It’s a case teaming with colorful characters: a reputed Russian mob boss once accused in an Olympic scandal, a wealthy art world impresario who hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio and a woman named Molly Bloom who gained a celebrity following by hosting them at high-stakes poker games.
U.S. authorities allege all had roles in a sprawling scheme by two related Russian-American organized crime enterprises. Prosecutors say in recent years the operations laundered at least $100 million in illegal gambling proceeds through hundreds of bank accounts and shell companies in Cyprus and the United States.
The sprawling case against more than 30 defendants, announced this week by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, illustrates the insatiable appetite for sports betting around the globe — and the enormous potential for illicit profits. The steep rise in wealth among the upper class in the former Soviet Union has driven that potential to new heights, said Mark Galeotti, a Russian organized crime expert at New York University.
“We’re seeing higher-rolling businessmen involved in these types of cases,” Galeotti said. The high rollers’ bookies are left with the problem “of trying to figure out what to do with suitcases full of cash, and that leads to the money laundering,” he added.
The tentacles of the scheme reached into Trump Tower, the high rise on Fifth Avenue where prosecutors say a U.S. ringleader was living in an apartment one floor below Donald Trump‘s own place. There, he oversaw a network of Internet sites that formed “the world’s largest sports book” that catered “almost exclusively to oligarchs living in the Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” prosecutors said.
On one of the thousands of conversations intercepted on the defendants’ cellphones, the leader could be heard warning a customer who owed money that “he should be careful, lest he be tortured or found underground,” a prosecutor said.
The ring paid Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov — already under indictment in a separate U.S. case accusing him of bribing Olympic figure skating judges at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City — $20 million in gambling proceeds in a two-month period alone, court papers said. In another transaction in late 2010, the same man wired $3 million from a Cyprus bank account to another account in the United States, the papers said.
The new indictment naming Tokhtakhounov called him a “vor” — a term roughly translated to “thief-in-law” and comparable to a Mafia godfather. His role,
From: http://feeds.foxnews.com/~r/foxnews/national/~3/smrAIW68DyM/
