Meet Felix Sater, the Russian-born, bar-fighting felon with ties to the mob at the center of Mueller's Russia investigation
Felix Sater, 52, was born in Moscow but his family moved to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, New York, when he was 8-years-old.
Sater has an extremely colorful history involving bar fights, prison time, mob ties, and work as an FBI informant.
Sater, the former managing director of the real-estate development firm the Bayrock Group, has close ties to the Trump Organization.
Sater is a felon and spent a year in prison after stabbing a man in the face with a broken margarita glass in a bar fight. He was 27 at the time. The man he stabbed suffered nerve damage and required 110 stitches to close the laceration on his face.
Source: The Nation
"I got into a bar fight over a girl neither he nor I knew," Sater said in a 2007 interview. "My life spiraled out of control." Sater was a Wall Street broker at the time and lost his stockbroker's license after the fight.
Source: The New York Times
In the late 1990s, Sater became an FBI informant after pleading guilty to involvement in a $40 million stock fraud scheme orchestrated by the Russian mafia.
Source: CBS News
In a statement Sater provided to government investigators in March, he claimed to have "provided extraordinary assistance to our government involving serious matters of National Security, posing tremendous risks to my safety and the safety of my family." This included allegedly providing information on Al Qaeda after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Source: Politico
Sater was also once reportedly involved in a CIA plan to buy antiaircraft missiles on the black market for the CIA in either Russia or Afghanistan.
Source: The New York Times
Sater met Trump in 2003 while working for the Bayrock Group, which had its offices in Trump Tower in Manhattan. In the mid-2000s, he was involved in a failed effort to purchase land and build a high-end skyscraper for Trump in Moscow.
Source: The Daily Beast
Sater in 2006 traveled to Russia with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump, giving them a tour of the Kremlin.
Source: BuzzFeed
In 2015 and 2016, Sater worked with Michael Cohen in a plan to build Trump Tower in Moscow. He pitched the idea to Cohen, telling him it would help get Trump elected. Sater told Cohen, "Our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it."
Source: INSIDER
Sater told Cohen he would manage the project and get Russian President Vladimir Putin's team on board. "I will get Putin on this program and we will get Donald elected," Sater told Cohen.
Source: INSIDER
Cohen on Thursday pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his involvement in the Trump Tower plan. The president's former personal lawyer said he and Sater discussed getting approval from the Russian government for the project up until June 2016, well into the 2016 presidential campaign season. Previously, Cohen claimed the discussions ceased in January 2016.
Source: INSIDER
In court documents linked to Cohen's bombshell revelations on Thursday, which came after a new plea deal with Mueller, Sater is referred to as "Individual 2" in relation to the Trump Tower discussions.
Source: Department of Justice
As part of the discussions, Cohen was at one point reportedly in contact with Dmitry Peskov, Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary.
Source: INSIDER
Sater claims that as part of the Trump Tower plan they wanted to offer Russian President Vladimir Putin a $50 million penthouse in the tower to make it more appealing to other rich Russians.
Source: INSIDER
"My idea was to give a $50 million penthouse to Putin and charge $250 million more for the rest of the units," Sater said. "All the oligarchs would line up to live in the same building as Putin."
Source: INSIDER
The scrapped Trump Tower plan is at the center of Mueller's probe into Russian US-election interference and allegations the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.
Source: INSIDER
Trump has vehemently denied the collusion allegations and routinely refers to the Mueller probe as a "witch hunt." He's also claimed he wouldn't recognize Sater if they were sitting in a room together, despite their well-documented history of working together.
Source: Newsweek
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