Had it not been for a preposterously improbable chain of events — some not of her own making — Cindy Yang’s activities would probably have gone unnoticed. That changed when Robert Kraft was arrested. riceid reports
Yang at the Truth About Israel Gala at Mar-a-Lago in February 2018. Photo: Paulette Martin and Amy Marie Meister The scandal started with a party, of course, because this was Palm Beach. It took place last year, during the winter season, when the rich men arrive on their jets with their third wives and the island swirls with charity benefits and gossip. A few opulent venues compete to hold society events, including Mar-a-Lago, the estate Donald Trump runs as a private club.
Even as relations between Trump and China were taking a hostile turn over trade and other issues, Yang was acting as a for-profit goodwill ambassador. On the Chinese-language website for her company GY US Investments, she promised she could open the gates to Mar-a-Lago and the president.
Yang saw the opening and pushed her way through, with a determination that would later look a little suspicious to some partygoers. She apprehended, maybe even more quickly than many native-born Americans, the way the mechanics of political ascent have changed under Trump. Influence once worked through campaign donations and winks and nudges, but this president has opened a more direct route.
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I didn’t get a massage, so I can’t say what happens inside the Tokyo Day Spa. What I do know is that once you start thinking about massage parlors, you notice them everywhere, especially in Florida, where they blend into the commercial landscape of osteopaths and pain clinics and salt therapy and physical therapy and spiritual therapy.
Xiaoqi Wang, another Republican activist in Palm Beach County who got to know Yang during the Trump campaign, told me Yang’s business model was to open a Tokyo location and then flip it to her students once it was established. Keyhan said that’s a common pattern — a way for those at the top to cash out and distance themselves from legal risk. She also said that a nice location means little. “They’re presenting an air of legitimacy,” she said.
This was during the period when China’s ruling class was rapidly acquiring immense wealth and looking for brokers who understood America to help them invest it. Around 2015, Yang tried to set herself up as an art dealer via a company called Fufu International. The gallery’s website — which had an address that corresponded to one of her spas — displayed pictures of Yang at art shows and described an event attended by Chinese collectors during Art Basel Miami Beach.
Over a long lunch at a strip-mall Thai restaurant, Li told me he was “an IT guy” and a former pro-democracy activist who left China after Tiananmen Square and later gravitated toward Republican ideas about free enterprise and affirmative action in education. He said he was initially wary of Trump — he was a Jeb! Supporter — and had to talk himself into overlooking the nominee’s radical rhetoric about trade and immigration. But Yang had no qualms. “She was fascinated by Trump.” Li said.
Yang attended Trump’s inauguration, where Li organized a party at the Mayflower Hotel. She appears to have spent a decent portion of 2017 in China, getting married to a furniture-factory owner whom she’d met through a mutual friend and making new business connections. Inevitably, this brought her into closer contact with the ruling Communist Party.
Yang started to escort guests to events at Mar-a-Lago, such as a Safari Night party for a youth charity. “She is a really good businessperson,” said Wang, who helped to organize a children’s Chinese-dance performance at Safari Night. “She saw an opportunity to get into Mar-a-Lago, and also if she buys the table, she can make money.”
The first big night for Yang’s new tourism company was the Truth About Israel Gala. Its organizer, a Boca Raton communications executive named Steven Alembik, had announced the event immediately after Charlottesville. “Somebody needs to take a stand here and do something,” he told the Palm Beach Post. “My president is my president.” But his planning was sloppy. Alembik didn’t even file to form a charity until nine days before the party.
Yang also seems to have been moving in rarefied circles in China. She traveled home to attend the Boao Forum, a conference modeled on Davos, where Xi delivered the keynote address. By this time, though, China’s rulers were starting to grow alarmed about Trump’s threats of punitive new tariffs. “Trade wars are good, and easy to win,” Trump tweeted that March, and he soon showed he was serious.
Yang told me if I wanted more answers, I should talk to her spokeswoman. So a couple of hours later, I met Turk at a restaurant in Delray Beach along with her husband, Evan, who is Yang’s attorney. They said they met Yang through the Mar-a-Lago scene. Karyn, who is blonde and chipper, won the 2016 Mrs. Florida pageant and was active in Trump’s campaign, often appearing at events in her sash and tiara.
The operation was ongoing, so Kraft was allowed to drive on after the phony traffic stop. Apparently, the brush with the law didn’t spook him, because the next morning he allegedly returned to the spa for another session, just hours before he watched the Patriots win the AFC championship in Kansas City.
One of the events that reporters discovered Yang was promoting was an “International Leaders Elite Forum” at Mar-a-Lago, which was to feature a speech by Trump’s sister Elizabeth. In reality, the “forum” was a reprise of the previous year’s Safari Night. “I was shocked,” said Terry Bomar, the minister who runs the Young Adventurers charity, which the event was supposed to benefit. He said he had been talking to Yang about using the party’s proceeds to sponsor a children’s trip to the Great Wall.
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