A week after Vladimir Putin awarded him a medal for service to Russia, billionaire developer Aras Agalarov was trying to broker a meeting between Putin and Donald Trump.
It was November 2013, and Agalarov had paid $14 million to stage the Trump-owned Miss Universe pageant, which Trump had flown in to personally oversee. Agalarov knew Trump admired the Russian president, so he spoke to Kremlin contacts to set up a meeting.
Putin canceled at the last minute, but Agalarov said the Russian leader sent Trump a “friendly letter” and an elegant lacquer box.
With the meeting off, Agalarov and his son, Emin Agalarov, a pop star who is also an executive in the family real estate company, treated Trump to a taste of Moscow’s famed nightlife, hitting parties in an armored Mercedes stretch limousine, the Agalarovs said in an interview last year.
The Agalarovs and Trump had first met each other a few months earlier at the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, after Emin Agalarov hired a Miss Universe winner to appear in one of his music videos.
That led to plans to bring the pageant to Moscow, a coup for the Agalarovs, who have said their fortune began humbly, with Aras Agalarov selling bootlegged videotapes.
On his visit to Moscow, Trump demonstrated his friendship with his new Russian pals by appearing in one of Emin’s music videos. On a set that looked like “The Apprentice,” Trump played himself while Emin daydreamed about bikini-clad pageant contestants until Trump finally told him, “You’re fired.”
“He really did me a favor by being in the video,” Emin Agalarov said
in the joint interview with his father earlier this year.
Perhaps most importantly, the Agalarovs said, they and Trump started talking about bringing the Trump brand to Russia. Trump and his family have been talking about building a Trump Tower in Russia since the waning years of the Cold War.
In the Agalarovs, Trump appeared to have found potential partners who shared his fondness for the massive. The Agalarovs’ Crocus City complex on the outskirts of Moscow features a huge concert venue, Russia’s largest movie theater and a giant shopping mall called Vegas.
And like Trump, Aras Agalarov loved to put his name on his creations.
“I convinced my father it would be cool to have next to each other the Trump Tower and Agalarov Tower,” Emin Agalarov said.
Those plans never got off the ground, due mainly to Russia’s crashing economy. The Agalarovs still hope it happens, and at the Crocus site, one muddy field is still reserved for a Trump Tower. JB emphasis]
Months before the election, Aras Agalarov said he worried that if Trump won, U.S. conflict-of-interest laws could put a damper on his overseas business ventures.
But Emin said he thought President Trump would be great for U.S.-Russia relations: “He thinks America, instead of fighting Russia, should bond and be friends. . . . This could be an amazing breakthrough if he becomes president and actually becomes friends with Putin.”
–Michael Birnbaum reported from Moscow.
