https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/anthonycormier/trumps-lawyer-launched-an-offshore-casino-and-left-a-wake

How Trump's Lawyer Placed A Big Casino Bet That Left Dozens Empty-Handed

Years before Trump’s candidacy, Michael D. Cohen backed a different kind of venture: a gambling cruise that stiffed employees and vendors, and blew off many of the ensuing lawsuits.

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Anthony Cormier

BuzzFeed News Reporter

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Chris McDaniel

BuzzFeed News Reporter

Posted on March 15, 2017, at 8:45 p.m. ET

Cohen’s two main partners, Arkady Vaygensberg and Leonid Tatarchuk, were born in the Ukraine, a country where Cohen has deep family and business ties. Both Cohen and his brother, Bryan, married Ukrainian women and did business with their fathers, Fima Shusterman and Alex Oronov. Oronov died earlier this month after a prolonged illness, Bryan Cohen told BuzzFeed News.

In an interview this week, Michael Cohen at first said that he did not have a stake in the casino business, only the yacht, and bore no responsibility for lost wages and unpaid debts. But BuzzFeed News then sent him documents with his signature showing he owned 30% of the company.

“I disagree and, if I did, I never knew it,” he said.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/4/18/1758117/-The-many-wild-links-between-Micheal-Cohen-Felix-Sater-Trump-the-Russian-Mob-the-NYPD-and-NY-FBI

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Cohen’s Russian links went far beyond just Garber and his lifelong friend Felix Sater — it also includes his wife who was born in Soviet Ukraine.

In 1994 Cohen married Laura Shusterman, who was born in the Soviet Union. Her father, also a taxi entrepreneur, pleaded guilty to a felony, conspiracy to defraud the IRS, the year before.

Continuing in some of the work he started with Melvyn Estrin in 2000 Cohen was involved a series of car insurance lawsuits representing plaintiffs who claimed to have been involved in accidents. However it appears that some of the accidents were staged and frequently involved Russian immigrants bringing suspicion that it might have been a scam concocted by the Russian mob.

At this time, a wave of staged auto accidents, involving immigrants from the former Soviet Union who claimed to have been hurt, had led prosecutors to open a massive investigation. They dubbed it Operation Boris, an acronym for Big Organized Russian Insurance Scam. The prosecutorial push resulted in hundreds of convictions.

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https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/04/18/with-backpage-com-prosecution-left-ties-online-free-speech-to-transgender-prostitutes-rights/

18 Apr 20188

President Trump signed the FOSTA-SESTA anti-sex trafficking bill last Thursday, the same day Backpage.com CEO Carl Ferrer pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge related to the shutdown of what Attorney General Jeff Sessions called “the dominant marketplace for illicit commercial sex.”

Internet activists of both leftist and libertarian orientation quickly connected the two events, despite the fact the shutdown preceded the passage by Congress of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA or SESTA after an earlier version of the bill).

“Backpage was shut down soon after the passage of FOSTA, a bill passed last month that will make websites more liable for what users do and say on their platforms. Advocates for FOSTA held up Backpage as the poster-villain for why they claimed we need stronger anti-trafficking protection,” the left-wing Motherboard, tech division of Vice News, writes.

Despite this, some internet businesses see the bill as deeply troubling. Most notably, Craigslist justified its decision to shut their own personal ads entirely over fears of new liability from FOSTA.

The left-leaning internet freedom think tank Electronic Frontier Foundation characterizes FOSTA as “censorship,” a view shared by many of the bill’s opponents. Lane pushed back on the notion of censorship and the idea that the Backpage.com take-down would chill free speech online, telling Breitbart News, “There is no difference between Internet free speech and free speech. The DOJ effort was about taking down a criminal enterprise. Criminal activity is not protected free speech online or offline.”