Rudy Giuliani's Client Once Bribed a Guard at the Prison Where Jeffrey Epstein Committed "Suicide"

 Rudy Giuliani

The Daily Mail reports:

Epstein's death is hardly the first scandal at the MCC facility in Manhattan.

Last year, a prison guard at the jail, Victor Casado, pleaded guilty to taking more than $25,000 in cash bribes to smuggle cellphones, alcohol and food to a wealthy Turkish gold trader between 2016 and 2017.

He also received thousands of dollars in payments from another inmate, which were given to him by the prisoners relatives and a paralegal representing him. 

Casado was sentenced in January to three years in prison by a judge who called the crime an assault on 'our entire system of justice'.

Reza Zarrab, who was the Turkish gold trader involved with bribing the guard, was in prison over a money laundering scheme to Iran.

He has previously testified in court that someone tried to assassinate him at the prison when he implicated Turkey's President Recep Tayip Erdogan in the scheme that would launder billions of dollars from the U.S. to Iran. 

'I came face to face with an individual who was trying to take my life, and he had pulled a knife on me, and I was about to lose my life,' Zarrab testified in 2017.

'He said that he had received instructions to kill because I was cooperating.'

Who is   Zarrab?

A Rudy Giuliani client that Giuliani fought very hard for.

Ahval reports:

The U.S. Judge presiding over the high profile U.S. sanctions busting case involving Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab, said he was shocked by the determination former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani displayed in serving as an intermediary between Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump in terminating the case, writes Adam Klasfeld, a reporter for U.S.-based Courthouse News.

The case, dubbed the “the biggest sanctions evasion case prosecuted in the United States,’’ exposed a scheme to move Iranian money past U.S. sanctions through HalkBank, one of Turkey’s largest state-owned banks. Turkish-Iranian gold trader Reza Zarrab, who turned state’s witness in the case, implicated high-ranking Turkish politicians in the scheme, including former economy minister Zafer Çağlayan.

Zarrab pleaded guilty to seven counts of sanctions violations, money laundering and bribery when Giuliani’s pressure in his case failed, Klasfeld explains. Judge Richard Berman became household name halfway across the world in Turkey, following the cooperation agreement Zarrab reached with prosecutors.

Evidence in the Zarrab case showed as well that Giuliani’s law firm Greenberg Traurig acted as a registered agent for the Turkish government, the article notes.

“Had Rudy succeeded, he and the two presidents…. would have helped very significantly the country of Iran – which was the beneficiary of the conspiracies to avoid USA sanctions against Iran, i.e. the very heart of the allegations in this case,” the site quotes Berman as writing. “My head still spins when I consider that.”

Giuliani was probably actually doing something decent here. There should be no sanctions against Iran and no one should be punished for skirting such sanctions.

But the big picture is about how powerful people operate even when they are locked up in the slammer and suggests it wouldn't have been that difficult to get to Epstein, probably very expensive but not impossible.

. -RW