Among all the radical policy shifts carried out during President Trump’s first 100 days, perhaps the most astonishing was his reorientation of America’s posture toward Russia. Support for Ukraine in the ongoing war was long a bipartisan article of faith, but Trump shattered that consensus almost immediately, first by ending the isolation of President Vladimir V. Putin with a direct phone call, and then with high-level talks in Saudi Arabia that cut Kyiv out entirely. The gravity of the change was made clear at the Munich Security Conference, where Vice President JD Vance took the stage to lecture European allies on their suppression of far-right parties — parties that, not coincidentally, have been sympathetic to or even explicitly aligned with Russia. By the time that Trump and Vance had a made-for-TV showdown with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office in late February, it was clear that Russo-American relations had entered a new and cozier era.
Amid the fracas, it would have been easy to miss two lines, buried on the fourth page of a Justice Department memo, circulated two weeks into Trump’s second term: An interagency task force, colorfully named KleptoCapture, would be disbanded. Though KleptoCapture was hardly a household name, its demise was portentous — it indicated the administration’s unwillingness to fight the financial systems that not only allow Kremlin allies to disguise their wealth but also enable international drug cartels to operate with impunity, corrupt officials to launder money from bribes into luxury real estate and the ultrawealthy to avoid paying taxes.
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. himself announced the creation of the force in his 2022 State of the Union address, just one week after Russian tanks started streaming across the border toward Kyiv. For nearly a decade, the United States had been steadily issuing sanctions against a raft of wealthy Russians with close financial and political ties to the Kremlin. Now the task force’s most ambitious goal was to confiscate their wealth, sell their assets and, whenever possible, send the profits to Ukraine. “We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets,” Biden declared, in a line that became something of an informal slogan. “We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”
Andrew Adams, a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who specialized in money-laundering investigations, was preparing to start a new job in the private sector when he got a call asking him if he wanted to lead the task force. He was given 90 minutes to decide. He said yes. Within 48 hours, Adams left New York for Washington, where he was handed the first of five cellphones, assigned an office and a laptop and introduced to his new colleagues in what he described as a succession of rapid-fire “‘West Wing’-style walk-and-talk” chats as he shuttled from room to room. Soon he was helping draft new laws to expand the government’s power to sell forfeited property and redirect the proceeds to Kyiv.
KleptoCapture’s basic concept was simple enough, but carrying it out would not be so straightforward. Once Adams and his team identified the yachts, luxury apartments and private jets of Russian billionaires, they would have to build cases to seize them. At a minimum, that meant proving who their owners were, which was no easy task. Practically every one of these assets existed in a byzantine realm known as the offshore financial system, where questions as simple as who owns what are obscured within labyrinths of shell companies, anonymous trusts and other legal structures. KleptoCapture was something new and ambitious, a serious effort to break through the offshore system and crack down on some of its most prolific clients.
Prosecutors would be facing off against some of the world’s wealthiest people — those with practically limitless resources at their disposal and legions of wealth managers, accountants and lawyers at their command. “As a prosecutor, you’re boxing with a blindfold on,” Adams told me. The task force’s work would show that these defenses could be breached much more quickly and efficiently than many assumed, provided that enough political will was brought to bear.
Though it’s often called a system, the offshore world is really more of an archipelago — a constellation of territories and nations operating with the same general aim of helping wealthy people move and hide their money. This world encompasses places as diverse as Hong Kong, Dubai, the Isle of Man, South Dakota and Curaçao and includes not only notorious tax havens like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands but also institutions and jurisdictions in the hearts of the countries that usually rank highest in global transparency indexes.
The system’s roots lie in the regulation-dodging behavior of banks and currency traders, particularly after World War II, as well as the innovations of mobsters and fraudsters who found in small island nations a perfect conduit for dirty cash. Wherever it exists, the offshore system’s basic mechanism is essentially the same: Set up a company — or another entity, like a trust — and then put someone else’s name on the paperwork. This company, often layered on other companies in similarly opaque jurisdictions, can then be used to avoid paying taxes, debts or fines. Even if the authorities do find out about it, getting their hands on the assets will be so time-consuming and expensive that they probably won’t bother.
Offshore companies have helped drug-trafficking gangs launder their proceeds, dictators siphon kickbacks into Paris and London apartments and governments targeted by sanctions procure military equipment. The same jurisdictions also provide more aboveboard amenities, such as helping run-of-the-mill wealthy people and corporations lower their tax bills: Some three-quarters of Fortune 500 companies are estimated to have tax-haven subsidiaries. According to the Tax Justice Network, a British advocacy group, as much as $32 trillion might be stashed in offshore accounts today, costing governments some $480 billion in lost revenue a year. U.S. authorities often waste months trying to coax records from an offshore registry, only to turn up another shell company, based in yet another offshore jurisdiction.
Few countries have been as intimately intertwined with this system as Russia. The men who grew rich from the fire sale of state assets after the Soviet Union’s collapse saw in offshore havens a means of keeping their newfound wealth out of the reach of capricious authorities. By the late 1990s, these newly minted “oligarchs” were using shell companies to help funnel as much as $2 billion out of the country a month.
A hallmark of Putin’s early presidency was that he established his dominance over the oligarchs, targeting a number of them with criminal prosecution. But rather than sever Russia from the offshore system, he recast it as a dimension of state power. Anonymous companies have been used to disguise the fortunes of Putin’s friends and family, bankroll Europe’s far right, make payments to sympathetic journalists and funnel cash to pro-Russian politicians around the world, including in Ukraine. A 2017 paper estimated that as much as 60 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product might be held in tax havens, six times the global average.
Ukraine’s elite, it’s worth noting, are similarly prolific users of the offshore system. The Pandora Papers, a 2021 leak of nearly 12 million financial documents, showed that Zelensky himself, along with his partners in a television production company, were beneficiaries of a network of offshore firms, some of which were used to buy upscale London property.
A central paradox of the offshore system is that its services are available to essentially anyone with enough money — meaning that, even as it benefits your friends, it can also empower your enemies. A nation’s corporations and ultrawealthy citizens can use the system to minimize their tax bills and funnel dark money into campaign donations for politicians who then ensure that the system remains intact. On the other side of the ledger, rivals of that same country’s government can use the system to dodge sanctions, fund proxies and launder illicit money.
Consider Delaware, where former President Biden served as senator for over three decades. The ease with which anyone can set up an anonymous shell company in the state means it is often mentioned in the same breath as traditional offshore jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Delaware has been used by ordinary corporations to dodge billions in taxes, but also by the Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to run weapons deals, Malaysian officials to drain public coffers and a Serbian drug lord to launder cash. Adversaries of the United States have long grasped this vulnerability. As Hal Weitzman notes in “What’s the Matter With Delaware?” Osama bin Laden himself once said that members of Al Qaeda were “as aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their hands.”
Washington’s attitude toward the offshore system began to change as the Panama Papers, a 2016 leak from a Panamanian law firm, and other leaks illustrated the system’s costs in granular detail: police officers unable to prosecute crimes, debts left unpaid, governments starved of revenue for schools and roads, all while dynastic wealth flowed frictionlessly from generation to generation. Though the first Trump administration was riddled with appointees and allies who availed themselves of the offshore system, Trump seemed to grasp that there was much to be gained and little to be lost by denouncing it. In a 2016 speech in Detroit, he promised to “bring back trillions of dollars from American businesses that is now parked overseas.” Trump’s first administration backed the Corporate Transparency Act, a landmark, bipartisan law enacted in 2021 that compelled shell companies registered in the United States to disclose their owners, which the White House hailed as “important progress in strengthening national security” and “supporting law enforcement.”
The Biden administration accelerated this trend by shifting resources to fighting illicit finance and pushing forward major anti-money-laundering legislation, though it was stymied in the Senate. Under Biden, the White House explicitly accepted the argument, long made by experts, that the offshore system undermines the government’s ability not only to collect taxes but also to enforce basic laws. “This whole issue of offshores and beneficial ownership information — this is the last major stumbling block for law enforcement,” John Cassara, a former intelligence officer and Treasury special agent, told me. “Who owns the yacht? Who owns the shopping center? Who owns the store? Whatever it is that they’re going after — we don’t know. There’s too many roadblocks.”
The Ukraine war redoubled the energy for reform. Everywhere, in the months after the invasion, the offshore system seemed to be coming unglued. Countries that happily accepted Russian dark money for years began to push through reforms: Cyprus, once known as Moscow on the Mediterranean for hosting some $200 billion of Russian money, invited the F.B.I. to help clean up its financial sector. Britain, a major repository of dark money, set up a registry forcing shell companies that hold real estate to say who actually owns them. (Historically, it has taken a leak like the Pandora Papers to learn that your landlord was, say, a member of Azerbaijan’s ruling family.)
Lawmakers even started pressuring the most notorious overseas tax havens in the Caribbean — many of which are British dependencies and territories — to open up their corporate registries. In the early days of the war, Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth College who specializes in offshore finance, mused in The Washington Post, “It would be a consummate irony if Putin himself accomplished with his invasion of Ukraine what a string of devastating offshore leaks could not: the self-destruction of the offshore financial system.”
Adams, the newly appointed head of KleptoCapture, had no illusions about the hurdles that the offshore system would present. Thanks to its robust protections, U.S. prosecutors had struggled to seize assets from far less formidable opponents than Russian oligarchs. Consider the case of Kevin Trudeau, an infomercial salesman ordered in 2009 to pay more than $37 million for making false claims in a weight-loss book. Trudeau stashed his money in a trust in the Cook Islands, a country of about 15,000 people in the South Pacific. For more than a decade, federal prosecutors struggled to get their hands on Trudeau’s cash, even though he has served a prison sentence. “Even the most powerful countries in the world,” Harrington told me, “like the United States, which can drone-assassinate people from a mile in the air, can’t collect debts from two-bit con men.”
KleptoCapture’s first major target represented a case in point. A little over a week after Biden’s address, Adams and his team located a boat nearly as long as a football field floating in the waters off the Caribbean island Antigua. Named the Amadea (Latin for “God’s love”), the yacht featured an infinity pool, a movie theater and a helicopter pad. Worth roughly $300 million, it was one of the most expensive luxury boats ever made.
The government had reason to believe the boat belonged to Suleiman Kerimov, a banking-and-mining magnate with Kremlin ties and one of Russia’s richest men, with a fortune estimated at the time at nearly $16 billion. Kerimov was briefly detained in France in 2017 on suspicion of fraud and money laundering, but the case was dropped; the following year, he was penalized by U.S. sanctions for his ties to the Russian government. To seize the Amadea, the United States did not need to bring a case against Kerimov, but rather against the yacht itself, using the controversial tool of “civil forfeiture,” which allowed authorities to confiscate and sell the vessel if they could prove a reasonable suspicion it had been involved in a crime — in this case, a sanctions violation.
Ship-tracking data showed that the yacht was leaving Antigua on its way to Fiji, and the team knew there was only a narrow window to seize it before it ended up in Vladivostok or some other Russian port, where it would be unreachable. The F.B.I. hurried to put together a case, and the wind seemed to be at the agency’s back. Support for Ukraine produced a “sea change,” Adams told me, as authorities in countries that usually would have taken months or years to turn over information snapped into action to help the task force.
KleptoCapture prosecutors were able to uncover records that they claimed showed that Kerimov owned the Amadea and that some $1.3 million had been spent on its upkeep. Because Kerimov was subject to U.S. sanctions and the payments had been routed through U.S. banks in U.S. dollars, they had grounds to seize the boat. When, on April 12, 2022, the Amadea pulled into Lautoka, a port town in Fiji’s sugar-cane region, federal agents were waiting. “This yacht seizure should tell every corrupt Russian oligarch that they cannot hide — not even in the remotest part of the world,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco said in a statement.
According to court documents, the agents discovered a world of nearly cartoonish opulence onboard — floors of “delicate marble and stones,” “precious woods,” a lobster tank, a pizza oven, a mosaic-tiled pool and what appeared to be a Fabergé egg. They also found a guest manifest, internal staff communications and crew members they grilled for information. (I reached out to Kerimov through the Russian Parliament, where he is a senator, and through a Russian lawyer who has represented him, but received no response. One of his representatives was previously quoted by the BBC as saying the allegation that he owns the Amadea was “denied and unproven.”)
Before the Amadea started making headlines, Kerimov rarely surfaced in international media. In 2006, he was briefly the focus of tabloid scrutiny when he smashed a $650,000 Ferrari into a tree on the French Riviera. The Panama Papers tied Kerimov to a series of shell companies that had paid $200 million to another set of shell companies, which were in turn linked to Putin’s childhood friend Sergei Roldugin, a cellist widely suspected of acting as a proxy for the president’s wealth.
The Pandora Papers connected Kerimov to another web of shell companies that funneled over $700 million through the Bank of New York Mellon over six years. Kerimov also apparently made use of the corporate secrecy offered by the United States itself: U.S. authorities claim he used “a complex series of legal structures and front persons” to obscure his interest in a Delaware company that was used to manage over $1 billion in assets, which Bloomberg reported included a 1 percent share in Elon Musk’s SpaceX, even after Kerimov was subject to sanctions.
In the case of the Amadea, the government’s success hinged largely on whether it could penetrate similarly opaque layers of secrecy to prove that Kerimov was the yacht’s “beneficial owner,” a term meant to differentiate between the people whose names are on the paperwork and those who actually call the shots. To mask Kerimov’s beneficial ownership, the Justice Department said, the Amadea had changed hands through a series of transactions between shell companies in different jurisdictions, none of which make ownership records public. Nowhere on any of these documents was Kerimov’s name to be found. Instead, the paper trail led to another Russian billionaire, Eduard Khudainatov, who was not a target of sanctions. (Khudainatov has since claimed to be the boat’s rightful owner and retained a U.S. law firm to sue for its release.)
Practically every one of the assets the task force seized provided a similar example of the tools the offshore system might offer its clients who were under sanctions. One $90 million yacht seized in Spain, the Tango, was purportedly owned by the oligarch Viktor Vekselberg through nested layers of companies and trusts registered in the British Virgin Islands, Panama and Russia. The ownership of two more megayachts, which U.S. authorities linked to Andrey Kostin, was apparently hidden behind opaque Cyprus investment funds on the eve of the sanctions imposed on him. The oligarch Oleg Deripaska had even reportedly been able to buy and sell a music studio in California thanks to the use of shell corporations.
The fact that Kerimov’s name was nowhere to be found on the Amadea’s papers was not particularly relevant, prosecutors argued: Interrogations of crew members, internal staff communications and other documents seized in the raid made it clear Kerimov was really calling the shots. The oligarch and his family had not only started sailing on the boat just after the usage rights were sold but also made changes like selecting new carpets and reading lamps and having the gym remodeled. Kerimov’s children approved a new pizza oven and spa beds. One crew member was even instructed to keep a couple of pairs of Kerimov’s favorite Nike trainers on board at all times. (Khudainatov’s lawyers dispute these characterizations and contend that Kerimov’s family merely chartered the boat.)
While the court case dragged on, the U.S. government was obligated to keep the Amadea in good condition — which, in this case, meant mooring fees and maintenance costs that amounted to nearly $1 million a month. The Amadea had the potential to be the task force’s signature triumph. Instead, it began to generate critical headlines, as the fees piled up. In December, The Washington Post published an article based on records it obtained detailing the Justice Department’s upkeep expenses. “The U.S. Seized a Russian Yacht,” the headline read. “Now You’re Paying for It.”
This was the state of affairs when Trump stormed back into office in February. Since then, the president’s open embrace of Russia has been accompanied by a similarly open defense of the legal loopholes that allow wealthy Russians and others to hide their money. On March 2, in a shift from the first Trump administration’s explicit support for the Corporate Transparency Act, Scott Bessent, the secretary of the Treasury, said the department would not enforce the law — in what he called a “victory for common sense.” The administration has also ordered the Justice Department to stop enforcing the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which banned businesses from paying bribes, and has imposed cuts on agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, that investigate tax evasion and money laundering. “The pace of change and unraveling of a lot of the protections and safeguards related to dirty money coming into the United States has been pretty dizzying,” Ian Gary, the head of the FACT Coalition, a transparency advocacy group, told me.
The administration’s permissive attitude toward corporate secrecy may at some point create friction with other aspects of its agenda. As the FACT Coalition points out, it’s not just Russian oligarchs who use the offshore system — it’s also fentanyl producers and international cartels. In 2023, Transparency International cataloged a series of recent cases in which anonymous shell companies, often registered right in the United States, were used to traffic fentanyl, heroin and methamphetamine and launder hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds around the world. In one case, a major Chinese synthetic-opioid-trafficking gang used front companies registered in Massachusetts to ship fentanyl and other drugs to dozens of U.S. states. In another, Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel was able to launder bulk cash from U.S. drug sales through a network of companies set up in Wyoming.
The same goes for geopolitics. Russia’s elite are hardly the only ones to use the system. Iran has regularly used nested layers of anonymous shell companies to procure military technology, sell oil in defiance of sanctions, fund its allies — and even, in one startling case, to own a skyscraper in Manhattan for more than two decades. In March, the Justice Department filed a civil-forfeiture suit against an aircraft purchased through a shell company supposedly for the benefit of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. Cassara, the former intelligence agent, has testified to Congress on how China’s use of offshore structures has fueled the fentanyl crisis, while Senator Mark Warner and Senator Mike Rounds have written about how Beijing has used companies whose owners are anonymous to expand its influence, thanks in part to the fact that setting these companies up in the United States is “often easier than getting a library card.” China has reportedly also used them to steal intellectual property and dodge tariffs.
KleptoCapture offered a powerful blueprint for how to combat these abuses. Over a month after the task force was disbanded, it scored a remarkable post-mortem victory: On March 10, the judge in the Amadea case, Dale E. Ho, agreed that Kerimov was the yacht’s owner, and about a week later, he allowed the government to sell the boat. (The case is under appeal.)
If it’s sold, the Amadea would hugely bolster the amount of assets that KleptoCapture was able to convert to cash, which previously included just about $5.4 million confiscated from the pro-Putin media mogul Konstantin Malofeev in an uncontested case that predated KleptoCapture’s formation and another half million from the sale of a precision machine known as a jig grinder seized from smugglers trying to bring it to Russia. (It is not clear whether the proceeds of the Amadea or any other assets the Justice Department eventually manages to sell will still be sent to Ukraine. In contrast to the sale of the jig grinder, which Monaco, Biden’s deputy attorney general, hailed as a “step for justice and restoration,” the Justice Department has not even issued a statement on its recent win.)
By and large, anticorruption activists have cheered KleptoCapture’s actions, framing them as proof that victories can be wrested from even the most determined and prolific clients of the offshore system. Due-process advocates, on the other hand, say it’s worth considering what it took to pull off those victories. In the Amadea case, the task force confiscated the assets of a noncitizen who was operating outside the United States and whose “crime” was a violation of sanctions — an inherently political designation, as the Trump administration’s recent blacklisting of the International Criminal Court has made vividly clear. Civil forfeiture, which is what allows the Justice Department to sell the boat without a conviction, has been extensively abused domestically, particularly by local police departments, and has been called “unfair, undemocratic and un-American” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
One of the most common defenses offered by advocates of the offshore system is that it offers its clients a way to protect their rightful property from authoritarian regimes, whose prodigious legal powers allow them to take whatever they want, whenever they want it, on whatever grounds they please. Indeed, Russians first turned to the system largely to escape the caprices of their own government. For that reason, experts say the best way to rein in the offshore system while preserving due process is to pass transparency laws like the Corporate Transparency Act, which compel shell companies to disclose who owns them.
The current dysfunction and partisan gridlock in Washington may make such laws seem unlikely, if not impossible, but Harrington, the Dartmouth professor, points out that the rapid change in attitudes that followed the Ukraine invasion shows how quickly and drastically the policy environment can change. Under sufficient pressure, wealth managers, lawyers and accountants were willing to cut ties with fantastically lucrative clients, while previously moribund anti-money-laundering agencies were inundated with new resources and staff. “When social norms solidify around the idea that something is wrong,” Harrington told me, “all of a sudden all kinds of things become possible, including the things we were told could never, ever, ever happen.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Chris Collins/The Image Bank, via Getty Images; Paul Taylor/Getty Images.
Read by James Patrick Cronin
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Brian St. Pierre
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