1/ This is a thread about the largest money-laundering casino on US...
NFT Ethics@NFTethics
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Jul 17, 2024
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1/ This is a thread about the largest money-laundering casino on US soil that ever existed and its deep connections to Bitfinex/Tether, FTX, Donald Trump, US elections, Russia, Wirecard, intelligence agencies & the most powerful/dangerous gangster in the world: Semion Mogilevich.
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2/ In 2014 the largest Bitcoin exchange at the time, Mt Gox, went bankrupt after having lost 744,408 Bitcoin in a theft by 2 Russians. Alexander Vinnik pleaded guilty to laundering $9bn. His exchange BTC-e (WEX) is now controlled by Konstantin Malofeev/Russian security agency FSB
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3/ Vinnik has ties to FSB-linked Semion Mogilevich, “the boss of all bosses” of the Russian mafia, whose crime organization has immense global power/reach & is connected to intelligence agencies/politicians around the world. He made alliances with Italian, Chinese & Japanese OCGs
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4/ Mogilevich is the preeminent money launderer of his generation & traffics in weapons, narcotics, oil, etc. He pulled off a $5bn Czech fuel tax fraud, a$150m US stock scam (YBM Magnex) laundering $10bn through the Bank of New York. He employs PhDs & Lazarus/Russia work together
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5/ By 2001, $70bn was already laundered through Nauru alone, a tiny Pacific island. Mogilevich was put on the FBI Top 10 Most Wanted List but later removed & former FBI director William Sessions became his lawyer. He allegedly made a deal with the German BND and is close to Putin
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6/ One party that wanted to save Mt Gox was Sunlot Holdings, a group around Brock Pierce and John Betts. Sunlot was incorporated in Cyprus, also described as “a Russian bank with dirty money posing as an EU state”. When Cyprus was bailed out in 2013 the Bitcoin price surged 178%.
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7/ Pierce is at the base of many crypto companies, being the co-founder of Tether, BlockOne & Blockchain Capital (which funded Coinbase, Bancor, BitGo, Blockstream). Pierce’s company IGE acquired Gamecliff from Brendan Blumer in 2005 and they later became co-founders of BlockOne.
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8/ Steve Bannon joined IGE in 2005 and got VCs/Goldman Sachs to invest $60m. Breitbart was indirectly connected to Sunlot and via Jonathan Curshen (jailed 20yrs), Bannon also has ties to Mogilevich. Bannon’s associate Guo Wengui AKA Miles Guo is implicated in a $1bn (crypto) scam
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9/ Sunlot Holdings’ advisor was former FBI director Louis Freeh, the first FBI director to go to Russia in 1994. In the 90s he also set up the first ILEA academy in Hungary and met Viktor Orbán, who Mogilevich seems to have ‘compromised’ via Dietmar Clodo when he lived in Hungary
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10/ After the FBI, Freeh started a consultancy firm called FSS with Stanley Sporkin (who used to work for the SEC & CIA) and Eugene Sullivan, a judge & former general counsel of the ultra-secret National Reconnaissance Office. They worked with William Sessions at Gavel Consulting
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11/ In 2014, the year of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, the first stablecoin Tether was launched by Brock Pierce&Co. When Tether faced banking issues in 2017 they moved their money to Noble Bank founded by Pierce & Betts. Freeh’s colleague Eugene Sullivan was on Noble Bank’s board
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12/ In 2018 it was again Louis Freeh who wrote Tether’s attestation report on behalf of FSS. 2014 was also the year that a casino was built in Saipan by Imperial Pacific, which on paper was “the most successful gambling operation in history” handling >$2 billion a month in bets.
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13/ This casino had very prominent advisors/board members that were also associated with Tether. Indeed, Louis Freeh & Eugene Sullivan. But also former CIA director James Woolsey & Haley Barbour, whose clients Mikhail Fridman & Dmytro Firtash are suspected frontmen for Mogilevich
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14/ Both Woolsey (implicated in a $1bn scam) & Sessions were part of GlobalOptions Inc, a “private CIA/FBI” by former secret agent Neil Livingstone. Barbour connected his client Firtash to Livingstone who tried to negotiate a very sensitive “Project M” (=Mogilevich) with the DOJ.
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15/ Freeh also represented many clients with ties to Mogilevich, eg Fridman, Prevezon (Pyotr & Denis Katsyv) and Andy Khawaja’s Allied Wallet, a client of Wirecard, where Firtash, German & Russian intelligence operatives had accounts. Wirecard’s COO Jan Marsalek was a Russian spy
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16/ Freeh was also implicated in the Mueller report for ties to Russian organized crime. Journalist Adam Levine confirmed that Bitfinex had a banking relationship in Macau where Imperial Pacific has its fraudulent origins & 3 Portuguese banks of Bitfinex’s shadow bank were active
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17/ Casinos allow (illicit) money to go from one party to another using gambling as a cover. Donald Trump received a ‘loan’ from his father in that way & donations via Imperial Pacific. Mark Brown headed Trump’s/Saipan’s casinos & worked in Macau for Steve Wynn, a client of Freeh
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18/ Trump has deep ties to Mogilevich, e.g. via Felix Sater/ Bayrock, via a Russian gambling ring run out of Trump Tower & via 1300 real estate transactions that were all cash purchases made by anonymous Russian-mobster linked shell companies. @CraigUnger wrote a book about it.
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19/ Michael Milken invented the junk bonds that were used to buy out Las Vegas’ mob-owned casinos by people like Trump & Wynn, initiating the $160bn Savings & Loans scandal, which was a conspiracy between corrupt politicians/businessmen, organized crime & intelligence agencies.
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20/ Bannon was involved in meetings between CIA-tied Erik Prince & George Nader to influence the 2016 US elections on behalf of Saudi Arabia/UAE with Putin’s approval & with Kirill Dmitriev to establish a backchannel between the Trump administration & Kremlin (Seychelles meeting)
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21/ Andy Khawaja claims the 2016 elections were bought by the UAE/Saudis with >$100m of donations to Trump. Others corroborate his story. Nader (now jailed) wanted to use Khawaja’s payment engine, but found an alternative. Dmitriev (ex Goldman Sachs) is close to Alisher Usmanov.
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22/ Mogilevich is also close to Usmanov, who co-founded DST Global with Yuri Milner, a VC firm that invested in many US companies (Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb). DST’s team came almost entirely from its proxy Goldman Sachs. GS & Jared Kushner’s Cadre served as DST’s funding vehicle.
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23/ Peter Thiel started to invest in BTC in 2014, also backed Cadre and is close to DST. Palantir was funded by the CIA’s VC arm In-Q-Tel. Palantir & Bannon were involved in the FB-Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. CA’s largest shareholder was Vincent Tchenguiz, Firtash’s partner
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24/ Thiel worked at CIA-linked Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm of FTX, Goldman Sachs & DST. S&C is accused of having coconspired in the FTX fraud eg via Ryne Miller who worked for FTX & S&C. S&C sold FTX’s assets at big discounts to Novogratz’ Galaxy Digital, another S&C client
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25/ Bitfinex issued their LEO token on 8 May 2019, the same day that FTX was founded, resulting in a $1bn bailout by Galaxy&Thiel backed BlockOne & FTX. BlockOne & Bitfinex share a founder (Pierce) and FTX & Bitfinex shared a bank (Deltec). Deltec granted FTX a $2bn credit line.
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26/ FTX & Binance (via Cumberland) were the largest recipients of Tether, which serves as (Russia’s) money-laundering vehicle. Research shows Tether & the BTC price are correlated. Wirecard was a card issuer for crypto firms and when Wirecard went down, Tether started to ramp up.
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27/ Christopher Bauer died aged 44 under suspicious circumstances in the Philippines. He was Wirecard’s contact for the late Boris Berezovsky & Badri Patarkatsishvili. Both are mentioned in @HeidilBlake’s book “From Russia with Blood” covering 14 Russian-linked deaths on UK soil.
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28/ Russia & other authoritarian regimes have been able to undermine democracies by buying influence in Western countries (via VCs, hedge funds, RE, etc), often via opaque constructions with the help of elite lawyers, lobbyists, bankers & shadowy businessmen, who all benefited.
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29/ Crime groups & private mercenaries are used to influence elections, destabilize/loot countries & fund covert operations to pursue/protect political & national security interests. Putin used German company SPAG to launder the Cali Cartel’s narco money via Mogilevich et al.
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30/ The CIA also made many alliances with drug lords & crime groups, a market worth trillions a year. Wall Street, Big Tech & the US Military-Industrial Complex, which are deeply intertwined, are engines of the debt-ridden US economy & key to protect the USD as reserve currency.
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31/ Crypto is part of this (geo)political battle. Mogilevich’s biggest nemesis, the late FBI agent Bob Levinson, warned about the dangerous gangsters that his former bosses (Freeh & Sessions) later started to ‘protect’ & features in a docu with Mogilevich’s only ever interview⬇️
37:55
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32/ This related thread shows some of the same actors and metapatterns:
NFT Ethics@NFTethics
1/ This is a thread about Jeffrey Epstein and 13 ways he was connected to an interrelated network of people that created the foundations of today’s crypto space. This could indicate that the crypto ecosystem after 2013 (or even earlier) was part of an intelligence operation. 🧵
