Tall, good-looking, with an authoritative air, Mr. Manafort thrived in political boiler rooms. But he distinguished himself even more as a lobbyist. He and two colleagues from his days with the Young Republicans and the Reagan campaign created two linked consulting firms that broke the mold in Washington, achieving legendary success. Shrewd and aggressive, Mr. Manafort, Charlie Black and Roger J. Stone helped elect politicians, then scored contracts to lobby those same politicians on behalf of businesses and foreign interests.
“After Reagan won the election, we started getting calls from people who wanted to know if we wanted to lobby,” Mr. Black said. “I didn’t think much of it,” he added, but Mr. Manafort “knew that it could be profitable.”
He also began to indulge his expensive tastes. He was attracted to displays of “opulence,” Mr. Stone said. “Manafort thought that if something was expensive, it meant it was good.”
His partners objected to some of his business expenses, questioning his Concorde flights to Paris and suites at the city’s lavish Hôtel de Crillon. In 1995, Mr. Manafort struck out on his own, focusing in part on clients in the former Soviet states where a clutch of oligarchs exercised control over entire industries. Washington seemed less hospitable. Mr. Manafort later told one associate that Karl Rove, the longtime Republican Party strategist, had “banished” him from the capital. In a 2016 memo seeking a position on Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment campaign, he cast his distance from the Republican elite as a positive.
By 2005, Mr. Manafort had forged bonds with two oligarchs in the former Soviet bloc. One was Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate who is close to President Vladimir V. Putin. One witness in Mr. Manafort’s trial testified that Mr. Deripaska lent Mr. Manafort $10 million in 2010, saying she saw no evidence it was ever repaid. Later, Mr. Deripaska sued him.
The other oligarch was Rinat Akhmetov, who with estimated assets of more than $12 billion was the richest man in Ukraine. At Mr. Akhmetov’s urging, Mr. Manafort agreed to try to engineer a political comeback for Mr. Yanukovych, a former coal trucking director, twice convicted of assault, who had lost a bid for the presidency in 2004.
In the words of federal prosecutors, Mr. Akhmetov and several other oligarchs backing Mr. Yanukovych became Mr. Manafort’s “golden goose.” Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian citizen who prosecutors have said had ties to Russian intelligence, served as Mr. Manafort’s man on the ground in Kiev.