Fifty-eight stories of black glass on Fifth Avenue – though Trump told everyone it was 68. He skipped floor numbers to make the building seem taller than it actually was.[2] Right from the start, shell companies based in places like Panama, the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands bought 43 condos there – all cash.[3] And nobody had to say whose money it was.
Here’s how it worked: Trump Tower was one of the only buildings in the city that would let you buy a condo through a shell company and pay entirely in cash.[3][6] No name on the deed. No proof of income. No questions about where the money came from. He’d built the perfect machine for making money disappear – and the people who needed that service found him fast.
On August 22, 1983 – months after the building opened – a shell company called “Lasa Trade and Finance” bought apartment 54-K in Trump Tower.[4] Public records show different prices depending on the source – one filing lists $446,875, another lists $1.65 million – but the buyer behind the shell company was the same: Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the dictator of Haiti.[4] Not former dictator. Current dictator. A man who was, at that very moment, looting his country’s treasury while his people starved.
Now, the Snopes fact-check on this sale adds an important qualifier: there’s no evidence Trump or his company took part in any money laundering scheme in this sale.[4] That’s how shell companies work – they hide the real buyer. But that’s also the point. Trump built a system where he didn’t have to know. He sold luxury condos to anonymous shell companies paying cash, and he never had to ask who was really writing the check. Whether he knew it was a dictator or not, he’d built the machine that made it possible.
Three years later, in February 1986, a popular uprising drove Duvalier out of Haiti.[5] When he fled, American officials said he held $200 million to $500 million in foreign bank accounts.[4] Haiti’s new government said some of it was already parked in Trump Tower. The Haitian people’s money, sitting in a Manhattan penthouse under a shell company name.
Then came the transaction that would set the pattern for the next four decades.
In 1984, a man named David Bogatin walked into Trump Tower and bought five luxury condos for somewhere between $4.9 million and $6 million, depending on who’s counting.[3][6] All cash, according to his partner Michael Franzese.[7] No mortgage. According to reporter Craig Unger, he “appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money.”[6] Trump reportedly attended the closing personally.[6]
And Franzese later said he was a silent partner in the deal – that Bogatin was “the front guy” buying them.[7] The partner – invisible. The source of the money – invisible. Millions of dollars in cash from a man with no visible way to earn it, and nothing in the record shows anyone in Trump’s organization asked a single question.
Here’s what Trump would have known if he’d bothered to look: Bogatin was a Russian emigre with deep ties to organized crime. He was partnered with Michael Franzese of the Colombo crime family in a massive gasoline tax scam – fuel run on paper through dummy companies that never paid the tax.[7] By Franzese’s own later testimony, it brought in as much as $9 million in cash a week – money that needed to be laundered.
Trump Tower condos were perfect for that. Buy with cash through a shell company, and dirty money becomes Manhattan real estate. Clean. Legitimate. Untraceable.
In 1987, New York prosecutors caught up with Bogatin. He pleaded guilty to charges related to the gasoline bootlegging scheme.[6] Then, instead of showing up for sentencing, he jumped bail and fled the country.[6] When the government seized his Trump Tower apartments, New York state prosecutors said he’d bought them “to launder money, to shelter and hide assets.”[6]
This was the mid-1980s, and something was shifting in New York’s criminal underworld. The Italian families that had dominated organized crime for decades were getting hit hard by federal RICO prosecutions. The Russians were moving in – not replacing the Italians, but filling the gaps they left. Real estate was the first place the money went. And Trump Tower, with its anonymous shell company purchases and no-questions-asked closings, was the front door.
But by then, the money had already done its work. Criminal cash had been transformed into Trump Tower equity. And Trump had facilitated every step of it.
The question the Bogatin deal answered was simple: would Trump ask where the money came from? Would he care? Would he demand to know?
No. He wouldn’t. He didn’t.
And that opened a door that would never close.
That same year – 1984 – a mob-connected gambling kingpin named Robert Hopkins showed up at a Trump Tower closing with a suitcase holding between $150,000 and $200,000 in cash.[8] Hopkins ran New York’s largest illegal gambling ring. The tax returns he gave the bank said he was a jeweler making more than $500,000 a year – but the state prosecutors who later convicted him found no evidence he had any job or reportable income. He counted the cash out on the table. A Trump limousine ferried the cash to a New Jersey bank that did business with his casino.[8] Deal closed.
This has every hallmark of money laundering. You take money that came from crime, feed it through a legitimate-looking real estate transaction, and it comes out looking clean. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has literally published advisories warning that all-cash purchases by shell companies are “an attractive avenue for criminals to launder illegal proceeds while masking their identities.”[3]
Trump didn’t just ignore these red flags. He built a business model around them.
A BuzzFeed News investigation later found that between 1980 and 2017, more than 1,300 Trump condos across his branded properties were purchased in all-cash transactions by shell companies.[3] That’s one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos ever sold. The total value: roughly $1.5 billion in transactions that hit Treasury Department red flags for money laundering.[3]Data from the BuzzFeed News investigation into shell company purchases across Trump properties
One thousand three hundred condos. $1.5 billion. One-fifth of every Trump-branded condo sold in the US.
These weren’t a few bad apples slipping through the cracks. This was the business. From the moment Trump Tower opened, anonymous buyers with unexplained cash were Trump’s bread and butter. Dictators. Mob bosses. Russian organized crime. Anyone with money they couldn’t explain and a need to make it disappear – Trump was open for business.
And nothing in the record shows he ever asked where it came from. The law didn’t make him.
The test was whether Donald Trump could be useful. Whether he would look the other way when dirty money showed up at his door. Whether he could be relied upon to take the cash, close the deal, and never ask questions.
He passed. Every time.
By the mid-1980s, everyone who mattered knew it. Russian organized crime knew it. The American mafia knew it. Foreign kleptocrats knew it. And the Soviet bloc’s spies – Czechoslovakia’s StB had been interested in Trump since 1977, as I showed in Essay 1 – knew it too.
Trump Tower wasn’t just a building anymore. It was a laundromat. You brought your dirty money, you left with a deed and property records that showed nothing but a shell company name. Trump got his cut. And nobody ever had to explain anything to anyone.
Which is exactly why, in January 1987, a Soviet ambassador named Yuri Dubinin would send Donald Trump a letter with an offer – one that, if former KGB officer Yuri Shvets is right, he’d been groomed to accept.
That’s the next essay.
Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said David Bogatin bought his five condos in the names of shell companies – nothing shows that. It also said a Snopes fact-check found no evidence Trump knew Duvalier was the buyer – Snopes said there’s no evidence Trump or his company took part in any money laundering scheme in that sale. It said Bogatin fled two months after pleading guilty and that federal agents seized his condos and said he’d bought them to launder money – nothing shows the two-month timing, and it was New York state prosecutors who said that. It said Duvalier fled hours before a revolution with $500 million to $800 million – a popular uprising drove him out, and American officials said he held $200 million to $500 million in foreign bank accounts. It said the gas scheme moved fuel across state lines for millions a transaction – it ran fuel through dummy companies that never paid the tax. It said Robert Hopkins brought a briefcase with $200,000 in cash – it was a suitcase with $150,000 to $200,000. And it said the Soviet ambassador picked up the phone to make Trump an offer in 1987 – he sent a letter, in January 1987.
Update, September 27th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so – Craig Unger, Michael Franzese, Wayne Barrett, Haiti’s new government and former KGB officer Yuri Shvets – and they now give the range of prices reported for Bogatin’s condos, what the Treasury actually warned, that it was Czechoslovakia’s spies who took an interest in Trump in 1977, that the one-in-five figure counts Trump-branded condos in the US, and that nothing in the record shows anyone asked where the money came from, while the footnotes now point to the pages that back each line.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
