When Paul Manafort, the former Washington super-lobbyist, bought an apartment in Trump Tower in Manhattan for $3.7m in 2006, there was no reason at the time to read the hand of destiny in it.

Manafort had known Donald Trump for a couple of decades, and the two men, only three years apart in age, had friends and certain superficial traits in common, including their tastes for expensive suits and lavish waterfront real estate. But Manafort, then engaged in a lucrative political consulting business based in Kiev, the Ukrainan capital, had an air of keen intellect and global savvy that his landlord lacked.

When they crossed one another in the elevator, they were casually friendly, in an incurious kind of way, acquaintances have said. Less than a decade later, Trump and Manafort are much more closely entwined, to their mutual discomfort.

In the spring of 2016, as he sought to prevent a fight for the Republican presidential nomination from breaking out on the floor of the party’s national convention, Trump would hire the man from the elevator, a longtime political operator who happened to be a veteran of a similar struggle in 1976.

Five months later, the partnership would end in shambles, with Manafort forced to resign as Trump’s campaign chairman over his controversial work in the former Soviet Union and questions about his personal finances.

Don’t fool yourself. That money we have is blood money Andrea Manafort, Paul's daughter

The final straw was a newspaper article in August claiming that Trump’s attention span was so short that aides had to go on TV to catch his eye. “You think you gotta go on TV to talk to me?” Trump reportedly said to Manafort in front of other senior aides. “You treat me like a baby! Am I like a baby to you … Am I a fucking baby, Paul?”

Manafort resigned and, that same day, in something of a signature move, set up a shell company which would soon receive millions of dollars in loans, including $13m from two businesses with ties to Trump, according to media reports. The purpose of the loans was unclear.

The public may soon know more about Manafort’s money, however. As part of his investigation of alleged ties between the Trump presidential campaign and Russian operatives, special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to be conducting a major money-laundering investigation of Manafort’s activities going back to at least 2006.

The presence of Mueller, a former FBI director, and his mission to investigate alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, represent a twist neither Trump nor Manafort could have foreseen.

Mueller was appointed after Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey and since his appointment, his portfolio has gradually expanded to include Manafort’s business affairs.

Manafort has not been charged with a crime, and a spokesman denied the allegations against him.

Former prosecutors believe Mueller’s interest in Manafort indicates an effort to get Manafort to testify about the inner workings of the Trump presidential campaign. If Mueller can get Manafort to flip allegiances, his testimony could strengthen any potential obstruction of justice or campaign finance case against Trump or his coterie.

So far, Manafort, 68, does not appear to be cooperating with the investigation. Justice department lawyers have informed Manafort, however, that he is a target – as opposed to a witness, or a subject – meaning that an indictment might not be far off. And that could change everything.

“To date, it does not look like he has shown any interest in cooperating, at least publicly,” said Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at the University of Alabama law school. “How that looks when he’s staring down the barrel of an indictment is a different question.

“For instance, if prosecutors were to make a money-laundering case on him, there is some pretty long potential sentence time. And he might decide that he would rather cooperate than spend 20 years in a federal penitentiary.

“It may be a question of whether he wants to die in prison or not.”

‘The Torturers’ Lobby’

There are multiple versions of how Trump and Manafort met. The political operative and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone claims to have introduced the two at the 1988 Republican national convention in New Orleans. Another version has the introduction made by the late Roy Cohn, Trump’s former lawyer and his escort through the sybaritic 1980s New York nightlife.

Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater in the 1980s. Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

Stone, one of Manafort’s earliest professional associates, is in a position to know. After successfully working to elect Ronald Reagan in 1980, Manafort and Stone opened a lobbying firm with associates Charles Black and, later, Peter Kelly. The firm came to specialize in cultivating favors in Washington on behalf of foreign clients with tricky images.

“Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly lined up most of the dictators in the world that we could find,” Stone said in a podcast last year. “Pro-western dictators of course. Dictators are in the eye of the beholder.”

It wasn’t empty boasting. A 1982 article in Spy magazine ranked the firm at the top of its “blood-on-the-hands” index of Washington lobbyists, for its foreign accounts from Somalia to Zaire to the Dominican Republic. A 1992 Center for Public Integrity report titled The Torturers’ Lobby detailed payments the firm had taken from foreign regimes, and corresponding US aid that flowed to those regimes.

The firm’s client list included Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko (1989); the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos (1985); Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi (1985); and regimes in Kenya and Nigeria accused of committing human rights abuses. Manafort had a relationship with Abdul Rahman el-Assir, a Lebanese arms dealer who by Manafort’s own account paid him almost $87,000 in 1994 to advise a French presidential candidate. In 1991 alone, Manafort’s firm took in more than $3m in fees to represent regimes in Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Savimbi’s group Unita, according to the CPI report.

Manafort’s strength as a lobbyist was directly related to his skill as a political adviser, and the relationships he built by re-entering the campaign cycle every four years. He played central roles in the Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Bob Dole presidential campaigns. Trump hired him in part for his experience on the 1976 Gerald Ford campaign, when Manafort helped to beat back a potential convention challenge by Reagan.

At times, Manafort’s extreme efficacy at making Washington work for his clients attracted the wrong kind of attention. In one infamous episode in the mid-1980s, Manafort, representing a developer, extracted a $43m grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development for housing in New Jersey that local officials did not want.

Called to testify before Congress about the deal, Manafort was uncowed. “I will stipulate for the purposes of today that you can characterize this as influence-peddling,” he said.

The Ukraine years

Manafort’s move into the former Soviet bloc after his most active Washington years set him on a course that would sharpen questions about the Trump campaign and Russia ties, and eventually fuel the investigation now placing everyone from the president on down in legal jeopardy.

In the autumn of 2005, Manafort and associates opened an office at 4 Sophia Street in Kiev. For the next decade, Manafort would perform consulting work for the Ukrainian Party of Regions, whose leader, Viktor Yanukovych, had made a botched grab at the presidency a year earlier.

Manafort had been recruited by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, the party’s main backer, to rehabilitate Yanukovych and advance the party. “As a person, he [Yanukovych] is growing,” Manafort told the Guardian’s Luke Harding in 2007. “I think the time out of power helped him.” Yanukovych won the presidency in 2010.

“The role that I played in that administration was to help bring Ukraine into Europe, and we did,” Manafort said in an interview last April. “We succeeded.”

Manafort’s work was not limited to Ukrainian politics. He entered business relationships with Ukrainian oligarch Dmytro Firtash and with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Putin. It is unclear when Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska ended, if it has. Earlier this week, the Washington Post reported that during his time as Trump’s campaign chairman, Manafort offered Deripaska “private briefings” on the election.

During the Ukrainian years, the lobbyist’s financial arrangements became increasingly byzantine. After Yanukovych fell in 2014, a hand-written ledger was recovered at his house, which showed $12.7m paid to Manafort. An ensuing Ukrainian investigation found no evidence of illicit payments to Manafort.



But multiple payments from the ledger have been confirmed, including $1.2m that arrived to Manafort’s consulting firm in the United States via companies once registered in Belize, according to an Associated Press investigation. Federal prosecutors are looking at that money flow, as well as accounts tied to Manafort in Cyprus, a tax haven; and at contemporaneous real estate investments by Manafort in New York, Florida, Virginia and Los Angeles.

Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, a former client of Manafort’s. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Manafort’s spokesman has pointed out that it is not illegal to be paid for foreign work. People who conduct that work are required by law, however, to register with the US government as foreign agents, which Manafort failed to do at the time. His status as a foreign agent was officially unknown when he ran Trump’s presidential campaign.

It was only in June of this year that Manafort registered his years of lobbying activity in the former Soviet bloc.

In thousands of hacked text messages posted in 2014 on a Ukrainian website, his daughter Andrea, a lawyer, said his activities in Ukraine were “legally questionable”.

“Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort wrote in one message to her sister, Jessica. “That money we have is blood money.”

Will Manafort flip?

In the early morning hours of 26 July, Manafort and his wife Kathleen were in bed at home in Alexandria, Virginia, when FBI agents entered without knocking, guns drawn, to seize files, computer drives and other potential evidence.

Afterwards, Trump came to Manafort’s defense. “I’ve always found Paul Manafort to be a very decent man,” the president said. “He’s like a lot of other people, probably makes consultant fees from all over the place, who knows, I don’t know, but I thought it was pretty tough stuff to wake him up, perhaps his family was there.”

But Manafort had reason to expect clashes with law enforcement. The Wall Street Journal and CNN reported this week that Manafort had been under government surveillance before the campaign, possibly as early as 2014.

Based on that surveillance and other potential unknown activity, investigators are likely to already know much more about Manafort’s activities than has been made public. They may seek to convert that intelligence into knowledge about Trump’s activities, said Vance, the former prosecutor.

“This is someone who had an apartment in Trump Tower, who was in meetings with Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr, and he presumably spoke to the president very frequently,” she said. “The question is, what did he see firsthand? What did he observe, what did he participate in, what did he read, what did he know?”

Manafort CV

Born 1 April, 1949, in New Britain, Connecticut

Family His father was the popular Republican mayor of a working-class, largely Democratic town. His mother was a homemaker with three sons.

Education Georgetown University

Career Political adviser to the presidential campaigns of Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush. One of the most powerful Washington lobbyists of the 1980s, whose firm represented real estate interests and other at home, and foreign clients including a roster of world dictators. Later took political consulting talents to the former Soviet bloc where he was a top adviser to the Kremlin-aligned Party of Regions in Ukraine.