A Russian Mafia dormitory

I’ve referred to podcasts of Gaslit Nation before. It is created by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. Before now I haven’t actually listened to an episode. Part of that is because I get enough dire news from Kendzior’s Twitter feed, so have a basic idea of what most episodes are about.

But the description of this one is intriguing – how did the GOP become easy marks for the Russian Mafia? So I listened, taking notes along the way. The guest in this episode is Olga Lautman, of Jewish Russian and Ukrainian descent who works as a freelance researcher and well understands what is going on in Russia, the Russian Mafia, and what Russia is doing in America. The audio for this episode is 56 minutes.

Lautman has been following Russian and Ukraine politics her whole life. In 2015 she noticed that Russian leaders were explicitly favoring the nasty guy to be the next president of the US. They hadn’t done that before.

Lautman knew (as did a lot of NYC) that the nasty guy had dealings with the Italian Mafia. So why was Russia interested? She noticed that over a few decades a lot of residents of nasty guy properties were members of the Russian Mafia or were Russian Oligarchs.

Lautman grew up in Brighton Beach, where a lot of Russians escaping from the Soviet Union settled. It was nicknamed Little Odessa. It was also where many Soviet criminals came when the US changed its Russian immigrant policy in the 1970s. The Soviet Union saw a way to get rid of some of their criminals – and annoy the US. They ended up being mobsters. Some of their early funding was from Soviet KGB agents moving money out of Russia. So ties between the two.

Lautman talks about some of the people who associated with the Russian Mafia, such as Henry Kissinger, whose name, Kendzior notes while studying the current GOP mess, keeps popping up. Kissinger has known Putin for decades, since Putin was Deputy Mayor, and has an apartment near Moscow. Kissinger appears to have been an integral part of the nasty guy transition team, helping the vice nasty guy build the cabinet and making sure people who weren’t in the know (such as Mitt Romney) were excluded.

It seems a lot of people from the Nixon Administration, such as Kissinger, also appeared with the Reagan Administration and are showing up again.

In the 1980s as the Russians were seeing the Italians as competition, Rudy Giuliani was a prosecutor and put a lot of Italian mobsters behind bars. Donating to Giuliani’s campaign are a few Russian mobsters. One of the mobsters is appointed to the NYC business commission when Giuliani becomes mayor.

The nasty guy begins doing business (at least in the beginning legitimate) with these mobsters in the 1970s. A Russian Mafia boss bought five apartments in Trump Tower in 1984.

As the Russian Mafia rose the New York and national investigators still didn’t see them as a threat, in spite of their increasing crimes. So investigators didn’t bother hiring agents who knew Russian and thus couldn’t infiltrate them.

In the mid 1990s William Sessions and others in Washington began warning about the power of the Russians mobsters. But when Sessions was dismissed from the Clinton Administration, he went to work for the head of the mobsters.

In the 90s a leading mobster bragged how many former KGB agents had infiltrated American government agencies. The Mafia recruited workers by first asking them to do small courier jobs. But once a person had done that the Mafia had blackmail power over them. Which implies these people had blackmail power over the nasty guy since the 1980s, though in terms of business prospects the nasty guy was quite willing.

Lautman reviews several more connections between the Mafia and people in the news in the last couple of years, such as Felix Sater, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. All of them had ties to the Mafia. Trump Tower essentially becomes a Mafia dormitory. Starting in the late 90s nasty guy was obsessed with all things Russian, sometimes even meeting Russian leadership. So why weren’t all these people prosecuted decades ago?

One reason why is at the time the nasty guy was seen as a harmless caricature of the rich buffoon.

The question still stands. The nasty guy and all these people certainly showed up in intelligence reports. Kendzior and Chalupa studied those reports (the parts made public) for what they know of the nasty guy. Some agents are now wondering how Kendzior and Chalupa knew those things when the agents didn’t. Guys … we read your reports. So with all this much incriminating info in public sources why didn’t the intelligence community put it together?

There’s a big difference between the Italian and Russian Mafia. The Russian Mafia is the same as the Russian government and Russian business. If the Russian government needs something done without fingerprints they ask the Mafia to do it. This is a thing Americans don’t understand. The Mafia not only made billions of dollars they also gathered a great deal of intelligence on all the major players.

They want revenge on the West, and the US in particular, for forcing the Soviet (Russian) country into collapse and breakup. They have the mentality of destroying and humiliating the West. They want to reverse our win in the Cold War.

The Mafia has infiltrated pretty close to every government agency. However, their primary target has been the GOP. And the takeover was possible because the GOP is white men who tend to think alike and who are all part of the good old boys club.

One thing that made that takeover easier is the Russian view of the West is the same as the GOP view of liberals.

This podcast mentions that there has been a big change in the GOP – they are no longer interested in governing. They only want power, the ability to make everyone else’s lives miserable. The podcast didn’t mention the timeline. However, I remember there was a big change in the GOP leading up to the 1994 election and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. So just a few years between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the GOP switching to just wanting power. Hmm.

So, yeah, the entire GOP is compromised by Russia. We’ve long known that the nasty guy is a Putin puppet. Watching Speaker Pelosi and her refusal to impeach makes me and many others wonder if she is also compromised by Russia.

Several months (maybe a couple years) ago Kendzior started using the phrase “This is a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” Now I understand why. Signs with this phrase have been appearing around St. Louis (Kendzior’s hometown) recently. An example is here.