Following Michael Cohen's fiery exchange with the House Oversight Committee, read our cover story on Felix Sater. The Trump associate is linked to the mob and the CIA—But what's his role in the Russia investigation?
U.S. Felix Sater Trump-Russia Scandal About three years ago, not long after Donald Trump announced his improbable bid for the White House, Felix Sater sensed a big opportunity. He and his childhood friend, Michael Cohen—then a lawyer and dealmaker for the Trump Organization—had been working for more than a decade, on and off, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Cohen, now the subject of a federal investigation, has been summoned to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller, as well as the House and Senate intelligence committees. They were interested in Sater too. Suddenly, reporters began hounding him, showing up at his house on Long Island, calling him at all hours. The negative publicity hurt his career in real estate, and his wife of more than two decades, with whom he has three children, has left him.
Sater grew up as a normal Brooklyn kid. His father worked as a cab driver, and young Felix attended public schools. He also performed odd jobs and hawked The Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper, in Brighton Beach. It was the worst period of his life. “[I] had a wife and a young daughter to take care of,” he says. “I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got out. It was bleak.”
One night, the group went out to dinner, and Sater met an American named Milton Blane, who introduced himself as a consultant. A few days later, Blane invited him to a popular British pub in central Moscow. He told Sater he was connected to “some serious people,’’ guys who had extraordinary access to senior levels of the Russian armed forces. OK, Sater said, so what?
During the Soviet occupation, the U.S. had supplied stinger missiles to rebel groups fighting the Red Army. Once the USSR pulled out, however, American policy eventually changed; it became clear that jihadi groups, including Al-Qaeda, might use the missiles for terrorism. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order to round up as many of the stingers as possible in Afghanistan.
Osama bin Laden during an interview by Pakistani journalist, Hamid Mir, near Kabul in 2001. During the conversation, bin Laden stated he had nuclear weapons. MIR HAMID/DAILY DAWN/Gamma-Rapho/Getty In late 2000, as Sater helped the feds take on the mob, he also tried to make some money. He joined a real estate business—Bayrock—and the company managed to get a few deals, he says.
Greed Is GoodOn the morning of September 11, 2001, Sater was still working at Bayrock and making his normal morning commute into Manhattan. But when he neared the Midtown Tunnel, he saw it: The twin towers of the World Trade Center had been hit by planes, one after the other. As bin Laden’s face became a permanent fixture in the papers and on the news, Sater couldn’t shake the thought out of his mind: “Could we have had him? Was that a possibility? I’ll never know.”
For Sater, the work was surreal and often gratifying. “FBI agents would come to my house each night and stay there until 2 or 3 in the morning,” he says, “drinking my wife’s coffee, poring over this stuff.” Sater says he has never been paid by any U.S. government agency for his assistance, and current and former FBI officials confirm that. “As all this was going on,” Sater says, “I just remember thinking how crazy it all was.
But Trump eventually distanced himself from Sater, after The New York Times published an article detailing the latter’s criminal conviction for assault, as well as his role in the stock scam case. “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump said of Sater in a 2013 video deposition taken in connection with a civil lawsuit.
‘A Bit of a Blowhard’Hackers. Terrorists. Spies. Mafioso. The future president of the United States. Unbelievably, for a kid from Brooklyn, all of these people have been in Sater’s orbit. And now he’s splitting his time between New York and L.A. and trying to become a Hollywood producer. He’s like Zelig, I tell him as we finish our breakfast during our final meeting, at the Mandarin Oriental in D.C.
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