At first blush, it just looks like the bust of another Russian human trafficking operation, run by a husband-and-wife team with two kids and a pricey Miami condo.
And then you look a little closer and it's a Manhattan Russian criminal enterprise run remotely from Trump Tower III in Miami.
The husband and wife team, Yevgen Rizanov and Ksenia Khodukina, both 29, flew women from Russia to New York as part of a “sophisticated long-term operation promoting prostitution,” according to New York Assistant District Attorney James Lynch.
Manhattan prosecutors also allege that the couple and a third defendant, Arkadiy Bashkatov, housed the sex workers in Brooklyn and dispatched them on jobs throughout New York, booking their hotels and hiring drivers, from June 2015 to June 2018.
I thought the dates were kind of interesting since June 2015 is when Trump announced his candidacy for president and Russians started turning our world upside down. It might be nothing, of course. But it seemed like a bit of a coincidence.
Here's the bizarre part. Rizanov and Khodukina do not live in New York, where their prostitution ring was active. No, they allegedly ran everything on remote control from their cushy beachfront condo in Trump Tower III, Miami. What a lovely place to raise some nice Russian children while importing women for the sole purpose of pimping them out. Look!
I'm sure the link to Trump properties is just a coincidence, too, though. Right? It's not like a lot of Russian criminal enterprises run out of Trump properties, right?
Wrong. FT reports:
An alleged Kazakh money-laundering network channelled millions through apartment sales at the Trump SoHo; a Russian oligarch bought a Palm Beach estate from Trump in 2008 for $95m, more than double what Trump had paid for it four years earlier; in Florida, 63 Russians, some with political connections, spent $100m buying property at seven Trump-branded luxury towers, Reuters established. The money was not exclusively from the former Soviet Union: at the Trump Panama, some of it allegedly belonged to Latin American drug traffickers.
Add human trafficking to the list, along with prostitution. Just imagine what's defiling the White House right now.
[h/t NY Post]
