Oligarchs’ fixer made fortune from New York apartment building

A dozen blocks from the nearest subway stop and a world away from posh cafes, the apartment building on 44th Street in Queens was for decades the sort of New York City building that would attract little attention. The ground floor had a pizza-by-the-slice shop with red walls, a $5 lunch special and a neon sign advertising “hot pizza.” Upstairs, the building had been home to a construction worker, a union doorman who worked late shifts in Manhattan lobbies and someone who worked at a small bank down the street.

The block is lined mostly with two-story brick row houses, making it sunnier than many spots deeper into the city. There’s the constant soundtrack of planes taking off from nearby LaGuardia Airport.

The life of an apartment building is always about change of one kind or another, but what was about to happen to the four-story building on 44th Street spoke to darker activities of war and covert finance happening a world away.

It had come under close scrutiny of a private equity firm working with overseas investors quietly buying rental buildings in the New York area via shell companies — the faceless entities that move billions in secretive funds through the U.S. economy every year. The firm had completed a painstaking analysis of the modest 44th Street building and concluded that under new ownership, its tenants could be charged far more in rent, making it far more in profit.

On its face, the building’s sale in 2014 was unremarkable: just another anonymous limited liability corporation entering a hot real estate market, raising rents and driving longtime tenants out. But a trove of leaked records provides a rare view into the secret forces profiting from this deal and many like it.

Behind the sale was a financial firm applying a highly analytic approach to profit-making, and a now-sanctioned financial fixer in Cyprus who made his wealth hiding money for billionaires in Vladimir Putin’s inner circle. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the United Kingdom targeted the Cypriot offshore services provider, Demetris Ioannides, in a crackdown on financial professionals “who knowingly assisted sanctioned Russian oligarchs to hide their assets in complex financial networks.”

The records provide vivid detail of a phenomenon affecting many millions of renters around the world, the extent to which secretive global investment structures have permeated the real estate market well beyond the luxury condos and beachfront mansions of the rich. These days, an increasingly hot investment for the ultrawealthy are modest homes and apartment buildings like the one on 44th Street in Queens.

This shift not only poses new challenges for authorities tracking money linked to Putin’s enablers, but has also raised complaints from tenants feeling the squeeze of a new breed of aggressive corporate landlord and from prospective home buyers…