The Rise and Fall of Paul Manafort: Greed, Deception and Ego

The whole trajectory of Mr. Manafort’s life — from the son of a blue-collar, small-town mayor to a jet-setting international political consultant to Trump campaign chairman and now to prisoner in an Alexandria, Va., jail awaiting a jury verdict — is a tale of greed, deception and ego. His trial on 18 charges of bank and tax fraud has ripped away the elaborate facade of a man who, the story went, had moved the swimming pool at one of his eight homes a few feet to catch the perfect combination of sun and shade, and who worked for the Trump campaign at no charge to intimate that for a man of his fabulous wealth, a salary was trivial.

His trial also underscores questions about how someone in such deep financial trouble rose to the top of the Trump campaign, spreading a stain that has touched the president’s innermost circle. The formidable parade of more than 20 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits has further eroded the notion, advanced by President Trump, that the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, Robert S. Mueller III, is on a “witch hunt.”

The trial is also a spectacle of small humiliations for Mr. Manafort, 69. His once perfectly coifed dark hair, admired by Mr. Trump, is now gray and shaggy without the benefit of a stylist. His shirts, which he once bought by the half dozen for $1,500 each, are now delivered by his wife to his lawyer in a white plastic bag. Their communication consists of him winking at her or forming a silent kiss as he is led in and out of the courtroom. He has been admonished not to turn around in his courtroom seat to look at her.

A subplot of the saga is the betrayal of Mr. Manafort by his longtime deputy Rick Gates, who had been at his side for the last dozen years. A former senior official of both the Trump campaign and the Trump inaugural committee, Mr. Gates has testified that he helped execute Mr. Manafort’s fraudulent schemes while simultaneously stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from him, apparently because he felt that Mr. Manafort was not dividing the riches from Ukraine fairly.

Mr. Gates, 46, has pleaded guilty to two felony charges and is hoping that by helping Mr. Mueller prosecute Mr. Manafort, he might receive probation despite the long list of additional crimes with which he has been charged. On the witness stand Tuesday, he sneaked a furtive glance at Mr. Manafort at a moment when his former boss was looking at his notes. In testimony, he stated that he had decided to come clean, but that Mr. Manafort had decided otherwise.

Some of Mr. Manafort’s associates now say they had predicted that greed would be his downfall. Blessed with extraordinary political instincts and his Georgetown Law School degree, Mr. Manafort built his political consultancy into a power center in Reagan-era Washington, where the name of Black, Manafort and Stone became synonymous with string-pulling, insider access and electoral success.

But along the way, many say, he became a mercenary, willing to serve brutal dictators and corrupt industrialists as long as they paid handsomely. Riva Levinson, an international lobbyist who worked for Mr. Manafort from 1985 to 1995, said she initially accepted his explanation that he served strongmen to push them closer to Western democratic ideals. But “as time went on,” she said in an interview, “it seemed to me, he became all about money, big money.”

The Russia-aligned oligarchs backing Viktor F. Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president whose rise to power Mr. Manafort helped stage-manage, provided very big money for at least five years. But when a popular uprising forced Mr. Yanukovych from power in 2014 and that financial spigot shut off, the government claims, Mr. Manafort resorted to bank fraud rather than give up his lifestyle.

“Paul never believed that the rules applied to him,” said Ms. Levinson, who described him as “brilliant” in her 2016 memoir. “They were for others who couldn’t outsmart the system.”

A Power Player

Paul John Manafort Jr. was born in New Britain, Conn., about 12 miles from Hartford. He caught the political bug from his father, the town’s mayor, when P.J., as Paul was then known, was in high school. His father was indicted over accusations of perjury in a municipal corruption scandal in 1981 but never convicted.

As an undergraduate and then a law student at Georgetown University, Mr. Manafort gravitated toward Republican politics. By the time he married Kathleen Bond, a George Washington University graduate, in 1978, he had already worked on Gerald Ford’s presidential campaign, and he would soon be hired by Ronald Reagan’s.

Tall, good-looking, with an authoritative air, Mr. Manafort thrived in political boiler rooms. But he distinguished himself even more as a lobbyist. He and two colleagues from his days with the Young Republicans and the Reagan campaign created two linked consulting firms that broke the mold in Washington, achieving legendary success. Shrewd and aggressive, Mr. Manafort, Charlie Black and Roger J. Stone helped elect politicians, then scored contracts to lobby those same politicians on behalf of businesses and foreign interests.

“After Reagan won the election, we started getting calls from people who wanted to know if we wanted to lobby,” Mr. Black said. “I didn’t think much of it,” he added, but Mr. Manafort “knew that it could be profitable.”

He also began to indulge his expensive tastes. He was attracted to displays of “opulence,” Mr. Stone said. “Manafort thought that if something was expensive, it meant it was good.”

His partners objected to some of his business expenses, questioning his Concorde flights to Paris and suites at the city’s lavish Hôtel de Crillon. In 1995, Mr. Manafort struck out on his own, focusing in part on clients in the former Soviet states where a clutch of oligarchs exercised control over entire industries. Washington seemed less hospitable. Mr. Manafort later told one associate that Karl Rove, the longtime Republican Party strategist, had “banished” him from the capital. In a 2016 memo seeking a position on Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment campaign, he cast his distance from the Republican elite as a positive.

By 2005, Mr. Manafort had forged bonds with two oligarchs in the former Soviet bloc. One was Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who is close to President Vladimir V. Putin. One witness in Mr. Manafort’s trial testified that Mr. Deripaska lent Mr. Manafort $10 million in 2010, saying she saw no evidence it was ever repaid. Later, Mr. Deripaska sued him.

The other oligarch was Rinat Akhmetov, who with estimated assets of more than $12 billion was the richest man in Ukraine. At Mr. Akhmetov’s urging, Mr. Manafort agreed to try to engineer a political comeback for Mr. Yanukovych, a former coal trucking director, twice convicted of assault, who had lost a bid for the presidency in 2004.

In the words of federal prosecutors, Mr. Akhmetov and several other oligarchs backing Mr. Yanukovych became Mr. Manafort’s “golden goose.” Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian citizen who prosecutors have said had ties to Russian intelligence, served as Mr. Manafort’s man on the ground in Kiev.

“Thank you for your unexpected generosity,” Mr. Manafort wrote to Mr. Yanukovych in an email with the subject line “bonuses” in 2010, the year that Mr. Yanukovych became Ukraine’s president.

Prosecutors allege that between 2010 and 2014, Mr. Manafort was paid more than $60 million from his Ukrainian patrons and hid much of that income in secret foreign bank accounts in the names of 15 or more shell companies. He avoided paying taxes on at least $16.5 million of it, they allege. The remainder, they said, might be considered nontaxable business expenses, construed broadly enough to include $45,000 for cosmetic dentistry.

Mr. Manafort used his tax-free dollars, prosecutors have said, to support a lifestyle of staggering extravagance. In 2012 alone, he bought three homes.

Mr. Gates has testified that he helped Mr. Manafort conceal his true income, hiding the foreign bank accounts from his accountants and disguising several million dollars in income as nontaxable loans from companies that Mr. Manafort secretly controlled.

At the same time, he admitted, he embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from Mr. Manafort’s accounts by falsifying his expense reports. A father of four, he suggested to others later that it seemed unfair that Mr. Manafort paid him an annual salary of $240,000 while raking in tens of millions.

For his part, Mr. Manafort seemed to trust Mr. Gates implicitly to handle both his business and personal finances. When he joined the Trump campaign in 2016, Mr. Manafort introduced Mr. Gates as “my deputy in the campaign” and “my deputy in my life.”

Money Dries Up

Mr. Yanukovych’s fall from power in Ukraine in 2014 was cataclysmic for Mr. Manafort. Even though the oligarchs regrouped to fund a new political party for which Mr. Manafort worked, the payments to him dwindled fast, and he complained about unpaid bills. When Mr. Gates told him in April 2015 about his estimated tax bill for the previous year’s earnings, he erupted in anger. “WTF,” Mr. Manafort demanded in an email. “How could I be blindsided like this.”

“This is to calm down Paul,” Mr. Kilimnik, the Russian aide in Ukraine, wrote to Mr. Gates in mid-2015 in an email that promised that $500,000 would be wired soon.

Ukrainian prosecutors had begun investigating the payments to Mr. Manafort and others, turning to the F.B.I. for help. Agents interviewed both Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates in 2014, but considered them only witnesses to the theft of Ukrainian government funds.

At about the same time, Mr. Manafort’s family confronted him over an affair he was having with a much younger woman, whose rent and credit card bill they believed he was paying, according to interviews and text messages hacked from one of his daughters. He entered an Arizona clinic to try to put his life back together, texting his younger daughter that he had emerged with newfound self-awareness.

But prosecutors claim that his schemes continued. They say he and Mr. Gates kept accountants at two firms and officials at three banks busy with a round robin of made-up explanations and doctored financial records.

For example, Mr. Manafort had falsely reported $1.5 million in income from Ukraine as a loan to lower his tax bill. He then claimed the same nonexistent loan had been “forgiven” in order to inflate his income so banks would agree to lend to him.

Mr. Manafort’s deceptions grew increasingly convoluted throughout 2016, prosecutors say, but the Trump campaign appears to have been oblivious to that. Like nearly everyone else hired by the campaign, Mr. Manafort was not vetted. The recommendation of Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a private equity investor who has been close to Mr. Trump for years, was enough. Also in his favor was Mr. Manafort’s offer to work at no charge, both because Mr. Trump is a notorious skinflint and because Mr. Manafort apparently thought Mr. Trump would be more likely to hire a man of seeming great wealth like himself.