Money Laundering Trial for Reputed CIA Asset and Turkish Tycoon Pushed — Again

A sprawling biofuel scam that involved an unlikely coterie of codefendants - members of a polygamist Utah blood cult; an L.A. gas staton titan; a cabal of dirty cops and a Turkish billionaire who vanished from a Utah lockup this year - will now play out in court in November, according to court records. 

Prosecutors say the bad actors in the years-long international green energy swindle pulled off “one of the most audacious tax frauds in history involving the filing of more than $1 billion in false claims” for credits intended to subsidize biofuel production but instead lined the pockets of criminals. The longtime scam was protected by a slew of dirty cops and federal agents who were paid with bribes, dinners and cocaine-fueled sex parties in Vegas.

As the money for the scam flowed, the men behind it, Levon Termendzyan, a Los Angeles energy magnate known as "the Lion," and his partner in the scheme Jacob Kingston, a member of the notorious Mormon polygamist sect known as "The Kingston Clan," turned to a Turkish biopharma billionaire Sezgin Baran Korkmaz to launder the hundreds of millions of dollars they were pulling in. 

During sentencing hearings in Utah last summer, Korkmaz and his friend James Woolsey, the former CIA Director under President Bill Clinton and advisor to former President Donald Trump, were repeatedly referenced. Jacob Kingston, who is serving an 18-year federal sentence, testified that Woolsey was referenced in his conversations with Korkmaz using the codename "Grandpa." 

With Kormaz's help, Kingston told the court, he laundered roughly $140 million stolen from the U.S. Treasury in Turkey. Together they purchased the Mardan Palace luxury hotel in Turkey, the airliner Borajet, a waterfront villa in Istanbul and a superyacht christened the Queen Anne. Kingston believed the monies he was sending to Korkmaz in Turkey “was being used to fund CIA operations with Kurdish groups,” his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, told U.S. District Court Justice Jill Parrish last year. “There is so much complexity."

“The crime is so massive, just so epic…hundreds of millions are going to Turkey,” Agnifilo said, adding: “Jacob believed that some of it, not all, was sanctioned by the U.S. government and the CIA, money is going to business entities in Turkey to fund the CIA. There is so much backstory.”

And that backstory directly involves Woolsey, the CIA, Agency assets and transnational crime figures, something the judge called “a million different rabbit trails,” involving, she added, “all kinds of unsavory characters.” A federal source told Los Angeles last year that Woolsey would have been criminally charged if he was "not suffering from dementia." He could not be reached for comment. 

Korkmaz went on the run in 2020 as the labyrinthine money train unraveled and was captured on a massage table at a five-star hotel in Austria nearly a year later.  He was extradited to Utah, where he was kept in the same lockup as the Kingstons and Termendzyhan, but he was moved out of the prison and his whereabouts are currently unknown. His attorney did not respond to an email. 

His criminal trial on money laundering and wire fraud charges was slated to begin Monday, but a filing in federal court Friday indicates that the date was moved to November 2024. The trial is slated to be a blockbuster for spy-watchers as Korkmaz's relationship to Woolsey and another former CIA station chief for Turkey, Graham Fuller, are expected to take center stage.