Michael Cohen’s Mysterious Manhattan Real Estate Deals Raise Eyebrows

Michael Cohen Image by Getty Images

By Nathan Guttman October 26, 2017

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Updated, October 28 3:52p.m.

President Trump’s lawyer and close confidant Michael Cohen has taken a page from his boss’s book in making money off New York real estate – buy low and sell high.

But not all is clear about Cohen’s buying and selling.

A McClatchy investigation published Thursday found four deals that “raised red flags for several experts” who reviewed them. In one case, Cohen bought a small Lower East Side apartment building for $2 million and sold it three years later for $10 million. The assessed value of the building did not increase at this time. The identity of the buyer is not known. In three other cases there was a similar pattern of sale to an LLC whose owners remained anonymous.

Cohen said the buyer of all properties “is a New York real estate family fund that has been around for almost a century” and that the purchase was made in cash for tax deferral purposes.

Jaimie Nawaday, a former federal prosecutor, told McClatchy that “An all cash purchase by an LLC of an overvalued property in Manhattan is usually worth a closer look by federal investigators.”

Contact Nathan Guttman at [email protected] or on Twitter @nathanguttman

Nathan Guttman, staff writer, was the Forward’s Washington bureau chief. He joined the staff in 2006 after serving for five years as Washington correspondent for the Israeli dailies Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. In Israel, he was the features editor for Ha’aretz and chief editor of Channel 1 TV evening news. He was born in Canada and grew up in Israel. He is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.