Immigrants aren’t driving up rent prices in America. The Russian Mafia is. Here’s how

The Russian Mafia (and before them the USSR) is deploying overlapping, multi-decades long covert attacks against us to destroy us. America’s housing crisis was created by the Russian Mafia to trigger nation-wide protests once they seat their preferred proKremlin president. [Our security agencies have told us Putin and the Russian government backed Trump’s presidential campaigns in 2016, 2020 and 2024.] By jacking up housing costs the Russian Mafia plans to trigger massive protests from: (1) all Americans paying exorbitant rents &/or mortgages they can’t afford, (2) workers who earn a decent income but can’t afford an entry-level home, and/or (3) people forced to commute long hours on freeways, including essential workers who must work in the city but who can’t afford city housing costs. Tens of millions of people will be covertly triggered by the Russian Mafia into enraged protesters demanding change. Below is a brief backstory about our real estate system which the Russian Mafia/USSR have covertly shaped over the last 60 years.

Paragraphs (1) to (17) are most of an outstanding article titled “The Little-Known Factor Driving up Housing Costs: Dirty Money,” by James K. Boyce and Leonce Ndikumana published in Politico Magazine on 10/12/2024, explaining our real estate system. I bold sentences I think are especially important.

(1) “The nation’s housing affordability crisis has become so acute that even our presidential candidates are paying attention to it. Former President Donald Trump blames immigrants for driving up prices and vows he will reduce demand by banning mortgages for “illegal immigrants” and deporting them. For her part, Vice President Kamala Harris promises to increase supply by building 3 million new homes.”

(2) “But the number of housing units … has grown faster than the number of households since the turn of the century. Something else is happening here. It’s not just a supply problem. And it’s not just a demand problem caused by an increase in households, whether they are immigrants or not.”

(3) “That’s because demand for real estate is not just about the number of people who need homes, it’s also about the amount of money buyers are bringing into the market. People without money cannot push up prices. It’s the people with money – especially those with a lot of money – who drive up prices for everyone else.”

(4) “The truth is that there are a lot of people buying luxury real estate who have a lot of money. Dirty money. And that money is distorting the market for ordinary homebuyers.”

(5) “In March, federal authorities seized a Manhattan luxury apartment…. The forfeiture complaint in U.S. District Court charges that the funds used to buy the $7 million apartment …. originated from ‘misappropriation, theft, or embezzlement’ from the Congo treasury, and traces the layers of shell companies through which the stolen money was laundered. Press accounts have highlighted the famous name on the outside of the apartment building: Trump International Hotel and Tower. But they have missed the bigger story.”

(6) “There has been an enormous influx of dirty money from overseas into high-end residential properties in major cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami. Some of this money comes from Africa, which has lost more than $600 billion to illicit capital flight since the turn of the century. More comes from Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.”

(7) “These sums are not small. Nearly a decade ago The New York Times estimated that anonymous shell companies accounted for more than half of all purchases in Manhattan and Los Angeles, nearly half in the San Francisco Bay area and over a third in Miami. Comparable statistics are not available for more recent years, but this suggests that the amount of hidden wealth invested in real estate in Manhattan alone surpasses $100 billion.”

(8) “Many of these properties sit vacant. They are bought not as places to live but instead as places to park ill-gotten wealth.”

(9) “These illicit financial flows don’t just hurt the citizens of countries like Congo. The looted money that flows into urban real estate markets pushes up prices for ordinary Americans, from first-time homebuyers who can’t get into the market, to families who can’t afford to ‘trade up’ to a larger home, to tenants whose rents are pushed upward. Dirty money is a major but little-recognized contributor to our current housing crisis.”

(10) “You might assume that purchases of high-priced condos in big metropolitan areas would not impact prices for the kinds of houses that ordinary Americans want and need. But purchases of luxury units set off a cascade effect. As would-be buyers are priced out of the top tier of the market, they bid up prices in the next tier down. Buyers priced out of that tier bid up prices in the next, and so on down the line. Low-income people – including many “essential workers” – are priced out altogether and wind up having to live far from city centers with long commutes to their essential work. Real estate in other cities and regions experience knock-on effects, as workers who can do their jobs remotely move out of high-priced cities.”

(11) “Immigrants coming to the United States to find work are not making this problem worse – instead they are arguably making it better. New immigrants often move in which relatives. And since many work in the construction industries, they are increasing the supply by helping to build housing. The real problem is not the influx of people from overseas, it’s the influx of cash.

(12) “There are tools to address the problem, but we are not using them effectively. In 2001, barely one month after 9/11, Congress passed Title III of the Patriot Act to combat money laundering and terrorists financing. It mandated banks to report suspicious money transfer from abroad. But lobbyists persuaded the Treasury Department to grant the real estate industry a “temporary” exemption from the law’s requirement to report dubious transactions. The loophole remains in place, fueling what has been termed “an extraordinary growth opportunity for high-end real estate.”

(13) “The United States is the only G7 country that does not require real estate professionals to comply with anti-money laundering laws. Is it any wonder that so much of the world’s ill-gotten gains are being stashed in U.S. real estate?”

(14) In August this year, the Treasury Department at last unveiled reporting requirements for real estate transactions. The new rules, which are scheduled to take effect in December 2025 and will apply only to new sales, have been hailed by transparency advocates as “a major turning point in the fight against dirty money.”¹

(15) “But past experience suggests caution. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the Treasury agency charged with implementing the rules, remains woefully underfunded and understaffed. A recent Brookings Institution study examined the impact of a pilot program launched in 2016 for monitoring real estate transactions in specific counties and concluded that it had no discernible effect, an outcome the authors attributed to weak enforcement. As Abraham Lincoln reputedly said, “Laws without enforcement are just good advice.”

(16) “The border between the U.S. economy and foreign capital is less tangible than the physical lines that demarcate national territory, but is no less significant. U.S. Customs and Border Protection today has more than 60,000 employees. The Treasury Department’s FinCEN has about 300.”

(17) “To address the nation’s housing crisis, we should be worrying less about undocumented workers and more about undocumented money.”

I believe the Russian Mafia has promoted homelessness here to cause people in America even more anxiety with which to trigger us. Homelessness is a visual reminder to everyone in America that our government doesn’t care about ordinary people. That is a lie but the Russian Mafia deals in lies. They don’t tell Americans how many homeless people they hooked on meth, crack and fentanyl. They don’t tell us how many employees they psychologically attacked at work, using compromised supervisors and coworkers. I’ve been on the receiving end of the Soviet Union’s and Russian Mafia’s destabilizing, physical and sexual assaults against workers. They Soviet Union were brutal. The Russian Mafia is brutal. Both were/are evil.

Described below are transactions between Russian gangsters and Trump Tower as discussed in “House of Trump, House of Putin” by Craig Unger, published in 2018. It is an excellent, highly informative book and can be checked out from the library in ebook or paperback. I quote from material from Chapter 2.²

“...according to author David Cay Johnston, Trump Tower was one of only two buildings In New York City that sold condos to buyers who used shell companies, such as limited liability companies, which allowed purchasers to buy real estate while concealing their identities.”

“’If you are doing a transaction with no mortgage, there is no financial institution that needs to know where the money came from, particularly if it's a wire transfer from overseas,” said Jonathan Winer, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “The customer obligations that are imposed on all kinds of financial institutions are not imposed on people selling real estate. They should have been, but they weren’t.’”

“So, thanks to these lax regulations, Trump began to sell condos in Trump Tower as an ideal vehicle through which criminals could put their dirty money into luxury condominiums while keeping their ownership anonymous. Thus, according to the New York State attorney general’s office, when Trump closed the deal for five apartments with David Bogatin, whether he knew it or not, he had just helped launder money for the Russian Mafia.”

“…. It was 1984….. Some people in the KGB were beginning to realize that the Soviet Union’s economy was doomed….the old party structures were failing. All of which created a gigantic power vacuum for the Russian Mafia to fill at a time when it had grown to roughly nine thousand criminal banks with thirty-five thousand members, many of whom, likely including Bogatin, were looking to transfer illicit funds into safe havens in the West.”

“Two powerful forces in the newly created global underground economy had begun to come together. On the one hand, the disintegration of the Soviet Union had opened a fire-hose like torrent to hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital that began to pour forth from oligarchs, wealthy apparatchiks, and mobsters in Russia and it’s satellites. On the other hand, Donald Trump’s zeal to sell condos no questions asked, to shell companies meant that Russians could launder vast amounts of money while hiding their personal identities.”

“As the Financial Times notes, the fact that the US and the UK, unlike most Western democracies, permit anonymous ownership of real estate facilitates money laundering of roughly $300 billion per year in the United States alone, most of it from Russia. As a result, luxury real estate has provided a haven for Russian oligarchs, and their kleptocratic president, Vladimir Putin, son of a factor worker and Russian seaman, to stash billions of dollars.”

“All-cash purchases through shell companies are not in and of themselves illegal or improper, and they have become more common in recent years in luxury home sales all over the world. Nor are sellers under any obligation to question where a buyer’s money comes from. However, Trump appears to have taken advantage of these weak regulations to sell en masse to the Russians.”

“Because it is so difficult to penetrate the shell companies that purchased these condos, it is almost impossible for reporters – or, for that matter, anyone without subpoena power – to ascertain the scale at which such laundering may have taken place in Trump-branded properties. Nevertheless, according to a BuzzFeed investigation by Thomas Frank, more than 1,300 condos, one-fifth of all Trump-branded condos sold in the US since the eighties, were sold “in secretive, all-cash transactions that enable buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.”

“The BuzzFeed article added that the total value of these condo sales – sales that match the US Treasury’s criteria for possible money laundering – was about $1.5 billion, a figure that actually may understate the amount of dirty money in play. The article did not include Trump's many buildings outside the United States, such as Trump-branded high-rises in Canada, the Philippines, Panama, Uruguay, Turkey, India, South Korea, and other countries where [former] President Trump often licenses his name and collects royalties.”³

The Russian Mafia expects to seat their preferred candidate into our Presidency. If we let them do that, they will slaughter us. Whatever people are being lead to believe they can expect from a proKremlin president, they’re being lied to. Yes, essential workers promised housing in the center of town instead of a two hour drive away will get that housing but they won’t be able to enjoy it because the Russian Mafia will promote anarchy here, arson, overt mass murder. Think cage-fight on a national scale with the Russian Mafia laughing delightedly at every American child slaughtered. Wealthy people who’ve been promised their wealth won’t be touched and tax rates will be dirt cheap will get it, but the Russian Mafia will slaughter them, their extended family and steal their wealth.

Many people won’t believe me but the Russian Mafia hates us, including the enslaved influencers they’re using to help destroy Americans. I understand. It’s hard to believe you’re hated in the way the Russian Mafia hates us but I’m one of the people with first hand experience about what the Russian Mafia is. They’ll keep specific promises, then murder the recipient.

Don’t vote for a proKremlin president.