Unsealed docs show Sater’s extensive FBI cooperation

COURTESY OF YOUTUBE

Felix Sater at an event in Port Washington.

Federal judge in Brooklyn unseals former Trump associate’s 1998 racketeering case

BY JESSICA PARKS

Felix Sater, a former resident of Sands Point and ex-associate of President Donald Trump, once said in an interview that his wife described living with him as “like reading next week’s newspaper today” and that just might have been true.

The Russian-born businessman has had frequent appearances in the media over the past year due to his involvement in attempting to broker a Trump Tower Moscow while Trump was running for president.

But last week, a federal judge in Brooklyn unsealed court documents that detail Sater’s cooperation with the FBI from 1998 to 2009 as a result of a deal made after Sater pleaded guilty to involvement in a “pump and dump” scheme, where his company inflated stock prices and sold the shares off once investors started buying in, according to court documents.

The documents were unsealed after The Intercept, an online investigative news site, requested access to them.

State Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Long Beach), an assistant U.S. attorney at the time of Sater’s 2009 sentencing hearing, described Sater’s cooperation as “extraordinary both in terms of its depth and breadth” in his court testimony.

“Mr. Doe’s cooperation runs a gamut that is seldom seen,” Kaminsky said on behalf of the government at the hearing. “It involves violent organizations such as Al Qaeda, it involves foreign governments, it involves Russian organized crime.”

In the unsealed documents, Sater is often referred to as “Doe” or “Slater” to protect his identity from those whom he helped convict.

And more specifically, Sater’s involvement included various families of La Cosa Nostra, a New York group of mafia families, such as an individual on the ruling board of the Genovese crime family, a captain in the Bonanno crime family, a soldier in the Gambino crime family and “the list goes on and on,” Kaminsky said. FBI’s entry into the types of financial frauds that were being perpetrated in the 1990s when “the criminal financial wizards were one step ahead of law enforcement,” which ended when Sater began cooperating with the FBI. Leo Taddeo, a former senior FBI agent, testified that Sater “was instrumental bringing Frank Coppa in” which led to further damage to the Bonanno family. Coppa’s case resulted in 19 defendants coming before the court for conspiracy to commit securities fraud. “Without his cooperation, it would have been a few more years where the FBI would have effectively removed La Cosa Nostra from the penny stock business,” Taddeo said. In an appeal filed in 2011 on a matter where confidential information on Sater was made public by a practicing attorney, Kaminsky wrote that Sater passed on specific information to the U.S. government about key leaders in al-Qaida and affiliated groups that the government

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