Cloak & Swagger

HE’S BEEN CALLED AN Associate OF DONALD TRUMP AND A CAREER Criminal CONNECTED TO THE MOB. BUT U.S. INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES CALL HIM SOMETHING ELSE: A Highly-Valuable ASSET. WILL THE REAL Felix Sater PLEASE STAND UP?

- Bill Powell

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 deal maker for the Trump Organization—had been working for more than a decade, on and off, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. The New York real estate mogul had long wanted to see his name on a glitzy building in the Russian capital, but the project had never materialized.

Now, with Trump running for office, the timing seemed right to Sater, who felt he had the proper connections for the project. A Moscow native whose family had fled to Brooklyn in the 1970s, he had returned to Russia in the 1990s, where he had done business with a number of high-ranking former Soviet intelligence officers. He eventually came back to New York but had stayed in touch with some of them—potentially a major asset in signing a lucrative deal. He even boasted to Cohen that Trump Tower Moscow could somehow help the candidate win the election. “Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater wrote in a November 2015 email. “I will get all of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s team to buy in on this.”