Behind the Bastards - No Matter How Much You Hate Paul Manafort, You Should Hate Him More (And Here’s Why)

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Paul Manafort invented some of the very worst parts of our modern world. In a real way, he is one of the architects of our current national nightmare. In Episode 15, Robert is joined by  comedian, Dave Ross (Suicide Buddies Podcast) to discuss Paul Manafort aka The Man Who Donkey-Punched Democracy. Paul Manafort’s work with the Trump Campaign is actually just about the LEAST objectionable thing this man has done in his entire life. Manafort is a MAJOR bad guy! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I am Robert Evans, and this is again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Today with me is my guest, who I will be reading a story about a terrible person to. My guest is coming in cold. His name is Dave Ross. He is the host of the Suicide Buddies podcast and a comedian. Dave, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, man. Thank you.

I had already thanked you before, but you deserve two thank yous, and at least one more. But that one's going to be a secret thank you. Look, man, thank you. You know what I mean? No, no, because now I have to give you my third thank you now, but that thank you was planned for later. You could also say you're welcome if you want to save your thank you. I've never heard those words before. Right, well, no one really is. All right, so today we're going to be talking about a guy, Paul Manafort.

What do you know about Paul Manafort? I know very little about Paul Manafort. He was an E-Trump's campaign manager for a half a minute. He sure was. Couple of months. Yeah, a couple of months. He was one of the guys that got fired. And yeah, I really don't know any more than that.

But that alone, he's in jail. I did not know that. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. He's fucking in jail. Mueller caught him on some bunch of shit. What are you getting into that? I am viciously not plugged in to current events or pop culture always my entire life. That's a sane thing to be.

Yeah, it's more so now because I'm forced to be. But yeah, jail, all right. Yeah, I'm going to guess what most people listening know about Paul Manafort is. Yeah, he was Donald Trump's campaign manager for a while. Mueller caught him doing some shady stuff and he's in jail now. And maybe he did something shady in the Ukraine, but they probably don't have all the details. We're going to be getting into all that today. But you know, Manafort is definitely most well known and most hated for the role he played in getting Donald Trump elected president.

And I, the big point of this podcast today is to let people know that Paul Manafort's work with the Trump campaign is probably the least objectionable thing he did in his entire life. Wow. Yeah, he is a major bad guy. And so far, I would venture to say he's done more damage to the world than Donald Trump so far. I mean, we're only two years into this presidency, so Trump can grow. But Paul Manafort is a world-class historical grade asshole. And that's what today's story is about. Oh my God.

I can't wait. Yeah, yeah. So join me, won't you, on a journey that I like to call. Paul Manafort is just as bad if it's not worse than Donald Trump and I hope a hypha fire ant sets up shop in his colon. That's a working title. Is that the whole story? Because we can't talk about that for a while. I mean, how would you get fire ants inside of a man's colon?

Wow, yeah. A horn definitely is involved. Horn surgery. So either a knife or a horn. Either a knife or a horn. Yeah, or I don't know, somehow. Some sort of funnel. Coerce him into sitting on a pile of fire ants for long enough.

And you have to coerce the ants up into his rectum, like it's a two-part, two-stage scheme. Yeah, they have to not bite him until they get up there. Or he has to be held down. Either way, it's workable, I think we can agree. There's a road to this destination. Okay, anyway. Paul Manafort, Jr. was born on April 1st, 1949, making his entire life and career essentially one very dark April Fool's joke on all of us. He was raised in New Britain, Connecticut, his grandfather immigrated there from Italy in 1907, and started a construction company.

But Paul's father, Paul Manafort, Sr., wanted more than just the lucrative corpse-burying mafia contracts an Italian contractor could expect to earn in the 1960s. He wanted political power. So in 1965, Manafort, Sr. ran for and won election to become the mayor of New Britain. He was a Republican, and his easy charm made him popular with voters. Manafort, Jr. worked on his dad's campaigns as a teenager. He has happy memories of going to bars with his dad, who'd buy rounds and drinks for and schmooze with potential voters. Manafort, Sr. was mayor until 1971, and as you might expect from the Manafort name, he was outrageously corrupt. In 1981, he was charged with perjury for lying in court about a municipal corruption investigation, a major source for this episode is the Atlantic article, Paul Manafort, American Hustler.

And it brings up a report from a lawyer, Palmer McGee, which is a fun name for a lawyer, cute, who was hired by New Britain to report on the hilarious corruption in their town. Quote, in his findings, he pointed a finger straight at Manafort Sr., calling him the person most at fault. According to the testimony of a whistleblower, Manafort had flatly announced that he wanted to hire someone flexible to manage his personal office, a place that would, quote, not be 100% by the rules, which is a very nice way of saying he was going to commit major crimes while the mayor of a town. Years later, in an interview, Paul Manafort, Jr. would say, some of the skills I learned there I still use today. That's where I cut my teeth. What?

With my criminal mayor dad. Wow, man. And so this isn't even his career yet. This is not even his final form. He's just starting on the road to being shitty and looking at his dad and going, but what if I was worse? Yeah. And I imagine his dad is the mayor from Jaws. I know that's...

I cannot recall Jaws well enough. Oh, well, it's got a great shitty mayor. One of the great shitty mayors in shitty mayor movie history. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah. I love a shitty mayor. Oh, man. It's one of my favorite characters.

I love it when they become a shitty governor. You know what I mean? Yes, several, yeah. Rob Ford is what I'm talking about. Oh, wow. I guess he's not a... You know, I expected a Reagan reference there and you didn't give me one. That's nice.

Yeah, I mean, we could do that. We could do Chris Christie if you want. There are more. George Bush. George Bush. He was my governor for a while. Yeah. Yeah, he was a shitty baseball team owner for a while.

A lot of shittiness out there. Shitty artist now. It's amazing. The news today, James Gunn just lost a movie for things he tweeted a decade ago. I heard about this. But if you're a terrible governor, you can do anything. It doesn't matter how corrupt you've been. Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, it's amazing. You can become fucking president. Like several times. Yes. Oh, what a great system we've developed. All right, so Paul Manafort, Jr., hereafter, the only Paul Manafort we'll be talking about, so just forget the senior. Forget that senior dude, got it.

Paul Manafort first got into national politics in 1976. That was the year President Gerald Ford ran for reelection. Manafort was his delegate coordinator and basically helped him fight off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan. Always a Reagan connection. Reagan lost that? Yeah. Against who? Against Gerald Ford.

Ford was the president at the time. It's pretty hard to unseat. I didn't realize we were talking about president for some reason. I don't know why I would have thought that Gerald Ford would have beat Ronald Reagan in like a comp-troller seat when they were 21 or whatever. He definitely would have beat Reagan in a fist fight. Do you think so? Oh man, I think of our modern presidents, Gerald Ford is probably close to the top of presidents I think could win in a fist fight. He's built like a boxer.

Wide face. He could definitely take a punch, for sure. Gerald Ford could take a punch. But he did not succeed in winning the presidential election that year, which was won by Carter, which led to four years of Carterism. In 1978, Manafort took a job as the southern coordinator for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign, because Reagan decided he was going to try and unseat Carter. He gave it another shot. Manafort held this position for two years and used it to begin his first experiment with dirty tricks. There was this guy, Neil Acker, who'd helped Manafort and his partner, Roger Stone, a couple years earlier during the midterms.

Manafort, yeah, that's the only proper reaction to Roger Stone's name. I hate him. He's a monster. He is a monster, admittedly a monster. He says, yeah, I like to piss people off. I like it when people hate me. Well, so Manafort and Stone had worked with this guy, Neil Acker, during the midterms, and he'd been a big help to them. So Manafort and Stone had promised to support Acker as a replacement for Roger Stone at the head of the influential young Republicans group.

In 1979, when it came time to put up or shut up, Manafort backed out of the deal and told Acker that now he wouldn't help unless Acker swore loyalty to Ronald Reagan. Acker wanted to stay neutral, and so Paul Manafort burned him to the ground. One week before the young Republican convention, Manafort went to the delegates who'd already promised to support Acker and told them to leave. Then he took over managing Acker's opponents' campaign. Acker lost the election in what one of Manafort's whips called one of the great fuck jobs in party politics. Politics people always have fun ways of talking about how they fuck with the government and the planet. Man, this is why I love Veep so much. It's the only show that's really accurately portrayed how much they say fuck and fuck job and make fun of each other in our assholes.

In my private career as a journalist, I interviewed a number of congressional aides and gubernatorial assistants and stuff like that. People who had worked in national and high-level state politics, and every single one of them said Veep was the only TV show about politics that was really accurate to how people talk in politics. None of them chose the West Wing. Well, of course not. The West Wing is liberal porn, which makes it the greatest TV show of all time, in my opinion. It's soothing to watch, but totally. It's like a back rub. That's all it is. Nobody with that much backbone and moral certainty has ever been president. There are no people that are that altruistic. They just are not.

We all wish there were. We all flip out like they could be, but they're not. No, they just don't get that far in politics. So President Reagan won the election in 1980 with Paul Manafort's help. What was the name of the guy that they buried? Neil Acker. Neil Acker, right? Yeah, Neil Acker. So in 1980, Reagan wins with Paul Manafort's help, and this gives Manafort the access and cloud he'd always needed.

He was appointed Associate Director of the Presidential Personnel Office. This meant he got to help pick the people who would work in Reagan's White House, which would be a huge benefit to someone who happened to also own a lobbying firm. And on an unrelated note, in 1980, Paul Manafort started his very own lobbying firm with his good buddy Roger Stone and a man named Charles Black. Their company, Black Manafort and Stone, would soon become a DC legend. Now, when you hear the phrase DC lobbyist today, it probably has a pretty strong negative connotation, because now we just assume that corrupt-ass lobbyists from the NRA and the tobacco companies in the oil and gas industry are constantly deep-dicking our democracy. But it didn't always used to be this way. In 1967, there were just 64 registered lobbyists in the entire United States. Whoa.

Yeah, this has not been a thing we've always done. In 1963, several political scientists studied the few lobbyists in DC and concluded, and I found this quote in that Atlantic article, when we look at the typical lobby, we find its opportunities to maneuver are sharply limited, its staff mediocre, its typical problem not the influencing of congressional votes, but finding the clients and contributors to enable it to survive at all. So lobbying is like not a thing for a long time. Wow. Yeah, and in 1980, lobbying was still a very small field. Foreign lobbying, like lobbying on behalf of a foreign country, was even rarer, thanks in part to our special bonus bastard of the week, Ivy Lee.

I should have called for an air horn there. I don't know. We can do it. Nailed it. Who is Ivy Lee? I've never heard this name. Most people have not. Ivy Lee was a PR man and one of the trailblazers of that profession. He is sometimes called the father of public relations, so he's like the George Washington of PR. Interesting.

Yeah, he worked for John D. Rockefeller in the early 1900s. Mr. Rockefeller owned a number of coal mines in Colorado. His company came into conflict with the United Mine Workers of America, a union who wanted better pay and conditions in exchange for dying and mining disasters. The union went on strike and set up a gigantic tent colony outside of the town of Ludlow, Colorado for themselves and their families. Things got heated and the National Guard was brought in to break up the strike. This quickly turned into a battle, and 12 children were burnt to death inside a tent, a total of 19 strikers and their family members, mostly their family members, and one National Guardsman died. This became known as the Ludlow Massacre, and it was very bad PR for Rockefeller and his company. Ivy Lee jumped to his aid and wrote a publicity leaflet blaming the child's deaths on quote, agitators, paid for by the union.

He didn't quite call the dead kids crisis actors, but the implication was there. This inflamed tensions between the strikers and the National Guard that led to 10 more days of violence. Another 50 people were killed, and the actual army had to be called in to calm things down via bullets. Ivy Lee was called in before a U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations and asked, in essence, what the fuck? He explained that he and Rockefeller had been lied to by mine managers. They hadn't meant to massacre anyone. They just trusted those conniving managers who told them the strikers were super dangerous. So it wasn't Rockefeller's fault or his fault that all those kids got burnt to death, right?

It's also such a funny argument. Like, yeah, no, we killed them because we thought that they were mad, and we found out that they weren't mad or whatever. Not that they weren't mad, but you know what I'm saying? They weren't monsters. Yeah, totally. And then we felt bad after we murdered them. Our first hour go-to is murder. But in this case, it was the wrong thing, and we apologize.

Yeah. In the future, we might murder people, but so you know, every time we murder people from now on, it's going to be because someone told us that they're mean. Yeah. Jesus Christ. So the miners started calling Poison Ivy Lee, which is the early 1900s. Nicknames are a new science. They were doing their best.

I don't know. Poison Ivy Lee's not so bad. Poison Ivy, you know, it itches. It itches. Yeah, it causes some real problems. So Poison Ivy Lee spent the next 20 years representing a variety of corporations. He eventually landed a contract with the IG Farben Chemical Company and traveled to Berlin in 1934 to give them advice. During this trip, he also had a meeting with a guy named Adolf Hitler and another guy named Joseph Gerbils.

Jesus Christ. He did free work on their behalf, speaking to a number of American journalists in Berlin to try and put a positive spin on their coverage of the Nazis. So I started my research on Mr. Lee on a website called PR Place, which describes itself as, quote, where public relations and communications practice meet scholarship, where insight is derived from evidence, and where questions of career development and professionalism are explored. Since this guy is the founder of PR in a lot of ways, PR Place had a largely positive description of it. Really? They talk about the controversy and he did some bad things with the Nazis,

but he was just giving them advice. He was an unpaid consultant. You know, it was a real, you know, it was a bad error of judgment, but, you know, he has a mixed legacy and we have to consider all the parts of it. So that's their take on this guy. We are 15 minutes in and I am tired. I am fucking tired. We are four out of 24 pages in.

This was a long week of research, my friend. Yeah. Okay. Yep. So I might get coffee, you know? I feel like I could leave, go get coffee, and come back and not miss anything, miss a lot of things, but not miss anything. Because the general theme here is all these people are huge pieces of shit

and you should probably, you should feel validated in being a nihilist. I think it's fascinating that they're all pieces of shit in the same way the pieces of shit that we still are dealing with. Right. Well, that's exactly what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. It's like evil if you believe that evil exists. In a lot of ways.

Drunk with power. These guys and Paul Manafort are kind of the truest form of evil. Right. It's one thing to believe a crazy thing about the world, like that this race is superior and to do terrible things based on that. It's another thing to support that guy just for cash. Absolutely. Yeah.

It's also, I mean, I think a lot of our conception of evil comes from people getting, like I just said, drunk with power. Yeah. You get power and you end up doing awful things. It drives you mad. Right. Exactly. But these people aren't even really that powerful before. Yeah.

They just want power. And so they're like, ooh, if I help this person by doing this manipulative thing because I'm super good at manipulating people I've learned over. Who knows where he learned how to be manipulative? Yeah. You know what I mean? Like in comedy, you have to go to open mics to get good. Open mics for these assholes are just like the people they date. Well, that and mining disasters.

And then, yeah, and then the next level is mining disasters and then eventually you get to destroy an entire country. Yeah. So here's how that wonderful website PR Place summarized the meeting between Hitler and Ivy League, the founder of PR. I can't even. Lee reportedly advised Goebbels to cease propaganda efforts in the United States and urged him to meet personally with foreign diplomats and press in an effort to establish better relations with them. So that doesn't sound too bad. He was asking them to stop propagandizing to Americans. Maybe this guy's a hero.

Only I dug a little bit deeper, just a little bit deeper, and I found a time article about Mr. Lee. Now, time is much harsher on his work with the Nazis. It also mentioned some facts PR Place decided not to include for some inexplicable reason. Like the fact that Lee's salary with IG Farben went from 3,000 a year to 25,000 a year as soon as Hitler came to power, which is probably just a coincidence. It also fails to mention that IG Farben was nationalized, so his paid work for that company was also paid work for the German government, a.k.a. the Nazis. Now, time includes a quote from Jonathan Auerbach, author of Weapons of Democracy, Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion. Auerbach suspects the main purpose of the meeting was to provide the Nazi High Command with, quote, some insight into how Americans think about Nazis. It was also to advise them on how to make us, quote, think more positively about Nazis.

Now, Mr. Lee was called to later testify in front of a congressional committee for all of this Nazi stuff. Time reported on that testimony back in 1934, so in the article they cite themselves from the past writing about Mr. Lee. I have told them repeatedly, testified Mr. Lee, that the dissemination of the organization of German propaganda in the U.S. was just a mistake and futile. That it was bad business, that complete reliance should be placed upon getting news to the American people through normal channels of publicity. I told them that there were certain policies which Germany had on Jews which were bound to antagonize American public opinion. So basically, he advised Hitler and Goebbels to X-Nay on the U.J. while they were trying to court public opinion in the U.S. This is exactly what happened. In the early 30s, the first couple of years after power, there was a distinct drop in the anti-Semitic mentions in Hitler's speeches and in like their communications to foreign powers which sort of culminated in the Olympics where they removed all signs of anti-Semitism just long enough for the world to visit for the Olympics

and then when, you know, put it in the high gear after that. So they took this guy's advice in other words. Now Lee died almost immediately after testifying in front of Congress. PR Place says that the stress of his testimony is what killed him. So, hopefully, right? Like, fuck the guy. But his mild hitlering went on to have ramifications that are still with us today. Good ramifications. In 1938, the U.S. passed the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires Americans to register with the government before working on behalf of a foreign government to say, influence public opinion towards an authoritarian regime in another country.

Now we're going to hear more about FARA later. For right now, it's important to understand that another aspect of Ivy Lee's little freelance Nazi career was a decades-long depression in the lobbying for sketchy foreign governments industry. It just wasn't done for a while. Again, there weren't very many lobbyists anyway and sort of the stigma attached to Lee had kind of stopped it from happening for quite a while. Black Manafortans. So Paul Manafort is the one that brought him back in? Yep, yep, yep, yep. Man, I wish I were dead.

This is fucking crazy. That might as well be the tagline for this podcast. I wish I were dead. That's how I feel every time I watch the news now. Yeah. Oh shit, you got a tide pod sitting here. Yeah, we always have a tide pod in the house. We're millennials.

Half an hour more I'm going to eat that shit. You will die, right? Probably. Yeah. Has anyone ever done it? I think you'll die. It's hard to say. It might be one of those things that's either way, we always have a tide pod around. I appreciate it.

So yeah, Black Manafort and Stone were the lobbying firm that brought this back with a vengeance. Now they started by working with standard respectable American corporations like Bethlehem Steel, Johnson & Johnson, Transworld Airlines, the Tobacco Institute. The Tobacco Institute. The Tobacco Institute. It's fine. It's probably, they probably weren't hiding anything. Tell me that was a university. Tell me that was a real college that people went to.

It's where you learn how to grow the best tobacco. Yeah. They were innovators in the lobbying field and were the first company to combine lobbying, consulting, and PR into the same business. Time Magazine called them a supermarket of influence peddling. In other words, they were the Walmart of propaganda. Black Manafort and Stone was the first lobbying firm to also include political consultants, which meant they could run campaigns and then lobby the politicians they put in power simultaneously. What a value. And like all true innovators, Paul Manafort wasn't willing to sit on his laurels.

He and his partners introduced another lobbying innovation in 1984, working for both sides at once. In Louisiana, Vermont, and Florida, the firm represented both Republican and Democratic candidates in that year's elections, guaranteeing they'd have a lobbying in no matter who won. Wow. Oh, yeah. See, we're well into it now. Yeah. And we will get back into it, but first we have to have some ads. And before we get into the official ads, I'd like to talk a little about our unofficial sponsor, Doritos, who have not yet given us any money, but who I think I'm a big advocate of Doritos.

Sure. They taste good. And after a long day of reading about terrible things. At least you're going to have some Doritos. At least you can have some Doritos, which should be their new tagline. At least you can have some Doritos. I remember when Taco Bell first came out with the Doritos Locos Tacos. Everyone in my world was making fun of them.

But my immediate reaction was like, man, that sounds great. Yeah. And then I went and had one. And you know what? It was great. And to this day, I still eat them. And it hurts me. Yeah.

It hurts my butt. But it's all right. Yeah. It's worth it. Sometimes you just need that Doritos flavor. And you also need the other products and services that are advertised on our podcast and help to support the show, which are coming up now. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told

you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. And our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI

based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards. We're eating fruit leather. I have fruit leather in my mouth. It's all good. Whatever kind of leather you have to put in your mouth to hear the rest of the story is fine. It's a rough one. Do you have some gin?

Paul Manafort. God, that would be the right drink. Because gin is terrible and this is a terrible story. Absolutely. Yeah, you nailed it. It's like a wood peg to chew on and some gin to drink. Yeah, I want to feel like a juniper berry is fucking me in the mouth. It's time for gin. I always want to feel like that.

Yeah. Okay, so we just talked about how Black Manafort and Stone, Paul Manafort's lobbying firm, had sort of invented the idea of just funding both sides of an election and not really carrying who wins because you can sell corporate access to them either way. So the Atlantic around this time in the early 80s quoted a congressional staffer who joked, why have primaries for the nomination? Why not just have the candidates go over to Black Manafort and Stone and argue it out? So that's sort of the attitude in the Beltway about these people and Manafort was very much into that attitude.

He filled out a questionnaire for the Washington time somewhere around this period and he stated that Machiavelli was the person he most wanted to meet, which is like... Okay, dude. What? Okay, dude. So things started getting very busy for Paul Manafort in the mid-1980s. He's revolutionizing the way Washington works. His first daughter, Andrea, was conceived in between conference calls.

She later wrote that he, quote, hung up the phone. How do you know that? This is what his daughter said. How does she know that? That's... I don't know. I'm guessing that's what Paul Manafort told her. Yeah, right.

Exactly. I mean, I don't know. It's pretty ridiculous for me to call bullshit on any of these facts at this point, but that one's just like... It doesn't paint any good light. She said he, quote, hung up the phone, looked at his watch and said, okay, we have 20 minutes until the next one, meaning the next conference call. So she's not painting a good picture of her dad here. No.

But we'll hear more from Andrea later. Especially knowing that he told her that. Whether it's true or not, he was like, how old was she when he told her? Yeah, this is clearly the story he wanted her to know. Yes. And it's gross. He wanted her to be vicious and fucking evil when she grew up, too. Yeah, it worked out.

So Paul and his fellow partners started taking home big, fat $450,000 a year on up paychecks, which back then was like a million dollars a year. The company was also full of money, so they started throwing massive yearly parties, golf parties, which got rowdy enough that they were apparently kicked out of every venue they booked. They never got to use the same venue two years in a row. Yeah, one former employee and good friend of Paul Manafort is quoted in The Atlantic as saying this, a couple of women in the firm complained that they weren't ever invited. I told them they didn't want to be.

So that's not gross at all. Yeah. So... God damn it. These people are just garbage. Paul Manafort ran the company's social committee. It was his job to arrange these fuck drenched golf parties and also to pick themes for their yearly gathering. During one three-year period, the themes were excess, exceed excess, and excess is best.

These are lovely people. Wow. Manafort demanded... Also creative themes. Yeah, super creative. No, and you can just imagine... You could just say Caligula? Yeah.

Right. That would be more creative. Then you could be creative. You could be fucking pouring wine down your faces and having slaves peel your grapes, but no, we just go with fucking Gordon Gekko bullshit. Yeah, straightforward. Wow. Yeah.

So Manafort demanded a loyalty test for employees hoping to make partner, but they were lame loyalty tests. Like you hear loyalty tests and you expect him to be like cutting people and stuff and planning them, but no, he would just like he had one guy entertain his friends from law school for several hours when he didn't want to deal with them. He gave two guys a day to find a Billy Barty impersonator for St. Patrick's Day. So it would be like dumb shit like that. Well, that's a little better than what you would think. You know, at this point, I just, I take points away from him for not leaning into being a monster. Oh, sure.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you're already ruining thousands of people's lives. Yeah, you might as well like demand a kidney from someone who wants to make partner. Totally. Just so you have an extra kid. He's just lame. Over on the global stage during the Carter administration, the US has started supporting some nice boys in Afghanistan called the Mujahideen. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, liked this Carter-era gun running operation and suggested it be expanded into at least nine other countries.

So when President Reagan was elected, the Reagan doctrine wound up being exactly what the Heritage Foundation had suggested, sending arms and advisors to aid anti-communist forces around the world. The goal essentially was to bleed the USSR white by engaging them in a bunch of Vietnam-style conflicts. And we would just give guns to whatever was against the communists, even if they were, you know, dictators or murder squads or whatever. We supported people like the Nicaraguan Contras and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front in Cambodia. So strong men, rebel leaders and dictators the world over suddenly realized that if they could charm the Reagan administration, they could win a shitload of guns and money. But to get those guns and money, they'd need lawyers. Enter Manafort Black and Stone.

Or Black Manafort and Stone is the actual name, but you know. Who cares, fuck him. Yeah. So Paul Manafort particularly developed an expertise for helping these people. His first big fish was the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos. Now I say president, but I mean dictator. Amnesty International estimates Marcos tortured more than 34,000 people and had 3,240 political opponents killed, which was bad in the 80s and now sounds like, like almost a nice guy.

I know. Just by the, our standards of, of tyrants. I know. At the moment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what, did he do anything good? No.

I mean, he embezzled $10 billion of the country's wealth to his own pockets. It is also funny that we're hearing, you're telling me a story of one man. And that story just lightly involves other sort of, I don't even know the word, demons. Paul Manafort's tale is a gentle caressing hand on the faces of like half a dozen different terrible people. Right. Yeah. A lot more. Because we could do a whole episode on Roger Stone because he's a real piece of shit.

So I feel like you could do 10 episodes on that guy. And there's, there's an episode, there's, you could do an episode on fucking Ferdinand Marcos because he's a real piece. Right. All of these, he exclusively works with pieces of shit. That's, that's the Paul Manafort brand. Is he single? He's about to be because he's in fucking jail.

Right. And we'll hopefully die there. Sure we'll get there. Yeah. He starts working for Ferdinand Marcos who had again tortured 34,000 people by this point and all of that murdering and torture was bad PR. Ferdinand set aside something like $57 million for Ronald Reagan's 1980 and 1984 campaigns. He didn't actually pay all that money to Reagan because it's illegal for foreign powers to directly donate to US political candidates.

But Marcos did give Paul Manafort's company a whole lot of money, at least $950,000 a year and possibly much, much more. Manafort's job was to improve the image of the Marcos regime, especially among the Reagan administration. That shouldn't have been a hard job. The first couple, the Reagan's, had met the Marcos's in the late 60s and become good friends. Ronald Reagan had danced with the Melda Marcos. Nancy Reagan may have received an illegal emerald necklace as a gift from him. But by the mid-1980s, Marcos was just killing way too many people to receive open support from his old friends, the president and the first lady. Now, we don't actually know how or if that earmarked $57 million was spent.

There are rumors that Paul Manafort himself was handed at least $10 million of it, some of it in cash in a briefcase, like given to him by a Melda Marcos. Wait, what $57 million? So Marcos had set aside, we know that he set aside $57 million to help the Reagan's and to hopefully, he didn't give that directly to them. And we don't know how much of that money was actually spent. There is a rumor that at least $10 million of it wound up in Paul Manafort's hands. That a Melda Marcos just walked it over to him in briefcases filled with cash. But we don't know, because none of it was reported. Manafort denies that he spent any of this money, that he received it, that he spent...

Manafort denies that he received any money that he didn't report to the government. But as we'll see in the rest of the story, he has a history of not reporting all the money he gets from dictators to the government. So the rumor is that he was given at least $10 million by the Marcos regime personally, as a bribe. And we know that one of the guys Reagan sent over to tell Marcos when he finally had to leave, because the rebels were at the gates, one of the guys the US sent over to give him this information, Marcos kept saying to him, but I paid $10 million to Ronald Reagan's campaign, how am I not getting help right now? This guy didn't know what he was talking about, because there was no record of that. What it is, he gave $10 million to Paul Manafort, who just walked the fuck away with it.

Which is a thing that Manafort says that's totally fiction, and that he did everything by the book. But we'll read the rest of the story and you can tell me how much you believe that Paul Manafort didn't just steal $10 million from a dictator. Right, well that's the thing with these people, right? I'm actually, I'm sorry, I don't mean to derail you entirely. No, it's all good. When you really think about people like Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and Donald Trump, people who just fuck with the world. They do fuck jobs. Yeah, right, that's what they do. I think they come from such a unique perspective on life, whereas I feel like even though people do awful things all the time, are rude to each other, disrespectful to each other,

we've all messed up and we've all bullied and been bullied and all that stuff. I think a great many people are trying to do the right thing. But I think these, in order to be like that, you literally have to think like, man, life would be fun if I didn't care about anyone else's pain at all. It would be super fun. And I really think that's what it is. And I know that shouldn't be shocking to me. It shouldn't be that weird to me that people think that way. But I can't accept it. But I really think that they look at the world as an amusement park in which they get to do whatever they want

and they don't care about their legacy at all. They just think like, man, if I could have the most sex and a bunch of money and my whole life could be an adventure, even if millions of people die, then that would be pretty fun. You only live once, right? And I think you're big part right. I think Roger Stone is that kind of guy, which is why he's very carefully picked the jobs he's picked. Paul Manafort wanted a legacy and wanted power. And that will wind up being his downfall later in the story, is that he wasn't happy just enjoying life. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Politico looked deeper into the story of Manafort receiving $10 million from Marcos after Manafort started working for Trump. And they found a lot of information that had never been made public, because nobody back then had cared what some shady guy with connections to Reagan did in the Philippines. I'm going to quote Politico here. Manafort and his associates advised the couple on electoral strategy, the Marcoses, on electoral strategy, and in Washington where they worked to retain goodwill by tamping down concerns about the Marcos regime's human rights record, theft of public resources, and ultimately their perpetration of a massive vote-rigging effort to try and stay in power

in the Philippines' 1986 presidential election. So Manafort became so well-known in the Philippines as the guy who was essentially lying to the rest of the world about what was going on in their country. Corazon Aquino, the woman who ran against Marcos in that election, actually brought up Paul Manafort a lot during her campaign. Teddy Luxon, a Filipino journalist, said quote, Manafort's name was like Voldemort today. So he made the Harry Potter connection. I'm not a guy for making Harry Potter connections to politics, but he fucking did. So that 1986 election was a snap election, and I think it was Manafort's advice to Marcos that he hold a snap election.

And the goal was, people say I'm not a Democratic leader, so if I hold an immediate election right now, you know what I mean? Is that what a snap election is? Yeah, exactly. It happens out of nowhere. It happens out of nowhere, and it's just so he can prove that he's the man that people want in charge. And they were hoping to just rig the election and coast on it. Manafort said at the time about this snap election, what we've tried to do is make it more of a Chicago-style election and not Mexico's.

And back then saying something was a Chicago-style election meant that it involved voter fraud, which it did. Yeah, so after the snap election, the Marcos regime claims victory, that they solidly won the election. International observers say no. Really? This is clearly fraudulent, and here is a shitload of evidence. It leads to a three-week standoff between Marcos, his opponent, and the whole country. A standoff? In what way?

Like an armed standoff. Like rebels taking to the streets. Like a round his palace or whatever? Yeah. Like these stereotypical, the rebels are at the gates of the palace, shaking on the gates. Pitchforks and stuff, yeah. And guns, like that happens. Whoa.

And Marcos has to depart the country with his wife. They wind up in Hawaii with one of Paul Manafort's employees, like flies out with them. Of course. Yeah, still just helping them get set up in their new life. Can you remind me real quick what the investment for Paul Manafort in the Philippines and the Marcos government is? They're just giving him a shitload of money. Right.

That's 100% of it. They're giving him a shitload of money. Oh my gosh. He's received on paper at least a million dollars a year from them, which is more like two million a year in our modern world. Right. And he has almost certainly received at least $10 million in straight up cash for him, not for his company.

Yeah. So this is a good business for him. Sure. So yeah, 1986 was a busy year for Paul Manafort. In addition to everything he was doing with the Marcos's, he also did a lot of work for a client named Jonas Savimbi, a former Maoist warlord who had become an anti-communist warlord. His army kind of sort of absolutely turned women into sex slaves and murdered children. So you can see why he needed the PR genius of Paul Manafort to refurbish his image.

He's working with this guy the same year he's working with fucking Ferdinand Marcos. Yeah. So Manafort had Savimbi make a pilgrimage to New York and D.C. to charm journalists and politicians with the hope of getting aid from the U.S. government and former shitload of weapons to continue perpetrating his war. He had Savimbi wear an expensive suit and ride around in a stretch limo from fancy hotel to fancy hotel. Here's how a Time Magazine article from 1986, the slickest shop in town, which is what they

called Manafort's firm, described the charm tour. When Savimbi came to Washington last month to seek support for his guerrilla organization in its struggle against the Marxist regime in Angola, he hired Black Manafort. When what the firm achieved was quickly dubbed Savimbi Chic. Doors swung open all over town for the guerrilla leader, who was dapperly attired in a Nehru suit and ferried about in a stretch limousine. Dole had shown Bob Dole had shown only general interest in Savimbi's cause until Black, the majority leader's former aide, approached him on his client's behalf.

Dole promptly introduced a congressional resolution backing Unita, that was his organization's insurgency, and sent a letter to the State Department, urging that the U.S. supply it with heavy arms. The firm's fee for such services was reportedly $600,000. Which is a bargain. So yeah, all this for... $670,000 that comes from where? From Savimbi?

This terrorist warlord. Wow, okay. He gives them $600,000 and they get him in touch with the halls of power who then send him missile launchers and shit. Bob Dole at the time was a Senate majority leader. And then how did... So all that happened was that Black was his aide and he walked in and was like, hey, would you do this?

And he just did it? Yeah, yeah. Why? That's what you're paying for when you pay for Manafort, Black and Stone. They have connections in Congress. And so if you're a warlord and you give them a shitload of money, they will make you look good. They'll advise you how to talk in order to be acceptable to DC.

And then they'll go to their friends who were in Congress who they helped get elected and be like, this guy needs a shitload of guns and we got plenty of guns, why don't we give him some? Man, I'm realizing I'm super naive. I'm just like, why would they do that mean thing to people? They don't give a shit. Because they don't care. Yeah, they just...

And you're like, money, man. And I'm like, what? Wow. Okay. If you're disturbed, all of this was disturbing to people at the time because it was very new at this time. Paul Manafort assured everyone who was disturbed that his firm was, quote, loyal to the president and added, we would never lobby against Star Wars, for example.

Such a piece of shit. Paul Manafort also assured everyone that Black Manafort and Stone did turn down some jobs like a possibly lucrative account with Momar Gaddafi. So they won't work with everybody. Wow. Gaddafi was too toxic. Yeah, when everybody has their limit. Now the lobbying...

They worked with Hitler. No, that was Ivy Lee. That was Ivy Lee. Well, right. That was Ivy Lee. They're far too young to work with Hitler. Either way, they worked with the guy. They totally would have.

They would have. So 34, 100% Paul Manafort would have been loving Hitler. They worked with Ivy Lee. Yeah. It's pretty rough. Yeah. So the lobbying work with Sevimbi, a warlord, also meant that Manafort and his company now had a vested interest in keeping the war in Angola going because they keep getting

money as long as they keep selling guns every year. Yeah, selling guns, right. And by the end of the 1980s, the country seemed close to peace, especially since the Soviets had stopped giving aid to Angola's communist government. So the side should have been able to work something out. USSR stopped aiding the communists in Angola, if he stopped aiding the insurgents, then they had to work out some sort of peace. But we want to keep the war going.

Well, Paul Manafort wanted to keep the war going. And he was able to guarantee additional shipments of weaponry, which allowed the war to continue into the late 1990s. By the late 90s, more than 200 people per day were dying in the fighting. And it's possible that the extension of the war that he's partly responsible for killed hundreds of thousands. Holy shit. Yeah, he's a real piece of shit.

And you know, I have to think that a man like Paul Manafort has never enjoyed the cheesy crunch of a nacho Dorito. Because I think that a guy like Paul Manafort probably subsists entirely on fancy caviar and $400 cheeses. He doesn't enjoy common pleasures like the Doritos. That's true. There's no caviar-flavored Dorito. There's not, because they're an honest working man snack.

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podcasts. And we're back. Yes, those were some good products and or services. All right, let's get back into the Manaforting. So we just talked about sort of the lobbying work that Manafort did for Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines up until he got ousted by Rebels and the work he did supporting Rebels and helping to extend to Civil War in Angola. And now we're getting into the rest of his career.

Yeah, I think the best summary of what his firm was doing at this time was actually by his business partner, Roger Stone. He gave it last year or in 2016 in Ken Rudin's political junkie podcast. So I don't think it's a gigantic podcast, but he said, of this era, Black Manafort Stone and Kelly lined up most of the dictators in the world that we could find. Pro-Western dictators, of course. Dictators are in the eye of the beholder. You're saying dictator?

Yeah. No, he's completely admitting it. And in 2015. Well, yeah. I mean, that dude is a complete sociopath. Yeah, he is 100% soulless. It's weird too, though. I mean, he's the only sociopath I'm aware of that is aware he's a sociopath and acts

on it, like knows what sociopathy is. And how it can be advantageous in the business sense. Right. So maybe he isn't a sociopath. He's actively bad. Yeah. I almost, I hate him less than most of the terrible people today just because he never seen, there seems to, I don't think there's any doubt in his head that he's making the

world worse. Right. And he likes it. I just don't need to take cares. And it's just, OK, well, you just need to be stopped somehow, hopefully, by just being ostracized politically in some glorious day in the future. Other people who pretend to be good, I guess, are who we have to go after first. Yeah.

I don't know. I don't know what you do with Roger Stone. So over the course of the 1980s, Stone and Black, you know, Black's Manafort and Stone got even deeper into Republican Party politics. Paul Manafort, though, did a little bit, started doing a lot less work in the U.S. and fell in love with working for Shady Four and Oligarchs. He did continue to do some work in the United States. He was the deputy convention manager for George H.W. Bush's Republican Convention.

It was at that convention in New Orleans where Paul Manafort and Donald Trump first met. This is in 1988. Here's how Slate described the encounter. Trump was in town and curious to see how a convention was really run. Manafort thought it'd be neat to get his picture with the Donald. The two convened in a trailer outside of the Louisiana Superdome during a steamy weekday for a friendly chit-chat. This friendly chit-chat would eventually lead to a decades-long personal and professional

relationship between the two men. For now, Manafort was by far the political senior of the two. He hadn't just succeeded in politics, he'd helped change the game entirely. See, in 1967, as I said, there were 64 registered lobbyists in the entire United States. Due to the lobbying boom that Paul helped ignite, by 1990 there were more than 10,000 registered lobbyists in the United States. That's Paul Manafort's doing in large part. That's crazy.

Yeah. So by 1992, people with actual souls had started to take notice of Paul Manafort's work. The Center for Public Integrity published a report on foreign influence peddling called The Torturer's Lobby. They called it this because the people Manafort and his colleagues represented were guilty of torturing hundreds of thousands of people. The report noted that both Kenya and Nigeria, who were clients of Manafort, have widely criticized human rights records.

Last year, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended an excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding for the U.S. government? Why it was black, Manafort, stone, and Kelly? They added to Kelly at this point. Sure. Macau Matua from Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program stated of this, quote, it's

morally objectionable all this influence peddling. There's no doubt several of these countries couldn't afford these lobbyists without the help of American taxpayers. In other words, the aid that these dictators received subsidized their ability to afford Paul Manafort and his fellow travelers. Wait, say that again? So they would get $8 or $10 million in aid from the U.S. and then they'd pay a million or two to Paul Manafort.

So he was getting the U.S. government to pay these guys and the Genoa ford to pay him because they were getting so much aid from the U.S. Right. Yeah. That doesn't seem like it should be doable. It doesn't. It seems like the kind of thing that a sane and ethical society would say no. Yeah, at some point at the very least.

We never did. So yeah, I'm going to quote from that report, the torturer's lobby again. A spokeswoman for Black Manafort Stone and Kelly told the center that the firm does not quote, attempt to explain away concerns about human rights. Instead, she said, we try to open a dialogue. So that's nice. Yeah. It's a conversation.

No, totally. With torturers. About torturing, which they need more money to do more of. Well, you got to be civil. Yeah. It's important. I heard that somewhere recently. Civility is critical.

It's the most important thing. No matter who you're talking to. Even what people who are torturing, you couldn't call a guy like Paul Manafort like a shit drenched ass nozzle, because that's not civil. No, it's not nice. He doesn't deserve to be treated that way, even though he's enabled the deaths of hundreds of thousands. I mean, yeah, that's crazy.

This person committed genocide. Sort of. So yeah, he definitely committed world-class human rights violations and he's culpable. Anyway, in 1992, Spy Magazine wrote an article on all this with the wonderful title, Publicists of the Damned, which is solid titling. It is a good title. 1992 Spy. They didn't talk to Paul Manafort, but they interviewed his friend and colleague, John

Donaldson. I think Donaldson's interview helps explain how these fuckers justified their fuckery to themselves. They didn't talk to Paul Manafort, but they interviewed his friend and colleague, John Donaldson. I think Donaldson's interview helps explain how these fuckers justify their fuckery to themselves. Quote, When a friendly congressional aide took Donaldson aside to express his misgivings

about the Black Manafort clients, Kenya and Somalia, saying, John, these guys are real bad. Donaldson responded, Yeah, I know, but we're really trying to persuade them to clean up their act. Yeah. We're trying. Well, good for him. Good for him.

And I think things are going well in Somalia these days. I haven't checked up on them since the early 90s, but it seems like a country that's just straight rocket ship to the early 90s. Yeah. No, everything's been good there since the early 90s, definitely. Seems like it. Yes, so most of that article, the Spy Magazine article, focused around a different firm, Van Kloberg and Associates, who are the PR dudes for Saddam Hussein, but Spy recognized

and gave credit to Paul Manafort's company for starting this industry and dominating it. They ranked all of the influence peddlers in terms of the amount of bloody hands and Manafort Black and Stone. They won? Yeah, number one. Man. Blood on hands rating.

Good for them. Which is the right way to rate this industry. Absolutely. Wait. It was an American PR firm that supported Saddam Hussein, sure was. I can't even handle it, man. I guess I knew. I knew it was this level of corruption, but wow, okay.

It's unspeakable. Right. I think I'm going to need more fruit leather pretty soon. Yeah, fruit leather and Doritos will help cleanse our moral pallets. So in the early 90s, Paul Manafort was a busy guy, as we've just gotten through talking about, but he was not too busy to help out a friend in need. A friend like his buddy, Donald J. Trump. In 1993, Mr. Trump came to Paul Manafort with a problem.

Pequot Indians had opened up a casino that was apparently taking business away from Trump's casinos in Atlantic City. Now it's hard to say what exact advice Manafort gave Mr. Trump, but Trump wound up testifying in front of the House Native American Affairs Subcommittee. And he said, among other things, those don't look like Indians to me. What? Oh, yes. So his argument was he was trying to convince them they're not Native American?

Yeah. That's where he started. He was asked. What were they have been? People with like toner on? Native American face? He was asked what an Indian looked like in Congress, and he responded, you know, you know.

What? He also insinuated the mob was heavily involved with these Indian casinos without any evidence. He claimed that Indian gaming had been, quote, a total disaster for Connecticut. Oh, man. The origin of the phrase, a total disaster. Yeah. I feel bound by honor to read you this excerpt from a Hartford Corinth article about his testimony.

When it was finally Trump's turn, he discarded the seven page statement he was going to read. I had a long and boring speech, he told the panel. It was politically correct and something that would have gotten me into no trouble whatsoever. With that, he offered off the cuff remarks about some of the things bugging him lately, such as the mob, forget the Justice Department, shrug, organized crime as rampant, people know it, people talk about it, Trump insisted. I wonder what J. Edgar Hoover would have said about this. Now Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat from Hawaii, wound up getting in the last word in that

Hartford Corinth article, and his speaking on that in 1993 inadvertently provides the best summary of modern politics I've ever heard, free speech reigns no matter how idiotic. Wow. Yeah. He really nailed 2018. Totally. So other coverage by Hartford Corinth at the time revealed that by this point, Trump had been retaining the services of Black Manafort and Stone for years for their advice on,

quote, housing matters. When he was asked why he needed Mr. Manafort's services, Trump laughed. I don't know if this lobbying does anything, but they've represented me over the years and I'm very loyal. If we know one thing about Donald J. Trump, he's a loyal man. Damn. That's a crazy left turn. It's weird because he seems so maniacal and so self-important that you forget that he's

really like socially incredibly smart. Yeah. Donald Trump. Yeah. He's dumb at so many things that you forget that he's a genius in one thing. Right. Absolutely. Yeah.

Which is the most dangerous, there's nothing as dangerous as an idiot with a trick up his sleeve. I also wonder how dumb he is. I wonder how much of it actually is calculated, even tweeting of co-fe-fe, how on purpose that was. Yeah. I've just stopped paying attention to anything funny about him because we shouldn't be laughing at him now.

It doesn't matter how ridiculous the shit he does. Yeah. Anyway. Right. This is not the Donald Trump episode, although it inevitably comes in here. Did he convince this subcommittee that those people were not Native Americans? No. Okay.

No. No one had to listen to Donald Trump yet. This was still that beautiful period where you could just ignore him. Do they just call him dumb and move on? They called him dumb and racist. Oh, really? You used to this guy Abercrombie? Yeah.

Yeah. They were like, this was really racist testimony because he said they're not, they don't look like Indians to me, but it's insanity. So during the 1990s, Paul began a friendship with another guy too, an arms dealer named Abdul Rahman Al-Asir, who paid him like 90 grand in 1994 to help broker a deal with a French politician to help Pakistan make submarines. It didn't end well and like 11 people were murdered, but Paul Manafort still got paid. According to the Atlantic, Al-Asir was something of a bad influence on Paul Manafort.

They quoted one of his friends as saying, Paul became aware of the difference between making 300,000 and 5 million. He discovered the South of France. Al-Asir would show him how to live that life. So Paul is now hanging out with like a fucking arms merchant multi-millionaire, if not billionaire, and he realizes that like his just millionaire lifestyle is small beings. Not enough. Yeah.

So Paul starts spending less and less time at the office and more time jet-setting around with Al-Asir. He also started spending money like he was worried it might evaporate. When his daughter Andrea decided she wanted a horsey, Paul Manafort bought a farm in Palm Beach and filled it with purebred Irish horses. He also hired a full staff to take care of them. In 1981, his firm gets bought by another company and he makes a bunch of money and he leaves in 1995 in order to set up another lobbying firm of his own, more focused on overseas

dealers. So he leaves Black Manafort in stone. Yeah. It gets bought and he leaves after a couple of years. But he starts a couple of different firms all doing the same thing. His life isn't all fun and games. His wife was injured in a horrible horseback riding accident in 1997 and by all accounts he was very devoted to her while she healed.

So that's one nice thing. One way he seemed to deal with his stress was by buying houses, often sight unseen. He'd just decide I want a new house and boom. As Johnny Depp's example proves, this kind of lifestyle is not sustainable without regular injections of cash. And since working with dictators wasn't always enough to make the bills, Paul decided to get it on a great scam opportunity with his arms dealer buddy, Al-Asir. Here's the Atlantic.

Quote, In 2002, he and Manafort persuaded the bank to invest 57 million euros in a Puerto Rican biometrics company. According to a reporting by the Portuguese newspaper Observador, Manafort was the lead American investor in the company. His involvement helped justify the bank's investment, despite evidence of the company's faulty products and lax accounting. Al-Asir is alleged to have extracted bloated commissions from the deal and to have pocketed some of the bank's loans.

Manafort reportedly made one and a half million dollars selling his shares of the biometrics firm before the company eventually came tumbling down. So he's just fine fucking over everybody. Damn. So yeah, by 2005, Paul Manafort is known as THE guy if you were a shady dictator or criminal looking to improve your image abroad and maybe get in the good graces of US politicians. This led him to Ukraine, and the employee of its wealthiest citizen, a steel billionaire named Renat Akhmatov.

According to Politifact, Manafort advised one of Akhmatov's companies on corporate communication strategy. But it turned out Akhmatov was a friend of this guy, Viktor Yanukovych, who was really in a bit of a pickle. Now Viktor was the prime minister of Ukraine and a buddy of the Putin regime. He wanted to move Ukraine closer in the geopolitical sense to Russia, but most Ukrainians, particularly in the western part of the country, did not want this. They hoped to eventually become part of the EU.

This was a big issue for the country and it came up front and center in the 2005 election, when Viktor Yanukovych went up against Viktor Yukushenko, who was pro-west. Yukushenko was horribly poisoned with dioxin during the campaign, and Yanukovych was declared the winner. So they thought this was shady and they took to the streets to protest. The Supreme Court ordered a revote, which is apparently an option in some countries, and yeah, they held a revote two weeks later. So this guy, Yanukovych, calls Paul Manafort two weeks before the new vote and asks him

to help save his ailing presidential campaign, which is very unpopular since he poisoned that guy. Had to have been him. Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. I mean, fucking no. Of course. Yeah, I don't know why people don't like me.

Yeah. Well, Manafort, being an honest guy, told him that there wasn't much he could do at this late hour, and Yanukovych did lose. But he wound up hiring Manafort shortly thereafter. The two worked together for nearly a decade. On paper, Manafort was an advisor to Yanukovych's party. In reality, he was also helping revamp Yanukovych himself. Here's the Washington Post, quote, Manafort and half a dozen businessmen, lawyers, and

political analysts involved in Ukraine at the time brought discipline and focus that the Yanukovych-led campaigns had lacked. He got Yanukovych to comb his hair better, to stay on message during public appearances. He drilled them on talking points and told them what suits to wear. He tried to control everything, a former member of Yanukovych's party recalled, how people who represented the party would be dressed, the words they said, their makeup and stylists, every small detail. And it's one of those things people at the time will say, he just advised Yanukovych to

dress like himself and comb his hair that Paul Manafort did, because they were kind of the same size. And Manafort was like, just be more like me and you'll win the election. Wow, did it work? Well, it's getting a little bit ahead of us. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I know you're the one with the...

Yeah, spoiler, yeah, it did. Totally did. But it took a while. In 2005, Manafort decided he needed some side action while he was starting up work with this Yanukovych guy. So he went to a Russian billionaire named Oleg Darapashka with an offer. If Oleg would put up a shitload of money, Paul would put together a program to, according to the AP, quote, influence politics, business dealings, and news coverage inside the United

States, Europe, and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin's government. So Darapashka says he didn't wind up going through with this idea, and maybe it's true. In any case, that's where Paul Manafort's head was at in 2005 vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin. Totally happy to peddle influence to the guy to the west. So yeah, Paul Manafort spent the early aughts using his American political know-how to shape Victor Yanukovych into the kind of guy who could win an election. Apparently Paul's A strategy was, yeah, to make Yanukovych look and dress exactly like him.

Manafort also advised Yanukovych's party, the party of regents, to focus on one single theme every week rather than come to grips with the opposition over a bunch of different issues. Just always say, focus on one thing that week, you know, ignore anything else, and just shout about that. Yeah, I forget because there's so much death in these stories that he's giving them political advice that seems to be working. Yeah, he's advising them to act like American politicians in a country that doesn't have

a long history of democracy. Sure, be manipulative. Yeah, and so he's just like, yeah, just say one thing a bunch. Huh. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Now, we're going to get into a lot more about Manafort's work in Ukraine and how that all

ended in blood and fire and horrible death, as well as the rest of the Paul Manafort story. But that is going to have to come in another couple of days, because this is the end of part one of our Paul Manafort podcast. Oh, wow. So we'll get back into it on Thursday. You can hear the conclusion of this thrilling story. Until then, do you want to plug some plugables for the people? Oh, sure.

I'm at Dave To The Ross on everything. That's DAVETOTHEROSS, Twitter and Instagram, and it's my website. And also listen to my podcast, Suicide Buddies. Suicide Buddies. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK, just two letters. You can find this podcast at atBastardsPod on Twitter. You can also find our website, BehindTheBastards.com, where we'll have pictures from this episode

and a list of all of the many, many sources that were used. So yeah, come check us out next Thursday, and we will continue to talk about what a fantastic piece of shit Paul Manafort is. There's a little bit of a spoiler. He's probably the guy that we're talking about on this show that I have the most of a personal connection to because I reported extensively on the Ukrainian Revolution and on their civil war back in 2014 and 15. So you can prepare for me to get real angry in the next podcast.

Can't wait. Yeah, it'll be exciting. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed

the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.