Alex & Tamir Sapir

Alex Sapir founded and Tamir Sapir co-founded the Sapir Organization, funded Trump SoHo, a NY real estate firm founded with the profits of a cab driver; Rotem Rosen, an associate. Alex and Rosen met with Aras Agalarov to discuss Trump Tower Moscow November 12, 2013.

Trump hosted Tamir’s daughter’s wedding.

Trump’s SoHo Project, the Mob, and Russian Intelligence Washington Monthly by Martin Longman 

“Tamir Sapir (nee Temur Sepiashvili), who died in 2014. An Ashkenazi Jew who was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to Israel just prior to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. From there, he quickly re-emigrated to Kentucky where he worked as a laborer.

There was a war between Arabs and Israeli in 1973, so Temur decided to leave Israel and head to a small town in Kentucky. “I was ready to accept any job, so I ended up caring for elderly women. Every day I took them to a special facility where they entertained themselves by knitting, singing and other things. They were the ones who taught me English. Right next to me lived a rich man who owned several shops. He had a business selling tools and offered me to work for him.” – remembers the billionaire. He worked as a driver, janitor and a loader, while dedicating his free time to studying English and saving up money.

Before long, he relocated to New York City, becoming a cabbie.

In 10 months, his family came to live in New York and Temur Sepiashvili became a cabbie. “I worked day and night, because I wanted to buy out the car. I slept at the airport, waiting for the first flight to arrive. In six months, the taxi became mine. I made 300-400$ per day and had time to go with my family to the park, to the movies, to the restaurant”, – says Sapir.

What happened next was either the work of Russian intelligence or one of the most surprising and unlikely success stories in history. According to the legend, Mr. Sapir and a fellow USSR emigrant named Sam Kislin pooled their savings and bought an electronics store on Broadway in Manhattan. They hoped to attract business from the Russian emigre community, but they had a different kind of luck.

Former President of Georgia Eduard Shevardnadze played an important role in his success. “Once USSR’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Eduard Shevardnadze, visited my shop. One of his bodyguards, Murad Kazishvili, turned out to be my childhood friend. Back in the day, an organization existed called “Council for American-Soviet Trade”, in which over a hundred large American companies participated, among them “Occidental Petroleum Hammer” and “Pepsi-Cola”, which also had business ties with the USSR. With Murad’s help, I also joined this organization and went to Moscow with Vice-President [George H.W.] Bush, who headed the Council,” Tamir says. According to him, during his stay in Moscow, one of his friends advised him to start exporting carbamide to America. This substance is necessary for oil production and during Soviet times it cost 5 times less than in the US. The Carbamide trade gave Tamir his first million and as he says, whet his appetite.

He exported American clothing, footwear and tech to USSR while importing oil and oil products from there, investing profits into real estate in New York. Prices on real estate were low in 1995-1996: for example, a skyscraper that is now estimated to be worth approximately 1.5 billion dollars cost just 17 million back then. Sapir got incredibly lucky; according to his own words, it was nothing less than divine intervention. In 1997, real estate prices grew and property that Sapir bought for miniscule prices was sold for colossal amounts of money. This is how Sapir got his first billion.

So, supposedly this guy went from sleeping in his cab to being a billionaire because he quickly made enough money selling VCR’s and Walkmans to make major investments in Russian carbamide which he then used to buy a skyscraper for 17 million dollars. In the process, he was invited to join the Council for American-Soviet Trade and meet with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

You won’t find it in his official biography, but I found the following in write-up on Sapir in a local Georgia news outfit that was profiling native Georgians who had emigrated and made a fortune (emphasis mine):

In order for Tamir Sapir’s biography to be complete, recollections of his classmate, Sergo Davlianidze, must be also mentioned. “We managed to be friends and also fight in the 60’s. My classmate from Tbilisi State School #45 was a boxing enthusiast, just like me. Who could imagine that he would become a businessman? He lived in a communal apartment near an Ashkenazi synagogue in Old Tbilisi, where all neighbors had to use the same water closet. Last time I saw Temur was in 1984 in Moscow, when he studied at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs’ academy. He already had his own business then and offered to provide me with foreign electronics and tech if I wanted to.

The article goes on to laconically state that “It is noteworthy that the fact of [the] émigré billionaire’s study at Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs isn’t featured in any of his biographies and neither does Sapir himself talk about this in his recollections.”

Now, here is where I tie all these individuals together with Donald Trump. They all were business partners on the Trump SoHo project. The project was a collaboration between the Trump Organization, the Bayrock Group (of Arif and Sater), and the (Tamir) Sapir Organization.

The potential Russian intelligence connections of Arif and Sapir should be obvious considering their unlikely rises to great wealth. Sater is already known for his well-established connections to the Russian mafia, and he was also turned back against the Russian mob and probably Russian intelligence, too, by our FBI.

Recently unsealed federal court records show that Mr. Sater helped the government disrupt an organized crime ring on Wall Street and deal with an unexplained national security matter involving his foreign connections.

And:

[Sater] was not the only F.B.I. informant in Bayrock’s offices. Another was Salvatore Lauria, an associate of Mr. Sater, who sometimes showed up to work wearing a court-ordered ankle monitor.

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.

Things got hairy at Bayrock when one of their lawyers accidentally let it slip to a major investor that Mr. Sater was in fact a part-owner. Forbes did a deep-dive on that story and devoted a lot of money to investigating Sater. I recommend their piece to you if you want to know more. But, basically, Sater’s ownership was supposed to remain obscured because of his felony record. The Trump SoHo project ran into its own problems as they were sued for fraud and had to return over $3 million in deposits. Those records remain sealed as part of the settlement.”

TRUMP TOWER MOSCOW: November 12, 2013: “A replica of Bayrock/Sapir’s Trump Soho hotel may be Moscow’s first big new hotel in ten years. Alex Sapir and Rotem Rosen of the Sapir Organization, co-developers on the Soho hotel at 246 Spring Street, met with Russian developer Aras Agalarov and Donald Trump over the weekend to discuss plans for the new project — Trump’s first in Russia. “The Russian market is attracted to me,” Trump told Real Estate Weekly. “I have a great relationship with many Russians, and almost all of the oligarchs were in the room.” The Real Deal