*[Colbert]”Allegedly! Allegedly!”[/Colbert]
As Mark Sumner has diaried already, indictments against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort have been unsealed by special counsel Robert Mueller, involving money-laundering, refusal to declare foreign income (aka tax evasion) and bank fraud (i.e. claiming his income was higher than it was to secure loans.) Here’s the document as PDF. (Speaking of PDF, the indictment says Manafort often edited documents falsely claiming income by switching them back and forth between Word and PDF. If someone refused to do it on ethical grounds, he’d find someone else or do it himself.)
But this diary isn’t about that. This diary is about the ridiculous amounts he spent on himself and his family from 2008 to 2014, when he was flying high on money earned by acting for Putin’s minions in the Ukraine, and especially in 2012. A bit of a glimpse into the 1-percenter lifestyle, perhaps. The indictment doesn’t give full details, but you get a rough idea from the specialties of the vendors, whose identities are not given.
Here’s the real estate:
Not hard to see how you can spend that sort of money on real estate these days, when the average price of a detached house in Toronto is about a mill. Location, location, location!
You can also see how someone could spend $5,434,793 on home improvements on a big house in the Hamptons… you know, maybe it was a shack beforehand. Big, but a shack. Takes lots of dollars to fix a 10,000-square-foot leaky roof. Don’t forget the audio, video, and control system home integration and installation, for 112,825 smackers. (These figures and all below are from paragraph 15.)
$655,500 to one landscaper and $164,740 to another buys lots of rose gardens… just like the one at the White House!
Of course for all the rooms in these spacious houses you have to have rugs, and if you like them to be antique rugs, that’s going to cost you as it did poor Paul, $934,350. I’m not sure what the related $100,000 is for. A battalion of top-of-the-line Roombas?
But then, housekeeping for his New York properties cost $20,000 over three years. The toilet brush is clearly gold-plated, but of course he and his family weren’t going to touch that kind of work.
Of course you must furnish and decorate these places also, which will put you back about $623,910 if you are into antiques and another $31,900 if you’re into art.
$1,319,281 buys a lot of home automation, lighting and entertainment. This article tells you all about how fabulous it is! That was a Floridian contractor; another Floridian contractor was paid $432,487. Bathrooms and kitchens, I guess, because those are the renos that most increase the value of your ill-earned private palace.
Of course the discerning international grifter who never met a dictator he didn’t like can’t be without a Mercedes Benz ($62,750) and a number of Range Rovers that seems to be either three or four, it’s a little hard to tell ($47,000, $83,525, $12,525, $67,655).
Now when you’re hard at work convincing hapless lenders that your income is good even though darn little of it shows up on your tax returns for some reason, and/or promising them a White House job in return, you’ve got to look your best. Spending $849,215 at a men’s clothing store in New York, plus another $520,440 at a Beverly Hills clothing store OKAY HANG ON RIGHT HERE…!
I admit I am no fashion whiz, I admit he spent the money over six years, and I admit possibly the $850 grand went partly to male relatives and the half mill in Beverly Hills to the wife and daughters… but still, HOW IN THE HECK DO YOU SPEND THAT KIND OF MONEY ON CLOTHING?
Do the suits have gold-threaded linings? Does money-laundering make you have sweaty armpits so you have to replace your shirts daily? Did he spend $58,435 in late 2014 on upscale underwear because the FBI had caught on and were now after him?
I know—designers. Still… it’s pretty amazing.
But really, if you’ve been hard at work helping Putin enslave the Ukraine and then gone to the trouble to arrange things so as not to pay a dime of tax on what he paid you, you deserve $18.4 million in real estate and personal expenses. Fair’s fair.
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I’m a SMWM (single mom with mortgage and not a single mansion in the Hamptons) who earns every dollar I earn by writing and has never laundered a penny. If you’d like to support my work on DKos, please consider sending a donation my way. Suggested amount $3. THANK YOU to all who have done so already. Your generosity humbles me.