On August 8, 2018, Leon Black, the cofounder of the buyout behemoth Apollo Global Management with a net worth exceeding $8 billion these days, should have been enjoying a beautiful summer day at his reportedly $42.8 million oceanfront home on Meadow Lane in Southampton. Instead, he was somewhere you’ve got to figure he didn’t want to be: In Washington, giving a deposition to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was investigating Donald Trump’s ties to Russia. (A relationship we now know, courtesy of Michael Schmidt, of the New York Times, that the FBI and Robert Mueller failed to fully explore, thanks to some sleight of hand from Rod Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general.)
On the docket for Black that day: Tell the senators about Trump’s 1996 trip to Moscow. According to the recently released 966-page fifth volume of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, “Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities,” Black was on the Trump trip, along with David Geovanis and Bennett LeBow, two men Black knew from his days as head of mergers and acquisitions at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the long defunct Wall Street investment bank. After Drexel blew up in 1990, Geovanis moved to Moscow in 1991, working as a representative of LeBow, the onetime corporate raider who was a longtime client of Black’s and junk-bond king Michael Milken’s at Drexel. In Moscow, according to the report, Geovanis worked as LeBow’s representative, “developing and investing in real estate“ for a Russian-American joint venture known as Liggett-Ducat and for something called Brookemil, Ltd. Geovanis later worked for investor and liberal benefactor George Soros in Moscow and in London, at Soros’s private-equity firm.
Also “likely” on the Trump trip to Moscow, the report said, were Ron Bernstein, now a managing director at the Blackstone Group; Theodore Liebman, an architect; Matthew Calamari, a longtime Trump bodyguard; and Howard Lorber, a longtime Trump friend who is now the CEO and president of LeBow’s Vector Group, of which Douglas Elliman, the New York real estate brokerage firm, is a subsidiary. Lorber is also the chairman of Douglas Elliman, which he sold to Vector in a series of transactions ending in December 2018. “Mr. LeBow was the senior partner and Howard was a partner, but I think it was more LeBow in charge,” Black testified.
According to the Senate report, Geovanis was assigned to show Trump “around town” and “take him to dinner.” In his deposition, Black said that Geovanis had “very good social skills” but was “more junior” and “probably not as serious analytically.” He said Geovanis, who Black had not spoken to in 15 years, knew the Moscow “geography, since he lived there,” knew “various people,” and had developed “various relationships.” He cited specifically Yury Luzhkov, then mayor of Moscow, and Zurab Tsereteli, a Russian artist. “He was always putting different people together with different people,” Black said of Geovanis. Black said he recalled “various Georgian feasts at Tsereteli’s place” with “loads of government officials” who would “come in and out of those dinners.”
There is a short video from the Moscow trip that surfaced last year. And a photograph, shared in the Senate’s report, shows Black and Trump together with Geovanis and Geovanis’s then wife. Black told the senators he did not recall “any compromising behavior” during the trip. (He also did not recall what was going on in the photograph.) He said he did remember going to a concert with Trump, and then to a “discotheque,” where they met other people whom Black could not recall. Black however added that he and Trump “might have gone to a strip club together.”