Ivana Trump, like so many others in Donald Trump’s personal orbit, died seemingly suddenly, leaving questions, in her case, at the age of 73 of what was initially reported as a heart attack. However, Trump’s first wife and the mother of Donald Trump, Jr, Eric Trump, and Ivanka Trump, was no distant hostile ex-wife. Donald Trump continued to maintain a business relationship with Ivana long after their divorce in 1992. Ivana Trump even enjoyed, courtesy of Donald, a one-month a year membership at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump ensured that Ivana was never in need of cash. He also wanted to ensure that his ex-wife stayed away from publishers to avoid any more embarrassing revelations such as those published in Mrs. Trump’s post-divorce “kiss and tell” book, “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump.” In that book, Ivana accused her ex-husband of spousal rape, a charge that resurfaced during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump also managed to grift off Ivana's death, sending a condolence text out on his Truth Social platform mourning his first wife's death while also appealing for cash for his "Save America" online panhandling contrivance.

The Trumps’ three children, all set to testify under oath in a civil deposition on the business practices of the Trump Organization ordered by New York Attorney General Letitia James, were also in close contact with their mother. And that makes the fact that the first Mrs. Trump was found “unresponsive” at the foot of a flight of stairs in her Upper East Side luxury apartment all the more suspicious. Ivana Trump was found dead after police were called to her apartment for a "wellness check." In keeping with the inherent corruption of the New York Police Department, police said Ivana Trump's death "was not considered suspicious."  If we accept the NYPD's conclusion, anytime a body is found at the foot of the stairs, foul play can be immediately ruled out. Perhaps homicide detectives should re-evaluate its initial conclusion and actually investigate whether Ivana Trump was pushed down the stairs. It is the Trump Organization, for which Ivana Trump was once a high-level official, that is under the investigation lens of the New York Attorney General’s office. Mrs. Trump’s sudden death may deprive state investigators of valuable information on the business, particularly when considering that Ivana Trump was a one-time high-level corporate officer in the Trump Organization. Ivana Trump held many positions including Vice President of Interior Design for the Trump Organization. She also served as president of the Trump Castle Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City -- renamed the Trump Marina -- and worked with Donald Trump on several projects during the 1980s, including the Trump Tower in Manhattan and Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort in Atlantic City. And it was during this time that Ivana Trump was introduced by her then-husband to some of the most notorious Mafiosi leaders in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, particularly members of the Russian Bratva criminal syndicate. And it should be kept in mind that Mrs. Trump’s suspiciously convenient death is not the only one to surround Donald Trump’s one-time criminal money laundering cash machine on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

Prior to September 11, 2001, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Mary Jo White, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, were investigating Donald and Ivana Trump for a stock "pump and dump" scam involving Simulated Environmental Concepts, Inc. (SMEV), a North Miami Beach-based company that marketed equipment and products for relaxation centers, gyms, doctor's offices, hotels, tanning and beauty salons, and spas. The 9/11 terrorist attack brought a quick end to the federal investigation of Donald Trump and his ex-wife.

Ivana Trump’s 5^th Avenue Channel Corporation, which was headquartered in a storefront in North Miami Beach, Florida and represented her attempt to break into the U.S. home shopping market, became a target for both the SEC and the U.S. Department of Justice. 5^th Avenue Channel had hoped to become its own 24-hour cable shopping channel featuring Ivana Trump selling her product line. 5^th Avenue Channel’s parent company was Tel-Com Wireless Cable TV of 3957 N. E. 163rd Street, North Miami Beach, Florida 33160. Interestingly, the address was the same as that of Simulated Environmental Concepts, Inc., the company for which Donald and Ivana were being investigated in a "pump and dump" scam prior to 9/11.

Tel-Com Wireless had already owned wireless cable operators in Costa Rica and La Crosse, Wisconsin and 5^th Avenue Channel programming was being carried by Tel-Com Wireless.

In 1998, a former investor in and consultant for Tel-Com Wireless Cable, Charles Arnold, complained that some Tel-Com investors were short-selling their shares in the company, causing the company’s stock to fall precipitously. Tel-Com’s President and CEO and major shareholder, Melvin Rosen, also suggested that short-sellers were to blame for the stock’s devaluation. Rosen's business partner, Howard Edrich, was a stockbroker banned from the securities industry after pleading guilty in 1992 to the possession of stolen property. Arnold was associated with Tel-Com’s brokerage firm, Meyers Pollock Robbins. In November 1997, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan charged that two of Meyers Pollock Robbins branches were “controlled, through a combination of bribes and muscle, by stock consultants and thugs from the Genovese and Bonanno crime families.” The brokerage firm’s ex-president, Michael Ploshnick, came under federal investigation.

Tel-Com investors began to complain to authorities about visits to their home by two Kosher Nostra gangsters, Michael and Boris Vax, both of whom were convicted of federal racketeering charges in 1995. Michael Vax received a 41- month sentence and Boris got 15 months. The Vaxes were connected to Arnold, the one-time Tel-Com stock promoter. The tip to authorities about the Vax brothers’ threatening visits came from Maier Lehmann, an Orthodox Jew from Monsey, New York, who was involved in various “pump and dump” stock schemes and pleaded guilty in 1994 to federal insurance fraud charges but avoided jail time by becoming a low-level government informant on Russian mafia activities.

Lehmann’s business partner was Albert Alain Chalem, formerly the proprietor of Pinnacle Technology Inc. (aka Pi-Tech), aka Spectrum Printing of Clifton, New Jersey until 1992, when it burned down after declaring bankruptcy in 1988. Chalem then bought Heartbreak Hotel in 1990. It burned down in 1994. Chalem later joined A.S. Goldmen & Co. of Woodbridge, New Jersey (where Jared Kushner’s ex-con father, Charles Kushner, had several real estate properties) and Naples, Florida. Founded in 1988, A. S. Goldmen, including 33 of its executives and employees, were charged in July 1999 with “penny stock” securities fraud by federal and New York state authorities. Lehmann and Chalem were reportedly involved in various stock “pump and dump” schemes and with businesses located in Israel. Although ordered disbanded, A. S. Goldmen apparently remains an active entity in Red Bank, New Jersey, where it does business, according to U.S. postal records, as “Body by Boris.” Although Chalem was tied by federal and state investigators to organized crime, there are indications that he, like his partner Lehmann, was a confidential informant for law enforcement.

According to Barron’s, which originally exposed the Tel-Com story and Ivana Trump’s role in the company, one Tel-Com investor was told by Michael Vax, who was originally from Kiev, Ukraine, “If you don't pay up, you should worry about your kids.” On December 7, 1998, Barron’s reported that 5^th Avenue Channel’s (FAVE) “boosters and big shareholders include convicted stock manipulators, shameless promoters and brokers who've been banned from the securities business." The Vax brothers obviously received orders from their mob bosses to silence the critics of Ivana Trump’s companies and informants like Lehmann and Chalem.

On October 25, 1999, Lehmann and Chalem were executed, mob-style, at a mansion home located at 3 Bluebell Lane in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. The estate home was owned by Russell Candela of Brooklyn, New York, the father of Chalem’s girlfriend, Kimberly Scarola. Ms. Scarola was in Fort Lauderdale at the time of the double homicide. The murders were gruesome. Chalem was shot at close range, once in the chest, once in the nose, once in each ear, and once in the forehead. Lehmann was shot one time in the leg and three times in the left side of his head. Whatever they told authorities about the threats made by the Vax brothers to Tel-Com and 5^th Avenue Channel investors, the manner of their murders sent a stark warning to those who might talk in the future to the feds or state prosecutors.

In 1986, Michael Vax was arrested for murder in a shootout with other Kosher Nostra mobsters involved in gasoline smuggling in Sheepshead Bay, New York. Michael Vax’s boss was Vyacheslav Ivankov, nicknamed “Yaponchik” (“Little Japanese”), who was sentenced in 1997 to 10 years in federal prison for extortion. He served nine of those years and afterwards, upon returning to Russia, he was assassinated by a sniper on a Moscow street in 2009. Ivankov was associated with the man the FBI considered to be the most dangerous Russian Jewish mobster in the world, Semion Mogilevich.

It may be a cold case for the SEC and FBI, but the fact that two hit men connected to Ivana Trump were working for Ivankov and Mogilevich helps to explain why Donald Trump, as president, wanted to emaciate the FBI, Justice Department, and SEC of all its seasoned investigators. While the FBI, U.S. Secret Service, and state law enforcement agencies in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania were looking for Ivankov in the 1990s, he was living comfortably in the Trump Tower in Manhattan and the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City. Ivankov laundered mob money through his purchase of a condo in the Trump Tower and was laundering counterfeit currency and traveler’s checks through the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. The Internal Revenue Service, another federal agency that was stripped to the bone by the Trump White House, reported that the Trump Taj Mahal violated anti-money laundering rules 106 times during its first year and a half of operation, beginning in 1990.

On October 10, 1989, while Trump was being investigated for his mob ties to the already-operational Trump Plaza Hotel Casino in Atlantic City, three Trump Organization officials were killed in a suspicious helicopter crash in the Jersey Pinelands, off the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey. Killed were Trump's Atlantic City operations chief Stephen Hyde, 43; Mark Grossinger Etess, 38, the head of the yet-unfinished Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City; and Jonathan Benanav, 30, the vice president of Trump Plaza Hotel Casino. The pilot and co-pilot were also killed. Hyde, Etess, and Benanav were persons of interest to the FBI, Secret Service, and state law enforcement in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York in money laundering and counterfeiting probes. Etess was the former vice president and general manager of Grossinger's, the hotel in the Catskills owned by his family and where a number of “Borscht Belt” Jewish comedians got their start.

The helicopter was rented by the Trump Organization from Paramount Aviation, but the actual owner of the aircraft was FSQ Air Charter Corporation, one of many murky aviation-related firms incorporated in Delaware. Eyewitnesses claim they heard a loud “bang” before the chopper broke up in mid-air and plummeted to the ground. The rear rotor section was found almost a mile from the crash site near Forked River, New Jersey. The pilot, Robert Kent, had been in radio contact with the tower at nearby McGuire Air Force Base, but never indicated any problem with the aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later ruled out foul play and said a main rotor blade failed due to "fatigue." Paramount later sued the Italian manufacturer of the helicopter Grupo Augusta and its American subsidiary Agusta Aerospace Corporation. There are still strong suspicions that the New Jersey helicopter crash was a "mob hit." Even more suspicious was Donald Trump’s last-minute change of plans just before the helicopter took off from the 60th Street Heliport on the East River in Manhattan. Trump was to have joined the three executives on the flight, but he said something had come up and he could not join them.

The three executives had flown to Manhattan to promote, along with Trump, the February 3, 1990 junior welterweight boxing match at the Atlantic City Boardwalk Convention Center between Hector Camacho, Sr. and Vinny Pazienza. One of the targets of the FBI and state law enforcement in their investigations of Trump’s Atlantic City casino operations was illegal and mob-linked gambling activities surrounding boxing matches hosted by the Trump Organization.

The one person who may have been involved in the "hit" on the Trump Organization executives was the head of the Philadelphia-Atlantic City-Camden rackets, mafia boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, Sr. After arranging hits on mafia rivals Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa, Scarfo took over the rackets in his hometown of Atlantic City. This included control of the construction and bartenders' unions with whom Trump dealt in running his casinos. Trump relied on Scarfo's organization to make problems "go away." These included labor issues and, quite likely, Trump Organization insiders who were willing to talk to the FBI and New Jersey state investigators. In May 1989, Scarfo was sentenced to 55 years in prison on federal murder and racketeering charges. However, his crime syndicate remained in operation in Atlantic City, South Jersey, and Philadelphia under the New York-based Lucchese crime family and his son, Nicky Scarfo, Jr. Conveniently for Donald Trump, Nicky Scarfo, Sr. died on January 13, 2017 from a reported heart attack in the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. HIs death came a mere week before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States.

If her shopping channel’s stock manipulation in the late 1990s was the only thing that Ivana Trump’s company had to worry about, the statute of limitations would have long since passed, allowing her and her business associates to breathe easy. However, Mrs. Trump managed to escape the prison sentence meted out to Martha Stewart, the Chairman and CEO of 5^th Avenue Channel’s home shopping competitor, Living Omnimedia, Inc. Stewart was indicted and convicted for her 2001 sale of ImClone stock based on insider knowledge. However, according to U.S. government insiders who tipped off WMR, the business problems of 5^th Avenue Channel entailed much more than stock fraud and involved a gangland-style double execution. For capital crimes such as murder, there is no statute of limitations.

It was not long before 5^th Avenue Channel’s start-up that employees of the firm were meeting with SEC investigators about several irregularities with the company and its principals. In 1999, the firm’s quarterly SEC filing stated that the commission was investigating “whether the Company and other persons misrepresented certain of the Company’s affairs in press releases and public filings.” Ivana Trump immediately retained an attorney, as allegations swirled around 5^th Avenue Channel and Tel-Com Wireless.

For Donald Trump, the protection of the mother of three of his children and grandmother to several of his grandkids remained paramount. That was until Ivana posed a threat in New York's investigation of Trump Organization business practices. It was the criminality of the Trump Organization that was at the center of then-President Trump's attempt to turn the Department of Justice into his own personal law office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation into his private security force, and the SEC into his own personal and corrupt stock brokerage. Trump named New York attorney Jay Clayton as the Chairman of the SEC. Not surprisingly, Clayton has ties to major figures in the Russian Bratva, including Mikhail Fridman of the Russian Alfa-Group. It was Fridman’s bank, Alfa Bank, that was found to have installed its own server in the Trump Tower during the 2016 presidential campaign. Clayton is also linked to Apollo Global Management, which helped bail out Jared Kushner’s failing office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

The Lehmann-Chalem murders continue as a “cold case” and neither the Monmouth County, New Jersey prosecutor nor the FBI’s Newark division gained any headway in bringing the murderers to justice. Mystery continues to surround the deaths of not only Lehmann and Chalem, but also those of helicopter passengers and crew Hyde, Etess, Benanav, Robert Kent, and co-pilot Lawrence Diener. Now add Ivana Trump to the list of suspicious deaths in Trump's orbit. In 2018, WMR contacted the office of New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal to ask whether he would take another look at the helicopter crash in light of Trump's subsequent issues related to criminal behavior. We received no response.

The corporate media has rushed to denounce any “conspiracy” theories arising from Ivana’s sudden death. That is their modus operandi as the scribes for the world’s multi-billionaire class. Their strictures and dictates are of no concern in the world of investigative journalism.

It goes without saying that Ivana Trump, more than just about anyone else other than Donald Trump, knows about his early days as an intelligence asset of the Czechoslovak State Security Service, Státní bezpečnost (StB).  After she married Trump in 1977, Ivana Zelníčková Trump, as well as her father, Miloš Zelníček, regularly debriefed their StB control officers in Zelnickov’s hometown of Gottwaldov (now Zlin) and in Prague. At the time of her marriage to Trump, Ivana possessed two passports, Czechoslovak and Austrian, a common practice for intelligence agents. Ivana obtained her Austrian passport as a result of her prior marriage to Alfred Winklmayr, an Austrian ski instructor. During the late 1980s, the information collected by the StB on the activities of Donald and Ivana Trump were courteously and dutifully passed on to the StB’s Soviet master, the KGB. The chief of the Dresden, East Germany station, who was among those who received reports on the Trumps, was none other than KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin.

During the late 1970s and 80s, the StB and KGB used the Trumps to gain access to various U.S. presidents and presidential candidates, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, and Bob Dole, as well as Vice President Dan Quayle and Vice Presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen.

Trump's KGB and StB controllers also expected him to run for president of the United States in 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000 as a candidate for either the Republican Party or the Reform Party, the third party founded by industrialist H. Ross Perot. They were cautionary in the 1988 and 1992 because of Trump's younger age and relative political inexperience. They held out higher hopes for Trump in 1996 and 2000. With the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the long-lead plans of the StB and KGB were shelved. That was until Russian President Vladimir Putin dusted off the former KGB's plan and reactivated Trump to run for the U.S. presidency in 2015.

When Milos Zelnicek died in 1990 in Gottwaldov, a number of StB agents from the StB Regional Administration, Gottwaldov Department, attended the funeral, not to mourn Zelnicek, but to conduct surveillance of Ivana and Donald Trump and their three children, Donald Jr., Eric, and Ivana Marie (Ivanka), all of whom were present in the town for the funeral. Gottwaldov had been a stronghold of the Czechoslovak Communist Party.

In his book, "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump," Peter Strzok, former Assistant Director of the FBI for Counterintelligence, states that it was his belief when running the bureau's operation CROSSFIRE HURRICANE -- the investigation of Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential campaign -- that Trump has been and remains a national security threat to the United States. Strzok’s knowledge of Trump’s dubious past placed a target on his back for Trump and his Russian handlers and to this day, Trump continues to harangue and threaten the former FBI agent. Our own analysis of declassified StB; KGB; and East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi) and East German foreign intelligence, Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA)(Main Reconnaissance Administration) files agrees with Strzok's contention, Trump was and is an intelligence asset of Russia. The FBI was clearly concerned about Donald Trump being what is known as a "proxy asset" for Soviet and subsequently, Russian intelligence. For primarily that reason and Trump’s close links to Russian and Italian mafia syndicates, the Trump Tower was under intense court-approved communications surveillance by the FBI, a fact that outraged Trump before, during, and after his presidency.

It is rather odd how many individuals have died suddenly when information in their possession could have placed Donald Trump in legal jeopardy. There was the suspicious hanging death of Trump’s one-time close friend, child sex trafficker, and statutory gang rape partner Jeffrey Epstein in the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan following his earlier arrest. It should be noted that Ivana Trump’s phone number was in Epstein’s “black book.”

After Trump became president, a slew of suspicious deaths of Russians likely aware of Trump's close ties to the Russian and Soviet governments occurred. They were as follows:

On November 8, 2016, Election Day in the United States, Sergei Krivov, 63, a Russian diplomat and "security officer," was found dead inside the Russian consulate in New York with "head trauma."

On December 20, 2016, Andrey Karlov, 62, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, was shot in his back by an assailant while attending an art exhibition in Turkey. That same day, Petr Polshikov, 56, a senior Russian Foreign Ministry official was found dead at his Moscow home by his wife. Polshikov had been shot to death in his bed with a pillow over his head.

On December 26, 2016, Oleg Erovinkin, 61, an intelligence officer for the Russian Federal Security Bureau, was found dead in his car while it was parked on a street in Moscow. There were unconfirmed reports that Erovinkin might have been a source for the Steele Dossier that provided details of Trump's close links to Russia and Putin.

In early January 2017, Andrey Malanin, 54 and a senior Russian diplomat posted to Greece, was found dead on his bedroom floor in Athens.

On January 26, 2017, less than a week after Trump was inaugurated, Alexander Kadakin, 67, Russian ambassador to India, died "after a short illness."

In March 2017, Nikolai Gorokhov, 53, a Russian lawyer with detailed knowledge of Russian financial operations abroad, fell from his fourth floor apartment to his death in Moscow.

In August 2017, Denis Voronenkov, a Communist deputy in the Russian State Duma and a critic of Putin, was shot to death in Kyiv after fleeing from Russia.

Also in August 2017, Russian ambassador to Sudan Mirgayas Shirinsky, 63, was found dead in the swimming pool at his residence in Khartoum. The Kremlin claimed he died from a 'heart attack." 

And the "hit parade" continued unabated.

On August 4, 2021, Miroslav Lazanski, 71, Serbia's ambassador to Russia, was found dead from a "heart attack" at his home in Belgrade.

On January 30, 2022, Leonid Shulman, 60, a former Gazprom Invest executive, was found dead with his wrists slashed in the bathroom of his St. Petersburg suburban home.

On February 25, 2022, the day after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Alexander Tyulyakov, 61, was found hanging in his home outside of St. Petersburg.

On February 28, 2022, Mikhail Watford, a Ukrainian-born magnate, was found hanging in his garage at his estate in Surrey, England.

On March 24, 2022, billionaire Vasily Melnikov, his wife Galina, and two young sons were found stabbed to death in their luxury apartment in Nizhny Novgorod.”

On April 18, 2022, Vladislav Avayev, a former vice president of Gazprombank, was found dead from a gunshot wound in his Moscow apartment, a pistol in his hand. The bodies of his wife Yelena and daughter, Maria, were found nearby, both dead from gunshot wounds. Neither Protosenya or Avayev were on any international sanctions lists.

On the following day, April 19, 2022, Spanish police found Russian oligarch Sergei Protosenya, his wife Natalya, 53, and 18-year-old daughter, Maria, dead in their villa on the Costa Brava in Catalonia. Natalya and Maria had been stabbed to death and Sergei was found hanging in his garden with a bloodied ax and knife nearby. Protosenya was the former deputy chairman of the natural gas company Novatek.

With all of these suspicious deaths in the United States, Russia, and other locations, the historically tainted NYPD would have us believe that Ivana Trump, with her past connections in Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Soviet Union and Russia, and elsewhere had a heart attack and fell down the stairs or fell down the stairs and then had a heart attack. Who would believe such nonsense?

The history of Donald Trump and his Russian pals is akin to a continuous episode of "Columbo." There are always new leads that point to the 45th president of the United States not only being a liar and swindler, but a murderer or accomplice to murder, as well.

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