As a golden green leaf thrown into the sea. The island, just 140 miles long, is wrapped in sandy beaches and rich history. These turquois waters, according to legend, were the birthplace of aphrodite. But today the playground of the gods has become a place for hide billions for sanctioned russian oligarchs with ties to vladimir putin. Cox always a big target. This Football Player wasnt just drafted into the nfl. At 611, hes the tallest player and only american currently playing australian rules football. A fast and fierce game that makes ours look like a quilting bee. Who is this tall texas transplant . And how did he become a star down under . Thats our story tonight. I believe the first piece was jeff koons is one of the most prom nntd and polarizing art stars in the world. His creations may look simple, but they can take decades to make and Push Technology and taste. Critics may scoff at times, but thats nothing new. Jeff koons has been controversial since he first started showing his art more than 40 years ago. Im lesley stahl. Im bill whitaker. Im anderson cooper. Im sharyn alfonsi. Im jon wertheim. Im cecelia vega. Im scott pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 minutes. You like that bone . I got a great price on it. Did you see my tail when that chewy box showed up . Oh, i saw it. Sorry about the vase. Can we just say vase like normal people . Fine. I always wondered what it would be like to have a tail. Maybe you did one time. And maybe a thousand years from now, ill be tailless using that chewy app to get you great prices on treats. Im pretty sure it takes more than a thousand years vase. Pets arent just pets. Theyre more. Vase [announcer] save more on what they love with everyday great prices at chewy. air whooshing box thudding if your momoderate to o se crohns didisease or u ulcerative e colitis sysyms are e stopping y you in your trtracks. Choosese stelara®® from the s start. 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[ tense mumusic ] one e aleve workrks all day o i can keepep working m my m. Just one a aleve. 12 hours o of uninterrrrud pain r relief. Aleveve. Who do youou take it for . And for fast topical pain relelief, try a alevex. We always s had questitions. Who do we e belong to . O . Whwho are our r ancestors . . I know we e have them. M. Oh m my god, herere it is. Whenen i found t that immigrgrn recordrd on anceststry®, it wasas amazing. Eveverything w was there. The u. S. W was in direre d of nururses duringng world war. Tia amaliaia as a nursrse in el salvlvador decicided to ansnswer that c. Itss a lot of f excitement fifinding somemething new. I feelel like a titime travel. Claudia ststarts callilin. Its a a party evevery time. After russia launched its invasion of ukraine, the u. S. And its allies responded with sanctions targeting companies, oligarchs and officials with ties to russian president vladimir putin. Headlines trumpeted the trophies of russian oligarchs seized throughout europe yachts in italy, villas in the south of france and priceless art in germany but those fixed assets are relatively easy to locate. Finding the billions of dollars oligarchs have stashed around the world is proving to be more difficult. How do you hide that much money from an International Community that says its determined to find it . The question led us to cyprus a tiny mediterranean island at the crossroads of europe, asia and the middle east. As we first reported in january, the once bustling vacation spot is in the middle of an International Game of hide and seek. A poet once described cyprus as a golden green leaf thrown into the sea. The island, just 140 miles long, is wrapped in sandy beaches and rich history. These turquois waters, according to legend, were the birthplace of aphrodite. But today the playground of the gods has become a place for wealthy russians. We headed down the Southern Coast of the island. To limassol. Before the war it was a favorite spot for russians to fall. A threehour flight from moscow, limassols mix of designer shops, fur stores, cyrillic signs and stores serving caviar earned it the nickname moscow on the med. But alexandra attalides, a member of the cyprus parliament, says after the fall of the soviet union, the oligarchs who descended on the island werent here for the beaches. There are beautiful beaches in spain, in portugal, in greece. There are a lot of beautiful beaches. I think that they found a Fertile Ground here that helped them. How did the russian oligarchs use cyprus . After 1989 when they stole the property of the russian people and they started to build their empires. And then maybe they were afraid that someday something would happen, so they wanted their assets to be safe outside russia. So they were looking for tax havens, and we had a very low tax rate at the time. They got a place to hide their assets. Yeah. Cyprus historically built a Financial System to attract overseas wealth. Maira martini is an analyst for transparency international, a nonprofit that tracks Money Laundering around the world. She says for decades, if you were an oligarch, or just a shady character looking to hide your rubles, cyprus was hard to beat. It offers the secrecy and still security, and thats what criminals and corrupt individuals are usually looking for. What do you mean it offers secrecy . So, in cyprus, for many years you could open a bank account without having a lot of questions asked. You can open a Company Without having a lot of questions asked, meaning you can put the money there without needing to tell who you are, where the money comes from. Cyprus became as famous for its opaque banking as its clear water. Soon, like sunstarved tourists, foreign money started pouring into the island. By 2012, the country of about a million residents had amassed Bank Deposits of nearly 72 billion euros. About 30 of those Bank Deposits came from russian nationals. But in 2013, the tide turned. The debt crisis in neighboring greece threatened to sink the cyprus economy. Lawmakers, fearing the country would lose all that russian capital, pushed a scheme other countries had used to attract wealth a citizenship by investment program. From the beginning, for me, this was unacceptable. Heres how it worked. Any foreigner who invested more than 2 Million Euros in the country, typically, buying real estate, could get a cypriot passport. A coveted possession because cyprus is part of the european union. So the people who are buying the passport of cyprus, they were buying the european passport. They were buying an open door to 27 countries. From 2013 to 2020, cyprus issued almost 7,000 of those golden passports nearly half to russians. Suddenly, the skyline of limassol was injected with highrise luxury apartments and its port with mega yachts and its stores with wealthy russians. You could see them Walking Around like princesses, moving in the most expensive shops. They have their business, they have their houses, they have luxury h houses. But in 2020, an undercover investigatioion by al jazezeera revealaled corruptioion in the passport program. No passport case is clean. Cyprus had illegally issued hundreds of golden passports some, to cririminals and fufugitives. After protests and under pressure from the e. U. , the cyprus government shuttered the program weeks later. But the passports were still out there. When you give passports to people that later we realize are criminals, then you open the door of europe to criminals. The golden passports also opened the door of europe to russian elites. 60 minutes has learned that at least a dozen of these now sanctioned russian oligarchs were issued golden passports. Among them, igor kesaev who owned a russian arms factory. Billionaire alexander ponomarenko, who was the chairman of the board of russias biggest airport and who the u. S. Government calls one of putins enablers. And aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, a part of putins inner circle. According to the u. S. Treasury, hes been investigated internationally for, among other things, Money Laundering, illegal wiretapping and extortion. Accusations he denies. Maira martini told us a cypriot passport could make it easier for those sanctioned oligarchs to buy property and move assets and that the cozy relationship between wealthy russians and cyprus is raising concern internationally. If youre a small country that is very dependent on foreign money coming from one single country, this also even might create a conflict, right . Really sanctions are only as strong as the weakest link. Is cyprus the weakest link here . I think cyprus is one of the weakest links. Then cyprus minister of finance Constantinos Petrides disagrees. We first spoke to him in fall. His office oversees efforts to freeze the cyprus assets of anyone sanctioned by the e. U. Who has been sanctioned, specifically, individuals within cyprus . Regarding the citizenship, i think about ten people were found under restrictive measures. And the council of ministers has initiated a process to revoke their passports. The ten people that have been sanctioned, who are they . I dont have any, any names now. But would you be able to provide us with that list of names if we asked for it . Im not sure. I would have to i would have to see. We sent minister petrides a request for those names and the list of any assets of sanctioned russians that cyprus has seized or frozen. In a series of emails, over the last three months, petrides office responded that due to European Data protection rules, no detailed list can be made public. But other e. U. Countries have publicized detailed lists of their actions. So is the expectation that everyone should just trust the cyprus government that theyre implementing the sanctions that theyre supposed to on russians . Im not saying that everybody should trust the cyprus government. The cyprus government does not need somebody to trust it. We have the reports of the mutual assessment for cyprus 2019 that shows all the progress made in the past years. I think that we have proved as cyprus that we are a reliable member of the e. U. We do admit that in the past there have been mistakes. But cyprus has also been unfairly stigmatized. Petrides told us the passports of sanctioned oligarchs are in the process of being revoked and said cyprus has seized 105 Million Euros of russian deposits. A big number, but just a fraction of the estimated 5. 6 billion euros of russian deposits made in cyprus last year. We also asked minister petrides about this. The dozens of Cyprus Properties and active Shell Companies we were able to trace back to sanctioned russians. He told us any Cypriot Company with an e. U. Sanctioned oligarch listed as the owner has been placed under increased scrutiny. But often, russian oligarchs dont list their names anywhere near their assets. Take the case of Roman Abramovich and his planes. According to u. S. Investigators, they were hidden under five Shell Companies, stacked like russian nesting dolls, with addresses in the bvi, and british island of jersey. All leading to an Anonymous Trust in cyprus. But it wasnt cyprus authorities who ultimately moved to seize the planes. It was prosecutors from the u. S. Department of justice. Theres always been dark corners of the international Financial System. And kind of like water finding a crack, thats where the criminal networks will go. U. S. Deputy attorney general lisa monaco is in charge of the department of justices kleptocapture unit, tasked with finding the assets of sanctioned oligarchs hidden around the world. It used to be, you know, the guy fleeing with suitcases of money. Thats not the case anymore. It is not. It is crypto. It is planes. It is yachts. It is layered. And so how do you keep up with it . Even the most notorious actors, whether its the mafia, whether its rogue regimes, the best tool we have is following the money. The money has led doj investigators around the world and closer to home. It turns out, like the tourists who visit cyprus, dirty money doesnnt stay on n the islandn forever. R. Typicalllly, its wwashed an invested in other western economies. Investigators say thats one way Oleg Deripaska has been able to skirt sanctions. What the task force exposed was the network of enablers, and money launderers, and facilitators who helped him hide his wealth in real estate here in washington, d. C. And in manhattan. In the United States . In the United States, in artwork, in vanity businesses, including a music studio in beverly hills. In their case, the doj alleges that in 2020, Oleg Deripaska arranged for one of his children to be born in the United States even though he was under u. S. Sanctions. He has a child thats a u. S. Citizen now . He was able to do that in one instance. And then in the second instance, that was not accomplished. Because u. S. Customs stopped it. The government case details how, as the war in ukraine intensified, deripaska used a Cyprus Company to arrange travel on a private jet from russia to los angeles for his pregnant girlfriend, moving money to rent a home for her in beverly hills. But when she landed in los angeles this summer, she was stopped by customs officers. Deripaska, his girlfriend, and the u. S. Resident who helped him are now charged with sanctions evasion. They are not in custody, but the doj has announced plans to seize his u. S. Properties worth an estimated 70 million. Since the ststart of the w war, u. U. S. Has moveded to seize mom ththan a billionon dollars of f sanctioned a assets aroundnd th world. So what should happen to those assets . We are seeking the authority from congress to allow us to use the proceeds for the benefit of the ukrainian people. Oleg deripaska has publicly criticized the Economic Impact the war in ukraine could have on russia. But u. S. Investigators maintain he is a putin cronie who is propping up russias war machine. Back in cyprus, 60 minutes found a villa in this seaside complex, offices in this building and more than a dozen active Shell Companies linked to Oleg Deripaska. The cyprus government will not say whether it has frozen any of those assets. How u. S. Prosecutors seize russian assets. Well go as far as fiji if we have to. Add 60minunutesovertimime. C. I take e oncedailyly jardiancnce, at eaeach days s staaart as s time went t on it wawas easy to o seee. 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They call australian rules football footy, which sounds cute and precious. But footy is a sport that makes american football look like a quilting bee. Its a game of almost cartoonishly violent collisions, without the benefit of pads. It features nonstop trash talk and is played on a field practically the size of a speedway. As the name does suggest, australian rules football is the National Sport down under, with games that draw 100,000 fans and tv audiences that, per capita, often outrate the nfl. So why in the name of waltzing matilda do crowds in melbourne sometimes break into chants of usausa . The answer, as we first reported in ap