Briatore

“First Friends: How “Italy’s Donald Trump” Introduced Naomi Campbell to Jeffrey Epstein“ (Webb).

Campbell is always being dragged through the mud in the gossip sites for being at least the witness to, if not the beneficiary of, many instances of wrongdoing against helpless victims, but never saying anything about it.

A nexus of many rich scoundrels.

Typical of Webb, little to no mention of intelligence connections.

The links around the mentions of Roy Cohn and Trump have nothing to do with Roy Cohn or Trump, although the statements about them are probably accurate (“Trump’s mentor and lawyer Roy Cohn, an organized crime associate, had been intimately involved in those blackmail efforts and Trump, after he bought the Plaza, was accused of hosting parties in Plaza hotel suites “where young women and girls were introduced to older, richer men” in which the women were allegedly exploited and illegal drugs were widely available.“).

The interesting parts are the mentions of organized crime.

In addition to the Capronis, Briatore also became acquainted with Luciano Benetton, the founder of United Colors of Benetton clothing company, during this period. That relationship would later prove critical to Briatore’s commercial success. However, not long after getting close to Benetton, Briatore was charged with several counts of fraud resulting from his ties to illegal rackets at Milan gambling dens. Those rackets were largely orchestrated and operated by successors to the Milan organized crime boss Francis Turatello. Evidence used against Briatore included a page from his personal agenda that listed a New York telephone number under the name “Genovese.” According to journalist Gianni Barbacetto, the number was registered to the G&G Concrete Corporation controlled by John Gambino, a well-known U.S. organized crime figure. Briatore evaded his prison sentence by becoming a fugitive, landing in the U.S. Virgin Islands, later a favorite haunt of a man who would soon become Briatore’s friend – Jeffrey Epstein. Notably, Epstein’s main patron and another circled name in his black book, Leslie Wexner, also had alleged ties to the Genovese crime family, according to heavily suppressed documents originally authored by Ohio law enforcement. Those documents resulted from the police investigation into the “mob style murder” of Wexner’s lawyer Arthur Shapiro, who was due to testify to the IRS shortly after he was killed. Shortly thereafter, Wexner hired Jeffery Epstein to sort out his “tangled” finances.

Around the time Briatore was charged and fled Italy for the USVI, he was chosen by Luciano Benetton to become “the Benetton Group’s principal representative in the United States.” During his time running Benetton’s North American operations throughout most of the 1980s, Briatore “ferried backwards and forwards between New York and the Virgin Islands tax haven,” becoming a “flamboyant member of the Italian-American business circles.” His forays into New York saw him become a partner at the most famous of the Regine’s Disco nightclubs. Regine, born Rochelle Zylberberg, was a European Holocaust survivor whose nightclub empire was originally bankrolled by Guy and Edmond de Rothschild of the infamous banking dynasty and they remained long-time patrons and supporters of her enterprise for decades. Presumably, Briatore met Epstein, as well as his friend Donald Trump, during this period.

Also during this same period, Briatore was tangentially involved in another scandal, one that involved an alleged effort to sell atomic bombs to Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. This attempt to help make Libya a nuclear power had notably involved an infamous Saudi family tied to the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) scandal and money laundering for drug cartels. The story, never fully investigated, goes something like this: a significant group of shares in the Italian insurance giant Assicurazioni Generali (aka the Generali Group) were passed around as part of a deal that benefited a small network of figures tied to Libya and/or Saudi Arabia with links to arms smuggling and money laundering. This particular group of shares “mysteriously left Italy” before returning to the country as collateral for “opaque international transactions” involving Libya, the Italian state oil company ENI and the smuggling of American-made weapons that traveled a serpentine route to ultimately end up in Libya despite the U.S. embargo.

The main figures involved in this memory-holed scandal included Anthony Tannoury (sometimes spelled Tannouri), a French-Lebanese arms dealer with close ties to Libya; Mazed Pharaon, a wealthy sheikh and the brother of the infamous BCCI investor and money launderer for drug cartels, Saudi “financier” Ghaith Pharaon; and Florio Fiorini, former manager of the Italian oil company ENI who had made significant, past deals with Libyan oil companies. A company that Fiorini controlled, Sasea, ultimately bought the shares, which were controlled by Tannoury, Pharaon and two of their associates. Tannoury and Pharaon had previously attempted to collaborate on a covert effort to sell nuclear weapons components to Libya by route of Venezuela. The effort was unsuccessful (some reports paint the effort as a scam orchestrated by Tannoury). Tannoury and Pharaon later claimed to have lost the $33 million that they had invested in the failed venture. As it relates to Briatore, a company he briefly controlled called Finclaus was one of the entities in this close-knit network that held onto the Tannoury-Pharaon-Fiorini group of shares in the Generali Group as it “toured the world.” Notably, the Benetton family, which has long-standing and deep ties to Briatore, are also long-standing shareholders of the Generali Group.

Nearly a decade after this scandal was covered up, Briatore’s London residence was bombed in 1993, allegedly by the IRA. Briatore survived the bombing and his house suffered minor damages. Notably, the IRA faction said to have been responsible had reportedly been supplied bombs and weapons by Libya. While it’s unclear why the Irish separatist militant group would choose to bomb Briatore’s home, his past ties to the figures involved with arms smuggling by way of Libya may provide one clue.

Another possibility could be that it wasn’t actually the IRA and another group angry at Briatore was responsible. The year before the bombing, there was a phone call intercepted by Italian officials the year prior between Briatore and Felice Cultrera, a Sicilian businessman. During the call, Briatore had asked about an effort by a mob-connected figure to sell engines to the Briatore-run F1 racing team owned by the Benettons (more on that shortly). The call was used as evidence as part of a large investigation targeting organized crime by the Italian state and it’s possible that interests angered by the investigation could have orchestrated the bombing to intimidate Briatore. Briatore notably became a major figure in the sale of engines to F1 racers and it’s unclear if his engine supply chain was ever connected to the organized crime networks that had approached him, as laid out in his intercepted call with Cultrera.

There is also other evidence that, in addition to the above, suggests Briatore had more than coincidental ties to the worlds of organized crime, arms deals and money laundering. In 2015, it was reported that Briatore held 38 accounts totalling $73 million in the private Swiss branch of HSBC, a bank later found to have enabled the activities of drug dealers, arms dealers, money launderers and terrorists. Reports suggest that Briatore’s accounts at the bank were closed in 2007, the year when the bank also “weeded out” clients who did not meet new standards meant to prevent the bank from enabling crime. Notably, the HSBC branch in question, where Briatore banked, was created after HSBC acquired some of the holdings of Edmond Safra and then took Safra’s “wealthy international clients” and moved their accounts to the new branch. It is unknown if Briatore was among these clients that had originally banked with Safra and Safra-controlled institutions, but – given Safra’s connections and Briatore’s own – it is plausible.

Safra was an international banker whose banking institutions were dogged by controversy, in large part due to scandals involving money laundering and organized crime. This includes those that later formed the basis of HSBC’s private Swiss branch where Briatore banked. Safra was a close associate and friend of Robert Maxwell – father of Ghislaine Maxwell and Israeli intelligence asset – and also appears in Epstein’s black book, though his last name is misspelled as “Saffra.” Safra had considerable ties to Russian organized crime, the state of Israel and the secret society of B’nai B’rith, where he served on the board of overseers alongside Edgar Bronfman and Leslie Wexner’s business mentor Max Fisher. Safra’s banks also had significant connections to the networks that operated the intelligence and crime-linked bank BCCI.