Monday, March 25, 2019
Associated Press
NEW YORK
The way Felix Sater tells it, his life is a screenplay just waiting to be written, with tales of drunken brawling, Wall Street rip-offs, international spying and a behind-the-scenes role in Donald Trump’s effort to build a skyscraper in Russia.
Sater, a Soviet emigre who befriended Trump in the 2000s and helped push the Trump Tower Moscow project during the 2016 presidential campaign, hasn’t shied away from his past on both the right and wrong sides of the law, even as he has become a key figure in the House Democrats’ investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia.
Sater, 53, is due to testify in public Wednesday before the House Intelligence Committee about his dealings with the Trump Organization and the Moscow discussions. That will be followed the next day by questioning behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee.
So just who is Felix Sater?
When he was in his late 20s, Sater served 15 months in jail and permanently lost his stockbroker’s license for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken margarita glass at a Manhattan bar.
A few years later, in 1998, Sater turned state’s evidence against New York’s Genovese and Bonanno crime families after getting caught in a $40 million pump-and-dump stock fraud, in which shady brokers drove up the price of stocks they secretly owned and then sold them, causing prices to crater and wiping out unsuspecting investors.
Testifying before Congress in 2017, he claimed to have helped the government track Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida and assembled a mercenary team of ex-Russian special forces and Afghan fighters in an attempt to kill bin Laden.
How much of that is true is unclear, since U.S. intelligence agencies don’t typically talk about such things. But former Attorney General Loretta Lynch acknowledged some of Sater’s cooperation when asked about him at her 2015 confirmation hearing.
Lynch, the former chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, said Sater had provided “information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals, including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra.”
It was through Bayrock Group LLC, a real-estate development company formed by a Kazakh-born former Soviet official, that Sater got to know Trump. The company moved into Trump Tower and presented Trump with a plan to build a Manhattan hotel, a $450 million, 46-story project completed in 2008.
Trump named Sater a senior business adviser in 2010, using him to scout out high-end real estate deals.
Sater was a driving force in trying to kickstart the Moscow project into the summer of 2016. Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen said Sater talked with him about having Trump visit Russia during the campaign and pitched the idea of offering Russian President Vladimir Putin a free penthouse in the planned tower as a marketing stunt to drive up the price of condos.
Sater was also involved in trying to get the White House to look at a Ukrainian peace proposal that favored Russia.