MOSCOW _ Out-of-town money pouring into South Florida real estate is as old as Henry Flagler.
But the tale of Igor Zorin offers a 21st-century twist with all the weirdness modern Miami has to offer: Russian cash, a motorcycle club named after Russia's powerful special forces and a condo tower branded by Donald Trump.
Zorin is a Russian government official who's spent nearly $8 million on waterfront South Florida homes, hardly financially prudent given his bureaucrat's salary of $75,000 per year. He runs a state-owned broadcasting company that, among other duties, operates sound systems for the annual military parade that sends columns of soldiers and tanks rumbling through Moscow's Red Square.
Zorin has other Miami connections, too: His local business associate, Svyatoslav Mangushev, a Russian intelligence officer turned Miami real estate investor, helped found a biker club called Spetsnaz M.C. Spetsnaz is a group of motorcycle-loving South Florida expatriates who named themselves after the Russian equivalent of Delta Force or Seal Team Six.
Spetsnaz members once asked for official recognition from Russia's biggest biker gang, the Night Wolves, an infamous group that has strong ties to Russia's security services. The Night Wolves played a role in the Ukrainian uprising, once had their flag flown in outer space by Russian cosmonauts and are under U.S. sanctions.
Zorin and Mangushev have ties in both Russia and the United States: In Russia, security firms that have been linked to Mangushev have won $2.4 million worth of contracts from Zorin's agency since 2015. In Miami, Mangushev once transferred a Florida company that owned a $1.5 million condo out of his name and into Zorin's. No deed of sale was recorded, meaning the price paid _ if any _ is unknown.
The condo is one of three units Zorin owned at Trump Palace, a ritzy tower in Sunny Isles Beach built by a local developer and branded by the Trump Organization. Their total value? $5.4 million. Zorin still owns two condos there, plus a $3.3 million home in Bal Harbour.
But back in Russia, none of those properties appear in the public disclosure forms Zorin is required to fill out as a government official. That's illegal under Russian law and would trouble Zorin's bosses, according to Ilya Shumanov, deputy director of the Russian chapter of Transparency International, a global anti-graft watchdog.
Given the contentious state of U.S.-Russia relations, owning properties in the United States is considered a black mark against officials like Zorin, according to Shumanov.
"It's like he owned a place in Hell," he said.
Zorin was not an original buyer at Trump Palace, meaning his funds would not have gone to the Trump Organization, which signed lucrative deals to brand several condo towers in South Florida in the early 2000s. The Trump name is attractive to Russian buyers and helped turn Sunny Isles Beach into a high-rise condo haven sometimes called "Little Moscow."
Mangushev is a former officer in Russia's security service, the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. He first appeared in Miami around 2010.
In Russia, he ran a group of companies called Alpha-Anticriminal that provided security for some of Russia's biggest state-owned companies and government agencies. The Alpha-Anticriminal companies were listed under the name of a relative until 2014, according to Russian corporate records.
Alpha Team is an elite Spetsnaz counter-terrorism unit that operates within Russia's security service. Mangushev told Russian media that he is a former Alpha Team officer and that many of his employees are veterans of Russia's security service.
Zorin would not comment for this story. A Miami attorney for Mangushev, Olesia Belchenko, declined to answer a list of written questions, except to say that her client sold his Russian security firms in 2013 and has no business relationship with Zorin.
But publicly available records suggest Zorin and Mangushev are connected. In 2011, Zorin wrote a letter of recommendation for Alpha-Anticriminal, posted on the group's website. While Mangushev's attorney said he no longer owns Alpha-Anticriminal and its related entities, Russian corporate records still list him as the majority owner of one Alpha-Anticriminal company that is in the process of being dissolved. In addition, he manages a U.S. company called Alpha-Anticriminal. And the website for his South Florida realty firm, Alpha Realty, lists Alpha-Anticriminal as a "partner."
Mangushev and his affiliated companies own nearly $10 million in South Florida real estate, including a Brickell condo, a Hollywood office building, an Aventura boat slip and a vacant residential lot near Liberty City, according to property records. Court records show he once tried to evict his wife from a unit at the Trump Palace that charged $9,000 per month in rent. The eviction case began one year after he was arrested on a charge of misdemeanor battery and she filed a domestic violence injunction against him, later dropped.
