Allen Weisselberg CFO

5 24 an stormy daniels hush money cohen

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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE

Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis

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https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.

:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:

There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:

And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.

So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?

Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...

That’s right.

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.

Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.

Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.

And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.

But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.

I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.

That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.

So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.

There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.

And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.

And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.

So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?

Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.

Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.

That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.

Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

It’s odd.

The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.

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an 10 23 no lnx

Here’s the 'problem' with ex-Trump Org CFO’s $2 million severance agreement: analyst

Maya Boddie

October 12, 2023

Following former Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg's testimony during ex-President Donald Trump's New York civil fraud trial Tuesday, MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin took to X (formerly Twitter) to share her knowledge of Weisselberg's severance agreement.

PBS reports New York Attorney General Letitia "James' lawsuit alleges that Weisselberg engineered Trump's financial statements to meet his demands that they show increases in his net worth and signed off on lofty valuations for assets despite appraisals to the contrary."

On Wednesday, Rubin wrote, "We learned yesterday that Allen Weisselberg's severance agreement will ultimately pay him $2 million by 12/31/24 if he fully complies. What I didn't appreciate is what he promised in return. To some extent, it's not atypical to require an employee to promise not to assist with others' claims. The problem here is context—and timing."

She continued, "Let's start with the fact that while Weisselberg left the company at the end of 2022 and the agreement contemplated his completing his work in good faith before that date, it wasn't executed by him until the literal eve of his Jan. 10, 2023 sentencing. And it wasn't signed by Alan Garten, the Trump Organization's chief legal officer, until Jan. 12, two days after Weisselberg entered Rikers."

Rubin added, "What's more, according to the payment schedule appended to the agreement, the Trump Org. did not start paying him until Mar. 31, 2023, well into his prison sentence and certainly after reports that the Manhattan DA was still investigating Weisselberg for insurance fraud. Now let's go back to his severance obligations. They include cooperating in an investigation or litigation against the company or Trumps by meeting with them in connection with 'discovery or pretrial issues' and providing "truthful testimony on behalf of Releasees. That means he was likely obligated to meet with them before his trial testimony."

She continued, "The severance agreement also entitles Weisselberg to be indemnified for any reasonable attorney's fees in any legal matter against him or the company--but there's some big catches. He can't hire a lawyer without the company's prior approval, and "to the extent there is no direct conflict of interest and at the election of the Company, [Weisselberg] shall be jointly represented by counsel for the Company. Put another way, if he wants his own fees paid, they get to decide who represents him and even force their own lawyers on him. But, of course, all of this pales in comparison to Weisselberg's commitment that except where forced by subpoena or other court-ordered process, he won't give information to anyone else with claims against the company and/or anyone he individually released (e.g., Trump)... or 'take any action to induce, encourage, instigate, aid, abet or otherwise cause" any person or entity "to bring or file a complaint, charge, lawsuit or other proceeding of any kind against the Company or any person or entity released by this Agreement."

Rubin concludes, "Read broadly, the agreement precludes Weisselberg from voluntarily cooperating with any law enforcement or prosecutorial agency in exchange for lenience as to other crimes for which he could be under investigation and/or ultimately charged. And yes, that might be the definition of unenforceable as a matter of public policy. But if you're Weisselberg, what incentive do you have to test that proposition when you have $2 million in severance, payable even if you die, riding on it? None. FIN."

READ MORE: Trump Organization gets 'corporate death penalty' after 'persistent fraud': legal experts

PBS' full report is available at this link.

favorable?

https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/allen-weisselberg-negotiating-plea-deal/

(AP) — Allen Weisselberg is seemingly everything his longtime boss, Donald Trump, isn’t.

The modest money man has always been content to work behind the scenes, with no hint of flash, braggadocio or ostentatious spending.

He lived in the same three-bedroom ranch house in suburban Long Island with the same woman for decades, shows up for work at Trump Tower every day and almost always goes to the same spot down the block for lunch. The bald, bespectacled, 71-year-old chief financial officer of the Trump Organization is known for being loyal, unobtrusive and, well, somewhat dull.

But Weisselberg also has his name on all manner of checks and documents of the company going back decades, is familiar with its tax returns, its lenders and investors, and is said to track every penny going in and out. And given what he knows, the prospect of him testifying in federal probes and congressional investigations of Trump’s business empire could pose a new danger to the president from one of his longest-serving confidants.

“He was like from central casting, a green-eyeshaded accountant,” said Gwenda Blair, who interviewed Weisselberg for her book, “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President.”

“He was not even remotely colorful, eyes cast down on the spreadsheet and the calculator — click, click, click,” she said. “He’s been in the inner, inner circle, but he is so colorless that he faded into the woodwork. That was his job, not to be noticed.”

Weisselberg, who through the Trump Organization did not respond to requests for an interview, may not be able to keep that up much longer.

At least one of the Democratic-led House committees investigating Trump’s finances, hush-money payments and taxes is seeking to question Weisselberg following Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s explosive testimony last week in which he dropped Weisselberg’s name nearly 20 times.

Weisselberg also spoke to federal prosecutors last year as part of the investigation in which Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations for payments to buy the silence of two women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump — porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal.

Weisselberg has not been charged in that case, but Cohen has said he was deeply involved and ultimately the one who decided how to secretly reimburse Cohen for a $130,000 payment to Daniels.

For his grand jury testimony in the Cohen case, Weisselberg received limited immunity, which would preclude any truthful statements from being used against him in a criminal case. Federal prosecutors in New York have declined to say whether they are investigating Weisselberg himself.

Weisselberg started working for the Trump family in Brooklyn in 1973 under Fred Trump, Donald’s father, and was there for all the son’s big successes and flops.

He was overseeing the books when Donald built Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, bought up several casinos in Atlantic City, and then drove them into bankruptcy. And he was there when Trump rose again as a reality-TV businessman and began slapping his name on hotels and residential towers owned by others. It was during that era that Weisselberg made a rare, if quiet, public appearance — as a guest judge on a 2004 episode of “The Apprentice.”

He was so trusted by Trump that he was named as the only non-family member to help Trump sons Eric and Don Jr. manage the trust the president set up to hold his business assets while he is in office.

Weisselberg’s family is deeply entwined in the company. His son Barry has managed the Trump Wollman Rink in Central Park. Another son, Jack, is an executive director at Ladder Capital, the biggest lender to the Trump Organization behind Deutsche Bank. Ladder had more than $100 million lent out to Trump’s company last year, according to the president’s financial disclosure report.

As is the case with his boss, Weisselberg was registered as a Democrat for years, according to the research service Nexis. He gave money to campaigns by New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and New York Gov. Mario Cuomo before switching to the Republican Party for the 2016 election.

But that is pretty much where the similarities to his boss end.

Weisselberg has no Twitter or Facebook account, though he does maintain a LinkedIn page with one “connection” listed — Matthew Calamari, a former bodyguard turned Trump Organization’s chief operating officer.

He has bought a few properties over the years besides a home in Wantagh, New York. He has a vacation home in Boynton Beach, Florida, that he purchased 17 years ago for $282,000. He bought two condominiums at Trump-branded buildings in Manhattan but sold them.

Weisselberg barely merits a mention in the many Trump biographies, nor in the many written by the man himself. He doesn’t appear in “The Art of the Deal,” for instance.

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, told The Wall Street Journal in a profile before the 2016 election that Weisselberg “is deeply passionate, fiercely loyal and has stood alongside my father and our family” for decades.

Weisselberg has also been tied to several Trump ventures tarnished by scandal. He reviewed the finances at the now-defunct Trump University , the real estate school hit by a fraud lawsuit that the president settled for $25 million. He was a director of the shuttered Trump Foundation , which is being sued by New York’s attorney general for allegedly tapping charitable donations for political and business purposes.

And in testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week, Cohen said Weisselberg knew about what Cohen said were falsified financial statements that Trump used to dupe insurers and investors . Cohen also said that it was Weisselberg who decided that the hush money that Cohen paid out of his own pocket to the porn star should be reimbursed in installments spread out over 12 months to “hide what the payment was.”

And Weisselberg is likely to know the answer to the biggest question since his boss pulled off his surprise election to the presidency: Just how much is Trump worth?

Trump testified in a 2007 deposition that Weisselberg was the one who valued his properties and other assets.

“My numbers are pretty in line with what he says,” Trump testified.