Russian American developer Felix Sater for years provided the United States with intelligence on the Mafia, North Korea, the Taliban, and al Qaeda — even helping hunt Osama bin Laden.
The new revelations about Sater’s connection to U.S. intelligence, whose role as an FBI informant was previously known, were confirmed today after a federal judge unsealed a 2009 letter from the Justice Department that detailed Sater’s decadelong cooperation following his 1998 guilty plea related to racketeering. At the time, prosecutors were making the case to the judge for why Sater deserved leniency in his sentencing. Sater ultimately paid a $25,000 fine and didn’t serve any time in prison.
The DOJ said Sater had continuously worked with American investigators to go after criminals both inside the U.S. and around the world, providing information which they said helped lead to the conviction of over twenty criminals, including Wall Street fraudsters, members of the La Cosa Nostra crime families, and foreign cybercriminals. Sater also helped break up money laundering schemes in Cyprus, Russia, and Turkey and gave the U.S. information about American links to Russian organized crime.
The contacts Sater made and the intelligence he passed along were especially useful in dealing with post-9/11 threats to the U.S., they said, writing that Sater’s information included details about: bin Laden’s cellphone, arms dealers, and whereabouts; the internal structure and finances of al Qaeda; the whereabouts of Taliban leader Mullah Omar; black market Stinger missiles in Afghanistan; an assassination plot against then-President Bush; North Korea’s nuclear capabilities; and more.
Sater is known for his role in the Trump-Russia investigation as Trump attorney Michael Cohen’s main contact in Russia in the Trump Organization’s effort to build a Trump Tower Moscow.
“I was building Trump Towers by day and hunting Bin Laden by night,” Sater told the Los Angeles Times in 2017.
Sater was also interviewed multiple times by the House Intelligence Committee. Sater’s name appears in Mueller’s report more than 100 times.
“I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected,” Sater wrote to Cohen in one email.
“Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it,” Sater told Cohen in another.
That project was ultimately abandoned, and Cohen, who pleaded guilty to eight counts of bank and tax fraud, also pleaded guilty to misleading Congress about the timing of the Trump Tower Moscow project, claiming the effort ended in January 2016 when discussions continued until at least June that year.
“Sater’s cooperation was of a depth and breadth rarely seen,” wrote former U.S. attorney Todd Kaminsky. “Sater went above and beyond what is expected of most cooperators and placed himself in great jeopardy in so doing.”
Judge Leo Gasser of the Eastern District of New York, who oversaw Sater’s 1998 conviction and his 2009 sentencing, ordered the release of these documents today following a lawsuit brought by the Intercept.
“I love this country more than anything else,” Sater told the Associated Press in July. “I’m not trying to wrap myself in a flag, but I did this out of patriotism.”
