There’s one primary reason that Manafort appears so unwilling to reconcile himself with the unimpeachable reality. For his entire career, he has taken audacious risks and managed to get away with them. His friends describe him as wired to take chances that most rational creatures would avoid. Such is the temperament that leads a person to allegedly launder millions, in a long series of batches, each one a fresh opportunity to get busted by the feds. And it has led him to spend much of his career working on behalf of murderous autocrats, capricious dictators and vengeful oligarchs, like the Angolan insurgent Jonas Savimbi and the Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos. Manafort not only had the skills to bend these characters to his will; he seemingly took pleasure in the challenge of taming and mastering dangerous men. (Trump was the rare strongman he couldn’t quite master.)
To live with the constant threat of personal peril requires a healthy dose of denial. Manafort behaves as if he believes everything will eventually fall in his favor, that problems will inevitably resolve themselves. When the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska accused him of stealing $20 million in 2011, Manafort simply didn’t respond to the aluminum magnate’s calls or emails for several years, according to a lawsuit filed by Deripaska earlier this year. Instead of trying to assuage Deripaska, who carries such a fierce reputation that the U.S. has denied him a visa, Manafort acted as if his pursuer didn’t exist. It wasn’t an entirely foolish bet. When Manafort eventually joined up with the Trump in 2016, he sent emails to Deripaska via an emissary promising him privileged access to the campaign, perhaps providing a tidy moment to settle their old differences. (Deripaska denies having seen the emails and denies any recent contact with Manafort.)
Much more in the article.
So it seems he's a spoiled rich guy who gets what he want's more than he's afraid of being poisoned.
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