2015: Trump Taj Mahal fined $10 Million for Anti-Money Laundering Violations

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Contact: Steve Hudak [phone]
Immediate Release
March 06, 2015

WASHINGTON, DC – The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) today imposed a $10 million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort (Trump Taj Mahal), for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). In addition to the civil money penalty, the casino is required to conduct periodic external audits to examine its anti-money laundering (AML) BSA compliance program and provide those audit reports to FinCEN and the casino’s Board of Directors.

Trump Taj Mahal, a casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, admitted to several willful BSA violations, including violations of AML program requirements, reporting obligations, and recordkeeping requirements. Trump Taj Mahal has a long history of prior, repeated BSA violations cited by examiners dating back to 2003. Additionally, in 1998, FinCEN assessed a $477,700 civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal for currency transaction reporting violations.

"Trump Taj Mahal received many warnings about its deficiencies," said FinCEN Director Jennifer Shasky Calvery. "Like all casinos in this country, Trump Taj Mahal has a duty to help protect our financial system from being exploited by criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors. Far from meeting these expectations, poor compliance practices, over many years, left the casino and our financial system unacceptably exposed."

Trump Taj Mahal admitted that it failed to implement and maintain an effective AML program; failed to report suspicious transactions; failed to properly file required currency transaction reports; and failed to keep appropriate records as required by the BSA. Notably, Trump Taj Mahal had ample notice of these deficiencies as many of the violations from 2012 and 2010 were discovered in previous examinations ...

https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-trump-taj-mahal-casino-resort-10-million-significant-and-long

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1. Trump Taj Mahal casino settles U.S. money laundering claims

By REUTERS February 11, 2015

The parent of Trump Taj Mahal, one of Atlantic City, New Jersey’s struggling casinos, has settled U.S. government charges that it violated federal laws designed to thwart money laundering, court filings show.

Trump Taj Mahal agreed to the assessment of a $10 million civil penalty by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, according to a proposed consent order filed on Tuesday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware.

The penalty will take the form of a general unsecured claim in Trump Taj Mahal’s bankruptcy.

In exchange, Trump Taj Mahal admitted to have willfully violated reporting and record-keeping requirements under the federal Bank Secrecy Act from 2010 to 2012 ...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/politics/trump-taj-mahal/index.html

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2. Trump's casino was a money laundering concern shortly after it opened

By Jose Pagliery, CNN Investigates
Updated 8:21 AM ET, Mon May 22, 2017

(CNN)The Trump Taj Mahal casino broke anti-money laundering rules 106 times in its first year and a half of operation in the early 1990s, according to the IRS in a 1998 settlement agreement.

It's a bit of forgotten history that's buried in federal records held by an investigative unit of the Treasury Department, records that congressional committees investigating Trump's ties to Russia have obtained access to, CNN has learned.

The casino repeatedly failed to properly report gamblers who cashed out $10,000 or more in a single day, the government said.

Trump's casino ended up paying the Treasury Department a $477,000 fine in 1998 without admitting any liability under the Bank Secrecy Act ...

But key details of the casino's cash reporting violations are missing from the publicly released documents, including the identities of the gamblers and casino employees involved in the transactions ...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/22/politics/trump-taj-mahal/index.html

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3. Trump's Russian Laundromat

How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House.
By CRAIG UNGER
July 13, 2017

In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

... The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.

If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.

In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America ...

... Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump ...

https://newrepublic.com/article/143586/trumps-russian-laundromat-trump-tower-luxury-high-rises-dirty-money-international-crime-syndicate

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4. Didn't Trump get out except for a 10 % holding @2011?

His name was still on, per a licensing agreement, but he wasn’t in control.

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5. ... During Trump's 13 years as the chairman of the board between 1995 and 2009, the company

made three trips through bankruptcy court, and was about to file its fourth when he left. Trump also resigned as CEO in 2004. Though Trump Entertainment Resorts was losing million, Trump personally profited during his tenure, partially thanks to a deal that had his flailing casinos buying up Trump Ice bottled water. Trump walked away having pocketed roughly $82 million during his time there ...

http://fortune.com/2016/10/10/trump-taj-mahal-bankrupt-icahn-pictures/

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6. Bless his heart, he may run the company in to the ground, but he makes money on the deal!

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7. Sold for 4 cents on the dollar: how Trump bankrupted it twice

... The hotel, which Trump called "the 8th wonder of the world" back in the 1990s, cost $1.2 billion to build.

Icahn blew $100 million trying to revive the property before throwing in the towel back in August. Trump bankrupted the property twice as part of his public casino holding company Trump Entertainment Resorts.

The property first went bankrupt in 2009, just a few days after both Donald and Ivanka resigned from the board ...

Of course, the Trumps were still debt holders in the company and had a say in the bankruptcy proceedings ...

The casino ended up spending a ton of money on Trump products, including about a quarter of a million dollars for Trump-branded water in both 2009 and 2010, filings show. Those payments, however, went to third-party vendors — to whoever it is that gets a cut of that particular piece of the Trump brand — and through them into the Trump universe ...

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-trump-bankrupted-the-taj-mahal-2017-5