# Felix Sater Soviet-born American businessman, convicted felon, FBI/CIA informant, and the single most important intermediary in the [[Trump Tower Moscow]] deal. Sater is the connective tissue between Trump's real estate ambitions in Russia, the Russian intelligence world, and organized crime — a figure who operated simultaneously in all three domains for decades. ## Background Born Feliks Mikhailovich Sheferovsky in Moscow (1966), Sater emigrated to the US as a child and grew up in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn — the epicenter of Russian émigré organized crime. In 1991, he was convicted of assault (stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass in a bar fight). In 1998, he pleaded guilty to a $40M stock fraud scheme tied to the Russian Mafia, operating alongside associates of [[Semyon Mogilevich]]. The fraud conviction should have ended Sater's career. Instead, it began his second one: as a US government informant. Sater cooperated with the FBI and CIA for over a decade, reportedly providing intelligence on Osama bin Laden's movements, North Korean weapons, and Russian organized crime. His sentencing was repeatedly delayed — and eventually resulted in no prison time — because of his intelligence value. The full scope of his cooperation remains partially classified. ## The [[Trump Organization]] Connection Sater worked out of Trump Tower with a Trump Organization business card identifying him as a "Senior Advisor to [[Donald Trump]]." He brokered deals for the Trump Organization through [[Bayrock]] Group, a real estate development firm headquartered in Trump Tower whose principals had extensive ties to Russian and Central Asian money. Trump's public posture on Sater has been consistent denial. Under oath in 2013, Trump said: "If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn't know what he looked like." This is contradicted by extensive documentation of their business relationship over more than a decade. ## The Trump Tower Moscow Deal Sater is the architect of the most politically explosive real estate deal never built. In September 2015 — while Trump was leading Republican primary polls — Sater brokered a proposal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow through [[Michael Cohen]]. His email to Cohen is one of the most quoted documents in the Trump-Russia record: > [!quote] **"Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin's team to buy in on this."** > — Felix Sater, email to Michael Cohen, 2015 Sater outlined a deal structure involving VTB Bank (under US sanctions) and associates of the Rotenberg brothers (Putin allies, also sanctioned). He proposed a $50M penthouse for Putin as a sweetener. The deal continued well into the 2016 campaign, with Cohen contacting the Kremlin directly (reaching Putin spokesman [[Dmitry Peskov]]'s office) in January 2016. The deal fell through — per Cohen's testimony — only because Trump won the presidency. Full details: [[Trump Tower Moscow]] ## The Artemenko "Peace Plan" *(added 2026-09-29)* In late January 2017 Sater and [[Michael Cohen]] met Ukrainian MP Andrii Artemenko of the Radical Party at the Loews Regency hotel in New York. Artemenko's plan called for a referendum on leasing Crimea to Russia (he compared it to "the Panama Canal and Hong Kong"), withdrawal of Russian forces from eastern Ukraine, and the lifting of sanctions. The *New York Times* reported on February 19, 2017 that Cohen left the plan in a sealed envelope at [[Michael Flynn]]'s office; Cohen denied delivering any documents. In Ukraine Artemenko was expelled from his party and investigated for treason. **A note on financing claims.** Bloomberg's reading of the [[Mueller Report]] is that Sater *claimed* access to [[VTB Bank]] financing for [[Trump Tower Moscow]], while in December 2015 he was actually dealing with Genbank, a Crimean lender. Treat VTB as a named prospective financier, not a committed one. ## The Intelligence Knot What makes Sater uniquely difficult to categorize is his simultaneous roles as: a figure with deep organized crime connections (the Mogilevich network); a US government intelligence asset; and a business partner of the future president brokering deals with the Russian government. Whether Sater's Trump work was freelance opportunism, part of his intelligence cooperation, or something else entirely has never been fully resolved. The [[Mueller Investigation]] interviewed Sater extensively but did not charge him. His cooperation agreement from the 1998 fraud case remained active, giving him continued legal cover. ## Significance Sater is the human embodiment of the overlap between Russian organized crime money, Russian state intelligence, and the Trump Organization's real estate business — the three-way intersection that defines the financial dimension of the [[Russia]] record. His "Our boy can become president" email captures, in a single sentence, the transactional nature of the Trump-Russia relationship as understood by the people closest to it.