As you’ve likely inferred from my recent posts I’ve spent a lot of time in recent days and weeks piecing together different elements of the Trump/Russia story. I’ve brought other colleagues into the work and plan to expand that once we have people hired for the three new investigative positions I discussed last month. Today everyone is talking about the   inexplicable news about Jeff Sessions . But there’s another dimension of the Trump/Russia story which has only become clear to me recently but which provides a critical backstory for understanding the background of this scandal and news story.

Let’s go back to   the story of Felix Sater , the Russian-American immigrant, convicted felon and longtime Trump business associate we   discussed last week .

Let me review two separate streams of information which are critical to understanding the story. First, here are some basic and well-attested facts about Felix Sater.

Sater began his professional life as a New York City stock broker; spent 15 months in prison for stabbing a man in the face with a broken wine glass in a bar fight; and then became involved in a pump and dump penny stock scheme in association with the Gambino and Genovese crime families. When he and his associates were arrested in the securities fraud scheme in 1998, Sater tried to make a deal to save himself.

According to   reliable   accounts , what Sater offered to do was work with the CIA to facilitate the purchase of Stinger missiles on the weapons black market in post-Soviet Central Asia. According to his accomplice and business partner, Salvatore Lauria, who   wrote a book detailing the story , the CIA was more keen on working with Sater than was the FBI, which had recently been burned by its longstanding and close working relationship with Whitey Bulger. The plan eventually fell apart. It seemed like Sater and Lauria might end up doing hard time. They had defrauded investors over more than $40 million. Then 9/11 happened and everything changed. Suddenly the federal government was much more interested in Sater’s help.

Lauria later disowned the book which he had cowritten with an AP reporter, David Barry, claiming it was fiction. But Barry insists that he reported out everything contained in the book.

Sater’s attorney Robert Wolf   made various seemingly hyperbolic claims   about Sater’s cooperation for federal law enforcement and intelligence. He told   The Washington Times   in early 2015 that Sater worked on “the most serious matters of national security, battling our greatest enemies at tremendous risk to his own life and for the benefits of all citizens of our country … [saving] potentially tens of thousands, if not millions, of our citizens’ lives.”

Needless to say this all sounds wild and improbably novelistic. And you would expect Sater’s attorney to make extravagant claims about the value of his clients cooperation. Despite being well-attested, we don’t know directly from the US government that any of these wild claims are true. But the statements and actions of federal law enforcement strongly suggest that even if some of the details are off, Sater’s assistance was of an exceptional character.

The US government   went and continues to go to extreme lengths   to keep Sater’s cooperation and work for the government a secret. Until quite recently, it went to great lengths to keep Sater’s conviction itself, and all documents related to it, a secret. It took the extraordinarily rare step of managing the entire adjudication of Sater’s crimes in secret, with all documents kept secret. Federal judges even pursued what might   reasonably be called a vendetta   against two lawyers who used leaked information about Sater’s case in lawsuits growing out of a failed Trump building venture, Trump Fort Lauderdale, as well as lawsuits on behalf of victims in the original pump and dump scheme.

The federal government also kept Sater on as a cooperating witness for fully 11 years before finally sentencing him in 2009 for the plea deal in 1998. In a $42 million securities fraud case, Sater received no jail time, was not forced to pay restitution and was fined a mere $25,000. In other words, he walked away from the crime with close to no punishment. The controversy over the government’s secrecy in the Sater case, as well as his minimal punishment, got enough attention that it eventually bubbled up from the criminal courts to the governmental and political realm. During her 2015 confirmation hearings, Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked about the propriety of the government’s cooperation with Sater, in part because she had been the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, where Sater’s case was adjudicated.

In response to questions from Sen. Orin Hatch, Lynch   wrote   (emphasis added):

The defendant in question, Felix Sater, provided valuable and sensitive information to the government during the course of his cooperation, which began in or about December 1998. For more than 10 years, he worked with prosecutors from my Office, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and law enforcement agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies,   providing information crucial to national security and the conviction of over 20 individuals , including those responsible for committing massive financial fraud and members of La Cosa Nostra. For that reason, his case was initially sealed.

Lynch’s references to “national security” has been echoed by other judges involved in Sater’s case, ones who have gone to great length to prevent the release of documents tied to Sater’s case.

It is impossible to know precisely what Sater was doing during this decade. But statements from government officials, news reports and Lauria’s book make clear that it required him to have extensive associations with and knowledge of the mafia and touched not just on organized crime but specifically on critical matters of national security. Based on published reports and Lauria’s book, it seems extremely likely that it also required him to have extensive knowledge of and contacts in the criminal underworld in the former Soviet Union. Clearly the US government saw Sater’s cooperation as highly important. Otherwise it would not have gone to such lengths to get it, to keep it secret and to protect Sater after the fact. Lynch’s words to Hatch speak volumes.

Then there’s Mikhail Sater, aka Michael Sheferofsky, Felix Sater’s father.

In 2000, two years after Felix was arrested in the securities fraud scheme, Mikhail Sater was charged along with Ernest “Butch” Montevecchi, a   soldier in the Genovese crime family , for running an extortion ring in Brighton Beach between 1990 and 1999. In a   separate legal filing by the plaintiffs in the suit seeking restitution for Felix Sater’s stock fraud , petitioners claimed that Mikhail Sater was a boss in the Semion Mogilevich crime organization. Mogilevich is considered one of Russia’s most notorious organized crime figures and was until 2015 on the FBI’s most wanted list. Mikhail Sater also became a cooperating witness in the Eastern District and received three years probation.

There has been great deal of controversy over whether the federal government should have provided such protection for Felix Sater. For our present purposes, that’s beside the point. What is relevant is that he was highly connected in the criminal underworld and the federal government found his cooperation extremely valuable.

Now, I’ve covered a lot of ground here, albeit compressing as much as I’ve been able a highly complex and florid story. You will no doubt see that Donald Trump’s name does not come up in any of these crimes. My aim here is simply to demonstrate who Felix Sater is, his connections with a transnational criminal underworld stretching from New York’s Outer Boroughs to Central Asia and (quite likely but not totally proven) meeting up with the weapons market where organized crime touches on international terrorist networks.

We don’t just know this information about Sater. Just as importantly we know that the FBI, attorneys in the Eastern District of New York and almost certainly the CIA also knew about Sater’s connections with these worlds since they were enlisting his apparently extremely valuable cooperation to help conduct investigations and national security operations in those realms.

Here’s where I think this becomes significant to the present moment. If you line up Sater’s story and his time as a cooperating witness with his time as a top business associate and finally employee of Donald Trump, they overlap almost exactly.

Trump first met Sater and got into business with Bayrock Capital, where Sater was a cofounder, in 2003. In Bayrock, Sater partnered with Tevfik Arif, a former Soviet trade and commerce official from Kazakstan. Trump and Bayrock partnered together on numerous building projects and Sater was the point man on most of them. The most notable is Trump Soho, which was financed with money from Russia and Kazakstan. There was also   Trump Fort Lauderdale , the Sater-managed project whose collapse first triggered the revelation of Sater’s 1998 securities fraud conviction. Trump’s work with Bayrock continued until 2010 when Sater went to work for the Trump Organization full time – again, putting together deals and financing for Trump-branded building projects.

Let’s put this together.

The federal government knew who Sater was, his ties to the criminal underworld, business ties into that world in the former Soviet Union, etc. They also had to know of his deep and longstanding association with Donald Trump, his key role in numerous Trump projects during the first decade of this century and his role arranging financing for these projects. We don’t know if the federal government had specific knowledge of the details of these business transactions or whether or how deeply Donald Trump was reliant on capital from Russia and more generally the murky world of oligarchs and underworlds that Sater is clearly immersed in and from which he appeared to draw investment capital. But they likely would have suspected as much, at least that Trump had uncomfortably close ties to someone like Sater.

They wouldn’t have had to look far to confirm these assumptions. Take the Trump Soho project. In April 2016,   The New York Times   published a story   on Trump Soho based on lawsuits which grew out of the project in 2011 and 2012. Consider this passage. And yes, Lauria is the same Lauria who was at the ’90s bar fight where Sater stabbed the man in the face. He was Sater’s accomplice in the 1998 pump and dump scheme and the author of the book that detailed Sater’s work for the FBI and the CIA …

Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt.

Here’s another passage …

Mr. Kriss’s lawsuit was filled with unflattering details of how Bayrock operated, including allegations that it had occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia. Bayrock and Trump SoHo drew more negative headlines in October 2010, when news spread from Turkey that Mr. Arif had been aboard a luxury yacht raided by the police, who were investigating a suspected prostitution ring that catered to wealthy businessmen. He was charged but later acquitted.

Whatever US law enforcement and intelligence knew about the specifics of Trump’s relationship with and his dependence on investment capital out of Russia and the former Soviet Union, material like this in public court filings surely would have raised red flags about Trump’s businesses.

As long as Donald Trump was just a high-profile and frequently clownish real estate tycoon from New York and the star of   The Apprentice , this probably didn’t matter very much. After all, as I’ve noted, there’s no specific evidence that Trump was involved in any of Sater’s criminal activity.

But at some point in 2014 or 2015, Donald Trump started moving toward having a credible shot at becoming the President of the United States. By early 2016 that became a real possibility.

(One notable, though perhaps distinct, detail is that we can be sure that the attorney general of the United States at the time, Loretta Lynch, knew a level of detail about Felix Sater and his father Mikhail that only would have been possible as the former US Attorney for the district in which Sater’s trial was adjudicated.)

It seems quite probable that as Trump moved closer to the presidency in the early months of 2016, alarm bells started to go off in the FBI and the CIA, as the relevance of business partnerships with Sater and reliance on capital out of the former Soviet Union suddenly became dramatically more relevant. Again, as I said, as long as Donald Trump was just Donald Trump this didn’t matter that much. There’s plenty of dirty money sloshing around the New York real estate world. But when it started to seem plausible that he might become the next President, this would start to be a matter of great concern.

This certainly also added to the concern when   popped up in a meeting   with   Michael Cohen   and a pro-Russian Ukrainian parliamentarian with a dossier he asked Cohen to hand deliver to Michael Flynn.

All of what I’ve said here would be an issue even if the Russian government had never inserted itself into the US election. It almost certainly predates any awareness within the US national security and law enforcement worlds that that was happening. But I suspect it is a critical backdrop for how this evidence was interpreted once it began to come to light. It quite possibly also informed and drove some of the scrutiny that was applied to Trump and his associates once it did.

Billionaire Donald Trump announced his desire to build a skyscraper in Moscow

The American tycoon confirmed these plans during his visit to Russia for the finals of the Miss Universe 2013 contest. He also announced his intention to start a business in Russia. According to the 67-year-old billionaire, he is already in talks with several Russian companies regarding the construction of a skyscraper.

In an interview with Real Estate Weekly after the Miss Universe pageant, Donald Trump brags about meeting with Russian oligarchs for Trump Tower Moscow.

The article is removed from the website sometime after Trump becomes president, but it’s still available on the Wayback Machine.

“The Trump Soho has a lot of very high profile Russian visitors and they have been telling us they wish there was something modern and hip like it in Moscow,” said Russian-born (Alex) Sapir.

“Over the last ten years, there have been no big new hotels built in Moscow. A lot of people from the oil and gas businesses have come to us asking to be partners in building a product like Trump Soho there.”

During their Russian trip, the developers attended the Miss Universe contest — an event co-owned by Trump and NBC Universal — that was held at Crocus City Hall.

The event offered a good networking opportunity.“The Russian market is attracted to me,” Trump said. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.”

Real Estate Weekly

Pictured, Trump with   Emin and Aras Agalarov   who are connected to the Trump Tower meeting and other events.

Federal agents monitored a unit at Trump Tower for two years, resulting in an April 2013 raid.  (Jefferson Siegel/New York Daily News)

Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, seen here in 2000 picture, evaded the raid on Trump Tower.  (STR/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

On May 10, two former executives at Bayrock Group file a lawsuit alleging that the company is owned by mafia members (Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif) with the sole purpose of money laundering and tax evasion.

According to a lawsuit filed [in 2010] by two former Bayrock executives, Arif started the firm “backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people.” In addition, the suit alleges, Bayrock “was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated.” The company’s real purpose, the executives claim, was to develop hugely expensive properties bearing the Trump brand—and then use the projects to launder money and evade taxes. New Republic

The list of claims include lying to investors, buyers, and lenders; using the organization for money laundering and tax evasion including paying millions to partners Felix Sater and Tevfik Arif under the table; operating on behalf of the mob or mafia; and creating multiple other businesses to expand operations beyond the Bayrock name.

The other businesses are Ocean Club, Merrimac, Camelback, Spring Street, and Whitestone. If the last name sounds familiar, that’s because it’s similar to   White Rock , the illegal brokerage Felix Sater established to commit stock fraud.

Yet Trump’s relationship with the Russian underworld, a de facto state actor, has barely surfaced in the uproar surrounding Russia’s interference in the 2016 campaign. That oversight may be explained in part by journalist Michael Kinsley’s long-held maxim: The real scandal isn’t what’s illegal; it’s what   is   legal.

Robert S. Mueller III, of course, is a prosecutor. His job as special counsel, now complete, was to decide whether to indict. But what if some of the most egregious and corrupt offenses are not illegal? Russian President Vladimir Putin has long insisted that American democracy itself is corrupt. Under his aegis, the Russians have methodically studied various components of the American body politic — campaign finance, our legal system, social media and perhaps especially the real estate industry — and exploited every loophole they could find.

As Oleg Kalugin, a former head of counterintelligence for the KGB, told me in an interview for my book “ House of Trump, House of Putin : The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia,” the Mafia amounts to “one of the branches of the Russian government today.” Where Americans cracked down on the Italian American Mafia, Putin dealt with the Russian mob very differently. He co-opted it. He made it an integral part of his Mafia state. Russian gangsters became, in effect, Putin’s enforcers. They had long and deep relationships. According to a   tape recording   made by former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko a year before he was fatally poisoned in London, Putin had close ties to Semion Mogilevich, a top mobster, that dated to the early 1990s.

That criminals with ties to Russia bought Trump condos, partnered with Trump and were based at Trump Tower — his home, his place of work, the crown jewel of his empire — should be deeply concerning. It’s not hard to conclude that, as a result, the president, wittingly or not, has long been compromised by a hostile foreign power, even if Mueller did not conclude that Trump colluded or conspired with the Russians.

Let’s go back to 1984, when   David Bogatin , an   alleged   Russian gangster who arrived in the United States a few years earlier with $3 in his pocket, sat down with Trump and bought not one but five condos, for a total of $6 million — about $15 million in today’s dollars. What was most striking about the transaction was that at the time, according to David Cay Johnston’s “The Making of Donald Trump,” Trump Tower was one of only two major buildings in New York City that sold condos to buyers who used shell companies that allowed them to purchase real estate while concealing their identities. Thus, according to the New York state attorney general’s office, when Trump closed the deal with Bogatin, whether he knew it or not, he had just helped launder money for the Russian Mafia.

And so began a 35-year relationship between Trump and Russian organized crime. Mind you, this was a period during which the disintegration of the Soviet Union had opened a fire-hose-like torrent of hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital from oligarchs, wealthy apparatchiks and mobsters in Russia and its satellites. And who better to launder so much money for the Russians than Trump — selling them multimillion-dollar condos at top dollar, with little or no apparent scrutiny of who was buying them.

Over the next three decades, dozens of lawyers, accountants, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and other white-collar professionals came together to facilitate such transactions on a massive scale. According to a BuzzFeed   investigation , more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the United States since the 1980s, were shifted “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

The Trump Organization has   dismissed   money laundering charges as unsubstantiated, and because it is so difficult to penetrate the shell companies that purchased these condos, it is almost impossible for reporters — or, for that matter, anyone without subpoena power — to determine how much money laundering by Russians went through Trump-branded properties. But Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist, put it this way to me: “Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people. Crooks have two big advantages. First, they’re prepared to pay more money than honest people. And second, they will always lose if you sue them because they are known to be crooks.”

After Trump World Tower opened in 2001, Trump began looking for buyers in Russia through Sotheby’s International Realty, which teamed up with a Russian real estate outfit. “I had contacts in Moscow looking to invest in the United States,” real estate broker Dolly Lenz told   USA Today . “They all wanted to meet Donald.” In the end, she said, she sold 65 units to Russians in Trump World Tower alone.

The condo sales were just a part of it. In 2002, after Trump had racked up $4 billion in debt from his disastrous ventures in Atlantic City, the Russians again came to his rescue, by way of the Bayrock Group. At a time when Trump found it almost impossible to get   loans from Western banks , Bayrock offered him enormous   fees   — 18 to 25 percent of the profits — simply to use his name on its developments.

So how did all this go unchallenged? According to Jonathan Winer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, one answer may be lax regulations. “If you are doing a transaction with no mortgage, there is no financial institution that needs to know where the money came from, particularly if it’s a wire transfer from overseas,” Winer told me in an interview for my   book . “The customer obligations that are imposed on all kinds of financial institutions are not imposed on people selling real estate. They should have been, but they weren’t.”

And without such regulations, prosecutors’ hands are tied.

All of which made it easier for the Russian Mafia to expand throughout the United States. As it did so, it grew closer to Trump. Even though Mogilevich had no known direct contacts with Trump, several of his associates did. Among them was Bogatin, who took part in a massive   gasoline tax scam , and whose brother, Jacob (Yacov) Bogatin, was   indicted with Mogilevich   in 2003 on 45 felony counts of stock fraud. (Because there is no extradition treaty between the United States and Russia, they were never brought to trial in the United States.)

Another Mogilevich associate in Trump’s orbit was the late Vyacheslav Ivankov, a ruthless extortionist who became renowned as one of the most brutal killers in the annals of Russian crime. Mogilevich had sent him to New York in 1992 with a mandate to consolidate the Russian Mafia in the United States and to form alliances with the Cosa Nostra and other Mafias. Once he arrived, Ivankov became a regular at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, and was widely thought to be based in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, where many Russian mobsters lived. But when the FBI came looking for him, it discovered that the head of the Russian Mafia in New York owned a   luxury condo   in the glitziest part of Manhattan — at 721 Fifth Avenue, in fact — Trump Tower. There is no evidence of personal interaction between Trump and Ivankov.

Yet another Mogilevich associate with ties to Trump was Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, better known as Taiwanchik, whose relationship with Mogilevich dates back more than three decades. Indicted in 2002 for bribing Olympic figure skating judges, Tokhtakhounov was awarded the No. 5 position on the FBI’s   Most Wanted List , two slots behind Mogilevich. In April 2013, two gambling rings that he allegedly ran were busted by the FBI on the 63rd floor of Trump Tower, resulting in the   indictments of 34 members and associates   of Russian organized crime. Among them was Tokhtakhounov, who fled the country to avoid prosecution, and appeared later that year at Trump’s 2013   Miss Universe pageant   in Moscow.

These were just some of the Russian mobsters who gravitated toward Trump as they laundered money and cultivated politicians. Over time, they learned how to work the system. They paid large sums for the most powerful legal talent in the land — enough, at times, to woo the very men who had once been charged with pursuing them. In 1997, former FBI director William Sessions traveled to Moscow and alerted the world to the horrifying dangers of the brutal Russian Mafia. But 10 years later, he took on as a   client   the Ukrainian-born Mogilevich. At the time, the U.S. Department of Justice was investigating racketeering charges against Mogilevich over questionable energy deals between Russia and Ukraine. Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, also later represented Russian clients. All perfectly legal. In Freeh’s case, the client was Denis Katsyv’s Cyprus-based Prevezon Holdings. Freeh helped Prevezon settle a money laundering probe by the U.S. government after the company was accused of laundering more than $200 million in a Russian tax fraud scheme in which an American hedge fund manager and his firm, Hermitage Capital, were said to have been framed by the Russians. The ensuing scandal culminated in the death of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage’s accountant, and led to the passage of the   Magnitsky Act , which sanctioned high-level Russian officials.   Natalia Veselnitskaya , Prevezon’s defense lawyer, attended the much-discussed   June 2016 meeting   at Trump Tower with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner; and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

Manafort has been convicted of bank fraud, tax fraud and failure to comply with the Foreign Agents Registration Act by not reporting foreign income.

The special counsel’s report has not yet been released, only Attorney General William P. Barr’s summary with its finding of no collusion. But it’s clear that it was profoundly naive to think that a prosecutor would save the day and cure our diseased democracy of all that ails it. That’s because the problem behind this assault on the nation’s sovereignty far transcends the criminal arena. I’m no fan of Putin’s, but he was right about one thing: Swaths of American society are corrupt. If we want to protect our most precious institutions, we should examine new regulations in a wide range of sectors. The House Intelligence Committee, the House Oversight Committee and the House Judiciary Committee have geared up for hearings and investigations. They had better move fast. We have a president who has a long, tangled history with figures connected to Russian organized crime — all of it, apparently, perfectly legal.

“An intelligence exchange,” former British intelligence officer   Christopher Steele writes , “had been running between” Trump’s team and the Kremlin, with the direct knowledge of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Within this context Putin’s priority requirement had been for intelligence on the activities, business and otherwise, in the US of leading Russian oligarchs and their families. Trump and his associates duly had obtained and supplied the Kremlin with this information.”

(Dutton)

The precise nature and location of that “intelligence exchange” have never been fully explained. But journalist Craig Unger thinks he may have found it, running out of the offices of Bayrock Group, a real estate development company that operated in Trump Tower in Manhattan in the early 2000s and partnered with the Trump Organization.

Based on his own reporting and the investigative work of a former federal prosecutor, Unger posits that through Bayrock, Trump was “indirectly providing Putin with a regular flow of intelligence on what the oligarchs were doing with their money in the U.S.”

As the theory goes, Putin wanted to keep tabs on the billionaires — some of them former mobsters — who had made their post-Cold War fortunes on the backs of industries once owned by the state. The oligarchs, as well as other new-moneyed elites, were stashing their money in foreign real estate, including Trump properties, presumably beyond Putin’s reach.

Trump, knowingly or otherwise, may have struck a side deal with the Kremlin, Unger argues: He would secretly rat out his customers to Putin, who would allow them to keep buying Trump properties. Trump got rich. Putin got eyes on where the oligarchs had hidden their wealth. Everybody won.

Thus Trump succeeded in business with Russia by what could most charitably be described as willful ignorance. Take the money. Don’t ask too many questions.

And he’d had a lot of practice at that, Unger writes. Trump’s burgeoning real estate empire was fueled in the 1980s by another privileged class, Russian gangsters who appear to have used Trump properties to launder their ill-gotten gains, Unger alleges.

It is this nexus between Trump, Putin, and wealthy mobsters and oligarchs — often the same people — that is Unger’s fixation in his latest book, “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.”

That subtitle is a bit misleading. There is much in Unger’s thoroughly researched narrative that has been told, including in the pages of The Washington Post. Close followers of the byzantine Trump-Russia saga will recognize many of the names and events that fill the pages of Unger’s book.

And yet the story Unger weaves with those earlier accounts and his original reporting is fresh, illuminating and more alarming than the intelligence channel described in the Steele dossier.

Unger believes that Trump was compromised by Russia as early as the 1980s, when the Russian money laundering through his properties probably began. “It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump had no knowledge whatsoever about what was going on,” Unger writes, as hundreds of millions in Russian investment flowed into Trump’s coffers. Trump evinced an “eagerness to turn a blind eye to practices that allowed the Russian mob to launder money,” Unger continues.

There’s never been a proven allegation that Trump was involved in or knew of money laundering through his businesses. But remember, Unger implores, Trump worked at the upper end of Manhattan real estate development. That’s not to say he engaged in organized crime, but he certainly knew what it looked like.

The richer Trump got, the deeper he sank into the Russian criminal underworld, which after the fall of the Soviet Union rose up to form the ruling class, now under Putin’s control.

Unger spends much of his story connecting the dots between Trump and individual alleged Russian mobsters, such as David Bogatin, the pioneer of a gas tax scam, who bought five apartments in Trump Tower in 1984 for $6 million.

Not all the connections run so directly. One famous gangster, Semion Mogilevich, who was renowned for his talent of making dirty money look clean, looms over the entire narrative like an orchestra conductor. Mogilevich, whom FBI agents have called the “boss of bosses,” directed the expansion of the Russian mob into the United States in the early 1990s. And although there is no definitive evidence connecting him directly to Trump, according to Unger, a mountain of facts places him in Trump’s corner of the real estate business.

As Unger tells it, Trump can’t be totally unaware of the criminality surrounding him, and even if he were, that ignorance is no defense. Trump allowed himself to become compromised by Russia, years before he seriously entertained running for public office.

The men who used Trump for their illicit purposes ensnared him. “They had ensured that he was beholden to Russia’s money, and its power,” Unger writes. “All largely unseen. With deniability.”

There is abundant evidence in Unger’s book that Trump made his business infrastructure — his condos, his developments, his very name — available to criminals and oligarchs trying to hide their ill-gotten gains, whether from tax collectors, investigators or the president of Russia. And that’s a form of collusion, too.

Unger sees the Kremlin’s intervention in the 2016 presidential election, which U.S. intelligence officials have said was ordered by Putin himself, as the latest manipulation of Trump by Russia, and the most consequential. Again, readers will find no evidence that Trump knew of or participated in the Russian campaign, which every U.S. intelligence agency has concluded aimed to help Trump win.

But Unger is convinced that the Russians succeeded in their goal because they had a willing target, who seized on false news stories, propaganda and unflattering Democratic emails that Russia disseminated. Trump weaponized Russian disinformation without ever questioning its provenance. He even asked for more when he publicly told Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton’s personal emails.

“Given Trump’s narrow victory in states such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — states that were predicted to vote Democratic but were won by Trump with a margin of less than 1 percent, and which put him over the top in the electoral college, it is more than likely that the Russian interference made the difference,” Unger writes.

If that’s true, then Trump the politician has replicated his business model with profound results: Both he and Putin have come out winners.

By Craig Unger

Dutton. 354 pp. $30