Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Ex-Cohen partner pleads guilty to tax fraud
New York ‘king’ of cabs’ deal requires his cooperation
Former business partner of president’s personal lawyer will cooperate in investigations as part of plea deal.
NEW YORK — A New York Taxi operator and former longtime business partner of President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, has pleaded guilty to tax fraud in a deal that requires him to cooperate in any ongoing investigations.
Evgeny “Gene” Freidman, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union long known as the “Taxi King” of New York, pleaded guilty to criminal tax fraud for improperly pocketing $5 million in state tax money in Albany County Court. He managed taxis owned by the president’s lawyer for several years.
Freidman is required to pay restitution as part of his plea deal and will be sentenced to five years of probation, according to the attorney general’s office.
The cooperation agreement could be a significant development for Cohen, whose personal business practices are under investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the federal Russia investigation, has also scrutinized Cohen’s activities and business relationships.
Freidman’s plea and cooperation were first reported by The New York Times.
Freidman denied the report.
“It is shameful,” he wrote the New York Daily News in a text. “I plead guilty to a felony, I am humbled and shamed! This is me taking responsibility for my actions, and has nothing to do w/ mc.”
As part of the New York probe, prosecutors are investigating Cohen for possible campaign finance violations and bank fraud. Last month, FBI agents searched his home, office and hotel room. Among the documents agents sought were records related to loans he took out against his taxi medallions, people familiar with the warrant have said.
Public records show that Cohen took out a business loan in late 2014 for an unspecified amount using three taxi companies as collateral.
Investigators also sought records related to Cohen’s October 2016 payment to Stormy Daniels, an adultfilm actress who said she had a sexual encounter with Trump, as well as other records related to Cohen’s involvement in responding to damaging news stories about Trump before his election.
Meanwhile in Washington, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday that his department’s inspector general is looking into whether Cohen’s banking records were leaked from an agency database, as well as whether any of the records were improperly blocked from view.
Mnuchin said the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, does have the power to “suppress important information” at the request of law enforcement agencies. But he says he does not know whether that happened in this case.
The New Yorker magazine reported last week that a law enforcement official leaked information about Cohen’s bank records to several media organizations. That information showed a Cohen company getting large payments from organizations seeking to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. The payments included money from pharmaceutical giant Novartis, telecommunications company AT&T and from a company associated with a Russian billionaire.
The magazine said the leak came from a law enforcement official who was worried that some information dealing with Cohen’s banking records had been removed from the FinCEN database and the missing data might indicate an effort to cover up the payments.
The information about the payments to a shell company being used by Cohen was first revealed by Michael Avenatti, a lawyer for Daniels. Avenatti has refused to say how he got the information.