Four criminal convictions, one suicide, and one satisfied customer: Unravelling Donald Trump’s “complicated” 1993 Palm Beach real estate purchase from convicted fraudster Leslie Greyling
The article left some nagging questions. For instance, why would Greyling – a professional con man – sell the property apparently at a substantial loss to himself?
Jeffrey A. Paine, a now-disbarred West Palm Beach attorney who helped arrange the deal and who in 2001 was handed a five-year sentence and fined $80 million for conspiring to commit mail fraud, speculated that Trump might have had other deals with Greyling.
Trump’s local realtor at the time, Robert Weiner, who committed suicide in 2012 after Florida state regulators launched a probe into the disappearance of over $250,000 from his real estate Escrow accounts, also suggested that other deals had taken place, but didn’t say what they were.
After digging around online, I found this February 3, 1994 New York Times report, which states that Trump “had purchased an option to buy a St. Charles, Mo., casino site from the Members Service Corporation,” a failed Winter Park holding company involved in gambling and real estate:
Although he didn’t say how much he paid for the option, Trump told the Times it would be good for a “fairly long term.”
Here’s the scoop: Members Service was headed by none other than – you guessed it – Leslie Greyling, who along with two other executives, Arthur S. Feher Jr. and Daniel M. Boyar, was indicted in March 1996 for charges including conspiracy, stock fraud, and money laundering.
Founder of “cult-like” alt-med cancer charity Johannes Fisslinger took donations from Clint Eastwood and other celebrities to fund breast cancer research. But now Fisslinger says the money wasn’t used to research breast cancer.
Another celebrity says Fisslinger used her name and image without her consent to promote a high-profile breast cancer research fundraising gala in LA: “If someone misleads once, they will do it again. We won’t be used.”
Johannes Fisslinger is an LA-based proponent/teacher of complementary and alternative therapies, and the founder of the Lifestyle Prescriptions Foundation (LPF) medical programme, recently the subject of a report by BuzzFeed UK (click here to read).
According to a recent e-mail sent to subscribers of that programme, Fisslinger once received a donation from renowned actor Clint Eastwood intended for Fisslinger’s now-defunct breast cancer research charity, the Heal Breast Cancer Foundation (HBCF).
What Fisslinger doesn’t mention in his e-mail is that money supposedly given to him by Eastwood and other celebrities wasn’t used to research breast cancer, and might even have been used to fund a “cult-like” alternative medicine programme whose members were later blamed for causing the deaths of three cancer patients.
Another celebrity, whom it was claimed had a major role in a high-profile charity fundraising gala organised by the HBCF, now says Fisslinger misrepresented her involvement and used her name and image without her consent.
The money was supposed to fund the following research projects:
• Brain Relay Diagnostics – confirming the Organ-Brain Connection • Traumatic Life Events causing breast cancer
• Pre-tumor breast cancer diagnosis and prevention
However, Fisslinger now says he did not carry out any research with the funds raised at the gala, except for a small study that was never published in any medical journal.
“Our intention was to do research,” said Fisslinger. “But then we found out quickly that it is very, very difficult to do preventive research into breast cancer and that the needed funds are very difficult to get.”
While Fisslinger didn’t say how much money was raised at the gala, public records show that for the financial year 2006-2007, IMMA grossed over $135,000 – significantly more than the organisation has made in any one year before or since.
So where did the money go? According to Fisslinger: “We did a small research project with Prof. Reiff from Cairo University but it was actually never published in a medical journal – then we basically decided to focus on teaching/training and helping clients.”
That’s when the bodies began to pile up.
In 2009, a Norwegian television station reported that at least three cancer patients died after they were advised by high-ranking members of IMMA’s Advisory Council, Dagfrid Kolås and Bent Madsen, to stop conventional treatments.
“At this point we just don’t have double-blind studies and research to verify that specific life experiences, emotions, stresses affect specific organs,” said Fisslinger.
He added: “The reality is that over 1,000 health professionals [use] this knowledge daily in their work with clients. They wouldn’t do that if it [didn’t] help them in their analysis and in helping clients heal.”
I also spoke with some of those said to have been involved in the 2007 gala.
Centre: Dr. Dean Ornish at the HBCF Awards & Gala (source)
Dr. Robert M. Goodman, professor of Applied Science at Indiana-Bloomington University, said he had “very limited contact from the Foundation and did not contact them” or do any breast cancer research while on HBCF’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Marc Neveu, PhD, an honorary fellow at the T.H. Chan Harvard School of Public Health, said he only had “a minor role on the advisory board and was not able to attend the event.”
One famous actress whom it was claimed had a major role in the gala and whose name I’ve agreed to withhold, said Fisslinger misrepresented her involvement and later used her name and image, without her consent, in a 2015 promotional video for an event in Hawaii.
Here’s what her agent told me:
[Fisslinger] misstated and admitted to [redacted] NOT being involved with the breast cancer event.
He used her name in the Hawaii conference without approval in order to generate business.
He used her name/image (unauthorized) for the video.
I’ve told him that if he removes [redacted]’s name from any and all references to him, his company, mission, etc, I will be still.
He said he would do it.
I don’t like misrepresentations at all.
Clearly those who do it use [redacted] to enrich themselves and in so doing, they are misrepresenting her name, goal, intents, etc.
I don’t want to be further involved and will never have anything to do with this man/org. moving forward.
I know many of those with whom he deals.
If someone misleads once, they will do it again. We won’t be used.
Fisslinger didn’t reply when asked to clarify if he used other celebrities’ names and images without their consent, but here’s a list of those who were said to have been involved:
Benefit Committee
Ben Stiller Geena Davis
Tommy Lee Jones
Sir Ben Kingsley Rosie O’Donnell
Kathy Griffin
Paula Abdul
Teri Polo
Lisa Vidall
Shaun Toub
Mario Lopez
Alfre Woodard
Harold Perrineau
Kendall Payne
Allison Janney
Tyler Hilton
Lourdes Benedicto Antonio Sabbato Jr.
Laura Innes
Honorees Dr. Dean Ornish
Eckhart Tolle
Susan Ryan Jordan
William Arntz
Dr. Christian Northrup
Dr. O. Carl Simonton
Celebrity Guests
Laura Dern
Ben Harper
Seane Corn
Ron Moss
Jon Seda
Lili Haydn
Caitlin Crosby
Elaine Hendrix Kelly McCarthy
Dr. Raj Kanodia
Scientific Advisory Board
Robert M. Goodman, PhD, MPH, MA
Friedemann Schaub MD, PhD
Andrew S. Baum, PhD
Bruce Lipton, PhD
John C. Pan, MD
John Gray, PhD
Gerhard Schwenk, MD
Richard Flook, PhD
Ruediger Dahlke, MD
Mark Neveu, PhD
Nicki Monti, PhD
HP Christa Uricher
Board of Directors
Erich Haeffner
Anton Bader, MD
Johannes R. Fisslinger, PhD
Danijela Haric, MA
HP Jutta M. Fisslinger
The Daily Beast picks up my story about Turkish court-ordered takedown requests by Trump’s Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif re: his 2010 arrest in prostitution sting
A former Russian government official – and business partner of Donald Trump’s – is gaining new notoriety, as the federal investigation into alleged election meddling widens.
Meanwhile, this Kazakh-born real estate mogul, Tevfik Arif, is doing his best to clean up his past, trying to purge the web of references to his arrest in an underage prostitution bust. He was later acquitted in the matter.
Arif, a former Soviet trade minister whose company once prospected for the Trump Organization in Russia and Eastern Europe, has demanded the removal of allegedly defamatory information about that arrest from websites that have investigated or recapped controversies involving some of President Donald Trump’s past business associates.
Some of those associates are now of keen interest to Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller and his team of investigators probing Russian influence in the 2016 election and the Trump campaign’s knowledge of it. According to a Thursday report from Bloomberg, Mueller is examining the finances of a Trump project involving the investment firm Arif founded.
[…]
Since May, [Arif] has sent four takedown requests to Google and one to Automattic, the owner of popular web publishing platform WordPress, demanding that they remove content from websites hosted by their respective companies that Arif claims is defamatory. Each complaint contained documents from Turkish court orders requiring the removal of similar web content. The takedown requests were first reported by the blog Shooting the Messenger.
A January 2016 post on one of the WordPress-hosted websites at issue claims that Arif was “charged with smuggling underage girls into the country for prostitution” and “accused of being the organizer of an international ring involving young girls.” It does not note that the charges were dropped.
Automattic partially complied with the request and blocked access to the website in Turkey, the company told The Daily Beast. Paul Sieminski, Automattic’s general counsel, said it risked the country’s government blocking access to all Wordpress-hosted sites if it failed to comply.
“This is not a decision we take lightly, but in our experience, failing to comply with a court order of this kind results in the blocking of all of WordPress.com, in Turkey—which removes the site in question, plus the millions of other sites that we host,” Sieminski wrote in an emailed statement.
Google did not respond to requests for comment on the takedown notices, though the websites listed in Arif’s complaint are still accessible from a US IP address. Efforts to reach Arif were unsuccessful, and Bayrock did not respond to questions.
A quick look at Trump’s failed new-age pyramid scheme
“At no time in recent history has our economy been in the state that is today. It’s a mess. The economic meltdown, greed, and ineptitude of the financial industry have sabotaged the dreams of millions of people. Americans need a new plan. They need a new dream” – Donald Trump, POTUS
No, that’s not Trump’s election pitch to the American people, but the pitch he gave to participants of The Trump Network, a new-age pyramid scheme that offered “millions of people new hope with an exciting plan to opt-out of the recession” and “develop your own financial independence.”
The Trump Network was born in 2009 when Trump licensed his name to Ideal Health, a multi-level marketing business founded in 1997 by Lou DeCaprio and brothers Scott and Todd Stanwood. Ideal Health invited independent salespeople to do their own marketing to sell a customised vitamin supplement package, which was determined by conducting urine hormone tests using the company’s signature product, the PrivaTest.
In a 2008 review article for Alternative Medicine Review, the test’s inventor, J. Alexander Bralley, claimed that urinary biomarkers “provide insight into diseases possibly caused or complicated by toxin accumulation and detoxification responses.”
Speaking to STAT in 2016, executive president of The Trump Organization Alan Garten said that Trump “was endorsing the idea behind the business” but that his role “did not amount to an endorsement of the products” themselves.
However, in a “personal letter” published on the Trump Network site, Trump appeared to give his stamp of approval.
To promote the company’s “cutting-edge,”“revolutionary” products and multi-level marketing concept, Trump even had planned an all-out publicity tour that was set to be “the biggest media campaign in the history of network marketing,” and “the legacy he leaves with all Americans.”
Trump would be seen “on the likes of Oprah, the Tonight Show, Larry King, the Today show, numerous press releases, online news broadcasts, major business magazines, and every daily newspaper in America – as well as newspaper business sections.”
In reality, the job of promoting the company was largely left to independent marketers via “personal self-replicating” sites and other, more innovative methods.
Results varied.
In one misplaced attempt at viral marketing, a Trump Network recruit used Google Books to issue a press release under items relating to Trump.
Curiously, the author of the release gave only modest ratings of Trump’s books. One book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, received a meagre two stars.
And the fun doesn’t stop there.
In August 2009, Wikipedia deleted a page that was created for The Trump Network after it fell foul of the site’s abuse guidelines. The page, authored by a user named “Trumpwellness” and signed-off by “Donald J. Trump,” was deleted by admins because it contained “obvious advertising or promotional material.”
Another innovative way marketers sought to enlist new recruits was by speaking to them directly using online forums. Going by some of the responses, this approach might have worked. But as the company fell into decline, pending lawsuits and accompanying PR disasters, it too failed to take.
In 2011, Trump’s licencing deal with Ideal Health expired and was not renewed. The assets were then sold to a “health and wellness” company named Bioceutica, which still sells the now-rebranded Trump Network vitamin packages and urine tests.
Last year it was revealed that, between 1999-2004, the Federal Trade Commission received 56 complaints against Ideal Health. According to official documents, marketing recruits complained that the company “made money off of marketers by misrepresenting what their marketing system can do” and placing “pressure on marketers to purchase all the companies tools in order to succeed.”
Trump purchased the house for less than half the original sale price from Leslie Greyling, a South African real estate investor who in 1995 was convicted and later deported to England for his involvement in a string of illegal business ventures, including a mafia-linked “pump and dump” scheme.
Trump’s deal with Greyling leaves some nagging questions. For instance, why did Greyling – a professional con man – sell the house apparently at a substantial loss to himself?
It’s “complicated” – that’s according to Jeffrey A. Paine, a now-disbarred West Palm Beach attorney who represented 1094’s former owners, and who in 2001 was handed a five-year sentence and fined $80 million for conspiring to commit mail fraud.
“I don’t know whether he intends to make up some money in another deal or what,” Paine told the Miami Herald in 1993. “All I can say is that we sold our shares (to Greyling) for substantially more than $1.6 million.”
According to Trump’s local realtor at the time, Robert Weiner, who committed suicide in 2012 after Florida state regulators launched a probe into the disappearance of $250,000 from his real estate Escrow accounts, Trump was “involved with a ‘South African company’ in some deals,” but didn’t elaborate about what they were.
It’s unclear if Trump had any other deals with Greyling, but public records show Trump still owns 1094. The house is currently valued at around $8 million.
Sater found fame during the 2016 election when Trump’s Russia connections became a focus for journalists. It was around this time that Sater, whose busy online presence rivalled Trump himself, deleted all of his sites and some of his social media accounts.
But as they say, nothing is ever truly deleted from the Internet.
Via the Wayback Machine, which archives the web, here’s a sample of Sater’s deleted sites and social media accounts, including:
Did former Trump advisor/Russian-American real estate mogul Felix Sater delete info about his criminal history from Trump’s Wikipedia page using a sockpuppet account? READ UPDATE HERE
The Russian-born real estate mogul collaborated with Trump on a number of high-profile projects, and until recently was one of Trump’s senior advisors.
Trump has denied having a close relationship with Sater. In 2013, he testified in a video deposition for a civil lawsuit that “if [Sater] were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like.”
Apparently, the feeling is mutual.
In 2016, it appears Sater was banned from Wikipedia for deleting unflattering facts about himself from Trump’s Wikipedia entry using a sockpuppet account.
Here’s the rundown.
In late 2015, a Wikipedia user named “591J” deleted from the site information about “Sater’s mafia and Russian criminal ties, as well as a 1998 racketeering conviction.”
August 25, 2015 edit of Trump’s Wikipedia entry by user 591J (source)
When that information was later restored by a different user, 591J deleted Sater’s name and substituted it for “ex-convict.”
December 6, 2015 edit of Trump’s Wikipedia entry by user 591J (source)
In February 2016, 591J created Sater’s current Wikipedia entry, which was originally flagged by admins because they suspected 591J of having“a close connection” with Sater.
April 2016 draft of Felix Sater Wikipedia entry (source)
In April 2016, 591J was “blocked indefinitely” after an investigation by admins determined 591J had “abusively used” multiple accounts to promote Sater and delete information about which 591J had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
UK’s Northumbria police department accuses me of abusing its complaints system for enquiring about student’s allegation of officer overreach
Last week I asked the department to comment on a threatening e-mail allegedly sent by one of its officers, PC Mohammed Khan, to Newcastle University student Jonaya English.
According to screenshots published by English, Khan told English that he would ask the university to withdraw its offer of acceptance if she did not respond to his e-mails.
The department at first denied my attempts to verify the authenticity of the e-mails. I then received a letter from Force Assessor Jon Keenan, who said he’d assessed my enquiries and considered them “to be an abuse of the complaints system, in that you have not been directly affected by the incident and have no right as a complainant.”
Why did Keenan accuse me of abusing his department’s complaints system when:
1. I did not file a complaint;
2. I merely asked a question via the section of the department’s website that invites members of the public to leave leave feedback and make enquiries?
WordPress blocks critical blog about Trump’s inner circle after Turkish court order from Trump’s Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif
Earlier this week I blogged about Bayrock Group CEO Tevfik Arif’s attempts to get news reports about his 2010 arrest for human trafficking removed from the Internet.
Tevfik Arif (centre) with Trump and former Bayrock director Felix Sater at the launch of Trump SoHo (source)
According to the Lumen Database, which collects takedown requests of online content, Arif sent multiple Turkish court orders to Google and Automattic (WordPress’ parent company) demanding the removal of sites and blogs that reported about his arrest aboard Turkey’s presidential yacht, where he was attending a private party.
During a raid of the $57 million yacht, Turkish police reportedly found “nine young girls” from Russia and the Ukraine, “a huge amount of contraceptives and a file with escort girls’ pictures and hotel receipts.”
While Google doesn’t appear to have honoured Arif’s demand, Automattic told Lumen it has taken “partial” action against a critical WordPress blog that reported about Trump’s dubious friendships and business relationships, including his partnership with Arif.
When I asked Automattic to confirm and clarify what action it had taken against the offending blog, I received the following reply from Community Guardian Francis:
Hey Dean,
Thanks for reaching out. The site has been blocked in Turkey as a result of a decision of the Turkish Access Providers’ Union. We were forced to take that step in order to avoid WordPress.com (as a whole) from being blocked in the region.
Best,
Francis
Community Guardian WordPress.com | Automattic
Trump’s Bayrock Group business partner Tevfik Arif demands takedown of news reports that he was arrested and charged with human trafficking
According to the Lumen Database, which collects and analyses takedown requests of online content, Arif recently sent Turkish court orders to Google and Automattic (WordPress’ parent company) demanding the removal of a number of sites and blogs – including The Huffington Post and The Guardian – that reported about his 2010 arrest aboard the MV Savarona, the presidential yacht of the Republic of Turkey.
Arif was charged with human trafficking after Turkish police raided the $57 million yacht where he was attending a private party. According to news reports, they found “nine young girls” from Russia and the Ukraine, “a huge amount of contraceptives and a file with escort girls’ pictures and hotel receipts.”
Shooting the Messenger 