A Column Worth Reading
When the old Soviet Union collapsed in
the Nineties, the government-owned engines which ran their economy, however
inefficient they were, their manufacturing, their extraction of natural
resources, their distribution systems, all were in disarray and what was left
“were up for grabs." Some individuals
associated with these former entities seized them as their own booty, not
necessarily without the assistance of the Russian underworld, and continued to
personally own and operate them as what we refer to as ‘oligarchs.’ As the Russian government reformed itself,
the existence of these oligarchs continued, but not without the recognition of
their importance by the Russian government.
That’s the background needed before you read Frank Cerabino’s
fascinating and witty recent column motivated by former Trump ‘fixer’ Michael
Cohen’s new book, “Disloyal: a Memoir.“
JL
A New Twist in the Old Saga of the
Palm Beach mansion off of which Trump Made a Killing
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| Cerabino |
Palm Beach Post
We
missed a good naming opportunity.
The
folks in Palm Beach like to name their houses. A showy name is easier to
remember than the address, I guess.
I say
“house,” but what I mean in this particular case is a Palm Beach residence with
492 feet of oceanfront property, a 48-car garage, 18 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, a
ballroom, an art gallery, two guest houses, and 36-foot-tall ceilings in some
places.
When
the estate at 515 N. County Road was owned by nursing-home magnate Abe Gosman
he named it “Maison de l'Amitié,” which translates to “House of
Friendship.”
Bankruptcy
forced Gosman to liquidate, and the two potential buyers were well-known Palm
Beach party chums: Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.
Trump
paid $41.3 million for the property in 2005, outbidding Epstein, who would go
on to become Palm Beach’s world-renowned serial rapist of underage teenage
girls.
If
Epstein had been successful in buying the estate, “House of Friendship” would
have been an outrageously inappropriate name.
Decency
would dictate a name change to something more fitting: Something like Palacio
Pedophilia, or Salon d’Sleazebaggio.
But
that’s not the missed naming opportunity I’m writing about.
When
Trump bought the humongous, empty estate, he didn’t hang onto it for very
long.
He sold
it three years later to a trust controlled by Russian oligarch Dmitry
Rybolovlev, who consolidated his wealth during the chaotic post-Soviet era by
getting a controlling share of Russia's biggest fertilizer company.
Rybolovlev
had a fortune in Russian flight capital which he used to buy fine art, a
European soccer club, an $88 million apartment in Manhattan and a $20 million
home in Hawaii.
So, at
the time, it seemed like Rybolovlev was just buying himself a winter home in
South Florida. The Palm Beach real estate transaction came at a particularly
good time for the cash-strapped Trump.
James
J. Henry, an investigative economist and fellow with Columbia University's
Center on Sustainable Investment, put it this way:
"The
nine-lived Trump, in particular, had just suffered a string of six successive
bankruptcies," Henry wrote in The American Interest. "So the massive
illicit outflows from Russia and oil-rich FSU (Former Soviet Union) members
like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan from the mid-1990s provided precisely the kind
of undiscriminating investors that he needed.
"These
outflows arrived at just the right time to fund several of Trump’s post-2000
high-risk real estate and casino ventures – most of which failed.”
Rybolovlev
paid $95 million for the estate that Trump bought three years earlier for $41.3
million. That’s quite a mark-up, and more than $30 million higher than the
property’s appraised value.
It was
the same year that Donald Trump Jr. told investors “We see a lot of money
pouring in from Russia.” And the year that Trump was facing another bankruptcy.
Trump
Entertainment Resorts, which operated three Atlantic City casinos, had amassed
$1.74 billion in debts when it failed to make a $53.1 million bond interest
payment in December 2008. Two months later it sought Chapter 11 protection.
The
$53.7 million markup of the Palm Beach property was strange, but maybe for
billionaires like Rybolovlev, it was chump change for a piece of property he
fell in love with.
Except
for this: Rybolovlev never moved into his Palm Beach estate, and nobody
can say for sure that he even visited the property during the time he owned it.
After
eight years of vacancy, the mansion and its out-buildings were leveled and the
property was subdivided into three smaller lots and sold by the company
Rybolovlev controlled.
There
is no more “Maison de l'Amitié.”
But
there is some new context to this strange sale. It comes from Trump’s former
fixer, lawyer and confidante, Michael Cohen, who had turned against his former
boss after being the fall guy for Trump’s illegal $130,000 hush-money payment
to porn star Stormy Daniels a month before the 2016 election.
Cohen
wrote in his newly released book, “Disloyal: A Memoir”, that Rybolovlev wasn’t
the real buyer of the Palm Beach estate.
“The
Russians bought the house from Trump for $95 million in 2008, an inflated price
paid on the eve of the real estate collapse and global financial crisis, at the
time the largest price ever paid for a private residence in the United States,”
Cohen wrote in Chapter 12 of his book.
“Trump
told me that the price hadn’t really been an issue. He explained that the
Russians weren’t really spending their own money when they made their excessive
purchases of European soccer teams and super yachts and Central Park South
penthouses,” Cohen wrote. “The oligarchs could enjoy the assets, but always and
forever at the pleasure of Vladimir Putin, the new tsar, and displeasing him
meant risking their fortunes but also their lives.”
Cohen
wrote: “‘The oligarchs are just fronts for Putin,’ Trump told me. ‘He puts them
into wealth to invest his money. That’s all they are doing – investing
Putin’s money.’”
“Trump
was convinced the real buyer of Maison de l’Amitie was Vladimir Putin,” Cohen
wrote.
It’s
too bad we didn’t know at the time.
We
could have given the Palm Beach estate a much more suitable name, such as
Maison de l’Murderer, Casa Kompromat, or Shady Acres.
fcerabino@pbpost.com
Coronavirus Confusion
I caught part of an interview
the other day by CNN’s Dana Bash with Robert Robbins, President of the
University of Arizona, part of a CNN segment dealing with how re-opened college
campuses were becoming hot spots of positive Covid19 testing. He commented that his University was now
“transitioning from prevention to treatment.”
I took this to mean that while testing of the student body would
continue, there would be reduced emphasis on stopping the spread of the virus
by social distancing, mask wearing, crowd avoidance, etc., particularly off of
the campus, where the University had less control, and a greater emphasis on
treating the symptoms of those infected young people who usually survive the
virus anyway.
This overlooked the facts that
those symptomless individuals who still remain untested actually might be carriers and contagious for
others (that’s why there is no such thing as ‘too much testing’), and of course
those who have tested positive for the virus definitely can infect others. More vulnerable than college students, these
include older family members when they go home on college breaks, or those they
encounter in the local community.
Although President Robbins
doesn’t come out and state it flatly, this approach, involving a de-emphasis on prevention, agrees with the “herd”
immunity theory which proposes that the more individuals who are infected, the
more who will acquire immunity from the virus, the vast majority of whom will
not die from it or even require hospitalization. That is where “transitioning from prevention
to treatment” seems to me to be heading. Those were his words.
Most reputable medical
professionals strongly disagree with the “herd” theory because whatever
immunities it might provide to those who have been infected, it increases the
number of those who can spread the virus.
Balancing this is the fact that President Robbins is an M.D., whatever
that is worth.
Some of you might have seen a recent NPR article on the nexus of evil in the Trump administration, adviser Stephen
Miller. For those who have not, CLICK HERE
In any event, I’ve noted a
strong resemblance between Miller and the late Roy Cohn who some of you might
remember as Senator Joe McCarthy’s young sidekick during the infamous hearings
during the 1950’s and much later, ruthless adviser to businessman Donald Trump in his business
career. Here are pictures of both. Could this be why Trump is so attracted to
Miller?
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| Miller |
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| Cohn |
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