Michael Cohen was hit with $185,000 in warrants for unpaid taxes on his taxi companies this month, bringing his total debt to the state of New York up to $282,000, according to a Monday Bloomberg report.
Collectively, the money is owed by 16 taxi-medallion holding companies owned by Cohen and his family.
Cohen reportedly claims that the cabs are not owned by him but by Evgeny Friedman, New York’s “Taxi King” who operated hundreds of cabs including Cohen’s. Per Bloomberg, Friedman will go to trial in June for allegedly stealing $5 million in surcharges supposed to fund New York’s public transportation.
Cohen, President Donald Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, is currently under federal investigation for his business practices. The FBI raided his home, office, and hotel room in April looking for information on his taxi cab businesses and on payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal.
More to come. Stay tuned.
“companies owned by Cohen and his family”
Once a member of Cohen’s family, wife/mother for example, is implicated in a crime related to the taxi business you can bet that Cohen will begin cooperating with the Feds.
So is he a straw purchaser for Friedman, or is it the other way around? Shell companies are so confusing.
And I thought one of the things that successful organized criminals learned was not to screw up the small stuff like taxes on visible income, because that’s how investigators get into your records. Unless this really isn’t small stuff – could Cohen be so leveraged and illiquid that he can’t come up with a few hundred grand to pay his taxes? I know that medallions have crashed in the past few years (or rather, returned to their pre-bubble valuations) but if he’s in a situation where he can’t just take the damn loss it’s all just a house of cards. Or maybe his debts aren’t that big, but they’re all to people who don’t believe in sharing losses.
Nicely put.
Everybody pile on Mikey! It’s canary time…