Donald Trump’s disgraced former campaign manager Paul Manafort has disposed of his Hamptons home for slightly more than its asking price. The property, off Jobs Lane in Water Mill, sold for $10.1 million, as the N.Y. Post was first to report. The asking price was $10 million, so seems Manafort got lucky (again). Susan Breitenbach at Corcoran was the listing agent.
According to Hamptons gossip, the house itself is in extreme disrepair and thought to be a teardown, so the $10 million or so is just for the land, of which there’s 2.37 non-waterfront acres near the bay and ocean. Manafort and wife Kathleen purchased the land in 1994 for just $400,000 and subsequently built a house larger than zoning permitted. Then, according to documents and testimony revealed at Manafort’s trial, they improved the hell out of the place, via money obtained through tax fraud and money laundering.
Over the years, Manafort spent more than $6 million on renovations and improvements on the Hamptons house. For example, a local landscaper testified about how Manafort retained him to care for hundreds of flowers at his house as well as “one of the biggest ponds in the Hamptons.” Four to five times a week, workers trimmed Manafort’s 14-foot hedges, mowed the lawn, cared for the flowers, maintained the pond, and, the best part, took care of a white-and-red flower bed in the shape of a the letter M alongside the driveway of stately Manafort Manor. The cost of all this? A whopping $450,000 over five years. In addition to the big red-and-white M and the even biggerpond, there’s a tennis court, a swimming pool and spa, two-story pool house, half basketball court, formal gardens and a putting green.
As for the home’s interiors, a Florida-based contractor testified that his company installed Apple TVs, networks and other electronics in Manafort’s various homes from 2011 to 2014, at a cost of $2.2 million. Where’d all that dosh come from? According to the Associated Press, Manafort had a lucrative contract with Russian aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to benefit President Vladimir Putin’s government.” (By the way, Derispaka’s Washington D.C. home was raided by the FBI last week.)
Manafort was sentenced to prison in 2019 and the federal government seized his properties, which included a condo in Trump Tower, a loft in Chinatown, a Brooklyn brownstone, an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, and a little pad in Palm Beach Gardens, plus the Water Mill house. President Trump pardoned him in December 2020; in February, a federal judge ruled that Manafort could keep the properties not yet sold by the government: the Water Mill estate, a Brooklyn brownstone, and a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Chinatown that’s on the market for $2.995 million.
Does crime pay after all? Guess so, if you can secure a pardon.
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