whether that was an issue of concern during the first phase of your work for Free Beacon?
MR. SIMPSON: I guess the general thing I would say is that, you know, the Russians are far more sophisticated in their criminal organized crime activities than the Italians, and they're a lot more global. They understand finance a lot better. And so they tend to use quite elaborate methods to move money.
You know, obviously, the offshore system has grown in sophistication in the last decade or so, too, so they've taken advantage of that. Things that I had wrote about involved laundering money through security straits, laundering money through fake arbitrations in court, laundering money through commodities deals.
I mean, if you can think of a way to launder money, the Russians are pretty good at it. But they specifically understand financial markets. So I think I can tell you all of that.
I can tell you also that the Russians are much more integrated in the way they operate with the political -- the sort of legitimate business structures. So you don't find too many Italian mafia guys who are major shareholders in big media companies, but you definitely can find Russian mafia guys who are big shareholders in international media companies.
So the only way that -- well, the thing that comes to mind, of course, is the real estate deals. And, you know, it did come to our attention during this, you know, first round or this first part of the project that there were a lot of real estate deals where you couldn't really tell who was buying the property. And sometimes properties would be bought and sold, and they would be bought for one price and sold for a loss shortly thereafter, and it didn't really make sense to us.
And we had done a lot of work for previous investigations on people buying
UNCLASSIFIED, COMMITTEE SENSITIVE
