https://www.newsweek.com/2019/01/18/donald-trump-mafia-connections-decades-later-linked-mob-1285771.html?fbclid=IwAR2D87EOoolEerEzByKmQsu61_GmBP9DzhMq9dNInIJMpEAny6lyVN4bJcI
"Russia’s intelligence services, oligarchs and gangsters are seamlessly connected, according to multiple news accounts through the years. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian mob has made huge inroads into the American underworld, sometimes forming alliances of convenience with La Cosa Nostra. As a teenager, Trump’s future lawyer Cohen, The Wall Street Journal reported last year, “frequented Brooklyn’s ethnic Russian neighborhoods and married into a Ukrainian family.” At a friend’s wedding, he “bragged to another guest that he belonged to the Russian mob.” The friend didn’t believe it, but when Trump pursued a hotel deal in Moscow, Cohen was dispatched to seal the deal, working through shady characters to offer Putin a top-floor penthouse, according to BuzzFeed News. The Trump Organization had long been awash in illicit Russian money, author Craig Unger claimed in a 2018 book, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. “It started out as a simple money-laundering operation at Trump Tower in 1984, when a Russian mobster came to Trump Tower with $6 million in cash and bought five condos. This is the template for what begins to unfold. At least 1,300 Trump condos in the United States have been sold similarly. All cash purchases through anonymous sources,” Unger told Newsweek last August."
