THE REAL WIRETAP AT TRUMP TOWER

By Robert P. Bomboy

           There's another Donald Trump wiretapping story you may not have heard about.

Years before the future President rode his golden escalator into the 2016 election campaign, the FBI really did tap some phone lines in the Trump Tower.

For two years, ending in 2013, the FBI had a court-approved warrant to eavesdrop on a sophisticated Russian organized-crime money-laundering network that operated in New York City, specifically in the Trump Tower. Was President Trump confused and remembering that when he famously tweeted that he had been wiretapped?

Nah! That's too much of a stretch even for him.

Some of the Russian mafia money-launderers whom the FBI was after worked out of the Trump Tower's 63rd floor - three floors below the Trump family's penthouse residence - running what prosecutors called an "international money laundering, sports gambling and extortion ring."

Among the crooks that the FBI wiretap caught in the Trump Tower was Vadim Trincher, who pleaded guilty to racketeering and is still serving a five-year prison term.

Looking over its two years of intercepts of phone conversations and text message exchanges, the FBI described Trincher speaking to a gambler who owed $50,000. He said his enforcer, a Russian named Maxin, would get the gambler and squeeze him for the money he owed. Trincher warned the gambler that he "should be careful, lest he be tortured and lest he wind up underground.”

The FBI was also after the Russian mafia boss, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, whose money-laundering ring based in the Trump Tower was bringing millions into the United States from former Soviet republics and washing the dirty money into clean U.S. dollars.

Tokhtakhounov has been dirty for years. He was indicted here in the United States, accused of paying bribes to Olympic judges so that Russian figure skaters would win gold medals.

Other Trump Tower floors were occupied by a real estate development company called Bayrock owned by post-Soviet oligarchs and operated by felonious securities fraudster Felix Sater, who was born in Russia. The firm built the eventually foreclosed Trump SoHo hotel-condominium where Donald Trump filmed The Apprentice. An investigation by the widely respected Financial Times shows the hotel was used to launder dirty money in a deal that ultimately profited Trump himself.

President Trump has said he doesn't know Sater, even though they were neighbors. "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like," he said under oath in a 2013 legal deposition. The Russian says differently: In a sworn deposition in 2008, Sater testified that he would pitch business ideas to Trump, "just me and him"  . . .  "on a constant basis." There are photos of Sater standing next to Trump.

Those floors in the Trump Tower were quite a neighborhood. It looks as if the Trump Tower at that time was a one-size fits all money-laundering superstore. The FBI with their wiretap did grab 30 of the Russian mobsters they were looking for, but Tokhtakhounov slipped through the dragnet - only to turn up standing near Donald Trump at the future President's 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow.

               There was a movie called The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming in 1966, long before there were computers or computer hacks. It was a funny movie back then, but there's nothing funny about this.

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