Michael Cohen Owned Piece Of Mobbed-Up Brooklyn Social Club
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Aiden Pink April 18, 2018
Trump “fixer” Michael Cohen owned a stake in a Brooklyn social club formerly used as a meeting place for leaders of the Russian Mafia, Rolling Stone reported last week.
The El Caribe Country Club, owned by Cohen’s uncle Morton Levine, was a well-known mob hangout. According to Talking Points Memo, the leaders of the Russian mob in the United States during the 1970s through the 1990s, Evsei Agron and Marat Balagula, ran their crime organization out of the El Caribe. Levine has never been charged with a crime.
Levine told Rolling Stone that all of his nieces and nephews still own stakes in the club, except for Cohen, who sold his share after the election.
Before the president entered politics, Cohen periodically worked on Trump’s business dealings in Russia. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating multiple examples of Cohen’s Russia connections, The Washington Post reported.
Such efforts include an attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in October 2015, where Cohen went so far as to email Vladimir Putin’s spokesman.
Mueller is also reportedly examining a back-channel and peace agreement Cohen attempted in order to help lift sanctions that were placed on Russia due to its 2014 invasion of Crimea.
Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink
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