It's gonna get really hard to keep up with Manafort's crimes

Now that Paul Manafort apparently has found the proper key in which to sing with Robert Mueller's ever-expanding canary chorale, we can take a step back and study properly the very strange—and extremely corrupt—ways in which Manafort kept himself in vacation homes and ostrich jackets during his fat years.

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It seems that, in one of his more successful international scams, Manafort would steal someone's identity, use it to set up a shell company, and then park tens of millions of dollars in the company's accounts. Then, one day, without warning, a Ukrainian hairdresser, say, gets a knock on his door because he owes $30 million in back taxes through his work as a member of the board of directors of a company he's never heard of in his life.

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Either that, or Manafort and his kleptocratic clients simply would roll a drunk.

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One of the risks to this scheme is that the fake directors might try to claim the millions held in their names. [...] “You need to have some knowledge and education to know how to do that,” she said, in the tax havens like Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands, where such companies are typically established...

Some homeless men have achieved a measure of fame among activists who track corruption in the former Soviet states because they pop up so often at the head of multimillion dollar companies. One man identified in the Ukrainian media as a homeless Latvian named Erik Vanagels has been listed as the owner of hundreds of companies in Britain, Cyprus, Ireland, New Zealand, Panama and elsewhere.

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This, I would point out, again, is the guy who was the president*'s campaign manager, and the guy who arranged for Mike Pence to be the vice president. Personally, I'd rather the homeless Latvian was president.

  Charles P Pierce

Me too.