What's Paul Manafort Really Like?

Back in July, we looked into Trump's ties to the Russian Mafia in general and Semyon Mogilevich-- Russia organized crime's boss of bosses-- in particular. Mogilevich is back in the news... this time tied to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Betsy Woodruff broke the story at the Daily Beast. Manafort "didn’t just do business with accused gangsters," she wrote. "One of them transferred millions into a Manafort account, allegedly used for money laundering." Mueller's indictment revealed that Manafort was using Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States. "The Cyprus-based Lucicle Consultants Limited, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from a businessman and Ukrainian parliamentarian named Ivan Fursin, who is closely linked to one of Russia’s most notorious criminals: Semion Mogilevich."

Mogilevich is frequently described as “the most dangerous mobster in the world.” Currently believed to be safe in Moscow, he is, according to the FBI, responsible for weapons trafficking, contract killings, and international prostitution. In 2009, he made the bureau’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

“Ivan Fursin was a senior figure in the Mogilevich criminal organization,” Taras Kuzio, a non-resident fellow at Johns Hopkins-SAIS’ Center for Transatlantic Relations and a specialist on the region told the Daily Beast.

Martin Sheil, a retired criminal investigator for the IRS, said the indictment, with its connections to Fursin, helps illuminate the murky world Manafort operated in before taking the reins of Trump’s presidential bid.

“This indictment strongly indicates the existence of a previously unknown relationship between an alleged Russian organized crime leader and Mr. Manafort,” Sheil told the Daily Beast.

According to the indictment, Manafort and his former business partner, Rick Gates, used Lucicle to avoid paying taxes on money which they then spent on a variety of pricey items: clothes, antiques, and at least one Mercedes-Benz.

Paul Manafort’s attorney, Kevin Downing, told reporters on Monday that the idea that anyone would engage in such a scheme is laughable.

“The second thing about this indictment that I, myself, find most ridiculous is a claim that maintaining offshore accounts to bring all your funds into the United States, as a scheme to conceal from the United States government, is ridiculous,” he told a scrum of reporters on the steps of a D.C. courthouse.

But the indictment alleges otherwise. According to Mueller’s team, from April 2012 to March 2013, Lucicle transferred more than $1.3 million to a home improvement company in the Hamptons, where Manafort owns property.

Lucicle also sent more than $200,000 to a New York men’s clothing store from March 2012 to February 2013. In that same window of time, it also sent more than $100,000 to a New York antique dealer, more than $340,000 to a Florida contractor, $88,000 to a landscaper in the Hamptons, and a comparatively paltry payment of $7,500 to a clothing store in Beverly Hills.

On Oct. 5, 2012, Lucicle wired in $62,750 to pay for a Mercedes-Benz. And on Valentine’s Day of 2013, it sent $14,000 to a Florida art gallery. In total, according to Mueller’s indictment, Lucicle wired more than $5 million into the U.S. for Gates and Manafort.

At least some of the money Manafort and Gates used to pay for all those goodies appears to have come from Fursin. The New York Times reported in July that Lucicle and Fursin are tied to an “offshore entity, Mistaro Ventures, which is registered in St. Kitts and Nevis and listed on a government financial disclosure form that Mr. Fursin filed in Ukraine.”

According to the Times, “Mistaro transferred millions to Lucicle in February 2012 shortly before Lucicle made the $9.9 million loan to Jesand L.L.C., a Delaware company that Mr. Manafort previously used to buy real estate in New York.” It was one month after that transfer that Lucicle started shelling out millions to pay for cars, clothes, and real estate, according to the indictment.

That isn’t Fursin’s only connection to Manafort. He is also a lawmaker for the Party of Regions, which paid at least $17 million to Manafort’s firm.

In addition, Fursin’s longtime business associate, Ukrainian billionaire Dmitry Firtash, has an off-again, on-again partnership with Manafort. Together, they tried to buy the Drake Hotel in Manhattan for a cool $850 million. Firtash also bankrolled Ukraine’s Party of Regions.

Firtash has his own legal complications. He is currently under indictment in U.S. federal court for allegedly orchestrating an international titanium mining racket. The acting U.S. attorney in Chicago recently dubbed him an “organized-crime member” and an “upper-echelon associat[e] of Russian organized crime.” His attorneys say those charges are mere “innuendo,” according to the Chicago Tribune.

A December 2005 report from the Austrian Federal Criminal Investigation Agency said the FBI described Fursin and Firtash as senior members of the Semion Mogilevich Organization.

Ken McCallion, a former federal prosecutor who represented Yulia Tymoshenko in a civil case against Manafort and Firtash, told the Daily Beast that Fursin and Firtash are close.

“It was very similar to the relationship between Manafort and Gates,” he said. “Gates was a significant player in the criminal activities that Manafort engaged in... He played a major role, he was a major lieutenant in Manafort’s organization. By the same token, Fursin was one of the chief lieutenants of Firtash.”

On Wednesday K. Riva Levinson, CEO of strategy consultancy KRL International, published a first-person OpEd for the Washington Post about her time working for Manafort: I worked for Paul Manafort. He always lacked a moral compass. She wrote that he was "strategic, canny and demanding" but that no one who knows him will have been surprised to see him indicted. She wrote that "he played by his own rules, in an industry where you usually got away with it. I was young and wanted to do right by the world, but my boss lacked a moral compass. Working for him nearly broke my spirit."

A few years out of college, in 1987, I landed a job as an international field operative for BMS&K-- Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, the capital’s first bipartisan lobbying firm. Manafort himself hired me after I promised that “there is no place in the world I will not go.” And I got what I signed up for: In more than a decade working for him, there was no place that Manafort would not send me.

According to a Newsweek cover story in 1985, BMS&K was “the hottest shop in town.” The service it provided to clients was part politics, part public policy and part commerce, a curious mix of self-interest, selflessness and opportunism that could exist only in Washington. BMS&K got paid to change policy and alter opinions. It could be for something as narrow as a modified export regulation or as all-encompassing as building strategic alliances against America’s enemies, real or perceived.

...You never knew what would come at you at BMS&K. It felt random and totally unpredictable. One autumn afternoon in 1989, Manafort summoned me to his office and announced that he was dispatching me and my colleague John Donaldson to Somalia. We had three days to prepare.

The mission: Meet with the country’s ruler, Mohamed Siad Barre, and have him sign a contract for $1 million, with $250,000 up front. The deal had been pre-sold to Siad Barre by one of Manafort’s shady intermediaries. We just had to collect the signature. Our assignment would then be to clean up Siad Barre’s international reputation, which needed plenty of soap. The Africa Watch Committee and other human rights organizations, including our own State Department, had documented a long list of barbaric acts carried out by Siad Barre and his ruthless cadre of Red Berets.

I told Manafort it didn’t seem like a promising strategy to march into a murderous dictator’s office and point out to him and his lieutenants that he had a public relations problem. “Are we sure we want this guy as a client?” I asked, in a garish display of naivete. Manafort sounded annoyed, as if I had asked the right question at the wrong time. He waved off my concerns as he settled into his large leather armchair in his spacious corner office overlooking the Potomac River, the walls adorned with photos of past presidents, senators, congressmen and other notables. It was intimidating, and meant to be. Manafort was regarded by my colleagues and me as a master geopolitical strategist. He was one of those rare individuals who could cut through the noise, get to the heart of a problem and hit on a solution. And he didn’t care about the collateral damage. I eventually learned that the hard way.

Donald Trump as Tokyo Rose

-by Noah

For those who don’t know, because history just isn’t really taught in schools anymore, Tokyo Rose was the name of one or more female broadcasters operating out of Tokyo during WW2. Tokyo Rose broadcast pro-Japanese propaganda to U.S. troops in the Pacific war, bent on demoralizing them, paralyzing them with fear, or, worse, trying to get them to either desert or come over to the other side if they could. Every war has had variations of such things.

Unlike Tokyo Rose, Herr Trumpf is much more successful. It seems that the majority of Republican voters and media are buying every bit of the un-American load he is selling.

With that in mind, imagine for a moment, if Herr Trumpf was somehow, however unlikely, a Democratic candidate for his party’s nomination whose putrid words and thoughts were used in the recruitment videos of terrorist organizations as those of Trumpf have been used by al Qaeda affiliate group al Shabaab has, according to several major news outlets. Imagine the conspiracy tales coming from FOX “News.”

Imagine the hyperbolic clown show congressional hearings being held at taxpayer expense by lunatic Republican politicians like Trey Gowdy and Darrell Issa if Hillary Clinton’s or Bernie Sanders’ words were used like Trumpf’s have! It would be the Benghazi orgasm that republicans dream about, with great, great shame, of course.

If it had been a Democrat’s words, this news would not be reported by the networks as just one of many news items of the day. No, the clip of the al Shabaaab recruiter would be running as an endless loop 24 hours per day, much like the clip of President Bill Clinton giving a quick embrace to Monica Lewinsky as he greeted his White House staffers in the Rose Garden ran so many years ago.

The al Shabaab video that we are now seeing dwells on our country’s racial strife. It is in English and is aimed at recruiting U.S. Muslims and African-Americans.

While it’s true that Donald Trump is not the only Republican extremist to say things like he has (“Jeb” Bush had previously called for the banning of all non-Christian immigrants and Marco Rubio had called for the closing of mosques, with virtually no media mention of any kind); when the charge that Trumpf’s words were being used to recruit terrorists was made by Hillary Clinton and others a copule of weeks ago, Hate Radio and the other usual suspect corporate news outlets erupted in insincere protestations that it simply was not true that Herr Trumpf’s words were now recruitment tools. Even apologies were demanded of Ms. Clinton.

Now that we can all see an actual clip, all we hear from republicans seems to be the ocean, or is just the proverbial crickets? Sometimes, the healthiest way to respond to Republicans and the damage that they do is to respond with derision and laughter. What else can we do but that and vote them into the oblivion that they deserve.

Here’s Andy Borowitz on what the most likely reaction to the al Shabaab recruitment video will be from the megalomaniacal Herr Trumpf.

Trump Calls His Al Qaeda Recruitment Video Highest-Rated Terror Video Ever
by ANDY BOROWITZ

Just minutes after the Somali-based Al Qaeda affiliate Shabaab group released a propaganda video featuring a clip of Donald Trump, the Republican Presidential front-runner boasted that the video would be the highest-rated terror video of all time.

Within an hour of the video’s appearance, Trump took to Twitter to crow about his role in the jihadist promo, and tweaked his G.O.P. rivals for failing to be chosen by Shabaab.

“Shabaab would never put Jeb in video,” Trump tweeted. “Knows he is loser!”

But even as the billionaire boasted about his inclusion in the terror video, the prospect for future collaborations between Trump and Shabaab seemed to dim, due to a series of escalating demands issued by the real-estate magnate.

In a cascade of tweets directed at the terror group, Trump insisted that he be paid two million dollars for every subsequent video and that he retain editorial control over the final cut.

In a terse official statement, a Shabaab spokesman said that the terror group was “discontinuing our relationship with Donald J. Trump.”

“He’s just too hard to work with,” the spokesman said.

Navy Seals Rescue American Hostage And Kill Somali Pirates

Even though a good friend is in Somalia now making a documentary on pirates-- and even though we have discussed the Somali pirates here in the past (yes, before they were so trendy)-- we've left the recent Somali pirate talk to the right wing blow-hards while we tried keeping the focus on the far more dangerous and predatory Wall Street pirates.

Now we're happy to report that Richard Phillips, the American captain of the Maersk Alabama, who was held hostage by 4 surrounded Somali pirates demanding a ransom, was freed, unharmed. Since the rightists were all blaming Obama I wonder when Fox will be congratulating him now that U.S. Navy Seals killed 3 of the pirates and locked up the 4th in a well-executed strategy that was very different from the insanity demanded by the slobbering right-wing nutcases. Despite all the worst wishes of the Republicans who would rather see America fail than Obama succeed, it looks like the president handled his first 3am call just fine-- and still managed to get his daughters a cute puppy!

I wonder why the Bush Regime never did anything about cleaning up the Somali pirates' nests along the Horn of Africa. By virtually ignoring the problem, they let it fester and grow. It was satisfying to see that President Obama moved in swiftly and surely-- and that he authorized the three AK-47 armed pirates who may have been attempting to kill Captain Phillips be shot. And thank God there's no chance of Obama strutting around an aircraft carrier with a sock in his crotch and a big "Mission Accomplished" banner in range of cameras.




UPDATE: The Blow By Blow

There's been so much misinformation, mostly spread by Fox and other rightist sources making things up, as usual, that I figured I'd mention that this was a carefully planned and sanctioned operation and that Captain Anderson had not escaped overboard again. Many of the sources are reporting variations on the story but I'm counting on this NY Times version, which is kind of like what CNN is reporting as well (from Bahrain):

Just after dark on Sunday, snipers on the U.S.S. Bainbridge saw that one of the pirates was pointing an automatic rifle at Captain Phillips, and that the captors’ heads and shoulders were exposed from the capsule-like lifeboat. President Obama had previously authorized the use of force if the commander on the scene believed the captain’s life was in danger, so they fired, Admiral Gortney said. The lifeboat was about 100 feet from the Bainbridge when the shots were fired, a little after 7 p.m. Somalia time (seven hours ahead of Eastern time). The vice admiral said he did not know Captain Phillips’s location at the time the shots were fired, but given the length of the lifeboat, he was less than 18 feet from the snipers’ targets... [T]he Navy managed to attach a line to the lifeboat and began towing it away from shore. Mr. Phillips was being held in a covered part at the back of the lifeboat, the official said, and one pirate typically stayed with him under cover. The lifeboat had gotten as close as 20 miles to shore, drifting after running out of fuel, off Gara’ad, Somalia.

...More than 250 hostages are being held by various Somalian pirate groups, including the 16 crew members of an Italian tugboat captured on Saturday.

One pirate named Ali, in Galkaiyo, Somalia, said the American Navy rescue won’t discourage other Somali pirate groups at all.

“As long as there is no just government in Somalia, we will still be the coast guard,” he said, adding: “If we get an American, we will take revenge.”

More details from this morning's Washington Post. And as JCWilmore pointed out at DailyKos last night, the Republicans, as usualy, bet against America-- and they lost when America won. All real Americans can be happy that the president passed his first security "test"-- with flying colors.

One Dead Somali Pirate's Uncle Blames Overbearing Naval Ships For His Death After He Collects Ransom Money

Ahoy, matey

One of the pleasures of foreign travel-- though not necessarily to places like London or Paris, but to the kinds of weird destinations Herman Melville and I like-- is that you get to meet other travelers. And when you're hitting places like Tierra del Fuego, Sidi Ifni, Yangon, Urgup and Timbuktu (each a kind of end of the road destination), you meet some pretty interesting folks. A few weeks ago, I was in a small and unnoteworthy town on the outskirts of the encroaching Sahara, Douentza-- where tourists stop to catch their breath on the way to Timbuktu from Dogon country (or going in the other direction). Either way, you're about to experience a road from hell and, even without any charms whatsoever, Douentza is a relief because your skeleton isn't being pummeled and jogged around. We stopped at a nondescript eatery and the most appetizing thing looked like the exit. Roland ordered spaghetti and we sat around with the flies and mosquitos for 90 minutes while they prepared it. But we met a family from Madrid, an architect, his intrepid wife and two daughters.

We swapped travel stories. Luckily I was able to pull out my 1969-era Afghan adventures. These folks had been everywhere. And their favorite place was Yemen. Why Yemen? Well besides the mud skyscrapers they had quite the adventure. They-- the husband and wife; I think it was before the daughters were born-- had been kidnapped and held for ransom by tribal bandits. In retrospect they say they loved the experience. I guess it's great for party chatter. Apparently all 25 crew members who were released along with the Liberian-flagged Saudi supertanker, Sirius Star, will have similar stories to talk about. And A.P. reports that "they are all in good health and high spirits."

They had been held-- as are another 300 or so crew members from the 100 or so hijacked ships-- by Somali pirates. The Saudis paid the pirates $3 million dollars for their (and the ship's and $100 million worth of oil on the ship) release. A Ukrainian ship, the Faina, hasn't been released and that one isn't full of oil, but tanks-- the kinds that shoot cannons and flatten buildings.

The sea off the huge Somali coast is being patroled by warships from France, Germany, Britain, the U.S., India and China. They haven't been very effective at stopping piracy although, according to a one pirate's uncle, they are being blamed for the death of several of the pirates who drown with their shared of the $3 million ransom.

Abukar Haji, uncle of one of the dead men, blamed the naval surveillance for the accident that killed his pirate nephew Saturday.

"The boat the pirates were traveling in capsized because it was running at high speed because the pirates were afraid of an attack from the warships patrolling around," he said.

"There has been human and monetary loss but what makes us feel sad is that we don't still have the dead bodies of our relatives. Four are still missing and one washed up on the shore."

Pirate Daud Nure said three of the eight passengers had managed to swim to shore after the boat overturned in rough seas. He was not part of the pirate operation but knew those involved.

"Here in Haradhere the news is grim, relatives are looking for their dead," he said.

Roland asked me to make sure his point of view is represented in this post and that is that things would be much grimmer if the French, German, British, American, Indian and Chinese navies decided to shell the coast of Somalia and see if they could make it uninhabitable for a few decades while the people further inland figure out that piracy has real consequences. The Somalis, by the way, actually justify their behavior.

“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”

The pirates quickly learned, though, that their booty was an estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry, heading for Kenya or Sudan, depending on whom you ask.

In a 45-minute interview, Mr. Sugule spoke on everything from what the pirates wanted (“just money”) to why they were doing this (“to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters”) to what they had to eat on board (rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, “you know, normal human-being food”).

He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”

...Piracy in Somalia is a highly organized, lucrative, ransom-driven business. Just this year, pirates hijacked more than 25 ships, and in many cases, they were paid million-dollar ransoms to release them. The juicy payoffs have attracted gunmen from across Somalia, and the pirates are thought to number in the thousands.

The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.

“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”

By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel they could catch: sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship.

The Somalis are close kin-- oddly enough-- to the Yemenis across the Bab el Mandeb and the Gulf of Aden. Kidnapping and holding people for ransom are perfectly acceptable traditions. In the mid-1850s Sir Richard Burton, one of Britian's greatest explorers and a bit of a crackpot, became the first European to travel to the heart of Somali territory and live to tell the tale.

As Richard Burton journeys deeper into Somalia, the water gets bad, the people wilder and the danger greater. More than once the Bedouin feign an attack-- with the idea of making a real one if the target makes a run for it. Such challenges are usually dealt with when Burton draws his revolver, ‘the father of the six’ and fires a shot overhead. Then the aggressive Bedouin become flattering and hospitable, treachery and dissimulation, according to Burton, being essential characteristics of the African Bedouin.

Passing through hostile foothills with thorns and tribes bearing poisoned arrows, Burton arrives close to Harar and the village that hosts him also prays for him-- and here we hear more of the author’s dry wit:

“..all the villagers assembled and recited the Fatihah, consoling us that we were dead men.”

Burton continues, of course, though half his party is too terrified to join him. He comes to the city of Harar and discovers it to be an unremarkable pile of rocks, devoid of any charm or grandeur. He’s ushered into to see the Amir and begins to make speeches full of the oriental pomp suitable for the occasion, declaring the earnest will of the British Empire to re-establish friendly connections and trade with the great city of Harar. He continues in this flowery vein until the Amir smiles and Burton realises that he won’t be executed that day at any rate. He lies down to rest that night and is:

“..profoundly impressed with the poesie of our position. I was under the roof of a bigoted prince whose least word was death; amongst a people who detest foreigners; the only European who had ever passed over their inhospitable threshold, and the fated instrument of their future downfall.”