State Department had revoked Deripaska’s visa, reportedly out of concern over his ties to organized crime (which he has denied). Deripaska had won his fortune by prevailing in the so-called aluminum wars of the 1990s, a corpse-filled struggle, one of the most violent of all the competitions for dominance in a post-Soviet industry. Manafort had known Deripaska for years, so he surely understood the oligarch’s history. The Russian oligarch wanted to know what had become of his money. Meanwhile, a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska had been after Manafort to explain what had happened to an $18.9 million investment in a Ukrainian company that Manafort had claimed to have made on his behalf. He seemed unwilling, or perhaps unable, to access his offshore accounts an FBI investigation scrutinizing his work in Ukraine had begun not long after Yanukovych’s fall. For her “wedding weekend kick off” party, he suggested scaling back the menu to hot dogs and eliminated a line item for ice. Andrea noted her father’s “tight cash flow state,” texting Jessica, “He is suddenly extremely cheap.” His change in spending habits was dampening her wedding plans. But he complained about unpaid bills and, at age 66, scoured the world (Hungary, Uganda, Kenya) for fresh clients, hustling without any apparent luck. After the revolution, Manafort cadged some business from former minions of the ousted president, the ones who hadn’t needed to run for their lives. Money, which had always flowed freely to Manafort and which he’d spent more freely still, soon became a problem. But in his Kiev office, he’d left behind a safe filled with papers that he would not have wanted to fall into public view or the wrong hands. Manafort avoided any harm by keeping a careful distance from the enflamed city. Fearing for his life, Yanukovych sought protective shelter in Russia.
And in the early months of 2014, protesters gathered on the Maidan, Kiev’s Independence Square, and swept his patron from power. Manafort had profited from the sort of excesses that make a country ripe for revolution. The power had helped fill Manafort’s bank accounts according to his recent indictment, he had tens of millions of dollars stashed in havens like Cyprus and the Grenadines.Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. One of his deputies, Rick Gates, once boasted to a group of Washington lobbyists, “You have to understand, we’ve been working in Ukraine a long time, and Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure … In every ministry, he has a guy.” Only a small handful of Americans-oil executives, Cold War spymasters-could claim to have ever amassed such influence in a foreign regime. Manafort would swim naked with his boss outside his banya, play tennis with him at his palace (“Of course, I let him win,” Manafort made it known), and generally serve as an arbiter of power in a vast country. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn.
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