PORT WASHINGTON, N.Y. _ Fresh from snatching up a former insane asylum in foreclosure for a cheap $1.2 million, a mystery man went running down a Syracuse, N.Y., street, iPad covering his face, as reporters gave chase and TV cameras rolled.
It was April 11, 2013, and the man _ whose identity was hidden until now _ was Felix Sater, two-time ex-con turned government informant, and at least one-time adviser to Donald Trump.
Sater was describing himself by then as "a very interesting guy with a colorful background," according to Kenneth Silverman, the bankruptcy trustee for that New York property Sater bought at auction. It was no idle boast.
His story is the stuff of Hollywood scripts. Sater has been tied to a jailed Russian-American diamond thief, the Italian mafia and wealthy Kazakh fugitives; he also appears on the fringes of an unsolved double murder in New Jersey that detectives considered a mob hit. He served time for stabbing a fellow securities dealer with a broken margarita glass.
Of course, he was also named Man of the Year at his synagogue and, according to federal prosecutors, helped put a lot of bad guys behind bars.
Now Sater has re-emerged as investigators probe deeply into Donald Trump's connections _ business and political _ in the former Soviet Union. Court documents show Sater's onetime company, Bayrock Group _ successor to an earlier firm that was caught up in a major Wall Street scandal _ was contracted by Trump in 2005 to find a suitable tower in Moscow that could bear the mogul's name. In 2010, he even carried a Trump Organization business card that stated he was a "Senior Advisor to Donald Trump."
This is the story of the ex-con who claims ties to the president.
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SLASH AND CRASH
Born in Russia in March 1966, Sater immigrated to Brooklyn as a grade schooler, escaping rampant anti-Semitism. As a hot-headed 25-year-old Wall Street trader, Sater had his first brush with notoriety when he drove the jagged stem of a glass into a fellow trader in a barroom altercation. He was convicted in 1993 and spent 15 months behind bars, walking free in September 1995.
Lesson learned? Maybe not. The conviction cost him his brokerage license, which in turn led him to team up with childhood friends involved in an illicit stock-manipulation scheme. One of those friends? Gennady "Gene" Klotsman, a Russian-American who as it happens, according to a story last year in the Moscow Times, was drinking with Sater on the ill-fated night of the stabbing in 1991.
Sater and Klotsman teamed up to form White Rock Partners in the late 1990s. Unluckily for them, their activities there put them in the headlights of what became a broad federal probe into stock manipulation known as Operation Uptick.
So much of life turns on the smallest of details. It was a missed monthly payment on a storage locker that led to the arrests of Sater, Klotsman and another White Rock partner, Salvatore Lauria. Citing a criminal complaint, BusinessWeek reported in 1998 that when police opened the locker they found weapons and a gym bag with documents. And those documents outlined stock manipulation and money laundering through a network of shell companies. They pointed at White Rock.
The FBI established that the operation was rife with underworld figures from both the Italian and Russian mafias. It was a nasty business: In 1999, two traders were found slain in a mansion in Colts Neck, N.J. One of them, Alain Chalem, was shot in the chest, forehead, nose and in both ears _ hallmarks of a mob hit, as news reports said at the time.
Lauria later confirmed in a book he authored (which was summarized in SEC filings) earlier rumors that Sater had threatened to kill Chalem, who detectives said had represented Russian investors. But he also wrote that he didn't think Sater was the actual killer.
The slayings were a chapter in the FBI's larger struggle to rid Wall Street of mob influence.
Lauria and Klotsman pleaded guilty and cooperated with the feds to at least some degree. In 2002, Klotsman was sentenced to six years in prison and restitution of the $40 million lost by investors. In 2004, Lauria was sentenced to five years of probation and a $20,000 fine.
Klotsman was released early and moved to Moscow in 2006, where old habits resurfaced: He was charged with helping pull off a spectacular 2010 heist in which thieves posed as intelligence agents and made off with diamonds and other jewelry worth more than $2.8 million. He was sentenced to 10 years in a gulag and was offered up last year to the United States as potential bait in a yet-to-happen U.S.-Russia prisoner swap.
