations, there is a nationalist theme running throughout the political mindset of Northeast Philadelphians, especially those who lean more conservative,” says Matt Smalarz, a professor at Manor College in the Philadelphia suburbs and a native of the Northeast whose dissertation focused on the area he grew up in. “You won’t go to any other part of Philadelphia where there are more American flags being flown.”

...In his campaign speeches, Trump leveraged a profound feeling of abandonment being experienced by white working-class voters, as if the government had cast them aside. You don’t have be an unemployed steelworker from western Pennsylvania to share that commonality. In fact... the population hailing from ex-Soviet states might be predisposed to an up-by-the-bootstraps message like that of the Trump campaign, and a drain-the-swamp message, too. “In my family, we paid for everything with our hard work and great attitude toward this country,” she says. “Eastern Europeans are not so much depend on public benefits. We’re not waiting for dollars to fall from the trees.”

After all, many of these immigrants ended up here, during the 1990s, seeking freedom from ethnic or religious persecution in their respective states. “Most of the Russians here are almost libertarians,” says Andre Krug, president and CEO of KleinLife, a senior-citizen program that caters to many Russian-speaking adults. “They came from a country where the country dictated how they were going to live their lives, so when they came to this country, they feel like the less government does, the better they’re going to be ultimately.” Their ideology-- to draw a generality-- is more like an attitude of rugged individualism, Krug says. In other words, one that is innately American but born of life in the former Soviet Union. In the end, Trump’s wealthy upbringing and his career of questionable business deals didn’t undermine the essential appeal of his well-practiced message of personal triumph. Last November, Donald Trump narrowly lost Philadelphia’s 58th ward, which encompasses Bustleton and Somerton, but garnered 1,464 more votes than Romney in 2012. Pennsylvania was decided by less than 45,000 votes.

...Despite a palpable dislike for Putin among most of the foreign-born Philadelphians I spoke to, there was concurrent praise of Trump for displaying what might be called Putin-like qualities: His unflinching projection of strength. And his intuition-- what Shapiro calls “guts.” And most of all, Trump’s promise of bygone economic enrichment for all Americans. The MAGA message can be a personal one for immigrants like Shapiro, who arrived during America’s relative prosperity during the 1990s. This pink-cloud period in our recent history happened to be his first taste of the West. “From 1996 until when the [World Trade Towers] collapsed, it was communism,” Shapiro says, meaning, everybody was reaping the spoils. “It was a very good time. Everybody happy. People buy houses. Real estate booming. Stock market booming. That’s why Trump won. He wants to make America great again. He wants to return to old times when people were happy.”

Have you ever tasted a maroon, not to be confused with a coconut macaroon?