Trump Surrounded

I write thrillers based on my over 25 years experience on Wall Street about shady financiers, crooked lawyers and megalomaniacal CEOs who cheat on their taxes, use offshore shell corporations to hide their assets, and launder money.

Sound familiar based on current events?

  

Andrea Kudacki for the New York Times

Yesterday, Michael Cohen, President Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, did a plea bargain acknowledging guilt for campaign-finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud, and Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, was convicted of tax and bank fraud and failure to report a foreign bank account.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When someone is surrounded by slimeballs, it's not guilt by association, just the old adage restated Tuesday by Representative Tom Cole, a former House Republican campaign chairman: "Where there's smoke, and there's a lot of smoke, there may well be fire." And there's so much of it here that Trump is not only surrounded, but engulfed.

When the FBI stormed Cohen’s office and hotel room by surprise in April, Rudy Giuliani, former U.S. Attorney who honed his hardball tactics in bringing down many of the 1980s insider traders—decades before he became Trump's attorney—said something very telling: “Is this surprising? Yes. Is it extraordinary? No. This is the way prosecutors get information…”

Giuliani spoke from experience; he knows how prosecutors like Mueller work. They throw lines in the water where they smell something stinky, then reel them in and see who they catch. Then use those peripheral crooks to turn States’ evidence, or just get early convictions and then squeeze the convicted for cooperation in exchange for short sentences. All as part of going after their ultimate prey.

So for Robert Mueller & Co., here's the score so far. Guilty pleas from Michael Flynn,(Trump’s first national security advisor), Rick Gates (Manafort’s longtime associate), and George Papadopoulos (a Trump campaign foreign policy advisor), 32 indicted individuals, and 187 charges regarding evidence of Russian tampering with our 2016 election.

And yesterday, Cohen and Manafort. More significantly, Cohen, in the process of copping his plea, implicated the president on the record in open court in baldly specific terms. He said he made payments to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal to keep them from talking about affairs they had with Trump “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office,” and, “I participated in this conduct, which on my part took place in Manhattan, for the principal purpose of influencing the election” for president in 2016.

Does anybody really think this is going away?

Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, remarking upon the potential for an impeachment inquiry, allowed that, "this is getting deeper, and it's going to get more and more serious."

So where do we go from here? Or where does Mueller go?

All I can say is if I were writing this story as a novel it wouldn’t turn out well for the president. Stay tuned.

The Theft of the Mona Lisa

In 1911, an Argentinian con man, the Marques Eduardo de Valifierno, came up with the idea for the signature scam of his life: the theft of the Mona Lisa.

But that was only half of it.  The other half was that, before the theft, he commissioned a famous French art forger named Yves Chaudron to paint six perfect copies of the Mona Lisa and had them shipped to different cities around the world.

Next, de Valifierno hired an Italian carpenter working in the Lourve Museum named Vincenzo Peruggia to steal the Mona Lisa.  On the day of the theft, Peruggia hid in a broom closet until closing, then stepped out of his closet and lifted the Mona Lisa off the wall.  He hid it under his smock and simply walked out of the museum.

After the sensational publicity about the theft, de Valifierno lined up six wealthy art buyers who fell all over themselves to buy his copies for millions, each thinking they’d bought the genuine article.

Peruggia hid the original in the false bottom of a chest in his spartan Paris apartment for two years until the Paris police dragnet ran its course.  Then he took it back to Italy with him.  Once there, he contacted a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, saying he had the Mona Lisa and wanted to sell it. Geri agreed to meet Peruggia, bringing the director of the Uffizi Gallery with him to authenticate the painting.  Once Geri knew he was looking at the real thing, he phoned the police and Peruggia was arrested.  By the time the world learned that the Mona Lisa had been recovered, de Valifierno had disappeared and it was too late for the buyers of his forgeries to do anything about it.

Some of that story is true, at least the part about Peruggia stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911, his means of accomplishing it, the fact he tried to resell it two years later and his arrest for it.  The stuff about de Valifierno, the forgeries and his wealthy art buyers are legend, and no one is sure whether or not any of that is real.  But it’s a story often retold, and probably embellished upon with each retelling.

That story inspired my new novel, Mickey Outside, about an art scam featuring Mickey Steinberg, one of the characters in my third novel, Bull Street.  And since novels are made-up stories, why shouldn't I use de Valifierno's apocryphal scam as the basis for Mickey Steinberg's story?

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In Mickey Outside, Mickey Steinberg, the financier of his generation and the mastermind behind a $2 billion insider trading ring, is getting ready to get out of Yankton, the cushy minimum-security Federal Prison Camp where he's been serving a reduced three-year sentence for cooperating with the Feds.  He's broke, banned from the securities industry for life, divorced by his wife, and none of his old hoity-toity friends from the world of high society and finance in New York will take his calls.

So he needs to come up with a creative way to get back on top.  He's always been a behind-the-scenes genius, but he's not much of a face man, so he recruits another Yankton con, Paul Reece, a good-looking, smooth-talking car-salesman type to help him put together his new con.  He knocks off de Valifierno's idea, researches famous art thefts and settles on Vincent van Gogh's View of the Sea at Scheveningen, a stolen masterpiece that’s never been recovered.  He hires an expert forger to copy it and he's off to the races.

After his release from Yankton and his return to New York, he contacts wealthy buyers in the shadowy underground art market for stolen masterpieces and embarks upon an auction process to sell the painting to the highest bidder.

Then things begin to come unraveled, and the real story begins.

Mickey Outside is caper steeped in the art world, the glamor of New York, mega-rich luminaries, and some good fun.  I hope you'll give it a try.

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