Towers Of Secrecy - Piercing The Shell Companies u6ej

Towers of Secrecy: Piercing the Shell Companies From Manhattan condominiums to California mansions to gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn, shell companies are increasingly pervasive in the world of real estate. These articles explore the people behind the opaque deals. For more than a year, The New York Times examined the influx of global cash fueling the city’s high-end real estate boom. The investigation pierced the secrecy of more than 200 shell companies that have owned condominiums at one complex, the Time Warner Center. Spurred in part by a series of stories by The Times, the de Blasio istration imposed new disclosure requirements on shell companies buying or selling property in New York City. The Times had found: 

Nearly half of the most expensive residential properties in the United States are now purchased anonymously through shell companies.

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The real estate industry does little examination of buyers’ identities or backgrounds, and there is no legal requirement for it to do so.

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At the Time Warner Center, 37 percent of the condominiums are owned by foreigners. At least 16 foreigners who have owned in the building have been the subject of government inquiries, either personally or as heads of companies.

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Part 2 of the Times investigation focuses on Jho Low, a financier who is close to the family of Malaysia’s prime minister. He was involved in purchasing five luxury properties in the United States costing more than $140 million from 2010 to 2012. The U.S. Department of Justice began investigating the prime minister, Najib Razak, in response to The Times article.

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Part 3 takes us to India. As complaints of unfinished homes mounted against Kabul Chawla, a New Delhi builder, an opaque corporate entity bought a $19 million condominium at the Time Warner Center.

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Part 4 focuses on a politically prominent Mexican family, the Murats, who have purchased homes in the United States.

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Part 5 in the series is about an enclave of powerful Russians including Andrey Vavilov. Wealth that has been accrued in the chaotic capitalism of post-Soviet Russia is a powerful force in the luxury condominium boom that is changing New York.

Part 1: Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate

Construction of the Time Warner Center, whose two lighted towers are at center, ignited the development of a billionaires row of residential towers overlooking Central Park.

On the 74th floor of the Time Warner Center, Condominium 74B was purchased in 2010 for $15.65 million by a secretive entity called 25CC ST74B L.L.C. It traces to the family of Vitaly Malkin, a former Russian senator and banker who was barred from entering Canada because of suspected connections to organized crime. Last fall, another shell company bought a condo down the hall for $21.4 million from a Greek businessman named Dimitrios Contominas, who was arrested a year ago as part of a corruption sweep in Greece. A few floors down are three condos owned by another shell company, Columbus Skyline L.L.C., which belongs to the family of a Chinese businessman and contractor named Wang Wenliang. His construction company was found housing workers in New Jersey in hazardous, unsanitary conditions. Behind the dark glass towers of the Time Warner Center looming over Central Park, a majority of owners have taken steps to keep their identities hidden, ing condos in trusts, limited liability companies or other entities that shield their names. By piercing the secrecy of more than 200 shell companies, The New York Times documented a decade of ownership in this iconic Manhattan way station for global money transforming the city’s real estate market. Many of the owners represent a cross-section of American wealth: chief executives and celebrities, doctors and lawyers, technology entrepreneurs and Wall Street traders. But The Times also found a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, at least 16 of whom have been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies. The cases range from housing and environmental violations to financial fraud. Four owners have been arrested, and another four have been the subject of fines or penalties for illegal activities. The foreign owners have included government officials and close associates of officials from Russia, Colombia, Malaysia, China, Kazakhstan and Mexico.

They have been able to make these multimillion-dollar purchases with few questions asked because of United States laws that foster the movement of largely untraceable money through shell companies. Vast sums are flowing unchecked around the world as never before — whether motivated by corruption, tax avoidance or investment strategy, and enabled by an ever-more-borderless economy and a proliferation of ways to move and hide assets. Alighting in places like London, Singapore and other financial centers, this flood of capital has created colonies of the foreign super-rich, with the attendant resentments and controversies about class inequality made tangible in the glass and steel towers reordering urban landscapes. Where it made landfall in New York, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, was the Time Warner Center. More than a decade on, even as a row of sky-piercing palaces rises on the southern rim of Central Park, the Time Warner Center remains the New York archetype of the global phenomenon, reflecting intertwined trends — the increasing sums of foreign money in high-end real estate and the growing use of shell companies. About $8 billion is spent each year for New York City residences that cost more than $5 million each, more than triple the amount of a decade ago, according to the website PropertyShark. Just over half of those sales last year were to shell companies. The Times examination reveals the workings of an opaque economy for this global wealth. Lacking incentive or legal obligation to identify the sources of money, an entire chain of people involved in high-end real estate sales — lawyers, ants, title brokers, escrow agents, real estate agents, condo boards and building workers — often operate with blinders on. As Rudy Tauscher, a former manager of the condos at Time Warner, said: “The building doesn’t know where the money is coming from. We’re not interested.” As an indication of how well-cloaked shell company ownership is, it took The Times more than a year to unravel the ownership of shell companies with condos in the Time Warner Center, by searching business and court records from more than 20 countries, interviewing dozens of people with close knowledge of the complex, examining hundreds of property records and connecting the dots from lawyers or relatives named on deeds to the actual buyers. Yet in some cases it is nearly impossible to establish with certainty the source of money behind shell companies. Purchasers can shell companies in the names of ants, lawyers or relatives. Purchases are often made not just by individuals but on behalf of groups of investors or numerous family , further obscuring the origin of the funds. What is more, ownership of shell companies can be shifted at any time, with no indication in property records. The high-end real estate market has become less and less transparent — and more alluring for those abroad with assets they wish to keep anonymous — even as the United States pushes other nations to help stanch the flow of American money leaving the country to avoid taxes. Yet for all the concerns of law enforcement officials that shell companies can hide illicit gains, regulatory efforts to require more openness from these companies have failed.

A Global Neighborhood Overlooking Central Park The Times traced condominiums to people from all over the world and many different industries. Here are some people who have been tied either personally or through close relatives to Time Warner:

“We like the money,” said Raymond Baker, the president of Global Financial Integrity, a Washington nonprofit that tracks the illicit flow of money. “It’s that simple. We like the money that comes into our s, and we are not nearly as judgmental about it as we should be.” In some ways, officials are clamoring for the foreign wealthy. In New York, tax breaks for condominium developments benefit owners looking for a second, or third, residence in one of Manhattan’s premier buildings. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on his weekly radio program in 2013, shortly before leaving office: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend.”

Among the Time Warner Center owners identified by The Times are at least 17 billionaires on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the world’s richest people. Five of the world’s leading art collectors own units, as do eight people who have been chief executives of major companies. And it has been home to numerous celebrities, including the singers Jimmy Buffett and Ricky Martin, the New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and the talk show host Kelly Ripa. A look behind some doors revealed more complicated tales. Units 72B and 51E are owned by the Amantea Corporation, which The Times traced to a mining magnate named Anil Agarwal. His company was fined for polluting a major river near a copper mine in Zambia, which sickened nearby residents. And judicial committees in his native India determined that his company had violated the land rights of an indigenous tribe near a proposed mine.

When Anna Ai Fang purchased Condominium 58E in 2004 for $2.1 million, the forwarding address on the deed was a decidedly more modest location: her dorm, Ruggles Hall, at Columbia University. At the time, her father, Fang Fenglei, had ended a long career running state-d banks in China and would soon begin working for Goldman Sachs. Unit 62CE belongs to Prime International Management Group, which in turn is controlled by Alexander Varshavsky, who runs auto dealerships in Russia. Few, if any, questions were raised by those involved in the deal when Mr. Varshavsky paid cash for the 4,300-square-foot apartment. But his condo shopping did not go unnoticed. “Agents observed defendant Varshavsky enter several buildings in the Central Park area with a real estate agent, including 25 Columbus Circle, New York, New York,” according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court in Newark, recounting surveillance by federal agents at the Time Warner Center. “In June 2011 defendant Varshavsky purchased an apartment located at that address for approximately $20.5 million in cash.” In December 2013, Mr. Varshavsky, who is now a United States citizen, was charged with failing to report the existence of a foreign bank . A lawyer for Mr. Varshavsky disputed the allegations and said he expected the complaint to be dropped. Meanwhile the case is pending, and Mr. Varshavsky posted bail — his Time Warner condo.

Ownership Becomes Opaque It was not all that long ago that Columbus Circle was the makeshift residence of dozens of homeless people squatting at the site of the abandoned New York Coliseum, the Robert Moses-era convention center. The demolition of the coliseum and the creation of the Time Warner Center — two residential towers with a retail atrium, corporate offices and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel — transformed the area into a vibrant shopping and dining destination in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The condos also sparked development of a billionaires row of residential towers overlooking Central Park. By marketing the condos to wealthy foreigners, Time Warner’s developer was at the forefront of luring cash from overseas to New York real estate. Twenty-six percent of the original sales were to people from other countries, a proportion that has grown to more than half among recent buyers. The complex’s dark glass exterior offers a sheen of both exclusivity and secrecy. It is no more transparent inside. There are no door buzzers or mail slots with residents’ names. You are unlikely to bump into neighbors wandering the halls because only about a third of the owners live there at any one time, according to people familiar with their comings and goings. The building’s annual holiday party is a lonely affair, they say. “It’s a really closely guarded secret who is in that building,” said Al D’Elia, an architect who has worked there. “It’s just the way they treat you, what you have to do to get in the building.”

The hallways are spare, but many apartments are loaded with the sort of amenities that have become standard in luxury real estate: panoramic views, stone bathtubs and custom everything — sound systems, millwork, lighting fixtures. Even the numbering of the floors was a bit of upwardly mobile sleight of hand, calibrated to enhance the perception of what the developer, the Related Companies, marketed as “Five Star Living.” So, the 80th-floor penthouses are actually on 53. The building’s layout and protocols facilitate anonymity. There are multiple entrances to its 192 condos — not just through the two towers’ main doors, but also through an adjacent parking garage and through the Time Warner Center shops. And while the building has a book listing the names of people associated with units, the owners do not have to be listed for them to get access to the building. They could walk in alongside someone whose name is in the book. Or, if they are cleared to visit, they could enter the complex through the shops or the hotel, and then take the secure elevators to the condos. “An owner could be obscured from our view,” said David Spector, who helped manage the condos until 2011. Over the decade since the Time Warner condos came on the market, high-end real estate sales in general have become increasingly opaque. In 2003, one-third of the units sold in Time Warner were purchased by shell companies. By 2014, that figure was over 80 percent. Across the United States in recent years, nearly half the residential purchases of over $5 million were made by shell companies rather than named people, according to data from First American Data Tree analyzed by The Times. Public records, dating back to at least the 1800s in New York, set real estate apart as more transparent than bank s or stock portfolios. “There’s a whole Jeffersonian rhetoric about land ownership,” said Hendrik Hartog, a professor of the history of American law at Princeton. “There was a goal to make land transparent, and it was justified by civic values and a whole range of moral judgments like not hiding ownership.” One type of corporate structure now commonly used in real estate transactions, limited liability companies, or L.L.C.s, did not even exist in the United States before the late 1970s. At first, they were primarily used by oil and gas traders in Wyoming to shield individual owners from liability — if, say, a well worker was hurt — and to avoid taxation of both the company and the investor. Nothing in the genesis of limited liability companies suggested they would be used to purchase personal real estate, said Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama professor who worked on L.L.C. policy while at the Internal Revenue Service in the 1990s. However, L.L.C.s are now commonly used in real estate for privacy, wealth transfer or shared ownership.

Condo ownership in the Time Warner Center reflects the dual trends of increasing foreign money in high-end real estate and the rising use of shell companies.

What becomes clear combing real estate records is that many Time Warner buyers have taken even greater steps, beyond using L.L.C.s, to keep their names out of sight. On many deeds, the line for the buyer’s signature is left blank, is illegible or is signed by a lawyer or other representative. Phone numbers are ed under lawyers’ names; the owner’s line on renovation permits is signed by Time Warner staff ; tax statements are addressed to the L.L.C.s. And because most of the sales are in cash, there are few mortgage statements, another public document that might identify an owner or trigger scrutiny. A spokeswoman for the Related Companies, Joanna Rose, said the developer had followed all federal and local laws in its sales at the Time Warner Center, adding, “With all of our sales, we know the identity of the purchasers.” However, documents and interviews with a half-dozen people involved in the sales show that in many cases, the company did not know the actual source of the money behind the sales. David J. Wine, the former vice chairman of the Related Companies, spoke bluntly of the lack of concern with buyers’ identities. “You pretty much go by financial capacity,” Mr. Wine said. “Can they afford it? They sign the contract, they put their money down with no contingency and they close. They have to show the money, and that is it. I don’t think you will find a single new developer where it’s different.” Real estate agents say commitment to anonymity is essential. “One thing of being a high-end broker is we have to protect the privacy of our clients,” said Hall F. Willkie, president of Brown Harris Stevens. “If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have them as clients. We’re very much like private bankers in that sense.”

An entrance to the condos at the Time Warner Center, where the owners include a growing number of wealthy foreigners. At least 16 foreigners who have owned in the building have been the subject of government inquiries, either personally or as heads of companies.

The shift to secrecy also reflects a fundamental change in the ownership structure of luxury real estate in New York. Many of Manhattan’s finest addresses were traditionally organized as co-ops in which residents were t owners of the building. Co-op boards generally prefer full-time residents and often subject would-be buyers to excruciating scrutiny. “Those co-ops wouldn’t accept billionaires, especially foreigners,” said Raphael De Niro, a broker at Douglas Elliman. By contrast, Time Warner and most new luxury buildings are condos; residents own individual units and boards have less power to screen prospective buyers. In addition, at the Time Warner Center and many other buildings, if a condo board rejects a buyer, building rules say all the residents have to chip in to buy the unit, creating a disincentive for the board to be too picky.

“That’s the joy of the condos,” said Julie Maxey-Allison, an agent for Brown Harris Stevens. “That’s why the L.L.C.s buy them. It’s a way foreigners can do whatever they want here.” In fact, interviews show, condo boards are not always aware of the individuals behind the shell companies. Seamus McMahon, a former Time Warner owner, said he had no idea units were sold to of the Saudi royal family while he was on the board in 2006, including one connected to Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of a former Saudi king, and her husband, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the former ambassador to the United States. A few years earlier, Princess Haifa had been in the news because of reports that some of her money had gone to a figure who aided the Sept. 11 hijackers. (The United States commission that investigated the attacks found no evidence that the money assisted the hijackers, either directly or indirectly.) Mr. McMahon said the Related Companies did not usually share details about buyers with board and did not inform them of the Saudi sale. “They probably asked to keep it quiet,” he said, referring to the Saudis. “Related would have kept it quiet.”

Behind Door 74B When the company with the complicated name of 25CC ST74B plunked down $15.65 million in 2010 for a condo in the Time Warner Center, there was no telling whose money was in play. But in January 2013, the company accused a contractor of overbilling in a classic New York City renovation dispute. The lawsuit identified the apartment’s owner as “Vitaly Malkin, a Russian senator who is domiciled in Russia and generally is not present in New York.” Less than two weeks later, a new complaint was filed with a change: It now said the apartment was owned by a trust whose beneficiaries included Mr. Malkin’s son, Leonid, and that Mr. Malkin was neither a trustee nor a beneficiary of the trust. In a deposition, a former employee of the contractor said that while he understood that the client was “the senator, the Russian oligarch,” he was not allowed to refer to the client by name. If he did use the family name, he said he was reprimanded and told “to make sure I just used 25CC.” In fact, Vitaly Malkin had been in public view for more than a decade, sometimes tied to controversy. Mr. Malkin, 62, made a fortune in metals and banking and was one of the wealthiest of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper legislative house. He resigned from the Council in March 2013 after Aleksei Navalny, the Russian anticorruption activist, revealed that he had failed to disclose property he owned in Canada and that he had dual Israeli citizenship.

Vitaly Malkin, a former Russian senator and banker, shaking hands with President Boris N. Yeltsin in 1998. A trust traced to Mr. Malkin’s family owns a condo in the Time Warner Center.

But the case that has dogged Mr. Malkin involves a 1996 deal to restructure Angola’s $5 billion debt to Russia, an arrangement that has become a symbol of official plundering in Africa among anticorruption advocates. The debt, incurred during Angola’s long civil war, was cut to $1.5 billion in a deal partly negotiated by Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian-born businessman. But the debt payment was conveyed through an intermediary company in which Mr. Malkin had a share, according to documents from the Canadian government and Swiss investigators. When Angola paid the debt, Mr. Gaydamak received $130 million of the payment and Mr. Malkin received $48.8 million, the documents show. A portion also went to various Angolan officials, including President José Eduardo dos Santos, who received $36 million, according to a report by the advocacy group Corruption Watch. Mr. dos Santos and Mr. Gaydamak did not respond to inquiries from The Times. “Everyone knew exactly what happened,” Rafael Marques, an Angolan journalist and activist, said of the payment to the president. “That money was for personal enrichment. They were kickbacks.” The episode became an issue for Mr. Malkin in 2007, when he tried to gain entry to Canada, where he had business interests. Two years earlier, a Canadian immigration official had deemed Mr. Malkin “inissible,” writing that he had “massively misrepresented” his net worth and how he obtained his assets, according to court documents obtained by The Times. When Mr. Malkin reapplied in 2007, among the issues was his role as Mr. Gaydamak’s banker in the Angola debt deal, the documents show. In addition to facing questions in the debt deal, Mr. Gaydamak was under investigation in in connection with arms sales to the Angolan government. He was later sentenced to three years in a French prison for money laundering and tax fraud.

Kuito, Angola, was heavily damaged in the country’s civil war. Fees paid to middlemen like Mr. Malkin in the restructuring of Angola’s war debt to Russia came under criticism.

Canadian immigration officials again declared Mr. Malkin inissible, this time because of what they called an “extended association with persons suspected to be involved in organized crime and money laundering.” In court papers, Mr. Malkin vehemently denied involvement in organized crime, calling the allegations by the Canadian authorities uned and noting that he had been free to travel to other countries. Mr. Malkin sued the Canadian authorities, and in June 2009 a judge ruled that the case should be reviewed because Mr. Malkin had not been given a chance to respond to the allegations. Mr. Malkin was allowed to visit Canada in 2012, his lawyer, Gregory Sidlofsky of Toronto, said in an email, adding, “Canadian authorities never had nor provided any evidence of any wrongdoing by Mr. Malkin.” In the Angola debt case, he said, Swiss investigators ultimately found no wrongdoing. Mr. Sidlofsky said the $48.8 million was a dividend reflecting his client’s share of the intermediary company. As for the long-running renovation of the Time Warner condo, he said, “Mr. Malkin does not own the apartment, nor has he had any recent involvement in the renovation.” The American Bar Association suggests that government officials like Mr. Malkin warrant enhanced scrutiny in real estate deals, but its guidelines are voluntary. Marc Isaacs, the New York lawyer who handled the condo purchase, said his firm’s client vetting goes beyond an online search, but he would not elaborate. Asked about Mr. Malkin, Mr. Isaacs said he could not discuss specific clients. The real estate agents on the Time Warner deal included Brenda S. Powers and Elizabeth L. Sample, who represent many foreign clients and who live in the building. Ms. Sample said that her focus when vetting buyers was this: “They have to have the money. Other than that, that’s it. That’s all we need.”

Two real estate agents, Elizabeth L. Sample, left, and Brenda S. Powers, have represented a number of foreign clients in transactions at the Time Warner Center.

A Blind Eye Federal banking guidelines are clear: “Banks should take all reasonable steps to ensure that they do not knowingly or unwittingly assist in hiding or moving the proceeds of corruption.” This means screening customers to determine whether they are “politically exposed people” — foreign officials and their relatives and associates — and filing a “suspicious activity report” if the customers transfer unusually large amounts of money. But such checks are not required on money flowing into the country through shell companies to purchase high-end real estate. L.L.C.s and other entities can be established in various states without revealing their true owners. Even when such companies move money through a bank , banks are not required to know who is behind the transaction because of a loophole in the law. In many ways, the government has allowed the real estate industry to turn a blind eye to the source of money used to buy luxury properties. It might not have turned out this way. In the late 1990s, after congressional hearings highlighted corrupt foreign officials with money in the United States, the Justice Department sought to expand the list of industries required to screen the financial activities of politically exposed people. That included jewelry sales, hedge funds and real estate. The proposal gained momentum after Sept. 11, when the Justice Department pushed to make it part of the Patriot Act. The rules were included in the law and handed to the Treasury Department to put into effect. The real estate and legal professions sprang into action, arguing that background checks were impractical and would hurt the economy. “The money-laundering risks presented by real estate closings are relatively small, compared to other types of financial assets,” the American Land Title Association said in comments on the proposed rules. Businesses insisted that tainted money was not likely to flow into real estate. “Anonymity and liquidity, two characteristics important to money launderers, typically do not exist in real estate transactions,” the Dechert law firm wrote. The industry’s assertions ignored the increasing use of shell companies and how often wealthy foreigners sought out high-end real estate as a safe deposit box. At the Time Warner Center, for instance, at least a dozen purchases would have received greater scrutiny under the expanded rules. But the Treasury Department never imposed the requirement on real estate or some other industries. Similarly, a proposal to extend the concept of the “know your customer” banking rule to the identities of people behind L.L.C.s and other shell companies that open bank s has been stalled for nearly three years in the Treasury Department. Banking associations say it would impose undue costs on them because there are no reliable federal or state databases with shell company owners. In fact, ing shell companies has become profitable for states like Delaware and Nevada, which also have lobbied against transparency. “I don’t see some kind of global effort to stop all this because the money’s too good,” said David M. Crane, a Syracuse University law professor who oversaw the United Nations’ effort to recover money from Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who was convicted of war crimes and thought to have plundered his country. A number of states do not require people forming companies to reveal the names of the owners or show any identification. This opacity presents challenges for law enforcement officials, who say billions of dollars in suspicious money move through shell companies each year. “It can be very, very difficult to penetrate who is the beneficial owner of these shell companies,” said Leslie R. Caldwell, chief of the Justice Department’s criminal division. She said that the department’s Kleptocracy Initiative has found that foreign officials often use shell companies or immediate family to move large amounts of money to United States real estate. In 2010, a Senate committee investigating corrupt money moving into the country drew attention to a shell company used by the sister of the president of Gabon to buy a $2 million residence in Manhattan, and to an L.L.C. used by the son of the president of Equatorial Guinea to purchase a $30 million home in Malibu, Calif. The proliferation of shell companies incorporated in the United States has hurt Washington’s attempt to get other countries to crack down on Americans who move money offshore to avoid taxes. “We are in a totally inconsistent position,” said Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who pushed for transparency in shell companies when he served in the Senate. “We’re way behind in of keeping up with what the international standard is, and it weakens our argument when we go to try to crack down the use of these offshore tax havens.” About a year ago, after the Group of 8 industrialized nations issued goals requiring identification of shell company owners, a British representative met with Justice Department officials to complain about the United States’ failure to comply. According to two people at the meeting, the British representative, Dominic Martin, delivered a stern message: The lax American laws were being used by other countries as an excuse for inaction.

Such a message resonates with Justice Department officials who have advocated tightening the rules. “For a long time we’ve taken the view that you have to focus on the people that manage the gateway to the financial system, and those guys are not only the banks,” said Stefan Cassella, a Justice Department lawyer. “Bad guys who are trying to invest money in the financial system — they use lawyers, they use ants, they use real estate, they use jewelers and private jets.”

Transactions Amid Investigations Just two months after the collapse of the Ponzi scheme run by Bernard L. Madoff in 2008, another Ponzi schemer was arrested: James Nicholson, whose Time Warner condominium was frozen. Mr. Nicholson’s $8.5 million unit would become the only one in the complex to be seized and sold off by law enforcement officials, even though other owners have been accused of wrongdoing. The difference is that Mr. Nicholson is an American citizen. Foreigners who buy real estate in the United States often have an easier time keeping it out of the reach of investigators, victims and plaintiffs back home. Take the case of Pablo Ardila, a former provincial governor in Colombia known for hunting trophies and lavish spending. Mr. Ardila acknowledged to The Times in 2004 that he and his parents had set up a shell company to buy a $4 million condo in the building. In 2007, while he was in office, Mr. Ardila was arrested and immediately jailed by local officials on charges of enriching himself illicitly. While Mr. Ardila was behind bars, the shell company sold the condo, making a $2 million profit. By then, the forwarding address on property records was no longer in Colombia, but went to a Jhon Ballesteros, in Weston, Fla. John Burger, a real estate agent who represented the seller, said recently that he did not know Mr. Ardila was involved. An extensive Colombian government analysis of Mr. Ardila’s holdings filed in court failed to unearth the Time Warner condo. Despite international agreements, the authorities in smaller countries have difficulty recovering assets from abroad. “Judges in Colombia have been struggling a lot to get this money back to Colombia,” said Elisabeth Ungar Bleier, executive director of the Colombia branch of Transparency International, an anticorruption nonprofit. Mr. Ardila was released from jail after two years and nine months without having been convicted. However, Arnulfo Mendez Castro, a spokesman for Colombian prosecutors, said Mr. Ardila was still under investigation. Mr. Ardila’s lawyer, Mauricio Cristancho, said his client was the victim of “an absurd prosecution.” Despite what Mr. Ardila had told The Times about the condo, the lawyer said, the unit belonged to Mr. Ardila’s father, a wealthy businessman. He said Mr. Ballesteros, who did not reply to inquiries, was an assistant to the family. The Ardila condo was not the only foreign-owned unit in Time Warner that was sold after an owner faced an investigation. Mr. Contominas, the Greek businessman, sold his condo nine months after he was arrested in January 2014 and accused of using a commercial loan for personal expenditures. His lawyer, Grigorios Tsolias, said Mr. Contominas “is strongly denying any criminal accusation.” Stewart Ford, another Time Warner owner, was facing a fraud investigation in October 2010 when he transferred the $6 million condominium he had bought in his own name to a shell company. At the time, Mr. Ford’s firm, Keydata Investment Services, was at the center of one of the biggest financial collapses in Britain, with an estimated 30,000 victims. That summer, it had been revealed that he had transferred close to $60 million out of Keydata investments before his company was put in receivership by the British government, and moved it into shell companies and trusts that benefited his family. Phil Burbidge, a disabled former teacher, said he invested through Keydata in 2008 but lost his life savings when the firm imploded the next year. “I’m in complete and utter poverty,” Mr. Burbidge said. “It’s all gone. I can’t even mend the roof.” British financial authorities have concluded their investigation and notified Mr. Ford that they plan to take enforcement action, a spokesman for the British Financial Conduct Authority said in an email to The Times. Mr. Ford, in turn, is appealing the authority’s decision, the spokesman said. In an interview, Mr. Ford said the government should not have put his company into receivership. He added that the funds he transferred out of Keydata investments were fees legitimately owed to entities his family controlled. He has since sold the Time Warner condo. Mr. Ford’s critics say he appears adept at keeping his assets out of reach of the authorities and bereft investors. “We don’t believe he’s got any assets that are touchable,” said Geoff Hartnell, a financial adviser in Britain who invested in Keydata products and also sold them to 70 clients. “First of all, we know that he had trusts set up in the Dutch Antilles, trusts in Tortola, in the Virgin Islands.” He added: “If they turn around and fine him, then he says, ‘I’m not going to pay it.’ Since it’s civil, what can they do?”

Even a computer server in the company’s office proved difficult for the authorities to examine. When British regulators seized it, Mr. Ford sued and said he did not own it. In fact, it was owned by a company that promoted Scottish culture, which in turn was owned by a shell company that was 70 percent owned by a trust, which, it was eventually revealed, was set up for Mr. Ford’s four children.

Anonymous in New York Like most Time Warner owners, Anil Agarwal, an Indian mining magnate, is anonymous in New York. While interviews and private documents reviewed by The Times confirm he is behind condos purchased by the Amantea Corporation for $9.1 million in 2004, his name appears nowhere on public records. The deeds for Amantea’s Time Warner condos — one on the “maids floor” and another with sweeping views of Central Park — are signed by a New York lawyer named Constance Cranch. When ed, she said: “You cannot say anything with respect to me. It’s a client of mine’s apartment, and I pay their bills.” For all the secrecy at Time Warner, Mr. Agarwal is hardly private about his wealth. He spends much of his time in London and told a newspaper in 2005: “I have to have a Bentley, the best of chauffeurs and butlers.” But Mr. Agarwal and his company, Vedanta Resources, are known in some parts of the world for having left financial and environmental problems in their wake. He moved his company from India to London in the late 1990s, after it was banned from the Mumbai stock exchange for involvement in a prominent insider trading case. An Indian judge later overturned the ban, saying that there was insufficient evidence of a connection to the trading, and that India’s securities regulator did not have the power to impose the penalty. The regulator is still appealing that ruling, a spokesman said.

Protesters outside the annual meeting of Vedanta Resources in London last year. The company has faced criticism over its financial and environmental record.

Ten months before he closed on his Time Warner condos, Mr. Agarwal, his father and his brother were found to have illegally moved money out of India using shell companies in Mauritius and the Bahamas. The Agarwals, an Indian judge later wrote, “tried to pull wool over the revenue’s eyes and manipulated foreign exchange.” There were also complaints about Vedanta’s environmental record and treatment of residents near its operations. In September 2004, an Indian Supreme Court committee stated that Vedanta had dumped thousands of tons of “arsenic-bearing slag” around its factory in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Gro Nystuen, a lawyer who evaluated companies for Norway’s pension fund, said the pollution was “harming the environment to such an extent that it also harmed the people living in the neighborhood.”

The next year, another Supreme Court committee accused the company of forcing 102 indigenous families from their homes in Odisha State, in eastern India, where it sought to mine bauxite for use in an aluminum refinery. According to the committee’s report, residents were “beaten up by the employees of M/s Vedanta.” “An atmosphere of fear was created through the hired goons,” the report said. “After being forcibly removed they were kept under watch and ward by the armed guards of M/s Vedanta and no outsider was allowed to meet them. They were effectively being kept as prisoners.” As Vedanta pursued its mining plan over several years, the plight of the indigenous tribe in Odisha became a focal point for international activist groups. The cause was taken up by Rahul Gandhi, the son of a former prime minister, as well as by Bollywood stars such as Gul Panag, who withdrew from a Vedanta marketing campaign. The British commerce agency issued a rebuke of Vedanta’s actions in Odisha, and the Church of England’s investment funds sold their shares in the company in protest. “It was just very apparent that the lives of the villagers immediately around the refinery had been made worse, rather than better,” said Edward Mason, the chief of responsible investment for a $9 billion church fund. “The villagers had not been properly consulted about the process, or properly compensated.” Vedanta’s operations elsewhere have drawn intense criticism. Its copper mine in Zambia has been a source of both pollution and suspicion of financial improprieties. In 2006, two years after Vedanta acquired the mine, the company dumped hazardous waste into the Kafue River, a major source of drinking water for the country, according to a lawsuit filed on behalf of 2,000 residents. Fish were dying, according to the ruling in the case, and local residents experienced skin diseases, lung pain and diarrhea.

A copper mine in Zambia owned by Vedanta. The company was fined for environmental damage in that country.

The company was fined by a local judge who wrote: “This was lack of corporate responsibility and criminal and a tipping point for corporate recklessness.” Last year, Zambian officials began an audit based on suspicions that Vedanta was not paying the government its proper fees. Hundreds of former mine workers are fighting Vedanta for severance or disability pay. “This company is making its own rules in Zambia,” said Darious Yundayunda, a former miner who has been active with a group called Foil Vedanta. “People are struggling.” Mr. Agarwal declined The Times’s interview requests over several months. But Vedanta has said publicly, “We remain fully committed to pursuing all our investments in a responsible manner, respecting the environment and human rights.” Despite the complications and controversy, Mr. Agarwal’s fortune, according to Forbes, has grown from $1 billion to an estimated $3.5 billion since he purchased his condos at Time Warner.

Big Spenders When Mr. Bloomberg set out the welcome mat for the world’s billionaires, the idea was this: Money they spent would trickle down to the doormen, concierges, cleaners, drivers and construction workers, as well as to the shopkeepers and restaurateurs who sell $5,000 handbags and $450 sushi dinners. And many of the players at the Time Warner Center are indeed big spenders. After Maxim Finskiy, a Russian business associate of the Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, moved in, he imported his Bentley. Robert Tsao, who gave up his Taiwanese citizenship after authorities there sued him unsuccessfully for investing in mainland China, owns one of the world’s most renowned private collections of Asian art.

Adam Chen, who graduated from New York University in May, was one of several college students to use the complex as a dormitory. He celebrated his birthday last year at the restaurant Per Se in the Time Warner Center, dining on its famous starter, Oysters and Pearls, all captured in photographs on Instagram. The precise impact of wealthy foreigners on the city may be more complex, though. As nonresidents, they pay no city income taxes and often receive hefty property tax breaks. A program aimed at new condo development doles out about a half-billion dollars in tax breaks a year, according to the city’s independent budget office. These savings are ed on to owners in the form of lower property taxes. The Time Warner Center was not part of the most lucrative tax break program, but many other buildings around Central Park have benefited. The city’s first condo costing more than $100 million, which sold in the last few weeks at the new luxury tower One57, had property taxes this past year of $17,268, according to the city’s finance office. Those taxes will go up over time, but for now that is a savings of more than $359,000. The Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonprofit in New York, recently suggested a downside to the influx of billionaires who are in the city only sporadically. “In of the local economy, you don’t have people who are going to plays, going to restaurants,” James Parrott, the institute’s chief economist, said. “They’re not spending at the dry cleaners, the grocers and all of that, so it deprives New York of all that local multiplier effect.” What is more, Mr. Parrott said, the skyrocketing prices of the pieds-à-terre are affecting the price of real estate in the city more broadly. “There’s a downside to having such pressure at the top. It pulls up the prices overall. When owners of $10 million condos see that there’s a big market for $95 million condos, they’re more likely to raise their prices,” he said. “Then the person at $2 million raises his prices, then the person at $1 million sees that and there aren’t any prices below $1 million.” Through a spokesman, Mr. Bloomberg said last month that he had hoped billionaires who moved to New York would not simply be part-timers but would live in the city and pay taxes “so we could use that revenue for government services that, incidentally, disproportionately benefit lowerincome New Yorkers.” Some local politicians have suggested taxing the owners of pieds-à-terre who are not city residents. “We are spending money to keep them safe and maintaining the infrastructure,” said Brad Lander, a city councilman. “Should there be the equivalent of a commuter tax? An international residents tax?” A proposal from the Fiscal Policy Institute would impose a graduated tax on pieds-à-terre worth $5 million or more. The group estimates it would generate $665 million a year in revenue for the city, mostly from owners of the approximately 445 apartments valued at more than $25 million.

Peeling Back Layers There is no simple way to unmask ownership of a shell company. Exploring each of the more than 200 shell companies that have owned units in the Time Warner Center became its own journey, with its own surprise ending. The case of Columbus Skyline, which paid $25.6 million for three condos, began with two clues: a barely legible signature and a forwarding address. The signature on the deeds was difficult to read, but in one spot it could be made out: Wang Zi. A search of that name did not yield obvious results, but a Wang Zi did a phone number at Time Warner. The Times cross-referenced that number and found it was tied to a firm called MQ Realty with an address at an apartment in a public housing complex in Chinatown. A visit to that apartment yielded little more than a conversation in Chinese with a neighbor who said the person behind MQ Realty had recently moved. It was a dead end. The second clue proved more promising. Columbus Skyline was formed in New York State. While the state filing does not list the name of the L.L.C.’s owner, it does have an address: 10 East 39th St., Suite 1110. In public records, one name comes up as having used that address: Wang Wenliang. Further searches turned up a prominent Wang Wenliang. This Mr. Wang is a former municipal official in Dandong, a city on China’s border with North Korea, and a member of the National People’s Congress, China’s parliamentary body. Among his businesses is a construction empire that has worked on numerous consulates and embassies for the Chinese government, and he is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He is on the board of trustees of N.Y.U., where he donated $25 million. But establishing that Mr. Wang from Dandong was the owner of the Time Warner condos required more confirmation. The lawyer listed on the condo sales was David Glassman. A search of commercial property filings showed that Mr. Glassman had also done legal work for an of Mr. Wang’s company, China Rilin Construction Group. When The Times called Mr. Glassman, he briefly discussed the condos and said he would ask Mr. Wang if he would be interviewed about his ownership. Another round of searches found a less glamorous side to real estate used by Mr. Wang’s company in the United States. In February 2011, the housing task force in Jersey City followed up on a complaint from a resident on Pavonia Avenue about the number of people living in a singlefamily residence rented by Rilin. “We conducted the inspection and uncovered conditions that were very troubling to say the least,” wrote Mark Redfield, the task force chairman.

“There were 15 Asian males with no identification, ports, or work visas all residing in this one-family attached rowhouse,” an internal email from Mr. Redfield said. “The house was divided up into sleeping quarters to accommodate 28 roomers,” he wrote, adding, “The crammed quarters were extremely unsanitary and posed an imminent hazard.” The same day, Jersey City officials found “the same conditions” at another house that was used by Rilin for its workers, according to city records. In 2013, Jersey City inspectors reported finding an illegal rooming house at another location used by Rilin. An internal city email said the building was “housing Chinese workers who work for the Chinese Embassy as construction workers. This is the same group China Rilin Construction Corp. that the task force issued summonses to in 2011 for housing multiple Chinese workers.” Rilin paid fines of several thousand dollars for the 2011 violations. The outcome of the 2013 case was unclear from city records, but the company said it had been dismissed. Mr. Wang’s lawyer said Rilin “took the allegations very seriously, and the reported violations were all quickly remedied by the company or dismissed.” He disputed the idea that 28 people lived at the Pavonia Avenue house, saying the top bunks had been used for storage. He said the Wang family had purchased the Time Warner condos through a shell company partly because a disgruntled former employee had threatened to harm them. When The Times asked Ms. Sample, the Time Warner real estate agent who represented Mr. Wang, for information about his condo purchases, she shot back: “How do you know about him?”

Part 2: Jho Low, Well Connected in Malaysia, Has an Appetite for New York

Jho Low, left, a Malaysian investor, with Paris Hilton at a nightclub in St.-Tropez, , in 2010.

In early 2010, a young Malaysian financier named Jho Low began making some very expensive real estate deals in the United States.

First, a shell company connected to Mr. Low, famous back home for partying with the likes of Paris Hilton, purchased a $23.98 million apartment in the Park Laurel condominiums in Manhattan. Three years later, that shell company sold the condo to another shell company, this one controlled by someone even more prominent in Malaysia: the film-producing stepson of the prime minister. A similar transaction was playing out on the other side of the country. Mr. Low bought a contemporary mansion in Beverly Hills for $17.5 million, then turned around and sold it, once again to the prime minister’s stepson. Mr. Low also went shopping at the Time Warner Center condominiums overlooking Central Park. He toured a 76th-floor penthouse, once home to the celebrity couple Jay Z and Beyoncé, then in early 2011 used yet another shell company to buy it for $30.55 million, one of the highest prices ever in the building. At the time, Mr. Low said he represented a group of investors, according to two people with direct knowledge of the transaction. Mr. Low recently told The New York Times that he had not purchased the penthouse for investors, and that it was owned by his family’s trust. One thing is clear: As with nearly two-thirds of the apartments at the Time Warner Center, a dark-glass symbol of New York’s luxury condominium boom, the people behind Penthouse 76B cannot be found in any public real estate records. The trail ends with Jho Low. Mr. Low, 33, is a skillful, and more than occasionally flamboyant, iteration of the sort of operative essential to the economy of the global superrich. Just as many of the wealthy use shell companies to keep the movement of money opaque, they also use people like Mr. Low. Whether shopping for new business opportunities or real estate, he has often done so on behalf of investors or, as he likes to say, friends. Whether the money belongs to others or is his own, the lines are frequently blurry, the identity of the buyer elusive. Mr. Low’s lavish spending has raised eyebrows and questions from Kuala Lumpur to New York, where he has made a boldface name for himself as a “whale” at clubs like the Pink Elephant and 1Oak. The New York Post once called him “the mystery man of city club scene,” adding, “Speculation is brewing over where Low is getting his money from.” One answer resides at least indirectly in his relationship, going back to his school days in London, with the family of Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak. Mr. Low has played an important role in bringing Middle Eastern money into numerous deals involving the Malaysian government, and he helped set up, and has continued to advise, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund that the prime minister oversees. Now, that relationship has become part of an uproar gathering around Mr. Najib and threatening his already shaky hold on power. In Parliament, in political cartoons and in social media, Mr. Najib’s critics tend to argue that he is too close to Mr. Low. Much of the concern, even in Mr. Najib’s own long-ruling party, involves questions about the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. More broadly, though, the prime minister’s trappings of wealth and the widely broadcast tales of his wife’s outsize spending — the diamond jewelry, the collection of extravagantly costly Hermès Birkin bags — have become a focus of Malaysians’ rising unease with their government’s institutionalized culture of patronage and graft. “We are very concerned,” Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a member of Malaysian royalty and an independent-minded elder statesman of Mr. Najib’s party, said in an interview in Kuala Lumpur last summer. “We want people of integrity to be up there.” Increasingly, the glare turns to Mr. Najib’s stepson, Riza Aziz, and so to Mr. Aziz’s friendship with Mr. Low. With Mr. Low’s help, Mr. Aziz runs a Hollywood company that produced the films “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Dumb and Dumber To.” He has spent tens of millions more on the homes in Manhattan and Beverly Hills, transactions that involved Mr. Low, The Times found. “That’s a lot of money,” Sivarasa Rasiah, an opposition lawmaker, said of Mr. Aziz’s spending. He added, “Every U.S. report on him talks about family wealth. Family who?” While Mr. Aziz has previously said he is personally wealthy, he declined to explain how he had acquired his money. Mr. Najib’s office, in a statement, said, “The prime minister does not track how much Mr. Aziz earns or how such earnings are reinvested.” As for the prime minister himself, the statement said he had “received inheritance.” In a statement provided by a spokesman, Mr. Low, whose full name is Low Taek Jho, said he “is a friend of Mr. Riza Aziz and his family.” His real estate transactions with Mr. Aziz were made “on an arm’s-length basis,” he said, adding that he had never purchased real estate in the United States for the prime minister’s family or “engaged in any wrongful conduct regarding any financial matters for the prime minister and his family.” At the Time Warner Center, The Times found, the 76th-floor penthouse, purchased through a shell company called 80 Columbus Circle (NYC) L.L.C., is one of at least a dozen that can be traced to people with close ties to current or former high-ranking foreign officials, or to the officials themselves. According to one member of the condominium board there, while the board understood that the penthouse had been bought for investors, it did not ascertain their identities. At the Park Laurel, where Mr. Najib’s stepson owns, the board did not respond to questions about whether it had examined the financing of the purchase. In fact, in-depth scrutiny of real estate deals is not required. International anticorruption organizations have criticized this lack of inquiry — not just by real estate brokers and condo boards, but by banks, lawyers and the federal government. “People should ask the questions, ‘Why is it that this individual is bringing in millions of dollars into America, and how was it acquired?’” said Charmian Gooch, co-founder of Global Witness, a nongovernmental organization that works against corruption around the world.

The Making of a Financier To mention Mr. Low in Malaysia is to conjure the image of a baby-faced young man in rimless glasses and a loose black V-neck, holding a magnum of Cristal and surrounded by celebrities. But if he is sometimes derided as a tabloid party boy who once flew a group of bottle girls from New York to Malaysia, the reality is that the clubbing life, for Mr. Low, was actually a way to build a booming business managing money for his friends. “I think a relationship with an investor is not just about managing their money well,” he said in an extensive interview with The Star, a Malaysian newspaper, in 2010. “Although it is not in my job scope, but if my friend says he wants a flight urgently to somewhere or he wants a dinner reservation at a well-known place, I’ll do my best to make it happen.” He also said, “I am usually the concierge service that arranges everything, and thus my name is all over the place.” Around George Town, on Penang Island, where Jho grew up, the Lows were seen as a family of somewhat deflated affluence, according to several businessmen who have known them for years. The father, Larry, was an executive for an investment holding company called MWE Holdings, but he split with his partner in the mid-1990s and faded from the local business scene. Still only a teenager, Jho, the youngest of three children, emerged as the family’s best hope for the future. There was money for education abroad, and in London, while attending the ancient and elite Harrow school, Mr. Low became friends with Mr. Najib’s stepson, Mr. Aziz, who was studying at the London School of Economics. He also grew close to Mr. Aziz’s mother, Rosmah Mansor, who stayed for months at a time in an apartment she kept there. In college, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Low kept up his ties back home by running a Malaysian student group. But he also came to know the children of prominent Jordanian and Kuwaiti families. Even before graduating, he was managing money for what he later described as “my family and close Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian friends.” After college, many of his early business deals were based in Malaysia — helping a Kuwaiti bank purchase a high-rise complex called the Oval, and bringing Middle Eastern money into the country to finance a commercial zone in the south and a new financial district in the capital. By 2007, he had formed an investment group that included a Malaysian prince, a Kuwaiti sheikh and a friend from the United Arab Emirates who went on to become ambassador to the United States and Mexico.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia, center, leaving the Time Warner Center in September 2014. Mr. Najib met Mr. Low briefly there that week.

Two years later, he was pitching his idea for a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund. His plan was to invest public money for the public good through a fund tied to one of the country’s oil-producing states, and so he began wooing the sultan of Terengganu, who was also Malaysia’s king under the nation’s rotating monarchy. It was all about making connections, making friends. Success, he told The Star, is “attributable to being at the right place and right time and meeting the right people coupled with a trusting relationship.” In April 2009, those ingredients all came together for Mr. Low. The stepfather of his friend Mr. Aziz became prime minister of Malaysia.

A Political Legacy Mr. Najib, 61, has a deep pedigree in Malaysian politics. His father, Tun Razak, was the country’s second prime minister, in the 1970s. His uncle was its third. His cousin is now defense minister. Mr. Najib has risen through the political ranks: member of Parliament at 23; chief minister of his home state; minister of education, defense and finance; and deputy prime minister. The family is tightly intertwined with Malaysia’s leading political party, the United Malays National Organization, whose long hold on power owes much to its close relationship with the country’s business elite. That closeness, in turn, has helped engender a culture of corruption, said Zaid Ibrahim, a former minister of legal affairs and judicial reform who served alongside Mr. Najib. Inflated government contracts are the norm, widely accepted because recipients simply turn around and donate to the party, he said. “You know why corruption is very high in Malaysia?” he said. “It’s because the party in power is synonymous with the state.” That point was underscored in the State Department’s 2010 human rights report, which said, “Officials often engaged in corrupt practices with impunity” and noted “a broadly held perception of widespread corruption and cronyism within the governing coalition and in government institutions.” There have been no proven corruption allegations against Mr. Najib. However, he has been dogged by questions, seized upon by his political opponents, stemming from a long-running bribery inquiry in involving submarines he commissioned from a French company while he was defense minister. The French national police found documents showing that the submarine company paid more than $100 million to a company controlled by one of Mr. Najib’s close associates. In addition, one police document says, without elaboration, that Mr. Najib demanded money in exchange for a 2001 meeting in Paris. Malaysian officials said the payments to the company controlled by Mr. Najib’s associate were for “ and coordination services”; the prime minister’s office said he received no payments and did not demand any.

Rosmah Mansor with her husband, Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia.

Mr. Najib, who earns an annual salary of about $100,000 as prime minister, has been battered by news media reports of his wife’s lavish spending. A notable episode involved the Birkin bags: A series of photos that went viral on social media in Malaysia showed Ms. Rosmah holding at least nine of the purses. They typically cost between $9,000 and $150,000 apiece. Ariff Sabri, an aide to Mr. Najib from 2000 to 2004 who ed the opposition in 2012, said the prime minister kept “piles and piles” of ringgit bills stacked in his safe. And invoices and other documents obtained by The Times show millions of dollars in jewelry ordered for Ms. Rosmah in Hong Kong in 2008 and 2009 — diamond and emerald rings, and diamond, emerald and ruby bracelets. The prime minister’s office said, “Neither any money spent on travel, nor any jewelry purchases, nor the alleged contents of any safes are unusual for a person of the prime minister’s position, responsibilities and legacy family assets.” For some people who have long known Mr. Najib, the lavish lifestyle that appeared to evolve with his second marriage, to Ms. Rosmah in 1987, has been a surprising — even dismaying — turn for a modest technocrat. Last year, Mr. Najib’s younger brother, Nazir, wrote a newspaper column that tacitly jabbed at the current prime minister by praising the frugality of their father, a career government official who died in office at age 53. When he and his brothers had asked for a swimming pool at the prime minister’s residence, Mr. Nazir wrote, “My father made it abundantly clear that while Seri Taman may be our home, the house belonged to the government and, hence, to the people. Anything spent on it would have to come from public funds, and there was no way he was going to allow the state coffers to be depleted on something as frivolous as a swimming pool. ‘What will the people think?’ he thundered.”

The Fund Mr. Low’s business romance with Malaysia’s king, it turned out, was short lived. But the new prime minister, Mr. Najib, was happy to have a way to benefit the nation writ large, and the sovereign wealth fund soon morphed into a new one, called 1Malaysia Development Berhad. Mr. Najib became chairman of the board of advisers of 1MDB, which calls itself a “strategic development company.” A close Penang friend of Mr. Low’s father became a director, and two of Mr. Low’s friends ed the staff. Mr. Low himself was not given an official role, but he is regularly consulted on its actions, according to three people who have had regular dealings with 1MDB but requested anonymity to preserve relationships.

A billboard in Kuala Lumpur for Malaysia's strategic development company. Mr. Najib has faced questions about 1MDB.

In his statement to The Times, Mr. Low played down his role in 1MDB, saying that “from time to time and without receiving compensation,” he has given his views on various matters. While Mr. Low has no official position with the fund, in 2012 it emerged in British court documents that he had presented a letter of from 1MDB in his investors’ unsuccessful bid for the hotel group that includes Claridge’s. He also said the financing would be fully underwritten by Malaysian government investment funds, according to the documents. Mr. Low and 1MDB also had dealings with an oil-drilling company called PetroSaudi International that had been founded by a Saudi businessman and a Saudi prince. Soon after its creation, 1MDB invested $1 billion in a t venture with PetroSaudi. A few months later, a PetroSaudi subsidiary purchased a Malaysian holding company, UBG, in which Mr. Low and his investors held a substantial stake, according to public records. News media reports did not say so, but corporate records reviewed by The Times show that a director of the PetroSaudi subsidiary was a close friend of Mr. Low named Geh Choh Hun. PetroSaudi has told the Malaysian press that the deals were unrelated. And both men said Mr. Geh was not representing Mr. Low’s interest in the deal. By 2011, 1MDB pulled out of the PetroSaudi t venture. The proceeds, however, were not immediately returned to Malaysia. Instead, they ended up in a Cayman Islands company and managed by an investment firm that 1MDB only recently identified. The money was recently returned to 1MDB, the fund has said. The Caymans maneuver has stirred an outcry even within Mr. Najib’s own party. “I don’t understand why the government carries on with 1MDB,” Daim Zainuddin, a former finance minister, said in an interview. “To me, it’s quite frightening because you don’t know what they’re doing,” he said, adding, “Why must government money be parked?” There have been other criticisms as well — that the fund has taken on large amounts of debt and that some of its investments have benefited large donors to Mr. Najib’s party. The prime minister’s office said that 1MDB was run by professional managers, and that many blue-chip companies do business with funds ed in the Caymans. The criticisms, it added, “need to be examined for political motivation.” A year ago, the ing firm KPMG refused to sign off on 1MDB’s financials, according to Nur Jazlan Mohamed, chairman of Parliament’s audit committee. KPMG declined to comment for this article. The fund, which described the parting as amicable, found a new auditor: Deloitte. Mr. Nur Jazlan, a member of Mr. Najib’s party, said the Deloitte blessing gave him comfort. “They wouldn’t sanction the s if there was a problem,” he said. Still, he acknowledged that “conditions are fertile” for fraud, given the scant oversight of 1MDB. “Yes, they make money, but should they make more money?” Mr. Nur Jazlan said. Yet as long as 1MDB shows a profit, he added, it is unlikely that there will be any serious inquiry into whether money went missing. “Money makes money,” he said. “You can basically hide a lot of things in there as well. Then, the party doing scrutiny of management is the board, which is appointed by who? And chaired by who? The prime minister.”

Luxury Home Purchases The year before Mr. Low showed up at the Time Warner Center, the New York news media reported the $23.98 million purchase of an apartment in the Park Laurel, a few blocks away on West 63rd Street. The purchase, the reports said, had been made by a shell company on behalf of two residents of Switzerland — Peter Edward Chadney and Simone Cécile von Graffenried Simperl. Those reports were mistaken. The Swiss “buyers” were actually Rothschild bankers. The real party behind the shell company was Mr. Low, whose spokesman acknowledged to The Times that the condo had been bought by a trust benefiting his family. Nearly three years later, the Lows sold it to Mr. Aziz’s shell company for $33.5 million in cash — a 40 percent appreciation. The sale involved a string of shell companies. In one spot on the property transfer, Mr. Aziz is listed as the “sole director” of Sorcem Investments, a British Virgin Islands company that was behind the shell company that bought the Park Laurel condo. The transfer of the Beverly Hills house from Mr. Low to Mr. Aziz was even more opaque. After Mr. Low’s shell company, 912 North Hillcrest Road (BH) L.L.C., paid $17.5 million for the home — 11,573 square feet, with five bedrooms, 10 bathrooms, private gardens and a glowing pyramid in the reflecting pool — his trust sold ownership of that shell company to a corporate entity controlled by Mr. Aziz, both men acknowledged to The Times. Legally, however, the property itself never changed hands. The same shell company appears as owner in the public property records of Los Angeles County. It is as if nothing ever happened. Mr. Aziz confirmed that he owned the New York condo as well as the Beverly Hills house, which is undergoing extensive rebuilding.

Mr. Low said the transactions were done at fair market value. He sold the Beverly Hills property, he said, because he had found another nearby. That house cost $39 million.

A shell company connected to Mr. Low purchased an apartment in the Park Laurel in Manhattan for $23.9 million. It later sold the unit to a shell company controlled by the stepson of Malaysia's prime minister.

Back in New York, the Time Warner Center was a natural destination because friends of Mr. Low already owned apartments there. There was also a prominent Malaysian — the brother of Syed Mokhtar al-Bukhary, a major beneficiary of government contracts and a generous backer of Mr. Najib’s political party. With the penthouses on the top five floors of the north tower came wraparound views — the Catskills far off to the northwest, the Statue of Liberty just beyond the southern tip of Manhattan, and Central Park right next door. Mr. Low went to view Penthouse 76B with a retinue of women and told people involved in the deal that he would pay $30.55 million — all cash, as in his other real estate purchases. One member of the condominium board and another person with direct knowledge of the deal said they believed that Mr. Low was buying for a group of investors. One of them recalled Mr. Low saying that a main investor was the family of Prime Minister Najib. In its statement to The Times, the prime minister’s office said Mr. Najib had no financial interest or any agreement related to any Time Warner condominiums. Mr. Low's statement said that the condo was owned by his family’s trust and that he and other family “stay there from time to time when they are in New York.” The professionals who helped Mr. Low buy the Time Warner condo included the same Rothschild bankers as in the Park Laurel condo transaction, as well as John Opar, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling, who did not respond to inquiries. One of the bankers, Ms. Simperl, said she could not discuss the client, who in the same time period briefly owned a $33 million condo at the Trump International, across the street from the Time Warner Center. Janice Chang, the broker the Douglas Elliman firm identified as representing the buyer, said, “We work with a lot of people; sometimes we know them and sometimes we don’t.” She added: “They’re very confidential. We try not to pry.”

Hello to Hollywood

Mr. Aziz’s film company, Red Granite Pictures, was largely unheard-of when it took over the financing of “The Wolf of Wall Street,” announcing its intentions with a party at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, complete with a fireworks extravaganza and concert by Kanye West. The Hollywood Reporter called it “an audacious hello to the movie industry.”

The Beverly Hills home, shown on a real estate website, that was purchased for $17.5 million by a shell company tied to Mr. Low.

Neither of its founders had the kind of résumé that reflected the experience, or the income, to bankroll a movie company. Mr. Aziz, now 38, had been a junior-level banker at HSBC. His partner, Joey McFarland, was a small-time investor from Kentucky whose entertainment-business apprenticeship included booking paid party appearances for celebrities like Ms. Hilton. All of which led to a certain amount of curiosity in Hollywood about who was financing Red Granite. Over time, the s seemed to change. Interviewing a job candidate early on, Mr. Aziz said the financing came from “sovereign wealth,” according to two people with knowledge of the conversation. When Irwin Winkler, an executive producer of “The Wolf of Wall Street” inquired, he was told that Red Granite had “a backer in Malaysia,” he recalled in an interview. He was introduced to the backer, and it was Mr. Low. “He’s the face, as far as I could see, of the financing,” Mr. Winkler said. At the film’s December 2013 premiere party at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, several people said, Mr. Low had been introduced to them as the financier. He is thanked in the film’s credits. The Malaysian explanations ended about a year ago, after Red Granite’s financing became the subject of persistent questions, especially from The Sarawak Report, a London-based news site that focuses on Malaysia. Mr. Low says he has not put money into Red Granite or its films. And last summer, a new money man emerged. In an interview with The Times for an article on Red Granite, Mr. Aziz said the principal backer was Mohamed Ahmed Badawy al-Husseiny, chief executive of an Abu Dhabi government-owned company, Aabar Investments, that has done deals with Mr. Low. Mr. Aziz noted that “The Wolf of Wall Street” had received New York tax breaks. He said there were other investors, but recently declined to identify them. “There is no Malaysian money” in Red Granite’s films, he said. Even so, both Mr. Low and Mr. Husseiny have been involved with Malaysian government funds, including 1MDB. Mr. Husseiny’s company, Aabar, had been a partner with Mr. Low in the failed Claridge’s bid that was backed by 1MDB. Aabar has also done business with s of a company called SRC International, which was spun off from 1MDB and is now owned by the Ministry of Finance.

Aabar also did a deal with a company outside Malaysia that SRC had helped create, according to two people involved with the transaction. Money from that deal was then set aside to be paid out to other corporate entities. That money was described as consulting fees for Mr. Husseiny and Mr. Low, the people involved said. Similar arrangements existed in other SRC deals, they said they were told by people at SRC.

From left, Riza Aziz, Joey McFarland and Jho Low at a premiere of "The Wolf of Wall Street" in December 2013.

SRC’s managing director, a friend of Mr. Low named Nik Faisal Ariff Kamil, said that to the best of his knowledge, neither Mr. Low nor Mr. Husseiny had received fees from deals involving SRC or its s. Mr. Low said that he had not consulted for SRC International Sdn Bhd, the Malaysia-based SRC. In a response from his lawyer, Mr. Husseiny did not answer questions about SRC. His investment in Red Granite, he said, was “personal money.”

Discontent at Home Just before Christmas, while visiting Hawaii, Mr. Najib played golf with one of his international allies — President Obama. It was “golf diplomacy,” the prime minister said when he was criticized in Malaysia for golfing while the country suffered through its worst flooding in many years. It was also the continuation of Mr. Najib’s long effort to draw his country closer to Washington. Earlier last year, Mr. Obama made an official visit to Malaysia, the first by an American president since 1966. Afterward, he and Mr. Najib said they would “elevate” relations to a “comprehensive partnership” of political and economic ties. A White House spokesman did not respond to inquiries about the president’s relationship with Mr. Najib. Even as Mr. Najib’s diplomatic standing has risen — Malaysia was recently elected to a two-year seat on the United Nations Security Council — his political star has been falling back home. Mr. Najib has positioned himself as a forward-looking moderate. Yet on issues ranging from the freedom of political speech to longstanding laws that favor the Malay majority over the country's ethnic minorities, he has not made good on promised reforms that would run afoul of his more

conservative opponents. One long-running case that has rankled critics at home and abroad is his government’s prosecution of a leading opposition figure, Anwar Ibrahim, on sodomy charges; a ruling on Mr. Anwar’s appeal is expected any day. In the 2013 elections, the opposition won the popular vote for the first time in more than four decades. Mr. Najib kept his job only because the allocation of seats in Parliament was weighted to favor rural areas, where his party’s coalition was strong. Within hours of the announcement, crowds filled the streets of Kuala Lumpur in protest. One of the toughest areas for Mr. Najib’s party was Mr. Low’s home state, Penang. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Mr. Low helped a newly formed group, the 1Malaysia Penang Welfare Club. The club gave out free food and beer, as well as “lucky draw” tickets for bicycles and other prizes, and Mr. Low flew in musicians like Busta Rhymes and Ludacris for what was described as a nonpolitical concert.

Mr. Low, pedaling at center, transported Busta Rhymes in George Town, Malaysia, in 2013. Mr. Low invited popular musicians for a party organized by the 1Malaysia Penang Welfare Club.

The club’s leader was Mr. Low’s close friend, Mr. Geh, who said the mission of the group was charity. But opposition figures in Penang said the prizes and concert were aimed at recruiting votes for Mr. Najib’s party. “Jho wanted to show that he could call the shots in Penang,” said Lim Guan Eng, the chief minister and an opposition member. In the end, the governing party won only a quarter of the parliamentary races in Penang, and Mr. Lim was re-elected. Since then, Mr. Najib’s standing has grown only more precarious, as criticism has spread from the opposition to factions of his own party. Over the summer, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who led the country for 22 years and retains considerable influence, publicly denounced Mr. Najib and called on him to reform 1MDB. And while speculation that Mr. Najib would be pushed out at the annual party congress in November proved unfounded, weeks later, an official from his party called for a police investigation of 1MDB and said he would file a complaint against the prime minister if no action was taken. In January, 1MDB officials responded to the controversy by appointing a new president, a banker named Arul Kanda. The appointment created its own flurry of questions. In 2008, as Mr. Low was working to bring Middle Eastern money to Malaysia, he helped a Malaysian bank, RHB Capital, raise money from the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, where Mr. Arul soon became an executive. The next year, Mr. Arul ed a board of RHB.

In mid-January, the Malaysian press reported that Mr. Arul said that any insinuations about connections to “certain individuals” were unfair. “My C.V. should speak for itself,” he said.

An Evolving Image Last September, Mr. Najib traveled to the United States for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly. He and his wife usually stay at the Time Warner Center when they are in New York, and they did so this time as well — at the Mandarin Oriental hotel.

A foundation led by Mr. Low, second from right, pledged $25 million to IRIN, a news agency focusing on humanitarian issues, in 2014.

Mr. Low was in town, too — for a Social Good Summit sponsored by his foundation, featuring speakers like Melinda Gates, Ed Norton and Alicia Keys — and he and the prime minister engaged in a bit of a pas de deux at the Mandarin Oriental: Mr. Najib arrived in the hotel lobby with his entourage and went upstairs; within minutes, Mr. Low followed for what he later described as a “courtesy social call.” Less than 10 minutes later, the two men came downstairs and took separate exits from the building. Lately, Mr. Low has been emphasizing that he is investing his family’s money and no longer managing money for investors and friends. He has been broadening his family’s business portfolio, making high-profile deals with the Abu Dhabi government and other Middle Eastern investors. In 2012, his family ed a group that bought EMI Music Publishing for $2.2 billion, and the next year, it was a principal investor in the $660 million purchase of the Park Lane Hotel in New York. After portraying himself for years as a friend of people with money — and saying in the 2010 interview with The Star that he came from a “fairly O.K. family” — he has started to say that he was born with it himself. Last fall, he did an interview with The Wall Street Journal, which reported that his grandfather had made a fortune in mining and liquor investments in Thailand. The Journal’s — which said the Low family had a $1.75 billion fortune and called Mr. Low a “scion” — was immediately picked up in Malaysia. As befits the modern scion, Mr. Low has lately begun trading in another asset class: contemporary art. His entry into the art market has generated buzz both for his youth and for the fact that he has become such a significant force so fast. Last summer, he made the ARTnews list of the world’s 200 leading private collectors. The art market is even more opaque than real estate, so that list is based not on actual sales data but on the assessments of people in the industry who know about collectors’ holdings. According to two people familiar with Mr. Low’s activities in the art world, though, he has taken a liking to pop art. “Inserting a Jho Low at the top of the market — who buys pictures over $20 million, $30 million, $40 million — it swings the market,” one of them said. To the public, of course, the purchaser is anonymous. But among the purchases Mr. Low has been involved in, they said, are Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Dustheads,” for $48.8 million. Asked if his family owned the painting, Mr. Low said he “did not purchase ‘Dustheads’ artwork on behalf of any investor.” Asked about his involvement in the art market, he replied, “The Low family is interested in fine art.”

Part 3: Amid Complaints in India, a Real Estate Deal in Manhattan

Neeraj Jagga bought this apartment in a 4,000-unit complex near New Delhi but said construction had barely progressed in three years. The developer, Kabul Chawla, has been the subject of numerous consumer complaints.

Last Sept. 28, a group of retired military officers demonstrated at Jantar Mantar, a historic site in New Delhi. “Though we are old veterans, we still have the strength to challenge your atrocity,” read the placard of one protester, who was leaning on a cane. Their animus was directed at one of the New Delhi area’s biggest residential builders, Kabul Chawla. In 2008, nearly 200 military officers had put down deposits on apartments at Park Serene, a high-rise apartment complex Mr. Chawla was developing. In addition to a swimming pool, a community center and special prices for of India’s military, a big drawing card was the prospect that the officers could live together in retirement. More than six years later, the protesters say that Mr. Chawla’s company has collected almost 100 percent of the price of the Park Serene apartments from 400 buyers, payments the protesters estimate at more than $35 million. But the company has not completed the units. “They put their life savings in it,” said Brajesh Kumar, a retired Army major general and spokesman for the protesting officers, who have taken their grievances to a national consumer commission. “They thought that after their retirement they would move in. It’s not a happy situation for a large number of consumers.” As complaints mount against Mr. Chawla, developer of two dozen other major residential complexes near New Delhi, many of the veterans are struggling to find a place to live. Mr. Chawla does not appear to have that problem. Even when he is more than 7,000 miles away in New York, he enjoys the comforts of a 4,050square-foot condominium in the Time Warner Center that has five bedrooms, a media/playroom, soaring ceilings and Central Park views. Although Mr. Chawla denies owning the apartment, saying that he stays there but that it belongs to his cousin, The New York Times has unearthed correspondence among real estate brokers involved in the apartment’s purchase, as well as other sources, tying the condo to Mr. Chawla. The ownership of the unit on the 68th floor of the Time Warner Center’s south tower is obscured by a corporate veil: a Delaware company with a Singapore address and a name, NYC Real Estate Opportunities, evoking the ambitions of an international buyer.

A 2014 protest in New Delhi against Mr. Chawla’s development company, BPTP. The firm is one of the New Delhi area’s biggest residential builders. Credit

The secrecy surrounding 68AF is not unusual. Of the 192 condos at the Time Warner Center, nearly two-thirds are owned through shell companies, a Times investigation has found. Often the names of the people behind those shell companies are shrouded in secrecy. And 68AF is among the most carefully cloaked. When the apartment was bought outright in February 2012 for $19.4 million, the backlash against Mr. Chawla had already begun in India.

A Boom in Development Mr. Chawla, who is in his early 40s, got his start in the real estate business more than 20 years ago when he put up a building on property owned by his father. While his family name was well known in India — his cousin was the astronaut Kalpana Chawla, who died aboard the space shuttle Columbia — Mr. Chawla’s company, BPTP, was little known until 2005, when he began aggressively purchasing farmland near Faridabad, a suburb of New Delhi. At the time, a new commuter rail line and highway were progressing toward the suburb, and BPTP began buying land at prices as low as $12 per square yard, which it would later sell for more than 10 times that. “No one showed interest in developing this area for 14 years, until we started land acquisition in 2005,” Mr. Chawla’s company said in an email, pointing out that the land had been cut off by two irrigation canals. Mr. Chawla’s company constructed a six-lane highway bridge to make the project, called Parklands, accessible. His efforts dovetailed with a state plan to transform vast tracts of rich farmland near Faridabad to residential use, which itself was part of a construction boom in India to accommodate a rising middle class. By the fall of 2009, BPTP said it had presold 10,685 apartments and 5,657 residential plots at Parklands, which Mr. Chawla envisioned as a community that would include apartment buildings, lots for single-family homes and commercial establishments. By 2012, the company was overseeing more than two dozen projects on nearly 2,500 acres. It had 22,000 customers and sales of $1.6 billion, according to a company news release at the time. Today, many of those customers appear to be unhappy. They have flooded Facebook pages, real estate forums and consumer websites in India with complaints about BPTP and have staged protests at some of the company’s properties.

A BPTP development outside New Delhi. In 2012, the company said it was overseeing more than two dozen projects, had 22,000 customers and had sales of $1.6 billion.

In an interview at his corporate headquarters near New Delhi and in emailed responses, Mr. Chawla and his company said that BPTP was highly professional and that it was catering to the region’s middle class. He acknowledged delays in some of his projects but blamed them on a “plethora” of external factors, including government setbacks in infrastructure development. Mr. Chawla’s company said it hoped to deliver the military officers’ apartments by this summer. “All the developers are facing this kind of issue,” he said in the company’s conference room, which is dominated by a large portrait of Gandhi. In addition to the six-lane bridge the company donated to the government, BPTP said it had taken on other projects that were the government’s responsibility. But rather than the middle-class mecca Mr. Chawla had envisioned a decade ago, his signature development, Parklands, is a 1,700-acre dystopia of vacant lots and apartment structures, some finished but others in various stages of completion. Many owners who had moved into their apartments complained about leaky roofs, poor plaster and wiring, substandard sewage treatment, deficient recreational facilities and parking spaces, and hidden and escalating charges. Other buyers who are still without housing have accused BPTP of failing to deliver on properties they purchased. At one of the Parklands apartment complexes, called Park Elite Floors, a buyer, Neeraj Jagga, said that there had been little construction progress in three years and that much of the project appeared to have been abandoned. A video Mr. Jagga made of his unit last winter shows crumbling bricks and plaster, unfinished walls and floors, no windows and rusting balcony railings. A recent visit to the site revealed no progress, he said. He bought one of the 4,194 apartments in the sprawling Park Elite Floors, most of which were sold in the spring and summer of 2009. Mr. Jagga, who works in commercial printing, said BPTP had given various reasons for delays, including claims of a contractor dispute. “It’s been five years,” he said. “Everybody is stuck.” The company has denied wrongdoing. In the case of Park Elite Floors, the company said that while work had slowed, the project had not been abandoned and that it had offered possession to 1,274 of the buyers. In India, customers frequently put down money for apartments and lots in advance, then continue paying as construction proceeds.

But as BPTP buyers have waited long beyond the promised delivery dates of their lots and apartments, the company has begun new projects. “Most of the money they have used for developing other projects, buying other lands,” said Ashok Rajan Agarwal, a retired executive for a stateowned power company who invested in BPTP property. BPTP denies such allegations, but a recent ruling by a government consumer commission seems to buttress Mr. Agarwal’s statement. Two buyers at another complex filed complaints in 2012 seeking the return of substantial deposits they had made on apartments beginning in 2005. The commission ruled that BPTP had to refund the money with interest, noting that the company failed for several years to use it for the apartments but “continued to utilize the amounts deposited by the complainants” in other projects. The complex has since been completed, and BPTP says it has appealed the decision. In addition to the complaints from angry and, in some cases, desperate customers, many critics have alleged that Mr. Chawla is a major beneficiary of government officials who have bent rules for favored builders, to the detriment of consumers. In August, an opposition party, Indian National Lok Dal, demanded an investigation of the relationship between several builders, including Mr. Chawla, and officials in Haryana State, where Faridabad is located. Mr. Chawla denies receiving any government favors. Putting it into perspective, Amit Jain, who heads a consumer association representing apartment owners in a Delhi suburb, said BPTP is one of many companies that are taking advantage of a housing shortage and a loosely regulated system with few consumer protections. “I would say he is not a bad guy,” Mr. Jain said. “He is doing what most of the builders are doing. They’re good people but they are enjoying the largess of this failed state.”

‘They Promised Heaven’

Mr. Jagga’s apartment at the BPTP development Park Elite Floors. The company said that work had slowed but that the project had not been abandoned.

On Dec. 26, 2011, The Times of India quoted a local police official as saying, “We are on the lookout for the accused Kabul Chawla.” The highly publicized case involved an ant’s allegation that BPTP had cheated him out of 40 lakh rupees, then the equivalent of more than $85,000. The ant, Suresh Goel, had bought a commercial lot in 2006 in Parklands, where he had planned to open an office. Mr. Goel said in an interview that he later learned that BPTP sold him the lot before getting required licenses and that when he complained to the company, it canceled his contract without returning his money.

After Mr. Goel filed a complaint with the police and another with a consumer commission, he said BPTP returned his money. The company said in an email that the allegations were false but that it returned Mr. Goel’s money to avoid harassment by the police. Even after the money was returned, the police continued their investigation. In 2012, BPTP went to court to get the case closed. The case was kept open, though, after an investigating officer testified that other people were approaching him with similar complaints against the company. The case was closed in 2013 without charges being brought. In interviews, some buyers who bought lots years ago in Parklands complained that the company arbitrarily switched the location of their lots to less developed parts of the project. In a statement, the company strongly denied the allegations but said that some buyers were assigned different lots when the government ordered changes to the overall plan, including the widening of roads, that required a new layout. Manoj Pandey, a real estate agent who said he sold more than 100 BPTP plots, ascribed a more nefarious motivation. He said that the company’s pattern was to sell property, then reassign customers to less desirable locations and resell the original property for more money. BPTP, in a statement, called the allegation “false, frivolous and a figment of someone’s imagination.” But Mr. Pandey said in an interview: “They promised heaven to all the buyers.” Naveen Verma, an Indian who works in a technology job in Scotland, said he bought a Parklands lot in 2006. Mr. Verma, who said he had invested more than $90,000 in his property, provided The Times with dozens of emails to BPTP asking for possession. Mr. Verma said he had been promised a swimming pool and Wi-Fi connectivity in a gated community, but none of that had materialized. Instead, local villagers were using the site to dry cow manure for fuel when he last visited in December 2013. In 2014, Mr. Verma went to court and BPTP agreed to turn over the lot to him, although he said there was little he could do with the property at this point. In a statement, the company said that no road had been built to Mr. Verma’s property because the government had been unable to acquire the necessary land, blaming “encroachment by some local villagers.” One villager, a retired electrical worker named Ram Kishan, whose home is near Mr. Verma’s lot, says he will not leave the settlement. “I told them this is the land of my forefathers and we have been living here for over 150 years,” Mr. Kishan said, speaking in Hindi about visitors to the site who told him he had to leave. “How can I run away from the village of my ancestors? The whole world is building their homes around our village.”

A Purchase in Manhattan By the summer of 2011, as Mr. Chawla fended off criticism back home, a buyer expressed an interest in Apartment 68AF in the Time Warner Center. The resulting cash offer of $19.4 million was more than $7 million below the asking price for the apartment, which encomes five and a half marble baths, a 23-by-24-foot great room, his-and-her master closets and river-to-river views of the city. When the contract was finally drawn up, it contained special language permitting the purchaser to transfer ownership to a limited liability company, which “may be owned by a Cayman Island limited liability company or a British Virgin Island limited liability company to be formed, and/or to a trust.” The contract went on to suggest that another family would occupy the unit and might become the owner. The family’s name did not appear in the paperwork but was to be disclosed to the condo board. If the board did not agree to the arrangement, the deal was to be voided and the $1.9 million deposit returned. Such a transfer would not require any public filing. Douglas A. Kellner, a New York lawyer who reviewed the contract at the request of The Times but knew nothing about the buyer, said the type of layering described in the document could place ownership in the jurisdiction with the most favorable tax treatment — which could reduce tax liabilities if a residence was rented or if a mortgage was taken out. “There is also the possibility that the layering is used to hide the real ownership,” Mr. Kellner said. Months went by before the deal finally closed. If not for a lawsuit over real estate fees, neither the of the contract nor a clue linking it to Mr. Chawla would have been revealed. Shortly after the sale, the brokerage firm Douglas Elliman sued the former owners of the condo, claiming the company was due brokerage fees. Documents filed in that case contained email exchanges among brokers, including Julie Rose of Citi Habitats, who had represented the buyer. One of the emails refers to the first name of a figure making requests from behind the scenes: Kabul. “Dear All,” Brenda S. Powers, then a broker for Brown Harris Stevens, which represented the seller, wrote in an email to others involved in the transaction. “Julie Rose who is in direct communication with Kabul has requested the following.”

The email went on to explain that the buyer’s lawyer would not release the contract and deposit until complete measurements had been made of the unit. “We will get the different ways — methods of calculation,” Ms. Powers wrote. “Architect’s approach, graphic designer’s approach, developer’s approach.”

The Chawlas’ son posted photographs on his Facebook page that, with their expansive views of Central Park, seem to have been taken from the Time Warner Center. Kabul Chawla said the Time Warner apartment used by his family was owned by a cousin.

A person inside the Time Warner Center had suggested to The Times that Kabul Chawla and his wife, Anjali, owned 68AF, and Ms. Powers’s email supplied additional information. In an interview, Mr. Chawla acknowledged that his family had used the Time Warner Center condo. The Chawlas’ teenage son had posted photographs on his Facebook page that, with their telling architectural detail and views of Central Park in the background, seem to have been taken from inside the unit. Mr. Chawla said the unit was owned by Aneil Anand, who he said was a cousin. “I don’t own an apartment in New York,” Mr. Chawla said. Mr. Anand, who is listed as the purchaser in documents disclosed in the lawsuit, ed the hedge fund Duet Group in 2009 from JPMorgan Chase & Company. Mr. Anand did not respond to requests for an interview. To further investigate the ownership, The Times ed one of the people on the “Kabul” email, Hall F. Willkie, the president of Brown Harris Stevens. Citing the deed on 68AF, The Times asked Mr. Willkie why it was signed by Aneil Anand and not Kabul Chawla. “I think they usually just put it in another name for public records,” he replied. When The Times asked whether Kabul Chawla or Aneil Anand toured the apartment before purchase, he said he did not know but could not disclose that even if he did. “The last thing we do is talk about them as individuals,” he said. “So for you to talk about this deal you would have to ask Kabul for permission?” The Times continued. “Yes,” Mr. Willkie responded. The deal for 68AF was one of New York’s 25 most expensive residential sales of 2012. After it closed, Citi Habitats posted an interview with Ms. Rose on the company website in which she described it as “a very complicated deal — but in the end my client was very happy. He loves his new home and that’s all that matters.”

In an effort to reach Mr. Anand, a reporter tried to deliver him a bottle of wine at the Time Warner Center. But staff there did not know who he was. A concierge at the front desk searched through a list of residents, looking for Aneil Anand. “We don’t have anyone by that name,” she said.

Part 4: Mexican Political Family Has Close Ties to Ruling Party, and Homes in the U.S.

José Murat Casab, left, a former governor of Oaxaca and an influential member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. of his immediate family have bought at least six properties in the United States, records and interviews show.

In the fall of 2013, one of Mexico’s top housing officials posted an item on Twitter about an advertising campaign promoting mortgages for lowincome Mexicans. The campaign’s message was simple: “The most important thing in life is in your house.” It carried the tag line, “Homes with value.” The official, Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, knows something about homes with value, especially across the border. Over the years, he and of his immediate family — starting with his father, José Murat Casab, a former governor of Oaxaca — have bought at least six properties in the United States, including two condominiums near a ski resort in Utah, another at the beach in South Texas and at least one in Manhattan, according to records and interviews. In New York, José Murat’s children have also lived for periods of time in one of the more modest condos at the luxurious Time Warner Center overlooking Central Park. Ownership of the homes was often obscured through variations on family names listed on deeds or through shell companies, according to records examined by The New York Times. In fact, on the day the younger Mr. Murat tweeted about the housing program, public filings in Florida recorded the transfer of a $750,000 Boca Raton condo that had been purchased in his wife’s name to an entity called IMRO 2013 Trust. The Murats’ real estate holdings stand in contrast to the Everyman image that José Murat, renowned for his political might and booming personality, worked to project as governor. “I arrived to the state government with my wife, Lupita, and my four children,” he said a year before his term ended in 2004. “And I’m leaving as I arrived, with the same tros, with the same shoes, with the same shirts and the same car.” The Murat properties, which emerged during a Times investigation into the people behind shell companies that own condominiums at the Time Warner Center, have not been the subject of any official inquiry and there is no evidence of any wrongdoing behind the purchases. But the private assets of Mexico’s public officials have come under intense focus recently with a fresh round of revelations and protests centered on the country’s endemic corruption.

Last fall, a scandal erupted over reports that a government contractor had built a multimillion-dollar home for the wife of Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto. While Mr. Peña Nieto’s wife, Angélica Rivera, said she was paying for it with money she earned as a soap opera star, she also revealed she owned a condo in Florida. Around the same time, Mr. Peña Nieto disclosed his own $3.3 million in real estate, jewelry, art and other investments. Last week, he said a new federal comptroller would examine purchases by him and his wife of homes in Mexico. And in December, an official at Infonavit, the housing agency run by Alejandro Murat, resigned after a photo of his son with a Porsche was posted on social media, setting off a furor and prompting federal inquiries. The official said the posting was a joke and the car did not belong to his family. These revelations added to the already widespread anger over accusations that corrupt police officers were involved in the abduction and presumed murder last year of 43 college students by a drug cartel. As demonstrations spread, Mr. Peña Nieto was reeling. His Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, had ruled the country for seven decades until 2000, and he had pledged to erase its legacy of corruption when he took office more than two years ago. José Murat, the former Oaxaca governor, has long been a PRI insider. His rise from a childhood in one of Mexico’s poorest states to a position as a power broker who has the president’s ear is the stuff of lore. There was a failed, and to some skeptics faked, attempt on his life; a long campaign to block a federal audit of state spending; and a record of hardball political tactics. Mr. Murat, who has also served as a federal legislator, recently raised his profile again by leading an effort by the Peña Nieto istration to build a cross-party legislative agenda. Mr. Murat’s 39-year-old son, Alejandro, by contrast understated and polished, worked for Mr. Peña Nieto in state government before being appointed to the federal housing post. In some ways, the father and son represent the new and the old of the PRI, said Edward L. Gibson, a Northwestern University professor who studied Oaxaca for a book on authoritarian governments. “Peña Nieto may be the new face of the PRI,” Mr. Gibson said, “but the dinosaurs are still part of the coalition.” José and Alejandro Murat denied ownership of several residences around the country that The Times traced to them. José Murat said the Time Warner condo was owned by a relative. Alejandro Murat said the Florida condo was owned by his mother-in-law. Another Manhattan condo, which records show was originally purchased in the name of Alejandro’s wife, belongs to an uncle, he said. In an email, José Murat said the only United States properties owned by his immediate family were the two condos in Park City, Utah. They were purchased in 2004 — one by his two sons and the other by his two daughters — for a total of $690,000. At least one of the Murat children was a teenager at the time. But Mr. Murat said: “I do not personally own any real estate directly or indirectly in the United States.” The Murat properties show how the legal mechanisms available in the United States to hold property without disclosing the actual owner’s name can make tracing money difficult. This can be a particular problem for Mexico, which, like many developing nations, has long experienced the flight of both legitimate and illicit capital. Wealthy Mexicans are buying property in the United States at a brisk pace with few questions asked, The Times found, even as border security is tightened against poor immigrants trying to cross into the country. “You have all these governors coming and going here, and they have investment properties in the United States with money made in Mexico,” said Juan Ruiz-Healy, a Mexican journalist who anchored the country’s “60 Minutes” program and has written about José Murat over the years. “The U.S. will never say to them, ‘Where did the money come from?’”

The Governor The assassination attempt is like so much of Mr. Murat’s 40-year political career, full of drama and suspicions ultimately left unresolved. There are numerous versions of the event, but the initial one went like this: One morning in March 2004, Mr. Murat was outside the Hotel Victoria in Oaxaca when armed men ambushed the 1999 Nissan Quest minivan he was in, leaving six bullet holes. “The matter here is that they tried to assassinate,” Mr. Murat said in a televised interview days later. “I have mixed feelings — anger, rage — because what they wanted at the end of all this was a dead body.” Even though the governor was slightly injured, there were skeptics who believed he had staged the attack to somehow enhance his image. The federal attorney general issued a news release questioning details of the attack. During the federal investigation, Mr. Murat repeatedly delayed giving a statement and the attorney general asked a judge to order the arrests of seven people who had backed up the governor’s on charges of perjury or altering the crime scene. The whole matter faded away after Mr. Murat demanded that the federal Congress put the attorney general on trial instead. The episode came toward the end of Mr. Murat’s term, but by then there was much intrigue around him, built up over decades in politics. Mr. Murat grew up in Ciudad Ixtepec, in poor, mountainous Oaxaca State, where his parents were shopkeepers. He was in law school in Mexico City around the time of the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, when military and police officers turned their guns on student protesters. While students raged against the PRI, Mr. Murat ed a pro-government group and met other young party loyalists, including Fidel Herrera Beltrán, the future governor of Veracruz, who remains a close friend. Mr. Murat went on to hold numerous PRI jobs, including posts as a party spokesman and as party representative to several states.

The windshield of a minivan after a reported assassination attempt against José Murat in 2004.

“He was just a middle-level functionary,” said Federico Estévez, a political science professor at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. “But he had the right connections.” Files from a former Mexican intelligence agency, which kept tabs on many foes and friends of the government, suggest that early on, Mr. Murat caused some amount of controversy. The files, available at the national archives, contain what amount to unverified field reports. One reported on a 1982 visit by the PRI presidential candidate to Oaxaca, which Mr. Murat then represented as a federal legislator. Residents circulated a letter signed by three local politicians, saying Mr. Murat had been putting his friends and relatives in public offices in an effort to “take over everything” and impose a “dictatorship on the people.” Beyond connections, Mr. Murat has a certain bravado and an imposing physical presence. “It was Lyndon Johnson style,” Mr. Gibson, the Northwestern University professor, said. “Stand up, tower over them and just threaten them with his size.” In 1998, Mr. Murat, then about 50, was elected to a six-year term as governor of Oaxaca. Mexico’s governors wield considerable power, mostly owing to the large amounts of federal money at their discretion, especially in poorer states like Oaxaca. But there have been few checks on how the public money is spent, and Mr. Murat had a reputation for tightly controlling the distribution of federal funds to local officials as a way to maintain power. Manuela Garza, who worked in the state’s planning office, said, “The distribution of policies and all of that wasn’t equal.” As part of her job, Ms. Garza visited villages where people lived without power, water or adequate health care, and she said the perception was that Mr. Murat “wasn’t prioritizing the people, that he was steering money to his regions.” Soon after Mr. Murat became governor, a new federal commission moved to audit Oaxaca’s use of federal funds. The Mexican Congress also proposed looking into money that the state had started steering to a handful of companies, according to congressional records. For years, Mr. Murat and some other governors argued that federal audits were an overreach of power. When the audit agency sent officers to Oaxaca, Mr. Murat blocked them. The auditors gained access only after a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, but by then Mr. Murat had left office. His tenure would never be fully audited.

Around the time José Murat was elected as a federal legislator in the 1970s, biographical information filed with the government showed that he lived in a rowhouse in Mexico City.

Over the years, Mr. Murat and his family have periodically faced questions about their finances. In a recent email to The Times, Mr. Murat said: “As is widely known in Mexico, my family and the family of my wife who ed away in 2000 have many assets and sources of income. This patrimony has been built up over generations through hard work and is unrelated to my public service.” Documents and interviews show that over his career Mr. Murat was paid modest salaries in party jobs and that he did some work as a private lawyer. Around the time he first won election as a federal legislator in the 1970s, he reported total earnings of 25,000 pesos, or about $1,100 a month. His salary as governor reached just over $11,500 a year — plus a bonus whose amount was not disclosed. His brother-in-law, Mateo Jiménez, said that the Murat family was “more or less middle class” and that he knew of no large inheritances from Mr. Murat’s parents. Early in José’s political career, he said, Mr. Murat’s mother sold housewares from her home. When Mr. Murat was governor, Proceso, a Mexico City magazine, wrote that he and his deputies experienced “inexplicable enrichment.” He had a particularly rough relationship with the local newspaper Noticias, which published an article questioning where his mother, Juana Casab, had gotten her money. Ericel Gómez Nucamendi, the paper’s publisher, said in an interview that he believed the governor had long held a grudge against him for refusing his request to purchase part of his newspaper. “He wanted to grab the newspaper,” said Mr. Gómez, who is now a politician in Oaxaca. “He offered to buy it and return it to me when he was no longer governor.” Another local businessman, Humberto López Lena, said in an interview that Mr. Murat proposed that he act as a proxy to gain a share of businesses in Oaxaca. Mr. López Lena said that soon after Mr. Murat was elected, the governor said: “You have a good image and you can be my rep.” Mr. López Lena said Mr. Murat asked him several more times, and he repeatedly turned him down. Recently, Mr. Murat has been drawn into a controversy involving two other former governors, including his friend from the 1970s, Mr. Herrera of Veracruz. It centers on accusations brought in a lawsuit by an activist and lawyer from Chiapas who alleged that the former governor of that state improperly steered state business to construction companies. The lawyer, Horacio Culebro, has said that Mr. Murat and Mr. Herrera have an interest in those companies.

In summer 2013, opposition legislators urged prosecutors to look into the allegations, with one saying, “what we see is a large network of corruption involving ex-governors.” A federal tribunal is deciding whether a state attorney general must review the evidence. Mr. Herrera and Mr. Murat have denied any involvement. Meanwhile, Mr. Culebro said in a deposition that he had received threats via cellphone and Facebook. “I hold José Murat Casab and Fidel Herrera Beltrán responsible for anything that may happen to me,” he said. Responding to written questions about his governorship — including the allegations by Mr. López Lena, Mr. Gómez and Mr. Culebro — Mr. Murat wrote in an email: “Most of your questions are based on the libelous and false assumption that I have done something corrupt. As such they do not merit a response.”

Purchases in the U.S.

Alejandro Murat’s wife, Ivette Morán, purchased a condominium at 40 West 55th St., left, for $1.18 million, property records show. Mr. Murat says the condo is owned by his uncle, José Hinojosa.

Mr. Murat and his family purchased property in the United States throughout his long political career. In 1984, Mr. Murat and his brother, Karim, bought a condominium on Texas’s South Padre Island, a resort town popular with Mexicans, according to public property records. The purchase followed a familiar course taken by many Mexicans of means. “The U.S. and maybe Switzerland are the two main places where Mexican wealth has been deposited,” said Mauricio Cano, a Mexico City lawyer who wrote a book titled “Game Theory and Tax Evasion” and advised friends of Mr. Murat on a Manhattan real estate deal. Soon after buying the South Padre Island condo, the Murat brothers purchased a house nearby, in Brownsville. In both instances, they listed only their maternal surname on the deeds — meaning José Murat’s name appears as “José M. Casab.” The deeds, on file in Cameron County, list their sister’s address in Brownsville, where her husband owns a building used for a nightclub. In political filings and other public records, Mr. Murat has alternated between using “Casab” and the more common Mexican surname “Casas.” By the 1990s, The Times found, Mr. Murat’s brother, Karim, and his mother, Juana, had begun buying properties in Michigan, where she had relatives. They have four properties there between them — a modest suburban home, a condo, land and commercial property. A cousin, Alfredo Casab, a lawyer in Michigan, confirmed that Karim and Juana were related to the former governor. Just as Mr. Murat’s term as governor was drawing to a close in 2004, his children purchased the condos in Park City, Utah, where the family likes to ski, and put their names on the deeds.

Mexicans are among those who have been increasingly using shell companies and trusts to move money abroad, said Geralda Buckley Kral, a wealth adviser based in Zurich. Such mechanisms provide privacy, yet can also enable a person to deny ownership. “If he gets questioned about these assets, he can legally say he doesn’t own it because he doesn’t own it in his name,” she said. Ms. Kral said that she helped set up a trust for a Mexican family named Herrera that was used in 2007 to purchase a condo at 40 West 55th St., a small building just off Fifth Avenue, near the Museum of Modern Art and Central Park. The deed lists the name of a son of Fidel Herrera, Mr. Murat's friend, as a representative of the shell company that bought the condo. After the apartments were upgraded and converted to condos in 2007, the Herreras and four other Mexican families scooped up five units for a total of $6.1 million. “They were all friends of friends,” said Louise Phillips Forbes, a broker at Halstead Property who handled the sales. “I have over the years placed many, many wealthy Mexican families, and their philosophy has been that many of them were educated in the States and many of them hold a residence here,” Ms. Forbes said. “They’re home working, but they come all the time.” Alejandro Murat’s wife, Ivette Morán, purchased Unit 6C, according to New York City property records. Next to her apartment, the records show, is a unit purchased by Melissa F. Alcántara, the daughter of José Murat’s longtime girlfriend.

José Murat and his family during a ski trip to Utah, where his daughters tly bought one condo and his sons tly purchased another. The photo was posted to Facebook in 2013. The condos were transferred to shell companies late last year.

Upstairs is a unit owned by a shell company, but property records include the name of a son of Fernando Margáin, the former mayor of San Pedro Garza García in northern Mexico. Another owner in the building is Víctor Manuel Álvarez Puga, who ran an ing firm in Mexico. Despite public records containing their names, sons of both Mr. Herrera and Mr. Margáin told The Times they were simply doing legal work for the actual owners, whom they would not identify. But in both cases, family ed telephones to the units. For the Murats, the 55th Street condo meant they now had two places to stay in New York. “The Time Warner came before 40 West 55th Street,” Ms. Forbes said. “Alejandro’s family owns in Time Warner.” The Time Warner condo used by the Murats is owned by a shell company called Nivea Management, which was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. The condo, purchased for $1.76 million, was one of two sold together on Jan. 12, 2004; the other cost $3.68 million. But figuring out whose money is behind any shell company is difficult. John Zampino, the lawyer who set up both companies, declined to identify the buyers, saying his job called for discretion. “It’s a very delicate situation, and I can be criticized,” he said. “I can’t even say who I represent.”

Both transactions were handled by the Ira Berman real estate law firm. The firm did “robo-g for the rich” and did not check the backgrounds of buyers, according to a former lawyer there, who asked not to be named out of concerns for his reputation. Mr. Berman, who has since served a prison term for day-trading with his clients’ escrow money, declined to discuss whether his firm did background checks of its clients and said he did not recall the Time Warner sales. Soozy Katzen, a real estate agent at Fox Residential Group who handles rentals for one of the two condos, said, “There’s no way you’re going to reach the owners. They buy under corporate names to not reveal who they are.” But she did say that the owner of the condo on the 57th floor, after originally planning to rent the unit, let his son use it instead. In fact, Alejandro Murat, who was then in graduate school at Columbia, began using that condo, according to records reviewed by The Times. José Murat confirmed that his son lived there in the summer of 2005. As for the ownership of the condo, people with knowledge of the building said they were told it was purchased by a group of Mexicans, including a businessman named Guillermo Vogel Hinojosa. José Murat said in response to questions that the condo was owned by Mr. Vogel. Mr. Vogel, who declined to discuss the properties, is a cousin of Mr. Murat’s deceased wife.

The Housing Chief

Alejandro Murat Hinojosa, José’s son, is one of Mexico’s top housing officials.

Protesters gathered outside Oaxaca’s grand 16th-century church in 2013, as friends and family flowed into a baptism and first communion ceremony for Alejandro Murat’s daughters. “Repudiate José Murat” a sign said, according to news reports at the time. Another called José Murat a “two-legged rat,” Mexican slang for thief. The Murats spend much of their time outside Oaxaca, but as Alejandro has risen as a contender to be Oaxaca’s next governor, some old tensions over the family are being stirred. It remains an open question in political circles how independent the son is of the father. “Alejandro has his own merits and his father’s figure may even be uncomfortable at times,” said Dulce María Sauri, a former national leader of the PRI.

Alejandro Murat practiced law for a few years before working for the State of Mexico, where Mr. Peña Nieto was governor, and then becoming head of Infonavit, which isters loans and mortgages to a large number of Mexican workers. All the while, the family has taken steps that obscure the ownership of several holdings in the United States. Alejandro Murat’s wife, Ivette Morán, had purchased the $1.18 million condo on West 55th Street using her maternal surname. The deed reads “Ivette M. Rodríguez,” but in one place it lists “Morán” under her signature.

A protest against José Murat outside a family christening and first communion in Oaxaca in 2013.

In 2011, while her husband was working for the State of Mexico, Ms. Morán transferred the property at no cost to a trust called Himo Ltd. That transfer was handled by Mr. Zampino, the lawyer who also set up the shell company that owns the Time Warner condo used by the Murats. (Mr. Zampino told The Times that he never worked for the family.) In a statement provided through the housing agency, Alejandro Murat said the 55th Street condo is owned by his uncle, José Hinojosa. Mr. Hinojosa’s name is on the forwarding address for a temporary mortgage placed on the condo, but Ivette Morán Rodríguez is listed as the borrower. She is also listed on the deed as the president of the Himo trust, and she signed the line for the buyer. Alejandro Murat’s statement also said the Florida condo is owned by his mother-in-law. But when the condo was transferred into a trust in late 2013, his wife was listed as the trustee. There have been two mortgages on the condo, one signed by Alejandro Murat and his wife, and the other signed by his wife. Late last year, the day after The Times ed the Murats with an additional interview request, José Murat’s four children transferred their Utah condos into shell companies. Both companies — XILA Company and LOMA AEAI — were incorporated in Florida in 2013 by Alejandro Murat’s wife. The forwarding address for one company was the Florida condominium. José Murat's youngest daughter, Lorena, has been the most recent Murat at the Time Warner Center, living there for two years and studying fashion at Parsons the New School for Design. She now runs a fashion blog called The Fancy Archive. The site’s registration lists the Time Warner condo as its base.

Part 5: At the Time Warner Center, an Enclave of Powerful Russians

Foreign money has fueled a billionaires row of residential buildings overlooking Central Park, including the Plaza, left, and the Time Warner Center in the background.

In March 2009, a bookish-looking Russian senator stepped to the podium at the Brookings Institution in Washington. The occasion was the inauguration of a new think tank devoted to United States-Russia cooperation on financial and energy security, and the speaker, Andrey Vavilov, had donated money. Mr. Vavilov was introduced as a brave individual who had toiled for years under adverse circumstances in Russia, a onetime deputy finance minister and former proprietor of an oil company. His talk, delivered in Russian, focused on the intricacies of the energy markets. Behind the trappings of Brookings and his professorial demeanor, though, were some more ambiguous elements of Mr. Vavilov’s career. At the Finance Ministry during the presidency of Boris N. Yeltsin, he helped develop a market-based economy that would ultimately mint vast riches for insiders. He also wielded enormous power over state revenue and expenditures, including decisions over which banks would garner coveted government deposits. A parliamentary anticorruption committee later investigated allegations against him of favoritism and abuse of power — charges that he denied but that would shadow him for a decade. He had become extraordinarily wealthy during the early years of Vladimir V. Putin’s presidency, when the oil company he had acquired for $25 million was taken over in 2003 by a state-controlled enterprise for $600 million. It was widely alleged that the purchase price was excessive, and that money was funneled to politicians in the form of kickbacks. Six years later, as Mr. Vavilov helped inaugurate one new venture in Washington, his personal fortune was bringing another piece of business to fruition in New York. A shell company tied to Mr. Vavilov was poised to buy a penthouse at the Time Warner Center for $37.5 million. Mr. Vavilov’s purchase — all 8,275 square feet of it, with his-and-her master bathrooms and 360-degree city views — is an opulent example of how the flight of wealth accrued in the chaotic capitalism of post-Soviet Russia has been a powerful force behind the luxury condominium boom reordering New York City’s skyline. In the decade and a half since Mr. Putin came to power, Russians have socked away hundreds of billions of dollars overseas. Even as the Kremlin was promoting what it called a “deoffshorization” campaign to repatriate Russian capital, an estimated $150 billion left the country last year. Unless Mr. Putin can effectively lock the door, that flow may intensify if Russia’s economy and currency continue to founder.

For many wealthy Russians, a New York condo serves as a double parachute — a safe-deposit box of sorts, and a soft landing spot should the climate back home turn inhospitable or dangerous — even if that apartment sits dark and vacant for most of the year. In the process, the Russians, while not quite as ubiquitous as they are in, say, some of the tonier districts of London, have become the face of a sharpening debate about the impact of New York’s pied-à-terre economy. In an interview with New York magazine in September 2013, the departing mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, described the wealthy foreigners as “a godsend” whose spending bolsters the city’s economy and provides revenue to take care of poorer New Yorkers. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?” the mayor said, and certainly many of his fellow citizens would agree. But to many others, the Russians, with their reputation for ostentatious wealth, are emblematic of a dangerously expanding gap between the city’s haves and havenots. The archetype of the condo boom is the Time Warner Center. Marketed during the real estate malaise that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the towers were heavily promoted to an international clientele. The Russians have come buying. Many of the apartments were purchased through shell companies, but a New York Times investigation identified at least 20 that have been owned by Russians or citizens of other former Soviet republics who, in all, invested more than $200 million in Time Warner Center condos. “This building has so many Russians, it’s unbelievable,” said Stratos Costalas, a real estate broker with Oxford Property Group who has sold apartments in the building. There is evidence of even more Russian owners, but their identities are so carefully concealed that The Times was unable to definitively identify them. For example, even the longtime renters of Apartment 63B in the south tower do not know the names of their landlords, though they believe they are Russian. Records show that the legal owner is a company called Daloa Group Holdings, but from there the trail goes cold. Many of the Russians whom The Times was able to identify at the Time Warner Center were players in the epic deals of the Yeltsin era that privatized vast, hulking state companies and created the country’s most powerful oligarchs. And quite a few of their stories circle through that of Mr. Vavilov. Mr. Vavilov did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. Nor did he speak up publicly a few years ago when a mysterious media blitz of charges and countercharges broke out involving a longtime adversary, a financier and former Russian lawmaker named Ashot Egiazaryan, who was seeking political asylum in the United States. It turns out that Mr. Vavilov was at the center of the byzantine affair. Seed money for the media campaign came from bags of cash Mr. Vavilov had lying around his Moscow home, according to a deposition from a subsequent defamation lawsuit in New York. Mr. Vavilov was neither plaintiff nor defendant in the litigation, but by the time it was over in 2014, he had quietly spent more than $1 million in legal fees.

Pursuit of Luxury Mr. Vavilov, 54, looks every bit the ivory tower economist, with closely cropped graying hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He has a Ph.D. from the Central Economics and Mathematics Institute in Moscow and is a visiting senior scholar in the economics department at Pennsylvania State University. Yet along with that academician’s image, cultivated on his personal website and in public appearances, comes a penchant for audacious gestures and an expansive appetite for luxury. He once placed billboards around Moscow announcing his love for his wife, an actress and dancer named Mariana Tsaregradskaya. In addition to the New York penthouse and a home in Moscow, they have had residences in Monaco and Beverly Hills. He has owned an Airbus jet, according to court papers, and the couple have been known to fly to the Little Nell, a luxury hotel in Aspen, Colo., for ski holidays. In 2004, the Russian news agency RBC reported that Ms. Tsaregradskaya had purchased two diamonds — of 55 and 59.5 carats — previously displayed in museums. The tab was $60 million. If the path was circuitous, it was quite by design that the couple ended up with one of the showiest condos in New York. Originally, they had hoped to settle at the Plaza, the venerable hotel that was undergoing a partial conversion to condos. Based on a model, they signed contracts in February 2007 for two penthouses — a triplex for $39.5 million through the shell company Penthouse 2009 Inc. and a duplex for $14 million under the name Penthouse 2011 Inc. The two condos shared a wall and could be connected through a bedroom and living room. Mr. Vavilov stated “in no uncertain that he wished to own the largest and most expensive apartment at the Plaza,” according to documents filed in a subsequent lawsuit over the sale. In January 2008, with construction underway, the couple visited the interior designer Howard Slatkin at his Upper East Side apartment filled with custom fabrics, art and antiques. He advised them that redecorating their condo in a similar motif would cost about $1,500 a square foot, according to court records. iring the décor — which a 2013 article in The Times described as “Italian palazzo meets Russian princess” — they engaged Mr. Slatkin’s company for several projects.

Andrey Vavilov, a former Russian senator and deputy finance minister, at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in the Time Warner Center in 2007. A company tied to Mr. Vavilov bought a penthouse in the building for $37.5 million.

One was to redecorate the Airbus jet. Another was the redesign of what was to be the couple’s interim residence while the apartments at the Plaza were under construction — Apartment 70B in the Time Warner Center’s north tower. The couple had purchased the 3,000-square-foot condo in 2007 for $13 million through another shell corporation — TW70B Inc. The decoration of 70B was to be a test before Mr. Slatkin set out on the largest and final project — decorating the Plaza penthouses that were to be their permanent New York residence. In late June, the couple conducted a walk-through of the Plaza penthouses before closing. It was during this visit that Ms. Tsaregradskaya expressed her displeasure, complaining that the apartments were not large enough, among other things. Several weeks later, the couple refused to close, alleging that the apartments’ design and construction did not measure up to what had been d. The developer said it would keep their $10.7 million security deposit. In a lawsuit filed in August 2008, the corporations Penthouse 2009 Inc. and Penthouse 2011 Inc. complained that the apartments at the Plaza resembled attics, with low ceilings, unsightly air conditioning units and inferior bathroom tile. Their lawyer, in a news release, accused the developer of a bait and switch. “My client was led to believe that it would receive one of the most luxurious apartments in New York history; it got far less than what it bargained for,” the lawyer, Y. David Scharf, said. The suit was ultimately settled. Mr. Vavilov and Ms. Tsaregradskaya later had a falling out with Mr. Slatkin as well, and an arbitrator directed him to repay more than $3 million. In May 2009, deeming the Plaza not up to their standards, the couple entered into a $37.5 million contract for PH78 at the Time Warner Center, property records show. The buyer was ed under the name Southerndown.

Questions and Investigations In February 1997, a bomb exploded in an empty Saab 9000 parked in front of Russia’s Finance Ministry, not far from the Kremlin. The car belonged to Mr. Vavilov, at that time a deputy finance minister.

A Time Warner penthouse, shown in a real estate listing, that was purchased by a company tied to Mr. Vavilov. Russians and citizens of other former Soviet republics have paid a total of more than $200 million for Time Warner condos.

No one was ever arrested, and the blast was never explained. But in the brutal political infighting of that time, Mr. Vavilov was a man with a certain number of enemies, a man surrounded by suspicion. Mr. Vavilov had ed the Finance Ministry in 1992, one of a handful of idealistic free-market economists embracing a capitalist model in the early days of the Russian Federation. He was only 31, but was already regarded as a leading expert in finance. The year before, he had cut short a fellowship at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington to return home and help shape the parameters of a market-based system for the young republic. At the center of those reforms was the auctioning of pieces of the old Soviet industrial complex. A principal component of that process — and one of the most vociferously assailed as a corrupt ceding of prized assets to a handful of insiders — was a program begun in 1995 called Loans for Shares, in which favored banks received stakes in state enterprises in return for loans to the cash-starved government. Mr. Vavilov’s primary portfolio as deputy finance minister, though, lay elsewhere. As the person responsible for all government expenditures and revenues in foreign currencies, Mr. Vavilov shouldered enormous responsibility for the day-to-day execution of financial transactions. He also managed debt issues as Russia sought to renegotiate billions of dollars in loans to international creditors held over from the Soviet Union, as well as to collect on debts owed to it by former client states. Where he wielded the greatest power, though, was in selecting banks that would win government deposits. With the oligarchic bank owners vying for these assets, Mr. Vavilov was in a position not only to distribute the cash and high-yield government notes, but also to shape the in an emerging market with few regulations. Although he played little direct role in the privatization process, this access to money was essential for banks in the competition to acquire the gems of the former Soviet state. “He decided how much deposits to place in which banks, coincident at the same time with privatization,” said one person knowledgeable about Mr. Vavilov’s time in office who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions. In 2001, after the recently elevated Mr. Putin began recentralizing industry, vowing to eliminate “as a class” the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, the Russian Parliament began investigating a host of the former president’s ministers. The review included a detailed look at Mr. Vavilov’s tenure at the Finance Ministry.

Andrey Vavilov, left, and other Russian officials at the opening of an auto plant in 1993. Mr. Vavilov, who ed the Finance Ministry the year before, helped shape a new market-based system for the Russian Federation.

Among the issues under scrutiny was a 1996 agreement that had permitted Ukraine to pay a natural gas debt to Russia with construction materials. Of $450 million in materials supposed to have been shipped to the Russian Defense Ministry to pay off the loan, only $123 million worth arrived, investigators said. A Russian general was tried and sent to prison. At trial, he argued that he was being made the fall guy for high-ranking ministers, and he pointed the finger at Mr. Vavilov as the signatory on the arrangement. Mr. Vavilov denied wrongdoing, and the case against him was dropped. Another case, though, would shadow Mr. Vavilov for years, nourishing suspicions that he had promoted the interests of favored banks. It involved allegations that he had mishandled about $230 million distributed in 1997 for the manufacture of Russian MIG jets destined for India. Soon after Mr. Vavilov left the Finance Ministry in spring 1997, the chairman of Russia’s Central Bank alleged that the money, instead of being transferred directly to the jet manufacturer’s , had been diverted through s at several banks in the form of government bonds known for their particularly beneficial to bankers. Mr. Vavilov denied wrongdoing, saying the money had been deposited in the manufacturer’s and had been spent appropriately. The case against him was closed, but the allegations festered until 2007, when it was reopened and the Russian Supreme Court upheld charges of fraud and abuse of office, clearing the way for Mr. Vavilov’s arrest. By then, however, he had become a senator, complicating the case because the position confers parliamentary immunity. The statute of limitations eventually expired, and the case was dropped in 2008. “You never know what’s going on, who is guilty or not, but they made a very good public case against him,” said Bernard Sucher, an American who worked for 20 years in Russian banking. Mr. Vavilov later said he was the victim of a smear campaign by his enemies. And in his 2010 book, “The Russian Public Debt and Financial Meltdowns,” he said he had argued strongly against the Loans for Shares auctions, which he called “a privatization for oligarchs of the Russian ‘crown jewels.’”

He invoked the story of Alexander Hamilton, the Treasury secretary in the early days of the American republic who died in a duel with Aaron Burr. “Because of my tough position I became the subject of a hysterical and dirty campaign in the mass media that was controlled by the oligarchs,” Mr. Vavilov wrote. “Duels in modern times are not permitted, and there is no place for heroism in the spirit of Alexander Hamilton. The only possible response to the insinuations in the mass media was my decision to resign at the beginning of 1997.” Unexplained in his book was his decision, upon leaving government, to become president of an of Uneximbank, which had been founded by one of the authors — and chief beneficiaries — of Loans for Shares, Vladimir Potanin. In 1995, in one of the program’s most notorious auctions, Mr. Potanin’s bank won virtual control of the mining giant Norilsk Nickel. Despite Mr. Vavilov’s close association with the Yeltsin istration, much of his wealth was acquired later, as Mr. Putin’s government was consolidating the nation’s oil industry in one state-d super company, Rosneft. In 2000, Mr. Vavilov had acquired a small oil company, Severnaya Neft, or Northern Oil, for $25 million. When Rosneft purchased Severnaya Neft in 2003 for $600 million, the deal was widely criticized as having been larded with kickbacks for Kremlin insiders. In a now-legendary confrontation at the Kremlin, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, chairman of the oil giant Yukos, challenged Mr. Putin about the purchase. Many people believed that it was Mr. Putin’s anger over the very public encounter that sparked his campaign against Mr. Khodorkovsky, who would be stripped of his company, prosecuted and imprisoned. In an interview with The Times in 2007, Mr. Vavilov said of Severnaya Neft, “It was a big achievement for me from all points of view. When I bought the company nobody even took it seriously. It became one of the fastest-growing companies in the country.” Even so, Mr. Vavilov’s critics look back over his career and see a classic transformation story of that Russian era. “The issue with Vavilov is that he was one of the reformers who switched to the oligarchic side,” said Anders Aslund, a Swedish economist who is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute.

Connections Among Neighbors At the Time Warner Center, Mr. Vavilov and Ms. Tsaregradskaya needed little introduction, particularly in the ultraexpensive top floors, where a number of the Russian owners were linked through a tangled — one might even say Dostoevskian — web of relationships and business deals. Before buying at the Time Warner Center, Mr. Vavilov had visited the unit of Oleg Baybakov, whose family have owned three Time Warner Center apartments at various times. Mr. Baybakov made part of his fortune as an executive of Norilsk Nickel, the mining company acquired for a fraction of its value in the Loans for Shares program. In fact, he is one of several Time Warner owners with ties to the Norilsk deal, in which one of the winning partners was Mikhail Prokhorov, now a visible figure in New York as principal owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.

Oleg Baybakov, left, and Maxim Finskiy in 2010.

Mr. Baybakov is primarily known in New York through his daughter, Maria Baibakova, a young socialite and art-scene fixture. Before helping foster his daughter’s art career, however, Mr. Baybakov had sought to establish her in the restaurant business. After plans for a downtown restaurant called Fum fell apart, Mr. Baybakov’s restaurant company sued his business partner to recoup his investment and collect $75,000 left in escrow. When advised by one of the lawyers that the legal fees might exceed the amount in escrow, Mr. Baybakov said he did not care. “I will spend 10 times more and sue you,” he told the lawyer, according to a deposition. In the end, Mr. Baybakov failed to show up for trial, and so did his exwife, also a partner in the business. “She also apparently evinced a disregard for the court’s process,” said Justice Louis B. York of State Supreme Court, dismissing the case, according to court records. The Baybakovs sold one of their Time Warner apartments, 74A in the north tower, to a shell company called Ff Property Management for $11 million in 2008. The Times traced the shell company to Maxim Finskiy, also a former Norilsk Nickel executive and a partner with Mr. Prokhorov in another mining company. The apartment was sold for $18 million last November. If Mr. Prokhorov was a big winner in the Norilsk deal, the loser was Vitaly Malkin, whose Rossiyskiy Kredit Bank submitted a higher bid but was shut out on technical grounds. At the time, though, another deal was on the horizon that would benefit him — an agreement to finance Angola’s $5 billion debt that generated controversy because of payments to Angolan officials and to middlemen, including Mr. Malkin. At the Russian Foreign Ministry, it was Mr. Vavilov who signed off on the deal. Mr. Malkin’s lawyer called his client’s $48.8 million payment a dividend, explaining that he had held shares in a company that served as an intermediary in the deal. In 2010, a limited liability company traced to Mr. Malkin’s family paid $15.65 million for Apartment 74B, a duplex, in the Time Warner Center’s south tower. A member of an istrative council of Mr. Malkin’s bank, Vasily Anisimov, has a connection to the Time Warner Center as well. A penthouse there was purchased in 2004 for $9.8 million through a trust for the benefit of Mr. Anisimov’s daughter, Anna Anisimova, then a student at New York University. Mr. Anisimov made his fortune in aluminum in the 1990s. He remains influential in Russia, where he has been an associate of Arkady Rotenberg, a longtime friend of Mr. Putin who was among those sanctioned by the United States after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Possibly Mr. Vavilov’s longest-standing associate in the Time Warner Center is Konstantin Kagalovsky. In 1991, the two were of a group of five who holed up in a dacha outside Moscow to develop an economic platform for the emerging republic. Mr. Kagalovsky went on to become Russia’s representative to the International Monetary Fund and later vice chairman of Mr. Khodorkovsky’s company, Yukos. In 1999, Mr. Kagalovsky’s wife, Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, was enmeshed in an international money-laundering investigation focused on her employer, the Bank of New York. The bank ultimately suspended Ms. Kagalovsky, who had authority over Russian s as head of the bank’s Eastern European division. She denied wrongdoing, and no charges were filed against her. She later sued the bank, saying that she had been wrongfully suspended, and received a settlement. Through records and interviews, The Times established that the Kagalovskys, through a shell company, are owners at the Time Warner Center. Mr. Kagalovsky, who did not respond to questions for this article, has become another of the Time Warner Russians embroiled in recent litigation in New York. In a lawsuit in State Supreme Court, he was found to have wrongfully wrested control of a Ukrainian television network from his partner, Vladimir Gusinski. The judge ruled in 2012 that Mr. Kagalovsky and his associates had secretly transferred ownership of the company to entities he controlled. In his decision, the judge wrote that Mr. Kagalovsky and a company executive had agreed that if Mr. Gusinski refused to step down, Mr. Kagalovsky would take over the company using “the traditional Russian and Ukrainian method.”

Behind a Media Campaign Mr. Vavilov was preparing to export his own Russian rivalry to America when he invited a Washington operative to his Moscow home in January 2011. Mr. Vavilov had recently learned that Mr. Egiazaryan, the financier and former lawmaker, had taken up residence in Beverly Hills after fleeing Russia, where he was facing fraud charges. While Mr. Vavilov hated Mr. Egiazaryan, according to a deposition from one figure in the later legal case, the precise genesis of that antagonism is not clear. It might have been related to Mr. Vavilov’s former oil company, Severnaya Neft, in which Mr. Egiazaryan’s cousin had once been an investor. Or it might have been related to the longstanding allegations about the murky MIG case, which included claims that money had disappeared in Unikombank, where Mr. Egiazaryan was a major shareholder. Now, tensions had escalated to such a degree that Mr. Vavilov wanted the operative, Rinat Akhmetshin, director of a Washington think tank called the International Eurasian Institute, to help derail Mr. Egiazaryan’s application for asylum in the United States.

Ashot Egiazaryan, a financier and former Russian lawmaker, was the subject of a negative campaign financed by Mr. Vavilov.

“I there was money in like $100 bills bags,” Mr. Akhmetshin would later testify, recounting how Mr. Vavilov pulled out $70,000 or $80,000 and handed it over — the first payment in a media campaign to discredit Mr. Egiazaryan. For help, Mr. Akhmetshin turned to Peter Zalmayev, who runs the Eurasia Democracy Initiative, which describes itself as devoted to promoting democracy and the rule of law in former Soviet states. Mr. Zalmayev later acknowledged in a deposition that he had been paid $100,000 but had not disclosed that he was working at the behest of Mr. Vavilov when he approached groups including the American Jewish Committee and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. Both ultimately signed anti-Egiazaryan letters to the State Department and the Homeland Security secretary. Mr. Zalmayev’s strategy largely relied on painting Mr. Egiazaryan as anti-Semitic because of his connection to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, headed by an ultranationalist. By March 2011, Mr. Zalmayev had persuaded The Jewish Journal, a widely read newspaper in California, to publish an opinion article he wrote. “Jewish groups in America and Russia have repeatedly condemned the L.D.P.R. and its leader as anti-Semitic,” the article said, adding, “The U.S. government must likewise put anti-Semites worldwide on notice: You are not welcome in this country.” Mr. Zalmayev also acknowledged paying $7,000 to a Russian-language radio host in Boston, whose byline was used on an article, partly drafted by Mr. Zalmayev, expressing opposition to Mr. Egiazaryan’s asylum application. And he donated $2,000 to Lev Ponomarev, a human rights activist in Russia, who had signed letters to of Congress, also partly drafted by Mr. Zalmayev. Mr. Ponomarev later rescinded the letters as a “grave mistake” and returned the money, but not before a staff member of the United States Helsinki Commission, a federal agency, raised questions in an email exchange with Mr. Zalmayev. “Who’s orchestrating this?” wrote the staff member, Kyle Parker, after Mr. Zalmayev ed him to suggest that Mr. Egiazaryan warranted attention for placement on a “no entry” list. Mr. Egiazaryan mounted his own public relations campaign, denying the charges of anti-Semitism and saying he had fled Russia after death threats against him and his family. The case against Mr. Egiazaryan back home involved claims that he defrauded two business partners of $48 million. In a recent interview with The Times, Mr. Egiazaryan said the fraud charges were drummed up by politically connected rivals as part of a corporate raid stripping him of his

interest in a t venture with the city of Moscow to renovate a Stalin-era hotel near Red Square. “All the accusations are built on fabricated documents,” Mr. Egiazaryan said. On Feb. 7, 2011, The Associated Press published an article portraying Mr. Egiazaryan as a victim of persecution in Russia. Within days, Mr. Egiazaryan hired BGR Gabara, a London unit of BGR Group, an influential Washington lobbying and public relations firm. The firm’s fee was $77,000 a month, plus expenses, to develop a “global media strategy” for Mr. Egiazaryan that portrayed him in a favorable light, including a Washington program in “ of Mr. Egiazaryan’s application to settle in the U.S.” By fall, BGR had scored a coup, helping to place an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal Europe, ostensibly written by Mr. Egiazaryan, expressing for the anticorruption activist Aleksei Navalny. A notation with The Journal article did not mention the criminal case, saying merely that Mr. Egiazaryan was living in the United States for his personal safety. On April 19, 2011, Mr. Egiazaryan filed suit against Mr. Zalmayev in federal court in Manhattan, charging that he had led a malicious disinformation campaign against him. Mr. Zalmayev countersued, and, in the end, the legal confrontation essentially ended in a draw. Mr. Egiazaryan’s lawyers had contended that one of their client’s rivals in the hotel deal was behind Mr. Zalmayev’s campaign, suggesting that Mr. Vavilov was merely a front. But documents produced in the discovery process and reviewed by The Times, show that in addition to financing the media campaign against Mr. Egiazaryan, Mr. Vavilov was covering Mr. Zalmayev’s legal costs. As of July 2012, nearly two years before the case ended, Mr. Vavilov had run through more than $1.14 million in legal fees. At one hearing, the federal magistrate, Gabriel Gorenstein, complained of the lack of monetary restraint on both sides. “It’s mysterious to me as to why this litigation has ballooned to what it is now,” he said in a hearing. Mr. Vavilov, he later wrote, “obviously has no interest in the integrity of the United States asylum petitioning process. Rather, he apparently harbors an independent interest in harming Egiazaryan.” Mr. Egiazaryan remains in the United States. The Justice Department would neither confirm nor deny Russian news media reports that the United States had turned down an extradition request. Acquaintances say Mr. Vavilov, who resigned from the Russian senate in 2010, lives as a private citizen of Russia, a status that makes him less susceptible to government interference. “He has no political connection,” said Sergei Guriev, former director of the New Economic School in Moscow, where Mr. Vavilov has donated money and sits on the board. Among Mr. Vavilov’s enterprises is a Russian company, SuperOx, which is developing high-temperature superconductors to improve magnetic levitation technology for high-speed trains. His foundation has donated more than $1 million to Penn State, where he is a visiting scholar. He appears to relish that connection, displaying a football signed by Joe Paterno, the longtime coach, in his Time Warner pied-à-terre, according to someone who visited there. The penthouse was recently put on the market for $68 million. There are signs that Mr. Vavilov may be turning away from the United States. He has taken a leave of absence this year from Penn State. “I think important Russians, just in general, it’s the case that people whose business interests are in Russia now, they feel very uncomfortable being seen as close to America,” said Barry Ickes, an economics professor there who has worked closely with Mr. Vavilov. In an interview with the magazine Elle Man Russia, which was posted in English in October on his company’s Facebook page, Mr. Vavilov expressed disenchantment with the American people, characterizing them as overly strict and hypercompetitive. “As for me (born in the Soviet Union and grown up further in Russia), in United States was built a cruel system, a cruel community, and people who are cruel to each other,” he said.

Part 6: Real Estate Shell Companies Scheme to Defraud Owners Out of Their Homes

Ozella Campbell says she was tricked out of her home in an alleged deed fraud scheme.

Partially paralyzed and reliant on a wheelchair, Ozella Campbell spends a lot of time watching television. It was under those circumstances in February 2014 that she saw a commercial urging her to call MyHouseIsADump.com, a company that offered to buy houses in as-is condition, in cash, and to close the purchase within seven days. She called the toll-free number and within hours, she said, a well-spoken young man appeared at her brownstone, a longtime family home in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a Brooklyn neighborhood in the throes of transformation. The next day, the man’s associate arrived. “He said, ‘You don’t have to pay any more bills,’” said Ms. Campbell, who was $1,000 behind on her electric bill at the time. A third man, named Alex, ostensibly the boss, arrived next. He promised, Ms. Campbell said, to pay her delinquent mortgage, provide for her housing for two years, and pay her $43,800. He also hired a lawyer for her. All she had to do was sign over the deed to her house. More than a year later, Ms. Campbell, 75, is in limbo. Her former home at 679 Jefferson Avenue is owned by an entity called Jefferson Holding LLC and she is left with her delinquent $529,000 mortgage. “He lied,” she said tearfully of Alex in an interview at the illegally converted garage in Canarsie, Brooklyn, where she lives for now. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs. Campbell, we’re going to take care of you.’  ” Ms. Campbell never learned Alex’s surname. And when her relatives tried to find Jefferson Holding LLC at its Great Neck, N.Y., address, there was no company there by that name.

Hard to Crack In Bedford-Stuyvesant and other pockets of the city, white-collar criminals are employing a variety of schemes to snatch properties from their owners. Often, they use the secrecy afforded to shell companies to rent out vacated properties until they are caught or sell them to third parties. Victims are left groping for redress, unable to identify their predators or even, in some cases, to prove a crime has been committed. Attention lately has focused on the growing use of shell companies to buy prized real estate in Manhattan and other glittering destinations for global wealth. But the stealthy practice of deed theft illustrates another way that limited liability company law used to create such entities has been twisted and stretched to conceal the ownership of real estate. This is particularly true in Brooklyn neighborhoods where profits in the hundreds of thousands of dollars from quick turnaround sales have become common. “Sham LLCs are a huge problem in of their lack of transparency, in of who is behind the property and who is behind these schemes,” said Jennifer Sinton, a lawyer with South Brooklyn Legal Services, which is representing Ms. Campbell in an effort to reclaim her home.

Mrs. Campbell's house at 679 Jefferson Avenue in Brooklyn.

A review by The New York Times of several dozen cases, and interviews with lawyers, prosecutors and others knowledgeable about fraudulent deed transfers, suggest they are accelerating even as officials struggle to address them. The city’s Department of Finance said it was investigating 120 cases, many of them hard to crack because of the role played by LLCs, officials said. Underscoring the rising alarm over the problem, the state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, and the Brooklyn borough president, Eric L. Adams, held a forum last month to warn property owners about it. Deed thieves often scan legal notices for mortgages in arrears, typically targeting properties like Ms. Campbell’s that are in poor repair or abandoned. Vulnerable homeowners — including older and disabled adults — are sometimes tricked into g over their properties, while believing they are getting financial relief. In other cases, signatures are simply forged on deeds. The thieves, meanwhile, hide behind inscrutable mazes of limited liability companies, rented post office boxes and fake addresses. Coming amid waves of gentrification, the reports of deed theft have helped feed the unease felt in neighborhoods where longtime residents — blacks and Hispanics, the poor and middle class — are increasingly being priced out. A report last year by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Center for NYC Neighborhoods found that the schemes disproportionately affected black and Hispanic homeowners. When LLCs are taken to court, those behind them often remain a step ahead — and impossible to find. “They’re shell companies,” said Jomo Gamal Thomas, a lawyer who has represented several deed fraud victims. “There’s no guarantee you’ll get your money back.”

The Shell Game Some schemes are particularly brazen, with thieves forging homeowners’ signatures and filing fraudulent deeds with the city to transfers. Among the telltale signs of forgery, according to Toby M. Cohen, a Brooklyn lawyer who has represented clients attempting to reclaim stolen properties: “a deed transferred for no consideration to an LLC or a corporation and scribbled signatures you can’t read.” LLCs formed in many states and offshore jurisdictions can shield their owners’ names, but secrecy was not originally their central purpose. A limited liability company is a legal entity similar to a corporation — though with a less formal structure and no requirement for annual meetings or the keeping of minutes — that protects an owner’s individual assets in case of litigation. Initially established in the energy industry in the 1970s to avoid the payment of personal and corporate taxes, LLCs have more recently become instruments for buying real estate, making a once-transparent real-property market ever more opaque. In a series of articles in February, The Times examined how Manhattan’s luxury condominium boom had been fueled by international investors buying properties through limited liability companies. More than half of such residences are now bought through LLCs.

A look behind the limited liability facades of one signature development, the Time Warner Center, found that a number of buyers had faced government inquiries around the world. A system of developers, condominium boards, real estate brokers and lawyers aid and abet the secrecy, The Times found. Saying he had been motivated in part by The Times’s findings, New York’s finance commissioner, Jacques Jiha, began last spring to require that all of LLCs be disclosed to the city for tax auditing purposes when deeds were transferred. Mr. Jiha said that wealthy residents might be able to use a “veil of secrecy” to evade city taxes by claiming to live elsewhere. While the new rules went beyond what many jurisdictions require, experts called them imperfect, because some LLC are nominees, meaning the true owners remain hidden. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s istration is sponsoring legislation in Albany intended to prevent deed theft. The bill’s provisions include a requirement that notaries public be fingerprinted. But the city recently removed a provision that would compel additional disclosure of LLC ownership in real estate transactions. While real estate interests had objected to the requirement, Sonia Alleyne, a spokeswoman for the Finance Department, said that was not why it was dropped. Instead, she said, city officials believed the new requirements imposed by Mr. Jiha had begun to work. At the same time, investigators have been working to crack down on fraudulent deed transfers. Beyond the 120 cases under investigation, the Finance Department is aware of another 167 cases that appear suspicious, according to Joseph Fucito, the New York sheriff, the agency that investigates allegations of deed fraud. Indictments have been handed up in all five boroughs, with 16 arrests since July 2014. But lawyers who have represented deed fraud victims said the sheer volume of such cases, which some estimate to be in the thousands, and the difficulty of tracking down the perpetrators, had overwhelmed law enforcement agencies. Even so, in May, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, announced the indictment of three men accused of tricking people into g over properties in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens. The men’s company, Homeowner Assistance Services of New York, relied on telemarketers to promote their alleged scheme. Among those who received a call were Roy and Iris Jones.

The Purloined Property Mr. and Ms. Jones have owned a multiunit building on Fulton Street in Brooklyn since 1999. An appraisal they commissioned put its value at $2.8 million. The couple used to operate an upholstery shop in the building. Since closing the shop, they have rented the property to tenants.

The house at 1547 Fulton Street in Brooklyn that belonged to Roy and Iris Jones.

In 2014, JPMorgan Chase & Company, their mortgage lender, told them they owed $182,000 in back payments, an amount they disputed. After learning of the dispute, apparently from public documents, Homeowner Assistance Services of New York called the Joneses, offering to work it out, partially through a refinancing. In an interview, Mr. Jones, 75, said officials with the company had offered the couple a loan at favorable , and even provided door-to-door car service to their offices in Hollis, Queens, to sign the paperwork. “Two months later, a friend called us and said, ‘Why are you selling the place?’   ” Mr. Jones said. The property had been transferred to an entity called Metro Development Group LLC without their knowledge, he said. Instead of a refinancing, the couple learned, the documents had conveyed ownership of the property — for no money — without resolving their dispute with JPMorgan Chase. Mario Alvarenga, one of the three men indicted in May, was among those with whom Mr. and Ms. Jones dealt. All three men have pleaded not guilty. A lawsuit filed by Mr. and Ms. Jones in an attempt to reclaim their property named Mr. Alvarenga — vice president of Homeowner Assistance Services — as a defendant. The Joneses have also filed a complaint with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. But litigation, already costly for individual property owners, can be particularly difficult when the owners of LLCs are hard to find. Consider the three-story house at 851 Lincoln Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Gordon Tracey, a hospital maintenance worker, said he bought the property in 2000 as an investment, then had difficulty making his mortgage payments. In 2014, when he needed money for the burial of a cousin in Jamaica, Mr. Tracey said he was approached by a man he knew only as Sam from a company called Lincoln Holdings NY LLC. Sam offered Mr. Tracey $500 just to meet, then later said he would pay him $30,000, negotiate with the lender to reduce his past-due mortgage, resell the property and pay him $245,000 when the deal was completed, according to a lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn. Then, Mr. Tracey said, his signature was forged on documents transferring the deed to Lincoln Holdings NY, which brought in tenants and collected rent but never paid off the mortgage. (Mr. Tracey said he had received the promised $30,000.) Three months after reaching an agreement with Sam, Mr. Tracey said, he realized that the Lincoln Holdings NY letterhead did not have an address or a phone number. Hoping to speak with Sam, Mr. Tracey said he sat outside what he believed to be his Brooklyn building for hours, but never succeeded in making with Sam or Lincoln Holdings NY. “I worked so hard for that place,” said Mr. Tracey, 64. “It’s a model block. It’s a very nice house.” A reporter visited the address of Lincoln Holdings NY at 694 Myrtle Avenue, Suite 166, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and found it to be a commercial mailing and shipping center. Suite 166 is not a suite at all, but a rented mailbox. The men operating the mailing center declined to identify Box 166’s owners. A Brooklyn lawyer for Lincoln Holdings NY in the pending lawsuit, Avi Rosengarten, declined to identify his clients. In court papers, Lincoln Holdings NY has denied the allegations.

An Amateur Sleuth Two years ago, shaken by a series of break-ins, Susan Green moved out of her rowhouse in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The house, she said, was also facing foreclosure after falling into disrepair amid her financial and personal setbacks, including a back injury that kept her from working temporarily. Last year, she was astounded to learn from a neighbor that the deed to her former home had been transferred to an entity she had never heard of, Greene Throop LLC. When she looked at the documents filed with the city transferring the property’s ownership, she realized her signature had been forged. Ms. Green, 47, who now works at a radio station, tried to track down Greene Throop LLC. Its address was of no help: it was her house’s address, 689 Greene Avenue. She went to the Brooklyn office of a lawyer listed as an authorized signatory of Greene Throop LLC: Mr. Rosengarten, the same lawyer who represents Lincoln Holdings NY. In a telephone interview, Mr. Rosengarten confirmed that he was involved in preparing paperwork for the transfer of Ms. Green’s house. Asked about Ms. Green’s visit, Mr. Rosengarten said a woman had appeared with identification showing that she was Susan Green; he said he now believed she was a different Susan Green posing as the owner. Ms. Green said she demanded that Mr. Rosengarten rescind the deed transfer. Instead, he supplied her with the phone number and the address, on Harrison Avenue in Brooklyn, of a man named Moshe, whom Mr. Rosengarten described as an investor in the property.

Susan Green at 689 Greene Avenue in Brooklyn.

ed by phone, Moshe, who would not give his last name, confirmed that he was an investor, but said the property had been purchased legally. He promised to meet with a reporter, but never set up a meeting despite two attempts to do so. Ms. Green said she now hoped to get the deed back somehow so she could arrange a sale and erase a debt that had reached nearly $1 million. “We’re hoping by the grace of God that they’ll do the right thing and return it,” she said.

A Criminal Case Ms. Campbell, who had taken over her Bedford-Stuyvesant house from her husband’s aunt, carrying on a multidecade family tradition in the neighborhood, is now, for all practical purposes, homeless. In October 2014, before padlocking her house, Alex — the man who had promised to pay off her delinquent mortgage and find her a new place to live — arranged for her to move to the unheated garage in Canarsie that had been illegally converted into an apartment. Last month, workers from the Buildings Department came to tell Ms. Campbell the apartment was too dangerous to inhabit. She is still there, waiting for the city to find her a safe place to live. In the meantime, she may soon be called as a witness in a criminal case. Teresa Russo, an investigator for the city Sheriff’s Department who was looking into Ms. Campbell’s complaints, realized that the Alex Ms. Campbell had been dealing with was the same man involved in another, similar case. His real name is Arash Noghreh. Mr. Noghreh, of Great Neck, had also signed some of the documents on behalf of Jefferson Holding LLC, the shell company that wound up with Ms. Campbell’s home. In August, he was indicted in Brooklyn on charges of grand larceny and filing false documents with the city. He pleaded not guilty. In court papers, his lawyer, Roger L. Stavis, said the allegations against his client were “demonstrably false and flatly contradicted by the testimony before the grand jury.” In an interview, Mr. Stavis said Mr. Noghreh had made payments to Ms. Campbell exceeding $40,000, as promised. Mr. Stavis argued in a motion that the charge of filing fraudulent documents should be dismissed. “The documents in question were submitted by and on behalf of the corporate entity, Jefferson Holding, LLC,” the motion said. “That corporate entity is not a named defendant in the indictment. The evidence was insufficient to establish that this defendant, Arash Noghreh, ‘presented’ those documents for filing, or even that he caused any documents to be filed. For that reason the counts must be dismissed.” The charge remains pending.

Part 7: A Mansion, a Shell Company and Resentment in Bel Air

The house under construction on Strada Vecchia in Bel Air has been cited for code violations and is the subject of a neighborhood battle. The property is owned by a shell company.

LOS ANGELES — The most notorious new house in Los Angeles hangs from a Bel Air hillside, high above the sprawl and smog, unfinished and unloved. Outraged neighbors call it “the Starship Enterprise,” and in truth it looks like nothing so much as an earthbound space station of curved glass and steel, draped in scaffolding and tarpaulin, roughly 30,000 square feet and nearly 70 feet high. That height, about twice the legal limit, is among a litany of violations that have stalled construction at 901 Strada Vecchia for more than a year. Without the city’s permission, workers tore down the original house and leveled the hillside. Though the site is in an “earthquake-induced landslide area,” subsequent inspections found “unsecured open excavations” and other perils. Inspectors also uncovered a host of features, unapproved though befitting a house with an aspirational price tag of $100 million, among them underground bedrooms and an IMAX theater. As unapologetically extravagant as the project is its impresario — Mohamed Hadid, father of the celebrity models Gigi and Bella Hadid, sometime guest on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” and one of the city’s leading luxury developers. For years, Mr. Hadid’s Instagram has featured photos of himself amid the rebar at the Bel Air site. He calls it his “office” and labels the photos with the hashtag #themodernhouseofhadid. Yet for all that, over four years of violation notices, inspections and hearings, efforts to hold someone able for the mess at 901 Strada Vecchia have repeatedly hit a legal wall. It is, as a judge said during an October session where once again nothing got done, “an extremely complicated case.” That is because “themodernhouseofhadid” belongs not to Mr. Hadid but to an entity that keeps the actual owner at a legal remove — a shell company named 901 Strada L.L.C. Fueled largely by the vast streams of wealth crossing the globe as never before, a new generation of hyper-luxury homes with stratospheric price tags is colonizing the most gilded hillsides and canyons of Los Angeles. In some areas, every third or fourth home has been torn down, leaving gashes of dirt and debris where new mansions will rise. And more often than not, the people behind the purchases are hidden by shell companies. Here, as in other roosting places of the superrich, the recent influx of foreign money has gone hand in hand with the rising use of shell companies — generally limited liability companies. Shell companies were used in three-quarters of purchases of over $5 million in Los Angeles over the last three years, a higher rate even than the roughly 55 percent in New York, according to a New York Times analysis of data from

PropertyShark. What is more, in Los Angeles, where so many of the new palaces are spec houses — luxury magnets for global wealth — not only are the buyers shielded by shell companies, but the developers are, too.

Le Palais, a Beverly Hills estate featuring a swan pond and a Turkish bath, was sold to a shell company tied to Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, a daughter of the president of Uzbekistan.

L.L.C.s were created to protect individuals from legal liability, and they have a range of legitimate uses. In an interview, Mr. Hadid said he used L.L.C.s for liability reasons, adding, “One hundred percent of the time that people build, they create an L.L.C.” Today in Los Angeles, as at 901 Strada Vecchia, L.L.C.s have provided insulation — some would say impunity — amid a gathering antidevelopment backlash. “That’s my — that’s the property I’m developing,” Mr. Hadid explained. “I’m the developer. I develop for other people.” Law enforcement officials and anticorruption groups worry that while many foreign buyers are simply seeking to safeguard their wealth in United States real estate, some are using shell companies to hide illicit gains, despite banking laws designed to flag the movement of large sums of money by foreign government figures, their families and close associates. This year, articles in The Times pierced the secrecy of shell companies owning units in one archetypal condominium complex in Manhattan — the Time Warner Center. Among the owners were a growing proportion of wealthy foreigners, including a number of government officials and people close to them. At least 16 owners had been the subject of government inquiries around the world, either personally or as heads of companies. Here in several neighborhoods of the Platinum Triangle — Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Holmby Hills — a search for who is behind shell companies, based on property and incorporation records, as well as interviews, found a predictable mix of celebrities, lawyers, media executives and the like. But it also turned up owners from a diverse collection of countries, including some involved in current or past law enforcement inquiries. Head up North Alpine Drive in Beverly Hills, for example, and on the right is a $14.7 million home owned by a shell company tied to Kola Aluko, a Nigerian businessman who is a figure in an investigation of that country’s former oil minister. A block away is one of several local properties that have been owned by shell companies tied to a son of Suharto, the corrupt and brutal former president of Indonesia. And back down the hill is Le Palais, a faux chateau — with a swan pond and a Turkish bath with hand-carved Egyptian limestone columns — that a shell company tied to Mr. Hadid sold to a shell company tied to Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, a daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. The Karimov family faces corruption investigations in several countries, according to two people who have worked in law enforcement and have knowledge of the inquiries. It is in Bel Air, though, that an army of resistance has risen, a coalition of influential neighbors with their own considerable resources. Call it the haves vs. the have-even-mores, or perhaps the old (for Los Angeles) money vs. the new. And while their bill of grievances extends to suspicions about shell companies hiding corrupt foreign money, what they talk about most is unethical and dangerous development — about dirt trucks run amok, the inevitability of mudslides and the waste of water in a time of drought. One of the Strada Vecchia neighbors, Nancy Walton Laurie, a Walmart heir, accused Mr. Hadid of encroaching on her land and harming her eucalyptus tree, damage she says will cost her $75,000. The property at 901 Strada Vecchia is the crystallization of all this — in its grandiosity, its 60 pages of violations and other notices, and the ire it has provoked. And for the maddening elusiveness of its provenance. “The person who is in control of the property has every interest in remaining invisible,” said James Spertus, a lawyer for the lawyer who is listed as 901 Strada L.L.C.’s manager and who became a co-defendant when the city took the highly unusual step of filing a criminal case. “They’re not charged, and they want to stay that way, so there is no public record of that person.”

‘Let’s Make a Deal’ Silver-maned at 67, Mr. Hadid, like many of his clients, is an immigrant. Born in Israel, he moved to Virginia as a teenager with his Palestinian family and spent his early business career in the Washington, D.C., area, developing office buildings and Ritz-Carlton hotels. Central to his success even then was his ability to woo foreign financiers — French and German backers, and in particular the SAAR Foundation, a group of Saudi investors. In the 1990s, Mr. Hadid was involved with a number of small companies. Several ran into problems, and he filed for personal bankruptcy. By the early 2000s, Mr. Hadid had moved to Los Angeles and begun his next act, as homebuilder to the stars. He built the estate where Michael Jackson died, as well as Palazzo di Amore, a Beverly Hills estate now listed for resale for $149 million. His clients were not always happy — among those who sued him and later settled was Sylvester Stallone — but new buyers kept coming. Among his big-ticket sales was a Beverly Hills house, with a glowing pyramid in a reflecting pool, that was acquired in 2010 by a shell company tied to the stepson of the prime minister of Malaysia. (The prime minister is now a target of corruption investigations at home and abroad.) When Mr. Hadid bought the 1950s ranch house on 1.2 acres at 901 Strada Vecchia for $1.93 million in 2011, the building boom was starting to pick up steam. Bel Air and Beverly Hills are among the areas most popular with foreign buyers in Los Angeles County, where more than 1,400 homes have sold for more than $5 million each since the start of 2013, according to PropertyShark. While the prices are high — $20 million, $50 million, $100 million — people in real estate say that in of square footage, Los Angeles is actually a deal. “L.A., it’s the cheapest real estate in the world,” Mr. Hadid said, sipping tea during the interview at Le Belvédère, the 48,000-square-foot mansion where he lives in Bel Air. “London is more, New York is more.” Los Angeles has another important advantage, according to a leading high-end real estate executive, Aaron Kirman of the John Aaroe Group: Buyers do not have to worry about being vetted by co-op or condominium boards. (In fact, as The Times reported in February, New York condo boards, at least, almost never investigate the identity of the individual behind a shell company or the source of a buyer’s money. Nor are real estate brokers legally bound to ask such questions.) “That’s the beauty of L.A.,” said Mr. Kirman, who says most of his buyers are foreign. “If somebody has the money to pay, let’s make a deal.” Allan Alexander, a former Beverly Hills mayor who now practices real estate law, said he, too, had seen a steep increase in foreign buyers, especially from China.

“A lot of them are buying because of the safety of the investment here, and they don’t care about the price so much because, candidly, they want to get their funds in a safe place,” he said. Some of those seeking a safe and secret harbor for their money are not buyers but investors, several real estate executives said. Developers pitch the projects with predictions of high returns, and the money flows in from shell companies with little scrutiny. As for the new homes themselves, even the designation “mega-mansion” seems insufficient, so Angelenos have derisively labeled them “gigamansions.”

In Bel Air, a truck backed up to let another in January 2015. Neighbors said they were concerned about heavy truck traffic from luxury home development.

“It’s another one of these — you walk in, and you’re at the Forum or something,” John Kelly, the lead investigator for the city’s building department, said of the Strada Vecchia house. Water features are popular — man-made streams and waterfall walls and manicured lawns that go on and on — even as poorer areas turn brown complying with drought restrictions. To compensate for the city’s strict height restrictions, a huge selling point is the “daylight basement,” an expanse of subterranean luxury built into a hillside so that a wall of windows opens out to the view. But such vast basements require removing dirt, vast quantities of it. Last year, an outof-control dump truck collided with a police car in Beverly Hills, killing an officer. Two months later, a concrete truck killed another officer. “The trucks will come and fill up the whole road,” said Maureen Levinson, a Bel Air resident who closely monitors the special hauling routes the city set up to manage the dirt-truck traffic. “I have feared for my daughters’ lives.” Impunity is a word that comes up a lot these days. It was big news here when a car belonging to a Qatari prince was caught on video racing through a residential neighborhood of Beverly Hills in September; the prince then left the country, claiming diplomatic immunity. According to Steve Soboroff, vice president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, some motorists have taken to installing license plates that, with the touch of a button, flip around to display fake plates at the approach of the police. “Ask a cop and they’ll tell you that 50 percent of their day dealing with the privileged is miserable,” Mr. Soboroff said.

Web of Political Connections One of Mr. Kirman’s top listings is a home perched on a promontory in the Trousdale Estates section of Beverly Hills, with seven bedrooms, 10 baths and $2.5 million worth of Baccarat chandeliers. It is listed for $135 million. “It’s the single best view in all of Los Angeles,” said Stephen Shapiro of Westside Estate Agency. “I think most people would consider tearing it down.” The house is owned by a shell company, Inch & Meter Ltd., whose corporate filings trace to the family of Gilbert R. Chagoury, a LebaneseNigerian businessman who was a close associate of Sani Abacha, the general who ruled Nigeria with a fierce grip in the 1990s. Mr. Abacha is believed to have stolen $4 billion from public coffers, which is the focus of a long-running international recovery effort.

In 2000, Mr. Chagoury was convicted of money laundering in Switzerland in connection with the Abacha family, court records show. He paid a fine, and in 2010 the PBS program “Frontline” reported that his record was expunged. Mr. Chagoury’s lawyer acknowledged that Mr. Chagoury had helped Mr. Abacha’s sons open bank s at Credit Suisse. In recent years, the Justice Department has been searching in the United States for Abacha money to return to Nigeria. Mr. Chagoury has never been accused of wrongdoing in this country. At the estate, the house manager confirmed Mr. Chagoury’s ownership and agreed to forward an email to Mr. Chagoury’s deputy. The Times did not receive a response. To the west of Trousdale is Beverly Park, a heavily guarded gated community of roughly 80 homes that is considered a classic redoubt of the celebrity class. The likes of Mark Wahlberg, Rod Stewart and the Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone have lived there. Beverly Park also has a complement of homes that The Times traced to current or former political families from around the world. Some owners’ names could be found in corporate records, while others were in a 2007 lawsuit that pitted homeowners on the south side of the community against those on the north. (At issue was driving access for nannies, maids and other household employees.) Just inside the gates, at No. 10, is a home owned by the Dastel Corporation. That company traces to the family of Mikhail Lesin, a former top aide to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and an architect of the government’s media and technology apparatus. Mr. Lesin purchased the home for $13.8 million in 2011, and then bought others in the area. Last year, Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, asked the Justice Department to investigate the Lesin homes, questioning how a longtime public official could afford such expensive real estate. It is unclear if an investigation was begun. Mr. Lesin was found dead in a Washington hotel in November. A family spokesman called him a “very successful media executive in Europe” who had purchased the homes legally and said the family knew of no Justice Department inquiry. At No. 73 is a home owned by TBN Holdings Inc., which traces to a Saudi prince, Turki bin Nasser. As a high-ranking military official during the 1980s and ’90s, Prince Turki was involved in arms deals with the aerospace company BAE that led to allegations of bribery and large fines in Britain and the United States. According to reports by The Guardian, the BBC and “Frontline,” Prince Turki was a bribe recipient, but, as had long been their practice, American and British authorities prosecuted only the company. Prince Turki did not respond to requests for comment.

Joseph and Beatriz Horacek in their backyard in Bel Air. They have documented construction activity at 901 Strada Vecchia, which looms over their property.

At No. 58 is a home bought in 2004 by a shell company tied to another Russian politician, a former senator named Alexander Sabadash. Last spring, Mr. Sabadash was sentenced in Russia to six years in prison for attempted embezzlement of public funds, according to Russian news reports. A man who answered at the phone number listed for the shell company said the Sabadashes might be renting the house. Finally, at No. 27, is a home owned by a shell company that has ties to the family of Bambang Trihatmodjo, long a contentious figure in Indonesia because his businesses amassed great wealth during the reign of his father, Mr. Suharto. Though Mr. Suharto died in 2008, his family’s fortune remains a focus of questions and legal action. Last summer, the Indonesian Supreme Court ordered the Suharto family to return $324 million that was embezzled from a foundation established with public money, according to news reports. The money was to have paid for education for the poor. A man who answered at the number listed for the shell company that owns the Beverly Park house acknowledged knowing Mr. Trihatmodjo, but hung up after learning the call was from The Times. Mr. Trihatmodjo did not respond to other messages seeking comment. The home, with a fountain out front, is being marketed online for $36 million.

A Neighborhood Battle On Strada Vecchia, the neighbors tend to frame their cause as a campaign against the forces of greed. It is not that they have not done well for themselves. Joseph Horacek III is a Hollywood lawyer; his wife, Beatriz, is a former bank compliance officer. Mr. Horacek likes to recall watching his client Michael Douglas film the famous Gordon Gekko “greed is good” speech in “Wall Street.” The Horaceks have made documenting the violations at No. 901 almost a part-time job. The battle over the property, Mr. Horacek said, “started out as a matter of principle, then it got to the point that, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is unsafe.’” They live directly down the hill, and they showed a reporter photos that appeared to show landslides. The Horaceks are hardly the only upset neighbors. There is the Walmart heir, Ms. Laurie, with her damaged eucalyptus. Carole Cramer, who sang with Tommy Dorsey, says Mr. Hadid encroached on part of her property. Another critic is Fredric D. Rosen, well known for his tough tactics in building Ticketmaster into a powerhouse. “We all want to know how that house got to be the size it did,” Mr. Rosen wrote in an email to city officials in February, adding, “We all feel that we are being gamed.”

City officials say development of the Strada Vecchia property violates height limits and other regulations. Construction continued even after stop-work orders were issued.

In the interview, Mr. Hadid said he did not want to discuss accusations about his construction practices. But he did want to discuss neighborly etiquette. His own neighbor, he said, has been doing construction for 11 years. Still, he said, “I never complain because I understand these complexities.” They come with the business, he said. “I seek the highest end of the smallest percentage of the market,” Mr. Hadid explained. “There’s a lot of need for the high end here.” Without naming names, Mr. Hadid said that the Strada Vecchia neighbors were “extortionists” and that they were the ones motivated by greed. Mr. Horacek, for one, dismissed that, saying Mr. Hadid had offered him $2.5 million to drop his complaints but he had turned down the offer. It is not about money, he said. Whatever the neighbors’ intentions, city officials say the project is in extensive violation of the building code. The list of violations, in summary, goes like this: After the unapproved teardown and leveling of the hillside, the construction team did ask permission to grade the hill but used a survey that made it appear that workers had not already removed significant loads of dirt. Then they ed two buildings that were supposed to be separate and built so high that they drastically violated the city’s height limit. “The house is nearly 70 feet high, and it’s only approved for 36 feet,” said Mr. Kelly, the building department investigator. In July 2014, the city said it intended to revoke the project’s work permits. That week, Mr. Hadid posted on Instagram, “The construction must go on.” It did, even after the permits were pulled. Neighbors documented workers on the site that Thanksgiving. In the spring, after repeated reports from neighbors about continuing construction, city inspectors found that parts of the project had been hidden with tarpaulins, plants and taped-over doors. That was when they found the underground bedrooms and theater — an entire unapproved basement below the basement, in fact. “As you’ve seen in evidence of pictures, during all these years after stop-work orders, that work continued,” Larry Galstian, the chief of inspections at the city’s buildings department, said at the hearing on the violations last summer, according to a recording. Indeed, a lawyer who works with Mr. Hadid said at the hearing, “We’re not challenging the fact that work that’s unapproved appears on this site.” City officials said their offices had been utterly drained.

“We have no trust,” Mr. Galstian said. “As a manager of this bureau, I have allocated multiple hundreds of hours of my staff to monitor this project. This is unfair.” He added: “Every time you come to the project, gates are closed. Every time we knock on the door, they have to take 15 minutes to open the door.” His belief, he said, was that workers were being hidden. “There is no cooperation from 901 Strada Vecchia L.L.C.,” he concluded.

Oil, Water and ability Mr. Hadid is not the only developer flirting with nine-figure price tags. His main competitor is Nile Niami, a former film producer building a Bel Air home he has said he hopes to sell for $500 million. One of Mr. Niami’s past projects was a boxy, modern house at 755 Sarbonne Road. In April 2012, a shell company tied to Mr. Niami sold it to a shell company traced to Kola Aluko, the Nigerian businessman. What followed was a tangle of events spanning two continents, involving oil and water, a host of shell companies and lessons in the difficulty of tracing responsibility.

A shell company tied to Kola Aluko, a Nigerian businessman, purchased this house for $24 million.

Mr. Aluko, it turned out, was on a buying spree. In addition to purchasing the Sarbonne Road house for $24 million, shell companies tied to him soon bought another Beverly Hills house for $14.7 million and two others in Santa Barbara for $33 million. At the time, Mr. Aluko was a beneficiary of an agreement with Nigeria’s state oil company; in the first four months of 2012, the company he coowned, Atlantic Energy, shipped $49 million in crude to the United States. But that deal came under fire back home amid growing questions about Mr. Aluko’s friendship with the oil minister at the time, Diezani Alison-Madueke. In 2013, the governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank said billions of dollars were missing from the nation’s oil revenue. Among the troubling matters was the Atlantic deal, which looked as if it “was structured in such a way that it would just rip off the country,” Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the bank governor at the time, said in a recent interview. The deal allowed Atlantic to sell oil in exchange for paying some production costs. But subsequent investigations indicated that while Atlantic was selling oil, it was not paying its full share, according to a document read to The Times, as well as Nigerian news reports.

It did not help that Nigerians saw Mr. Aluko in news reports partying with celebrities overseas, driving racecars and buying luxury real estate. “People in the sector started wondering,” said Aaron Sayne, who recently co-wrote a report on the industry for the Natural Resource Governance Institute, a nonprofit in New York. “Has the government given this company a sweetheart deal, and if so, for whose ultimate benefit?” In California, the problem was water. First, water from the Sarbonne Road property began running into the street, according to a neighbor who provided photos to The Times, Chantal Burnison. The water seeped under her driveway. It ruined her koi pond. And when it reached her house, she installed retaining walls to hold back the hillside. Ms. Burnison recalled commiserating with Mrs. Levinson, the neighborhood watchdog, about how, with all the L.L.C.s involved, it would be hard to figure out whom to sue.

Water draining from the Stradella Road property.

Then the Sarbonne Road house became a flooding victim itself, when part of a hillside above collapsed, creating a cascade of “water, muddy soil and debris,” according to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Aluko’s shell company. That flood came from the new house up the hill, at 864 Stradella Road, on the market for $49.9 million, which has become infamous in the neighborhood as a water waster because of another leak into the street. Beginning last fall, Mrs. Levinson said, she began trying to the owners, but signs at the site listed only untraceable L.L.C.s. After the construction manager told her he could not the owner’s name, she said, she photographed the leak and wrote to her city councilman. “You couldn’t find out who was responsible,” she said. The leak has ebbed somewhat, she said, but in October a reporter observed water still flowing. Mark J. Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the shell company that owns 864 Stradella, said that the flooding onto the Sarbonne property was due to rain, and that the legal dispute had been resolved. Any water flowing into the street, he said, would be minimal and within normal limits. Neighbors, sensitized perhaps by news reports that Bel Air harbors four of California’s top five residential water s, were unmollified. “A little? Excuse me, it’s a river down the street,” said Helen Erickson, who owns the house across the street. “It goes down at all hours, midnight, morning, afternoon.” Recently, construction vehicles have been heading back to 755 Sarbonne. Mr. Aluko’s shell company had sued the developer, Mr. Niami, alleging building defects. But with the case settled, a new round of construction has begun. (Mr. Niami declined to comment.) Mr. Aluko’s broader legal entanglements continue. Law enforcement officials in Nigeria, Britain and the United States are examining whether the former oil minister improperly acquired funds. Among the issues being studied are the Atlantic deal and whether Mr. Aluko helped enrich the former minister, according to three people with direct knowledge of the matter. How many of the California properties are actually Mr. Aluko’s is a mystery, since shell companies are not required to identify their actual owners. Mr. Aluko is listed in their incorporation papers, and the purchase agreement for 755 Sarbonne says the home was for Mr. Aluko or his “assignee.” Mr. Aluko and his lawyer did not reply to requests for comment; a lawyer for Ms. Alison-Madueke said she was receiving medical treatment and was unable to answer questions. Mr. Sayne, the oil industry researcher, said it would be difficult to connect any properties to Ms. Alison-Madueke. Any “ties between the former minister and U.S. property,” he said, “are almost sure to lead partly offshore, to the opaque world of tax havens and shell companies.”

Shifting Ownership The ambiguities surrounding Mr. Hadid and the ownership of 901 Strada Vecchia came to a head over the summer, as the neighbors pressed their case for legal action. At a hearing about the violations in June, several speakers pronounced themselves totally confused. Documents trace a shifting trail of ownership over time. When Mr. Hadid purchased the property in early 2011, he put it in his own name and took out a loan through an L.L.C., with himself as “sole member/manager.” Early violation notices were addressed directly to Mr. Hadid. But by the next year, the city was addressing notices to another shell company, Syntra Wva L.L.C. Mr. Hadid had sold the property at a belowmarket price to that L.L.C., which in turn resold it to another shell company, 901 Strada L.L.C.

A document with the signature of Mohamed Hadid identified him as "sole managing member."

As recently as spring 2014, Mr. Hadid signed a bank loan as “sole managing member” of 901 Strada L.L.C. And then there was the inspection this past spring, when Mr. Hadid “introduced himself as owner of the property,” according to Mr. Galstian, the buildings department official. As the legal process ground on, Mr. Hadid was, increasingly, steps removed from 901 Strada L.L.C. At the hearing, a lawyer for the L.L.C. made a point of saying, “Our client is not Mr. Hadid, who has been mentioned by name. Our client is an entity. It’s an L.L.C. Its managing member is here. He’s from Washington D.C.” That was a Virginia lawyer, James Zelloe, who is listed as 901 Strada L.L.C.’s manager in its incorporation documents. The L.L.C.’s phone number in city lobbying records is a recently disconnected cellphone for Mr. Zelloe. When the city filed a criminal case in July, alleging a range of misdemeanor construction violations, Mr. Zelloe was listed as a co-defendant, along with the L.L.C. Suddenly, the explanations began changing again. Mr. Zelloe’s lawyer told The Times that his client was a mere functionary. “He has incorporated this property, as hundreds of attorneys do, but he doesn’t have any control or oversight of the property,” the lawyer, Mr. Spertus, said. Calls to the L.L.C. seeking comment were not returned. As for Mr. Hadid, he would not say if the L.L.C. was in fact his. The opacity of Mr. Hadid’s financing is one aspect of the project that the neighbors, the Horaceks, have emphasized in urging the city attorney to add Mr. Hadid to the criminal case. (Though the Horaceks’ home and several of their neighbors’ are owned by trusts, the trusts are in their own names.) Until a few years ago, Mrs. Horacek worked as a bank compliance officer, investigating clients for possible money laundering. Several aspects of Mr. Hadid’s background, she said in a letter to the city attorney, would raise flags in a compliance review. A case in point, she wrote, is his own residence, Le Belvédère. According to public records, his shell company sold the property for $50 million in June 2010 to an individual who quickly transferred it to an L.L.C. that in turn gave it to another shell company. But Mr. Hadid still lives there. The letter also cited the transfers involving 901 Strada Vecchia. “Changing the property title multiple times among his L.L.C.s from 2011 to 2015 may also be deemed as ‘layering,’ which is the process used to obscure the audit trail and sever a direct link to the beneficial owner,” Mrs. Horacek wrote. Mrs. Horacek also pointed the city attorney to Mr. Hadid’s sale of Le Palais to the daughter of the president of Uzbekistan. “Spec houses,” she wrote, “are a perfect vehicle for money-laundering and tax fraud, especially if the property is purchased in cash or by an entity used to obscure the beneficial owner, or even more so by foreign buyers from ‘High Risk Countries.’ I am not saying that Mr. Hadid is engaged in money laundering or tax evasion but there are certainly many red flags.”

Ms. Karimova-Tillyaeva of Uzbekistan, who is tied to three other multimillion-dollar homes in the area, has not been charged with any wrongdoing. Her lawyer said she and her husband had “always conducted themselves lawfully” and had not “benefited from her family connections.” Mr. Hadid said he knew nothing about the sources of his client’s money, but added, “All of my transactions involve United States-licensed banks, title companies and real estate companies.” For the Horaceks, the entire business has become a bit overwhelming. In November, they decamped to the desert for the winter. Last Wednesday, at a hearing on the misdemeanor case, the judge noted that there was a new defendant — Mohamed Hadid. Still, the central question remains: What will become of the unfinished behemoth up on the hill? For all the criticism, Mr. Hadid said, “We are diligently working to finish this project under the supervision and approval of all necessary government agencies.” The Horaceks, though, believe that the only way to bring the house into compliance is to tear it down. Whether the city might eventually order that — and given the ambiguities of ownership, precisely whom it might order to do it — remains unclear. But even with all of the case’s tentacles and mysteries, Mr. Horacek has hope. “I think there is a chance we’ve opened up a piercing of the corporate veil,” he said.