The Trump SoHo, an incongruous condominium hotel leering over Lower Manhattan, has something of a troubled past. Built over a cache of human remains, the 46-story complex never attracted as many foreign buyers as the Trump family had hoped, an inconvenient truth that didn’t stop Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr. from allegedly inventing cheerier sales numbers. As The New York Times reported last year, the two Trump siblings had been quoted in 2008 and 2009 as saying that about 6 in 10 units had been sold, when the true percentage was about a third of that figure—one of several misleading statements that led a group of unhappy buyers to sue in 2010. The following year, Donald Trump settled the civil case, with defendants returning 90 percent of buyers’ deposits in exchange for an agreement not to cooperate with a parallel criminal investigation being pursued by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Without any witnesses, District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. ultimately dropped the criminal case.

What wasn’t made public at the time, was how close prosecutors were to bringing felony fraud charges against Ivanka and Donald Jr. According to a new report by ProPublica, the two Trump children were under investigation by the Major Economic Crimes Bureau for misleading investors who bought property at the Trump SoHo. “They knew it was wrong,” said one person who saw e-mails in which Ivanka and Donny discussed inflating sales figures. (In a response to ProPublica, Alan Garten, chief legal officer for the Trump Organization, described the investors’ complaints as a “simple case of buyers’ remorse.”)

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