David Geovanis told Senate investigators that he first met Donald Trump in 1996 while acting as a local fixer for the Moscow real-estate scouting trip that also brought financier Leon Black to the Russian capital. In his closed-door testimony, Geovanis described the now-famous photograph—taken at a cocktail reception inside the Baltschug Kempinski hotel—as nothing more than a “site-promotion dinner” for the would-be Trump Tower Moscow project. He insisted that Jeffrey Epstein was not present that night, but acknowledged that Epstein already controlled a leased mansion on Pavlovskaya Street and had quietly floated the idea of raising equity for the tower through an offshore Cayman vehicle. Geovanis’ account places the three men inside the same Moscow circle at the same moment: Trump scouting sites, Black sizing up joint-venture stakes, and Epstein holding a ready-made bricks-and-mortar compound that could double as an investor salon.
Epstein’s Moscow footprint was not aspirational—it was operational. Senate documents show he took possession of the 9,500-square-metre walled estate at 3 Pavlovskaya Street in November 1996, the same month the Baltschug photo was snapped. The property—locally nicknamed “Dom Pavlov”—came with an underground cinema, vault-size safe room and a private elevator identical to the one later found in Palm Beach. Geovanis testified that Epstein bragged the mansion could host “deep-pocket Muscovites” and that Maxwell had already shipped massage tables and CCTV racks by December 1996, weeks after the lease was recorded. Thus the mansion was not a future asset; it was a parallel command center activated while Trump’s team still circled the Moskva-City parcel.
Geovanis’ narrative undercuts the idea that the 1996 trip was a one-off sightseeing tour. He told investigators that Black flew back to New York with a memorandum of understanding—never disclosed to Apollo shareholders—giving him first refusal on up to 25 % of any Trump Moscow entity once zoning was secured. Epstein, meanwhile, used the mansion to court Russian portfolio investors, flying at least two Moscow bankers to New York on his private jet in early 1997 and hosting them at 358 El Brillo Way. The Senate report reproduces flight logs showing those passengers later transferred money into Southern Russian Holdings Ltd, the same Cyprus shell that held the Pavlovskaya lease, completing a circular pipeline: Moscow capital in, Epstein equity out, Trump branding on top.
Crucially, Geovanis admitted that by 1998 he himself had become a limited partner—through a Cyprus entity—in Epstein’s Southern Trust Company, the same vehicle that would later funnel cum-ex dividend rebates back to Black’s GRAT. That places the fixer inside both financial chains: the Trump tower feasibility route and the Epstein tax-arbitrage route, both anchored to the same Moscow mansion. When senators asked why he never flagged Epstein’s 2008 plea, Geovanis answered, “I thought the girls were a Florida thing; the Moscow house was just business.” The committee left his transcript open, noting that his timeline “requires corroboration,” but the photograph—frozen in November 1996—now functions as a birth certificate for a tri-city, tri-man venture that began with cocktails under Kremlin spires and ended with victims flown in from Palm Beach to Pavlovskaya Street.