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Small real estate agency, now selling the trump brand. he had made the big leagues. he became overnight a mover of money. reporter: who was it that ventura and the firm homes were targeting? russians. russians that had dirty money. reporter: specifically? specifically. and then the russian mafia came in. a guy called alexander sasha ocho. reporter: what was he doing in panama? came down made a proposal to ventura and made him an offer he couldn t refuse. reporter: he became a partner in ventura s marketing firm but we can t verify his connection to the russian mafia because although the allegation has been repeated in several court cases, he seems to fend off the charges every time. another partner, stanislav bought several units in the building and since accused of running a prostitution ring in canada but the case was dropped ....
Nobody. nobody. reporte nobody checked anybody out. people were buying, spending millions 5, 10, 20 units at a time. the money would go to ventura. reporter: if you want to know about the flow of dirty money through panama, monty freezener is the man to ask. in 1992, he was convicted in federal court of 20 counts of money laundering and fraud. he still knows all the players and all the plays. do you think it s possible trump didn t know the kind of people buying in his building? he didn t know. reporter: how could he not have known? because you don t walk up to somebody, hey, are you russian mafia? reporter: is it fair to say trump didn t ask because he didn t want to know. would you want to know? reporter: i would want to know who s buying a building with my name on it. because it s you. most, no. they don t care. reporter: a team from global witness, an anti-corruption watchdog often critic al of businesses and their connections to government officials s ....
That got us wondering is that a fair suggestion? so we decided to look at all of the countries we could find which the trump organization considered as possible locations to expand into and run them against the annual ratings published by transparency international. a well-respected anti-corruption campaign group. the results are pretty telling. take a look at this. out of all the countries where the president has explored or closed deals, more than half are in countries that get a score below 50. that s out of 100. in school we used to call that a fail. take azerbaijan, one of the most corrupt places on earth, transparency international gives it just 30 points. the philippines doesn t do much better coming in at 35. argentina and indonesia, scored just a little better at 36 and 37 respectively and the country we re in panama gets 38 points. compare that with our own national average. which stands at 74 out of 100. ....
Judiciary. he broke the law. he broke the constitution, violated every possible rule. and got away with it, for a time. he really was a person looking out for his own interests and not the interests of the country, and during his time, what happened in the country was without precedence. it was the largest scale robbery of our treasury. reporter: not long after his term ended, martinelli quietly boarded a private jet and disappeared. days later, panama s supreme court charged him with embezzlement and illegal wiretapping. reporter: what did martinelli do to you? violated and tapped conversations i had with my wife. my kids. and my entire staff. my professional staff. also with my campaign manager. and all of my campaign team. reporter: martinelli ended up living in the lap of luxury in miami. but eventually, the law caught up with him and he s now sitting in a federal dissension center ....
Marketing the trump ocean club as part of a real estate portfolio where corrupt people could park their money? you got it. reporter: and they did. yeah. but they didn t just park the money. the money was turned over consistently. reporter: how does a luxury tower become a money laundromat? the buyer uses dirty money to buy unit 1605 in the unbuilt to you perp sometimes just two weeks later unit 1605 gets resold. the money coming out of the building is now clean. the proceeds of a legitimate real estate deal. the only way to trace its dirty origins would be to go back to the beginning, and identify the original buyer. and that should be relatively easy. but not in panama. our investigation led us here to panama s public registry. after going through a lot of paperwork a pattern started to emerge. tushs out many of the condo units aren t owned by individuals but panamanian ....