Paul Manafort to be transferred to Rikers Island
Manafort is serving four years for tax and bank fraud and will remain in solitary confinement for his own protection.
While former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort rests his head in a federal prison in Pennsylvania — or, possibly within the next few weeks, the jail complex on Rikers Island — apartment hunters can pick up one of his old pads, a swanky SoHo loft, for a cool $3.66 million.
The apartment is one of five New York properties in Manafort’s roughly $22 million New York real estate portfolio — testaments to the former foreign lobbyist’s high-flying lifestyle — that the government seized as part of a deal with prosecutors in which he pleaded guilty to two conspiracy charges.
The fourth-floor loft at 29 Howard St. in SoHo is the only one of the five properties that the US Marshals Service has put out on the market so far. Feds alleged that he scored the property in 2012 with money he made lobbying for pro-Russian groups in Ukraine.
A view of 29 Howard Street (at center), where Paul Manafort reportedly purchased a condo unit in 2012, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
ICONIC 'SOPRANOS' HOME IN NEW JERSEY SELLING FOR $3.4 MILLION
According to testimony last year in Manafort’s federal case in Virginia, Manafort had told his daughter and son-in-law to act as if they had been living in the condo — but it was actually being rented out through AirBnb for over a year.
The loft also came up in the most recent indictment against Manafort, in which the Manhattan District Attorney has accused him of residential mortgage fraud and other charges.
Manafort may be staying in protective isolation on Rikers when he is brought back to New York to face the state charges. Neither the Manhattan DA nor defense attorneys for Manafort responded to requests for comment.
The other properties seized from Manafort are a 5,574-square-foot mansion in the Hamptons that features 10 bedrooms, a tennis court and a putting green that could go for $8.9 million, according to a Zillow estimate.
The feds have also seized Manafort’s brownstone at 377 Union St. in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood that could sell for $3.7 million and which has drawn complaints from neighbors fuming about late-night construction work; a Trump tower apartment estimated at $2.4 million and a loft 123 Baxter St. near the Chinatown-Little Italy border estimated at more than $3.8 million.
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Ari Harkov, a broker who has sold units in the Baxter Street building, said that in New York City, where Hillary Clinton carried about 80% of the vote in the 2016 presidential race and where it’s currently a buyer’s market in the residential sector, a unit with even loose ties to Trump might be a hard sell for some prospective buyers.
“I think there are buyers who wouldn’t buy it or would be less interested because of it,” he said.
He cited difficulties with selling off a Williamsburg property on Kent Street owned by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — several buyers said they didn’t want to be a party to putting money in the family’s pocket.
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With the Howard Street property itself, Harkov said that, judging by the photos on the government’s listing, the $3.66 million price tag might be north of what buyers are willing to pay — he said the unit has dropped ceilings and a “suburban”-looking kitchen that Manhattan loft hunters would probably want to replace.
“It’s fine, it’s livable, but it probably needs some work,” Harkov said.