A Tale of Two Bell Curves

Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard Quillette Online Magazine

“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic” ~ John F. Kennedy 1962

To paraphrase Mark Twain, an infamous book is one that people castigate but do not read. Perhaps no modern work better fits this description than The Bell Curve by political scientist Charles Murray and the late psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. Published in 1994, the book is a sprawling (872 pages) but surprisingly entertaining analysis of the increasing importance of cognitive ability in the United States. It also included two chapters that addressed well-known racial differences in IQ scores (chapters 13-14). After a few cautious and thoughtful reviews, the book was excoriated by academics and popular science writers alike. A kind of grotesque mythology grew around it. It was depicted as a tome of racial antipathy; a thinly veiled expression of its authors’ bigotry; an epic scientific fraud, full of slipshod scholarship and outright lies. As hostile reviews piled up, the real Bell Curve, a sober and judiciously argued book, was eclipsed by a fictitious alternative. This fictitious Bell Curve still inspires enmity; and its surviving co-author is still caricatured as a racist, a classist, an elitist, and a white nationalist.

Myths have consequences. At Middlebury college, a crowd of disgruntled students, inspired by the fictitious Bell Curve — it is doubtful that many had bothered to read the actual book — interrupted Charles Murray’s March 2nd speech with chants of “hey, hey, ho, ho, Charles Murray has got to go,” and “racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray go away!” After Murray and moderator Allison Stanger were moved to a “secret location” to finish their conversation, protesters began to grab at Murray, who was shielded by Stanger. Stanger suffered a concussion and neck injuries that required hospital treatment.

It is easy to dismiss this outburst as an ill-informed spasm of overzealous college students, but their ignorance of The Bell Curve and its author is widely shared among social scientists, journalists, and the intelligentsia more broadly. Even media outlets that later lamented the Middlebury debacle had published – and continue to publish – opinion pieces that promoted the fictitious Bell Curve, a pseudoscientific manifesto of bigotry. In a fairly typical but exceptionally reckless 1994 review, Bob Hebert asserted, “Murray can protest all he wants, his book is just a genteel way of calling somebody a n*gger.” And Peter Beinart, in a defense of free speech published after the Middlebury incident, wrote, “critics called Murray’s argument intellectually shoddy, racist, and dangerous, and I agree.”

The Bell Curve and its authors have been unfairly maligned for over twenty years. And many journalists and academics have penned intellectually embarrassing and indefensible reviews and opinions of them without actually opening the first few pages of the book they claim to loathe. The truth, surprising as it may seem today, is this: The Bell Curve is not pseudoscience. Most of its contentions are, in fact, perfectly mainstream and accepted by most relevant experts. And those that are not are quite reasonable, even if they ultimately prove incorrect. In what follows, we will defend three of the most prominent and controversial claims made in The Bell Curve and note that the most controversial of all its assertions, namely that there are genetically caused race differences in intelligence, is a perfectly plausible hypothesis that is held by many experts in the field. Even if wrong, Herrnstein and Murray were responsible and cautious in their discussion of race differences, and certainly did not deserve the obloquy they received.

Claim 1: There is a g factor of cognitive ability on which individuals differ.  

First discovered in 1904 by Charles Spearman, an English psychologist, the g factor is a construct that refers to a general cognitive ability that influences performance on a wide variety of intellectual tasks. Spearman noted that, contrary to some popular myths, a child’s school performance across many apparently unrelated subjects was strongly correlated. A child who performed well in mathematics, for example, was more likely to perform well in classics or French than a child who performed poorly in mathematics.

He reasoned there was likely an underlying cognitive capacity that affected performance in each of these disparate scholastic domains. Perhaps a useful comparison can be made between the g factor and an athletic factor. Suppose, as seems quite likely, that people who can run faster than others are also likely to be able to jump higher and further, throw faster and harder, and lift more weight than others, then there would be a general athletic factor, or a single construct that explains some of the overall variance in athletic performance in a population. This is all g is: A single factor that explains some of the variance in cognitive ability in the population. If you know that Sally excels at mathematics, then you can reasonably hypothesize that she is better than the average human at English. And if you know that Bob has an expansive vocabulary, then you can reasonably conclude that he is better than an average human at mathematics.

Despite abstruse debates about the structure of intelligence, most relevant experts now agree that there is indeed a g factor. Sociologist and intelligence expert, Linda Gottfredson, for example, wrote that: “The general factor explains most differences among individuals in performance on diverse mental tests. This is true regardless of what specific ability a test is meant to assess [and] regardless of the test’s manifest content (whether words, numbers or figures)…” Earl Hunt, in his widely praised textbook on intelligence, noted that, “The facts indicate that a theory of intelligence has to include something like g.” (pg. 109). And Arthur Jensen, in his definitive book on the subject, wrote that, “At the level of psychometrics, g may be thought of as the distillate of the common source of individual variance…g can be roughly likened to a computer’s central processing unit.” (Pg. 74).

Claim 2: Intelligence is heritable.

Roughly speaking, heritability estimates how much differences in people’s genes account for differences in people’s traits. It is important to note that heritability is not a synonym for inheritable. That is, some traits that are inherited, say having five fingers, are not heritable because underlying genetic differences do not account for the number of fingers a person has. Possessing five fingers is a pan-human trait. Furthermore, heritability is not a measure of malleability. Some traits that are very heritable are quite responsive to environmental inputs (height, for example, which has increased significantly since the 1700s, but is highly heritable).

Most research suggests that intelligence is quite heritable, with estimates from 0.4-0.8, meaning that roughly 40 to 80 percent of the variance in intelligence can be explained by differences in genes. The heritability of intelligence increases across childhood and peaks during middle adulthood.

At this point, the data, from a variety of sources including adoptive twin studies and simple parent-offspring correlations, are overwhelming and the significant heritability of intelligence is no longer a matter of dispute among experts. For example, Earl Hunt contended, “The facts are incontrovertible. Human intelligence is heavily influenced by genes.” (Pg. 254). Robert Plomin, a prominent behavioral geneticist, asserted that, “The case for substantial genetic influence on g is stronger than for any other human characteristic.” (Pg. 108). And even N. J. Mackintosh, who was generally more skeptical about g and genetic influences on intelligence, concluded, “The broad issue is surely settled [about the source of variation in intelligence]: both nature and nurture, in Galton’s phrase, are important.” (Pg. 254).

Claim 3: Intelligence predicts important real world outcomes.

It would probably surprise many people who criticize the fictitious Bell Curve that most of the book covers the reality of g and the real world consequences of individual differences in g, including the emergence of a new cognitive elite (and not race differences in intelligence). Herrnstein and Murray were certainly not the first to note that intelligence strongly predicts a variety of social outcomes, and today their contention is hardly disputable. The only matter for debate is how strongly intelligence predicts such outcomes. In The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray analyzed a representative longitudinal data set from the United States and found that intelligence strongly predicted many socially desirable and undesirable outcomes including educational attainment (positively), socioeconomic status (positively), likelihood of divorce (negatively), likelihood of welfare dependence (negatively) and likelihood of incarceration (negatively).

Since the publication of The Bell Curve, the evidence supporting the assertion that intelligence is a strong predictor of many social outcomes has grown substantially. Tarmo Strenze, in a meta-analysis (a study that collects and combines all available studies on the subject), found a reasonably strong relation between intelligence and educational attainment (0.53), intelligence and occupational prestige (0.45), and intelligence and income (0.23). In that paper, he noted that “…the existence of an overall positive correlation between intelligence and socioeconomic success is beyond doubt.” (Pg. 402). In a review on the relation between IQ and job performance, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter found a strong relation of .51, a relation which increases as job complexity increases. In a different paper, Schmidt candidly noted that “There comes a time when you just have to come out of denial and objectively accept the evidence [that intelligence is related to job performance].” (pg. 208). The story is much the same for crime, divorce, and poverty. Each year, more data accumulate demonstrating the predictive validity of general intelligence in everyday life.

Claim 4a: There are race differences in intelligence, with East Asians scoring roughly 103 on IQ tests, Whites scoring 100, and Blacks scoring 85.

Of course, most of the controversy The Bell Curve attracted centered on its arguments about race differences in intelligence. Herrnstein and Murray asserted two general things about race differences in cognitive ability: (1) there are differences, and the difference between Blacks and Whites in the United States is quite large; and (2) it is likely that some of this difference is caused by genetics. The first claim is not even remotely controversial as a scientific matter. Intelligence tests revealed large disparities between Blacks and Whites early in the twentieth century, and they continue to show such differences. Most tests that measure intelligence (GRE, SAT, WAIS, et cetera) evince roughly a standard deviation difference between Blacks and Whites, which translates to 15 IQ points. Although scholars continue to debate whether this gap has shrunk, grown, or stayed relatively the same across the twentieth century, they do not debate the existence of the gap itself.

Here are what some mainstream experts have written about the Black-White intelligence gap in standard textbooks:

“It should be acknowledged, then, without further ado that there is a difference in average IQ between blacks and whites in the USA and Britain.” (Mackintosh, p. 334).

“There is a 1-standard deviation [15 points] difference in IQ between the black and white population of the U.S. The black population of the U.S. scores 1 standard deviation lower than the white population on various tests of intelligence.” (Brody, p. 280).

“There is some variation in the results, but not a great deal. The African American means [on intelligence tests] are about 1 standard deviation unit…below the White means…” (Hunt, p. 411).

Claim 4b: It is likely that some of the intelligence differences among races are caused by genetics.

This was the most controversial argument of The Bell Curve, but before addressing it, it is worth noting how cautious Hernstein and Murray were when forwarding this hypothesis: “It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might that mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate.” (p. 311). This is far from the strident tone one would expect from reading secondhand accounts of The Bell Curve!

There are two issues to address here. The first is how plausible is the hereditarian hypothesis (the hypothesis that genes play a causal role in racial differences in intelligence); and the second is should responsible researchers be allowed to forward reasonable, but potentially inflammatory hypotheses if they might later turn out false.

Although one would not believe it from reading most mainstream articles on the topic (with the exception of William Saletan’s piece at Slate), the proposal that some intelligence differences among races are genetically caused is quite plausible. It is not our goal, here, to cover this debate exhaustively. Rather, we simply want to note that the hereditarian hypothesis is reasonable and coheres with a parsimonious view of the evolution of human populations . Whether or not it is correct is another question.

Scholars who support the hereditarian hypothesis have marshalled an impressive array of evidence to defend it. Perhaps the strongest evidence is simply that there are, as yet, no good alternative explanations.

Upon first encountering evidence of an IQ gap between Blacks and Whites, many immediately point to socioeconomic disparities. But researchers have long known that socioeconomic status cannot explain all of the intelligence gap. Even if researchers control for SES, the intelligence gap is only shrunk by roughly 30% (estimates vary based on the dataset used, but almost none of the datasets finds that SES accounts for the entire gap). This is excessively charitable, as well, because intelligence also causes differences in socioeconomic status, so when researchers “control for SES,” they automatically shrink some of the gap.

Another argument that is often forwarded is that intelligence tests are culturally biased—they are designed in such a way that Black intelligence is underestimated. Although it would be rash to contend that bias plays absolutely no role in race differences in intelligence, it is pretty clear that it does not play a large role: standardized IQ and high stakes tests predict outcomes equally well for all native-born people. As Earl Hunt argued in his textbook, “If cultural unfairness were a major cause of racial/ethnic differences in test performance, we would not have as much trouble detecting it as seems to be the case.” (p. 425).

Of course, there are other possible explanations of the Black-White gap, such as parenting styles, stereotype threat, and a legacy of slavery/discrimination among others. However, to date, none of these putative causal variables has been shown to have a significant effect on the IQ gap, and no researcher has yet made a compelling case that environmental variables can explain the gap. This is certainly not for lack of effort; for good reason, scholars are highly motivated to ascertain possible environmental causes of the gap and have tried for many years to do just that.

For these reasons, and many more, in a 1980s survey, most scholars with expertise rejected the environment-only interpretation of the racial IQ gap, and a plurality (45%) accepted some variant of the hereditarian hypothesis. Although data are hard to obtain today, this seems to remain true. In a recent survey with 228 participants (all relevant experts), most scholars continued to reject the environment-only interpretation (supported by 17%), and a majority believed that at least 50% of the gap was genetically caused (52%). Many scholars in the field have noted that there is a bizarre and unhealthy difference between publicly and privately expressed views. Publicly, most experts remain silent and allow vocal hereditarian skeptics to monopolize the press; privately, most concede that the hereditarian hypothesis is quite plausible. Here, we’ll leave the last word to the always judicious Earl Hunt: “Plausible cases can be made for both genetic and environmental contributions to [racial differences in] intelligence…Denials or overly precise statements on either the pro-genetic or pro-environmental side do not move the debate forward. They generate heat rather than light.” (p. 436).

Whatever the truth about the cause of racial differences in intelligence, it is not irresponsible to forward reasonable, cautiously worded, and testable hypotheses. Science progresses by rigorously testing hypotheses, and it is antithetical to the spirit of science to disregard and in fact rule out of bounds an entirely reasonable category of explanations (those that posit some genetic causation in intelligence differences among racial groups). The Bell Curve is not unique for forwarding such hypotheses; it is unique because it did so publicly. Academics and media pundits quickly made Murray an effigy and relentlessly flogged him as a warning to others: If you go public with what you know, you too will suffer this fate.

There are two versions of The Bell Curve. The first is a disgusting and bigoted fraud. The second is a judicious but provocative look at intelligence and its increasing importance in the United States. The first is a fiction. And the second is the real Bell Curve. Because many, if not most, of the pundits who assailed The Bell Curve did not and have not bothered to read it, the fictitious Bell Curve has thrived and continues to inspire furious denunciations. We have suggested that almost all of the proposals of The Bell Curve are plausible. Of course, it is possible that some are incorrect. But we will only know which ones if people responsibly engage the real Bell Curve instead of castigating a caricature.

Bo Winegard is a graduate student at Florida State University. Follow him on Twitter: @EPoe187

Ben Winegard is an assistant professor at Carroll College. Follow him on Twitter: @BenWinegard

Metformin

The Unauthorized Biography

A month’s supply costs you about the same as

a Starbucks latte. It’s one of the oldest drugs in active clinical use today, and it’s now the first-line drug for almost everyone with newly diagnosed Type 2 diabetes on the planet. Most of the millions of people who take it don’t give it a second thought, but humble metformin may well be the closest thing we have to a miracle drug.

Consider the following: Other than insulin, metformin packs probably the biggest blood-glucose-lowering punch of any diabetes drug on the market, lowering HbA1c levels (a measure of blood glucose control) by up to 1.5%. It protects your heart, and it might even hold some cancers at bay. It gets along well with a wide variety of other drugs and treatments, and by most measures, it’s safer than most other prescription drugs. Impressively, it’s risen from the ranks of a “me-too” drug (a drug that’s very similar to an existing drug) to the very pinnacle of diabetes treatment worldwide.

The birth of metformin

When metformin was born to Dr. Jean Sterne at Aron Laboratories in Paris, France, in 1959, its proud father had no way to foresee how it would change the world. Initially (and still) sold under the trade name Glucophage, Greek for sugar eater, it would grow up to be a superstar, the most prescribed diabetes drug on the planet.

Like most drugs, metformin has its roots in a plant — in this case, the French lilac (Galega officinalis). Research into this plant’s potential as an antidiabetic agent dates back to the early 1920s, but major efforts were abandoned with the discovery and development of insulin. It wasn’t until 30 years later, in the search for oral drugs to control diabetes, that these efforts resumed. While the French lilac has long been known to have glucose-lowering properties, it has also long been known to be poisonous. Because it is dangerous to livestock, here in the United States it’s listed as a noxious weed in 12 states, including pretty much every state it grows in.

And just how does metformin lower blood glucose? No one knows, despite the fact that it is one of the most studied compounds in the world, having been the subject of over 13,000 clinical researchers and more than 5,600 published studies over the last 60 years. The leading theories on metformin hold that it limits glucose production in the liver, or that it helps muscle tissue take in glucose. Or that it helps with carbohydrate absorption. Or that it’s a mild insulin sensitizer. It’s probably a combination of all of these factors, although this is far from a definite answer.

But metformin does work, and it works fast, nearly from the first pill. It also carries little risk of overdoing its job; when used alone as a treatment, metformin rarely causes hypoglycemia (low blood glucose). It does not cause weight gain, and in many people it causes mild weight loss. It reduces the risk of heart attack, can be combined with other blood-glucose-lowering drugs, and has few harmful side effects. (Click here to learn more about the side effects of metformin.) Yet in the beginning, metformin was nowhere near as beloved as it is today.

Early setbacks

Metformin has been in clinical use now for over 50 years, a stellar run that’s bested only by aspirin. (Insulin, as a category, is closing in on the 100-year mark, but no one formulation of insulin comes even close to metformin’s Golden Jubilee.) But it didn’t have an easy childhood.

Fears of lactic acidosis, a wickedly dangerous side effect from some members of the biguanide family of medicines, of which metformin is a part, delayed its approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States until 1995 — fully 38 years after the drug’s deployment in Europe. Lactic acidosis is a metabolic crisis in which the blood becomes acidic. It frightens doctors and patients alike because of its reputation as a one-way street, with an overall mortality rate above 75% and a median survival time of only 28 hours.

But what’s the risk of lactic acidosis from metformin, really? Cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants may have said it best in the famous episode on sea bears: “Sea bears are no laughing matter. Why once I met this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy, who knew this guy’s cousin…” Like sea bears, very few doctors have actually seen a case of metformin-induced lactic acidosis with their own eyes. But these rumors and hearsay kept prescriptions low during metformin’s early years in the United States, despite its already long clinical career in Europe.

But now, after 50 years in the trenches, we know just how safe metformin really is. At the very worst, the rate of lactic acidosis associated with metformin is 3 cases per 100,000 patient-years. And on those exceptionally rare occasions when lactic acidosis is seen in metformin users, the fatality rate appears to be much lower than is usually seen when other drugs or conditions cause lactic acidosis. By comparison, the arthritis medicine celecoxib (Celebrex) carries an associated all-cause mortality rate of 1,140 per 100,000 patient-years.

But does metformin really cause lactic acidosis at all? One recent study, first published in the Cochrane Database, looked at pooled data from 347 recent clinical studies. In all of these clinical studies, there were no cases of lactic acidosis among participants who were assigned to take metformin. The new study also points out that people with diabetes are more prone to lactic acidosis than the general population in the first place. Other studies have shown that rates of lactic acidosis in non-metformin arms of clinical studies are actually higher than in metformin arms, seriously calling into question the conventional wisdom that metformin causes lactic acidosis.

Why, then, has this fear been so widespread? Metformin actually wasn’t the first member of the biguanide family of drugs to hit the market. It was preceded by buformin and by phenformin, which is now banned nearly everywhere. In contrast to metformin’s theoretical lactic acidosis rate of 3 cases per 100,000 patient-years, phenformin had a rate more than 20 times higher. It was pulled from the market following a number of high-profile deaths in France in the 1970s.

By the way, even if metformin does cause lactic acidosis, it’s not the only cheap pill to do so. Lactic acidosis is also associated with overdoses of acetaminophen, more commonly known by its brand name, Tylenol.

Metformin makes it big

Once a small-town kid suspected of mischief, metformin is now embraced by the International Diabetes Federation, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes as the first-line drug for Type 2 diabetes. In fact, a few years ago the ADA dropped its long-standing recommendation to start Type 2 diabetes treatment with just diet and exercise. Now the group recommends diet, exercise, and, when necessary, metformin.

So how did metformin achieve this career transformation? It wasn’t until the UK Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) was released in 1998 that the floodgates of acceptance opened. The UKPDS gave American doctors solid clinical evidence of metformin’s effectiveness at both lowering blood glucose and improving cardiovascular outcomes, just at the time when medicine in the United States was moving to a more evidence-based framework. Metformin began to pick up speed, and it hasn’t really hit any stumbling blocks since then.

According to the IMS Health National Prescription Audit, roughly 80 million prescriptions for metformin were dispensed in the United States alone in 2015. If you’re wondering how 29.1 million people with diagnosed diabetes can use nearly three times as many prescriptions, it’s because each time someone refills a 30- or 90-day supply of metformin, it counts as one prescription. Still, that’s a lot of metformin. Even at a measly four bucks a pop, the drug grosses nearly half a billion dollars per year in the United States alone. And globally, metformin is the most widely prescribed diabetes drug. Its father, Dr. Sterne, would be proud.

Metformin gets married

Metformin works well with other medicines, giving rise to precious few drug interactions. More than that, combinations of metformin and other glucose-lowering drugs have been shown to be significantly more potent than either medicine alone — and sometimes even more potent than the sum of each drug’s individual effect. Since getting people to take multiple prescription drugs can be a challenge, metformin has been married to a number of other diabetes medicines to create “polypills,” capsules or tablets with more than one drug in them.

Metformin has been combined in diabetes polypills with sulfonylureas (in Metaglip, Glucovance, Amaryl M), thiazolidinediones (ACTOplus met), DPP-4 inhibitors (Janumet, Galvumet, Kombiglyze XR), and SGLT2 inhibitors (Invokamet, Xigduo XR, Synjardy). Globally, there are now more than 20 polypills containing metformin, and the list is likely to continue to grow as new diabetes drugs are developed.

Metformin’s descendents

Although garden-variety metformin hasn’t really changed in 50 years, several new formulations have been introduced since that time. For people who have a hard time swallowing pills, metformin comes in a liquid formulation called Riomet. The most popular variant, however, is an extended-release version of the drug. Metformin is only absorbed within the body at the very upper part of the gastrointestinal tract, and any portion of the drug that passes further “downstream” is simply excreted. The trick to extending the action of the drug, then, is to keep the pill in the stomach longer while releasing the medicine slowly.

The most commonly prescribed extended-release version of metformin is Glucophage XR. This pill accomplishes its mission with a polymer that turns into a gel in the stomach, which blocks quick absorption of the medicine. This XR formulation has been shown to prolong the absorption of the drug to a peak of around seven hours, compared with traditional metformin’s three-hour peak in working action.

Indian researchers have also experimented with a floating pill that would stay in the stomach for even longer, slowly releasing metformin the entire time. For as long as metformin remains a popular diabetes drug, it is a safe bet that researchers will be trying to create new and innovative ways to deliver it to the body.

A promising future

As of today, metformin is FDA-approved only for use in Type 2 diabetes as a blood-glucose-lowering agent. However, it is increasingly used off-label by people with Type 1 diabetes to reduce insulin requirements, which it most likely achieves through its insulin-sensitizing effects. Some doctors also prescribe it to people with Type 1 diabetes who are overweight, to counteract the weight gain from insulin that some people experience.

Beyond diabetes, metformin is an effective treatment for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), for which it can increase ovulation rates fourfold. While it is not FDA-approved for this use, metformin features prominently in the treatment guidelines for PCOS of many organizations worldwide, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. In the area of HIV/AIDS treatment, metformin is sometimes used to reduce cardiovascular risk factors. And far on the cutting edge of medical research, metformin is being evaluated for its potential to reduce the growth of tumors.

Closer to its original home, metformin is increasingly used in efforts to prevent Type 2 diabetes, or at least to delay the onset of full-blown diabetes in people with prediabetes. Although metformin is not FDA-approved for prediabetes, more and more doctors prescribe it to keep blood glucose levels in the normal range for as long as possible.

After more than 50 years, it is safe to say that metformin is still going strong.

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Volume Three: The War Years and After 1939–1962

720pp. Viking. $40.

{TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT/London)

Biographies of outstanding public figures used to be written to inspire and impress; now, they are written as much to explore human fallibility as to celebrate achievement. It is not easy for contemporary biographers to do both, especially when, for example, early reticence about a marriage gives way to a tide of revelation and speculation. Both these books work hard to achieve the right balance.

Eleanor Roosevelt, distant cousin and then wife of the American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt – architect of the New Deal and the man who led his country out of depression and into the Second World War – was one of the outstanding women of the twentieth century. Then and now regarded as his moral compass, she became a national and international celebrity in her own right, a campaigner and communicator who transformed, even if only temporarily, the role of First Lady of the United States, with her energetic dedication to progressive and humanitarian causes. She and her husband had an extraordinary relationship, both personally and politically; quite how extraordinary has taken some time, and the gradual release of much private correspondence, to become clear. Both books under review take the crucial question about any political marriage – the extent to which the couple’s private life affected their conduct of public affairs – further than ever before.

Blanche Wiesen Cook has been working on her comprehensive biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for over a quarter of a century. The first part appeared in 1993, the second in 2000; both won prizes and much praise. This is the third and final volume, taking her subject through the war and the death of her husband in 1945 and her last years working for the United Nations; as in the first two, Cook tells the story as a straightforward, detailed, blow-by-blow narrative. This approach could have seemed old-fashioned and dull, but her deftness in selecting and handling her rich material makes it consistently absorbing. It also ensures that private matters, whether family or romantic, are always seen in the context of the demands of the Roosevelts’ demanding and dizzyingly complex political activities.

ER and FDR (as Cook calls them) have enormous archives, and many previous accounts have been written, mostly by their admirers, although there have been those whose right-wing predilections made them more critical. Cook acknowledges from the start that as a lifelong left-wing activist and feminist herself, with a long history of support for pressure groups such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she has always regarded ER as an inspiration. She is too scrupulous a historian to let this significantly affect her account, which does not present ER as a paragon; but it does sometimes affect her prose, which can slip into heroine worship. And it is indicative that an unattractive episode from ER’s later life, when she behaved badly in public to a woman senator during a disagreement over the Suez crisis – first shouting at her and then refusing to shake hands – is related not in the body of the text, but almost casually, in the preface.

In the first chapter of the book, “Lady Great Heart”, Cook conveys the substance of the previous volumes, sketches in key moments and relationships and gives us a sense of what is to come. Her admiration is clear from the outset. “Everywhere she went, ER offered hope. Her interest and concern empowered impoverished communities and healed the wounded.” ER’s empathy for those in trouble went back to her childhood, which had left her, by her own admission, in desperate need of love and attention. Both the alcoholic father she adored and her chilly, critical mother were dead by the time she was ten, and the happiest period of her youth was spent at Allenswood boarding school in England, where the first of her strong emotional connections with independent, unconventional women was formed. Cook credits Marie Souvestre, the French headmistress who also taught Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey’s clever sisters (one of whom put her experiences into the once scandalous novel of schoolgirl passion, Olivia), with recognizing ER’s character and intelligence and rebuilding her confidence, preparing her for a life of “endless learning, passionate intensity and surprising romance”.

The other defining episode in ER’s earlier life, Cook reminds us, came in 1918 when, having had six children and after thirteen years of marriage to her handsome, ambitious cousin, she discovered his affair with her friend and social secretary, Lucy Mercer. ER agreed not to divorce him on condition that marital sex cease (she apparently told her daughter later that it had always been an ordeal), that he allow her to build her own social and political life, and that he never see Mercer again. The first two conditions held; as this volume shows, the third did not.

As Cook – here and elsewhere unafraid of cliché – says of Eleanor: “She would forgive, but she would never forget”. The bargain with her husband ensured that their partnership, for the most part affectionate and mutually supportive, endured. She looked after him with devotion during the illness that left him partly paralysed in 1921, and was always concerned about his health: she turned a blind eye to his flirtations and permitted his secretary, Missy Le Hand, to become virtually a junior wife. Cook maintains that FDR would only ask her to moderate her opinions and actions for “reasons of state”, sometimes national, sometimes international; and when he did, she complied. Above all, their agreement released ER to move into public life, pursue the causes dear to her heart, and make new friendships, most of them with able, politically active women, several of them in stable same-sex relationships.

Two couples were especially important to her from the 1920s onwards. Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, leading campaigners for workers’ and women’s rights and racial equality, who lived in New York and were deeply involved in the Democratic Party, were her political touchstones, and Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook became her colleagues and companions at Val-Kill, the communal house, school and furniture workshop on the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson. Val-Kill became ER’s retreat from the formality of the family home, Hyde Park, and FDR’s formidable mother. FDR called it “the love nest”. ER’s “core emotional team”, consisted, according to Cook, of those four as well as Malvina Thompson, her devoted gatekeeper and secretary; Earl Miller, a young state trooper who taught her to ride and play tennis; and, from 1932, Lorena Hickok, known as Hick, a leading reporter who covered her arrival in the White House that year, fell deeply in love with her and was soon, as Cook rather primly puts it, ER’s “primary companion”. It was Hick who encouraged her commitment to the New Deal, accompanied her on tours to deprived parts of the country, and helped her to establish her nationally syndicated column, “My Day”.

ER’s romantic friendship with Hick has been known about since their correspondence became available to researchers in 1978 (they exchanged more than 3,000 letters). The first reaction was shock, and the suggestion that the collection should be closed. Since then, writers – including Cook – have been more open and sympathetic, while still holding back from asserting that ER and Hick had for a while, as the letters certainly indicate, a passionate physical relationship. Now Susan Quinn, herself in a long-standing lesbian partnership, has been able to write an account that takes love between two women for granted – although she still meets people who cannot believe ER was susceptible to it.

As her subtitle shows, Quinn also wants to give Lorena Hickok her due as one of the people who helped to make ER the effective writer and campaigner she was. Hick was an outstanding journalist from a tough background. She worked in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press, and met ER when she was assigned to cover her during FDR’s first campaign for the presidency in 1932.

After the two became close – they would end nightly phone calls by saying to each other “je t’aime et je t’adore” – Hick gave up her job, moved into the White House, where she had a base for the next twelve years, and devoted herself to working with and for ER. It was her suggestion that ER should hold news conferences especially for women journalists, to build up her own support base, and that the lively, informal letters ER sent Hick about her activities could be made into a newspaper column. “My Day” became a huge success, appearing six days a week and being syndicated all over the country. Quinn also demonstrates that Hick’s work for Harry Hopkins on researching and extending New Deal projects in poor communities had real influence on FDR, directly as well as through his wife.

The trouble, as time passed, was that while ER was the centre of Hick’s life, ER had many other demands on her time and her affections. Hick was the favourite at court for some years, but by the late 1930s “the personage”, as ER called her public self, was often taking her away, physically and emotionally, from Hick. There were jealousies and scenes. By 1939, as war approached, Hick’s role was dwindling, although ER was always loyal, kind and supportive as her friend’s financial and health worries increased.

During the war years, ER’s energies and attention were more on international than domestic affairs, as both she and FDR struggled to overcome the country’s deep reluctance to go to war in Europe again even as the evidence of Hitler’s atrocities mounted. ER, with her network of younger radical friends, had lobbied for the Republicans in Spain and now began to press for action on behalf of refugees fleeing fascism, with only partial success; she admitted later, after the full horror was clear, that the US had not done enough. Cook has expressed dismay that the plight of Jewish people features very little in ER’s papers, although she intervened more than once to help individuals brought to her attention by friends. She continued to urge FDR to act, and her lobbying and allegiances to young activists, some with communist associations, were not always welcome. But she never gave up.

As both Cook and Quinn demonstrate, Hick was to some extent replaced in ER’s later life by two younger men: Joseph Lash, who abandoned his early communism and later wrote several books about ER and FDR; and David Gurewitsch, who became her doctor and favourite travelling companion during her post-war widowhood. Both men were married, and ER was always friendly with their wives; but both, as correspondence shows, were emotionally vital to her. She once wrote to Gurewitsch that she had never loved anyone as she had him. All her life she needed to give and receive love in one form or another. Neither of these books says enough about ER’s frequently difficult relations with her own children; she found it hard to forgive her sons’ troubles with drink, money and women, and was hurt badly when she discovered that her daughter Anna had known of FDR’s renewed relationship in later life with Lucy Mercer.

After the war, under successive presidents – Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy – ER continued to write her columns, to broadcast, to press for racial equality and civil rights, and to work, through the newly established United Nations, for a new world order that would ensure peace. Chairing the UN Commission on Human Rights, she led the way to the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Until her death in 1962 she remained in touch with Hick, who lived quietly not far from Hyde Park, always drinking her morning coffee from the blue and white cup she had used over breakfast with ER at the White House.

DONALD TRUMP’S WORST DEAL

The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

By Adam Davidson The New Yorker

The Trump Tower Baku never opened. Trump partnered with an Azerbaijani family that U.S. officials called notoriously unethical.

Heydar Aliyev Prospekti, a broad avenue in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, connects the airport to the city. The road is meant to highlight Baku’s recent modernization, and it is lined with sleek new buildings. The Heydar Aliyev Center, an undulating wave of concrete and glass, was designed by Zaha Hadid. The state oil company is housed in a twisting glass tower, and the headquarters of the state water company looks like a giant water droplet. “It’s like Potemkin,” my translator told me. “It’s only the buildings right next to the road.” Behind the gleaming structures stand decaying Soviet-era apartment blocks, with clothes hanging out of windows and wallboards exposed by fallen brickwork.

As you approach the city center, a tower at the end of the avenue looms in front of you. Thirty-three stories high and curved to resemble a sail, the building was clearly inspired by the Burj Al Arab Hotel, in Dubai, but it is boxier and less elegant. When I visited Baku, in December, five enormous white letters glowed at the top of the tower: T-R-U-M-P.

The building, a five-star hotel and residence called the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku, has never opened, though from the road it looks ready to welcome the public. Reaching the property is surprisingly difficult; the tower stands amid a welter of on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses. During the nine days I was in town, I went to the site half a dozen times, and on each occasion I had a comical exchange with a taxi-driver who had no idea which combination of turns would lead to the building’s entrance.

The more time I spent in the neighborhood, the more I wondered how the hotel could have been imagined as a viable business. The development was conceived, in 2008, as a high-end apartment building. In 2012, after Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project, plans were made to transform the tower into an “ultra-luxury property.” According to a Trump Organization press release, a hotel with “expansive guest rooms” would occupy the first thirteen floors; higher stories would feature residences with “spectacular views of the city and Caspian Sea.” For an expensive hotel, the Trump Tower Baku is in an oddly unglamorous location: the underdeveloped eastern end of downtown, which is dominated by train tracks and is miles from the main business district, on the west side of the city. Across the street from the hotel is a discount shopping center; the area is filled with narrow, dingy shops and hookah bars. Other hotels nearby are low-budget options: at the AYF Palace, most rooms are forty-two dollars a night. There are no upscale restaurants or shops. Any guests of the Trump Tower Baku would likely feel marooned.

The timing of the project was also curious. By 2014, when the Trump Organization publicly announced that it was helping to turn the tower into a hotel, a construction boom in Baku had ended, and the occupancy rate for luxury hotels in the city hovered around thirty-five per cent. Jan deRoos, of Cornell University, who is an expert in hotel finance, told me that the developer of a five-star hotel typically must demonstrate that the project will maintain an average occupancy rate of at least sixty per cent for ten years. There is a long-term master plan to develop the area around the Trump Tower Baku, but if it is implemented the hotel will be surrounded for years by noisy construction projects, making it even less appealing to travellers desiring a luxurious experience—especially considering that there are many established hotels on the city’s seaside promenade. There, an executive from ExxonMobil or the Israeli cell-phone industry can stay at the Four Seasons, which occupies a limestone building that evokes a French colonial palace, or at the J. W. Marriott Abershon Baku, which has an outdoor terrace overlooking the water. Tiffany, Ralph Lauren, and Armani are among the dozens of companies that have boutiques along the promenade.

A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”

The Azerbaijanis behind the project were close relatives of Ziya Mammadov, the Transportation Minister and one of the country’s wealthiest and most powerful oligarchs. According to the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Azerbaijan is among the most corrupt nations in the world. Its President, Ilham Aliyev, the son of the former President Heydar Aliyev, recently appointed his wife to be Vice-President. Ziya Mammadov became the Transportation Minister in 2002, around the time that the regime began receiving enormous profits from government-owned oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. At the time of the hotel deal, Mammadov, a career government official, had a salary of about twelve thousand dollars, but he was a billionaire.

The Trump Tower Baku originally had a construction budget of a hundred and ninety-five million dollars, but it went through multiple revisions, and the cost ended up being much higher. The tower was designed by a local architect, and in its original incarnation it had an ungainly roof that suggested the spikes of a crown. A London-based architecture firm, Mixity, redesigned the building, softening its edges and eliminating the ornamental roof. By the time the Trump team officially joined the project, in May, 2012, many condominium residences had already been completed; at the insistence of Trump Organization staffers, most of the building’s interior was gutted and rebuilt, and several elevators were added.

After Donald Trump became a candidate for President, in 2015, Mother Jones, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and other publications ran articles that raised questions about his involvement in the Baku project. These reports cited a series of cables sent from the U.S. Embassy in Azerbaijan in 2009 and 2010, which were made public by WikiLeaks. In one of the cables, a U.S. diplomat described Ziya Mammadov as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.” The Trump Organization’s chief legal officer, Alan Garten, told reporters that the Baku hotel project raised no ethical issues for Donald Trump, because his company had never engaged directly with Mammadov.

According to Garten, Trump played a passive role in the development of the property: he was “merely a licensor” who allowed his famous name to be used by a company headed by Ziya Mammadov’s son, Anar, a young entrepreneur. It’s not clear how much money Trump made from the licensing agreement, although in his limited public filings he has reported receiving $2.8 million. (The Trump Organization shared documents that showed an additional payment of two and a half million dollars, in 2012, but declined to disclose any other payments.) Trump also had signed a contract to manage the hotel once it opened, for an undisclosed fee tied to the hotel’s performance. The Washington Post published Garten’s description of the deal, and reported that Donald Trump had “invested virtually no money in the project while selling the rights to use his name and holding the contract to manage the property.”

A month after Trump was elected President, Garten announced that the Trump Organization had severed its ties with the hotel project, describing the decision to CNN as little more than “housecleaning.” I was in Baku at the time, and it had become clear that the Trump Organization’s story of the hotel was incomplete and inaccurate. Trump’s company had made the deal not just with Anar Mammadov but also with Ziya’s brother Elton—an influential member of the Azerbaijani parliament. Elton signed the contracts, and in an interview he confirmed that he founded Baku XXI Century, the company that owns the Trump Tower Baku. When he was asked who owns Baku XXI Century, he called it a “commercial secret” but added that he “controlled all its operations” until 2015, when he cut ties to the company. Elton denied having used his political position for profit.

An Azerbaijani lawyer who worked on the project revealed to me that the Trump Organization had not just licensed the family name; it also had signed a technical-services agreement in which it promised to help its partner meet Trump design standards. Technical-services agreements are often nominal addenda to licensing deals. Major hospitality brands compile exhaustive specifications for licensed hotels, and tend to approve design elements remotely; a foreign site is visited only occasionally. But in the case of Trump Tower Baku the oversight appears to have been extensive. The Azerbaijani lawyer told me, “We were always following their instructions. We were in constant contact with the Trump Organization. They approved the smallest details.” He said that Trump staff visited Baku at least monthly to give the go-ahead for the next round of work orders. Trump designers went to Turkey to vet the furniture and fabrics acquired there. The hotel’s main designer, Pierre Baillargeon, and several contractors told me that they had visited the Trump Organization headquarters, in New York, to secure approval for their plans.

Ivanka Trump was the most senior Trump Organization official on the Baku project. In October, 2014, she visited the city to tour the site and offer advice. An executive at Mace, the London-based construction firm that oversaw the tower’s conversion to a hotel, met with Ivanka in Baku and New York. He told me, “She had very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” The Azerbaijani lawyer said, “Ivanka personally approved everything.” A subcontractor noted that Ivanka’s team was particular about wood panelling: it chose an expensive Macassar ebony, from Indonesia, for the ceiling of the lobby. The ballroom doors were to be made of book-matched panels of walnut. On her Web site, Ivanka posted a photograph of herself wearing a hard hat inside the half-completed hotel. A caption reads, “Ivanka has overseen the development of Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku since its inception, and she recently returned from a trip to the fascinating city in Azerbaijan to check in on the project’s progress.” (Ivanka Trump declined requests to discuss the Baku project.)

Jan deRoos, the Cornell professor, developed branded-hotel properties before entering academia. He told me that the degree of the Trump Organization’s involvement in the Baku property was atypical. “That’s very, very intense,” he said.

The sustained back-and-forth between the Trump Organization and the Mammadovs has legal significance. If parties involved in the Trump Tower Baku project participated in any illegal financial conduct, and if the Trump Organization exerted a degree of control over the project, the company could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Tom Fox, a Houston lawyer who specializes in anti-corruption compliance, said, “It’s a problem if you’re making a profit off of someone else’s corrupt conduct.” Moreover, recent case law has established that licensors take on a greater legal burden when they assume roles normally reserved for developers. The Trump Organization’s unusually deep engagement with Baku XXI Century suggests that it had the opportunity and the responsibility to monitor it for corruption.

Before signing a deal with a foreign partner, American companies, including major hotel chains, conduct risk assessments and background checks that take a close look at the country, the prospective partner, and the people involved. Countless accounting and law firms perform this service, as do many specialized investigation companies; a baseline report normally costs between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand dollars. A senior executive at one of the largest American hotel chains, who asked for anonymity because he feared reprisal from the Trump Administration, said, “We wouldn’t look at due diligence as a burden. There certainly is a cost to doing it, especially in higher-risk places. But it’s as much an investment in the protection of that brand. It’s money well spent.”

Alan Garten told me that the Trump Organization had commissioned a risk assessment for the Baku deal, but declined to name the company that had performed it. The Washington Post article on the Baku project reported that, according to Garten, the Trump Organization had undertaken “extensive due diligence” before making the hotel deal and had not discovered “any red flags.”

But the Mammadov family, in addition to its reputation for corruption, has a troubling connection that any proper risk assessment should have unearthed: for years, it has been financially entangled with an Iranian family tied to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideologically driven military force. In 2008, the year that the tower was announced, Ziya Mammadov, in his role as Transportation Minister, awarded a series of multimillion-dollar contracts to Azarpassillo, an Iranian construction company. Keyumars Darvishi, its chairman, fought in the Iran-Iraq War. After the war, he became the head of Raman, an Iranian construction firm that is controlled by the Revolutionary Guard. The U.S. government has regularly accused the Guard of criminal activity, including drug trafficking, sponsoring terrorism abroad, and money laundering. Reuters recently reported that the Trump Administration was poised to officially condemn the Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization.

I asked Garten how deeply the Trump Organization had looked into the Mammadov family’s political connections. Had it been concerned that Elton Mammadov, as a sitting member of parliament, might exploit his power to benefit the project? How much money had Ziya Mammadov invested in Elton’s company? Garten noted that he didn’t oversee the due-diligence process. “The people who did are no longer at the company,” he said. “I can’t tell you what was done in this situation.” He would not identify the former employees. When I asked him to provide documentation of due diligence, he said that he couldn’t share it with me, because “it’s confidential and privileged.”

No evidence has surfaced showing that Donald Trump, or any of his employees involved in the Baku deal, actively participated in bribery, money laundering, or other illegal behavior. But the Trump Organization may have broken the law in its work with the Mammadov family. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, passed in 1977, forbade American companies from participating in a scheme to reward a foreign government official in exchange for material benefit or preferential treatment. The law even made it a crime for an American company to unknowingly benefit from a partner’s corruption if it could have discovered illicit activity but avoided doing so. This closed what was known as the “head in the sand” loophole.

As a result, American companies must examine potential foreign partners very carefully before making deals with them. I recently spoke with Alexandra Wrage, who runs Trace International, a consortium of three hundred corporations that do business overseas. Trace helps these firms avoid violating the F.C.P.A., and it has a division that can be hired by individual clients to assess potential foreign partners. To comply with the law, Wrage noted, an American company must remain vigilant even after a contract is signed, monitoring its foreign partner to be sure that nobody involved is engaging in bribery or other improprieties.

Wrage pointed out that corrupt government leaders often use their children or their siblings to distance themselves from illicit projects. Such an official creates a company in the relative’s name which appears to be independent but is controlled by the official. To lessen the likelihood of an F.C.P.A. violation when working with a company that is owned by a child or a sibling of a government minister, Wrage told me, “you’d need to show that the child has real expertise, real ability to do the work.” Otherwise, Wrage said, “the assumption is that they are a partner entirely because of their ability to use their parent’s power.” Before Elton Mammadov became a member of parliament, in 2000, he was a maintenance engineer who had no experience in real-estate development. When the Trump Organization joined the Baku project, it barred a Mammadov-owned company from doing construction work, because it was deemed incompetent.

Wrage said that a U.S. company looking to make a deal with a foreign partner should be confident that the partner has a reasonable likelihood of making a profit from the venture. If the project seems almost guaranteed to lose money, it could well be a bribery scheme or some other criminal operation. The partner also should uphold modern accounting standards.

“It’s simple,” she said. “Will money flow through this business because it offers a compelling product at a decent price, or will the money come because of an illicit relationship with someone who uses their power?”

Wrage told me that, in 2009, an American entrepreneur was successfully prosecuted for his part in a corruption conspiracy in Azerbaijan. Frederic Bourke, the co-founder of Dooney & Bourke, the handbag company, had invested in a project in which a foreign partner paid bribes to Azerbaijani government officials and their family members. Bourke was sentenced to a year in prison for violating the F.C.P.A.; he appealed the conviction, claiming ignorance of the corruption. Two years later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the conviction, saying that, regardless of whether he had known about the bribes, “the testimony at trial demonstrated that Bourke was aware of how pervasive corruption was in Azerbaijan.” The F.C.P.A., they said, also criminalized “conscious avoidance”—a deliberate effort to remain in the dark about any transgressions a foreign partner might be involved in. After Bourke’s conviction, Wrage said, U.S. companies were well aware of the dangers of making careless deals in Azerbaijan.

Even a cursory look at the Mammadovs suggests that they are not ideal partners for an American business. Four years before the Trump Organization announced the Baku deal, WikiLeaks released the U.S. diplomatic cables indicating that the family was corrupt; one cable mentioned the Mammadovs’ link to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In 2013, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project investigated the Mammadov family’s corruption and published well-documented exposés. Six months before the hotel announcement, Foreign Policy ran an article titled “The Corleones of the Caspian,” which suggested that the Mammadovs had exploited Ziya’s position as Transportation Minister to make their fortunes.

The Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation revealed that Baku XXI Century, the company controlled by Elton, had at least two other stakeholders. One of them was a company called zqan, an acronym for the family members of the Transportation Minister: Ziya Mammadov; Qanira, his wife; Anar, his son; and Nigar, his daughter. Anar is the official head of zqan. Another stakeholder in Baku XXI Century was the Baghlan Group, a company run by an Azerbaijani businessman who is known to be close to Ziya Mammadov.

Baku XXI Century, zqan, and Baghlan have so many overlapping interests that they often seem to operate as a single concern. According to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty investigation, the companies all prospered largely through contracts with the Transportation Ministry. The Trump Tower Baku complex was built partly on land controlled by the ministry. A Baghlan subsidiary received a contract from the ministry to import a thousand London-style cabs to Baku. Soon afterward, ministry inspectors began preventing competing taxi services from parking in the city center or at subway stops. Another new rule required all taxi owners to pay taxes and license fees at the Bank of Azerbaijan, a private entity that at the time was owned jointly by Anar Mammadov and Baghlan.

Anar’s net worth has been estimated at a billion dollars, but he is not a self-made man. According to the Associated Press, zqan was founded in 2000, when he was in his late teens. He began studying in England that year, and remained there until 2005; during that period, the company that he ostensibly ran experienced explosive growth. Trump Organization officials, as well as others familiar with the Baku project, told me that during the tower’s construction Anar was barely involved, and was often travelling abroad. (He flies on a Gulfstream G450 private jet.) An American who did business in Azerbaijan told me, “It’s common knowledge there that Ziya Mammadov controls zqan.”

One of the cables sent in 2010 by the U.S. Embassy in Baku noted that, “with so much of the nation’s oil wealth being poured into road construction,” the Mammadovs had become disproportionately powerful in Azerbaijan. Another cable suggested that Ziya controlled zqan, the country’s “largest commercial development company.” This cable described Ziya as being the object of “many allegations from Azerbaijani contacts of creative corrupt practices.”

Much of the land occupied by the Trump Tower Baku complex was once packed with houses. In 2011, residents received letters from the local government authority informing them that their homes were to be demolished to make way for a project of crucial government significance. Thirty families were evicted. One resident, Minaye Azizova, told me that the government gave her eighteen thousand dollars in compensation for a home that, by her estimation, was worth five times as much. After she discovered that her home had been condemned so that Baku XXI Century could build a luxury tower, she sued the government.

Construction of the building began in 2008. I have spoken with more than a dozen contractors who worked on it. Some of them described behavior that seemed nakedly corrupt. Frank McDonald, an Englishman who has had a long career doing construction jobs in developing countries, performed extensive work on the building’s interior. He told me that his firm was always paid in cash, and that he witnessed other contractors being paid in the same way. At the offices of Anar Mammadov’s company, he said, “they would give us a giant pile of cash,” adding, “I got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars one time, which I fit into my laptop bag, and two hundred thousand dollars another time.” Once, a colleague of his picked up a payment of two million dollars. “He needed to bring a big duffelbag,” McDonald recalled. The Azerbaijani lawyer confirmed that some contractors on the Baku tower were paid in cash.

Two people who worked on the Trump Tower Baku told me that bribes were paid. Much of the graft was routine: Azerbaijani tax officials, government inspectors, and customs officers showed up occasionally to pick up envelopes of cash.

The executive at Mace, the construction firm, told me that the Mammadovs handled payments and all interactions with the Azerbaijani government. “Were people bribed?” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe. We didn’t check.” (A spokesman for Mace said that the firm was “not involved” in any corruption.)

Pierre Baillargeon, the architect whom the Mammadovs hired to alter the tower’s original design, is a Canadian who runs a studio in London. He has often worked in parts of the world known for corruption, including Sudan and Syria, and has done several projects in Azerbaijan. In a phone interview, Baillargeon said that he knew nothing about corruption and was “just a designer.” I asked him why he thought the hotel had been built in such an inhospitable part of Baku. “Every project has detractors,” he said. When I asked him if he had seen large payments being made in cash, he hung up. (He did not respond to later calls.)

Alan Garten, the Trump Organization lawyer, did not deny that there was corruption involved in the project. “I’m not going to sit here and defend the Mammadovs,” he said. But, from a legal standpoint, he argued, the Trump Organization was blameless. In his opinion, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act doesn’t apply to the Baku deal, even if corruption occurred. “We didn’t own it,” he said of the hotel. “We had no equity. We didn’t control the project. The flow of funds is in the wrong direction.” He added, “We did not pay any money to anyone. Therefore, it could not be a violation of the F.C.P.A.”

“No, that’s just wrong,” Jessica Tillipman, an assistant dean at George Washington University Law School, who specializes in the F.C.P.A., said. “You can’t go into business deals in Azerbaijan assuming that you are immune from the F.C.P.A.” She added, “Nor can you escape liability by looking the other way. The entire Baku deal is a giant red flag—the direct involvement of foreign government officials and their relatives in Azerbaijan with ties to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Corruption warning signs are rarely more obvious.”

Tillipman explained that the F.C.P.A. defines corruption as “the payment of money or anything of value” to a foreign official. Last year, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay two hundred and sixty-four million dollars to settle charges that it had violated the F.C.P.A.; the bank had given jobs and internships to relatives and friends of government officials in Asia. Tillipman, along with several other F.C.P.A. experts, told me that the Trump Organization had clearly provided things of value in the Baku deal: its famous brand, its command of the luxury market, its extensive technical advice.

In May, 2012, the month the Baku deal was finalized, the F.C.P.A. was evidently on Donald Trump’s mind. In a phone-in appearance on CNBC, he expressed frustration with the law. “Every other country goes into these places and they do what they have to do,” he said. “It’s a horrible law and it should be changed.” If American companies refused to give bribes, he said, “you’ll do business nowhere.” He continued, “There is one answer—go to your room, close the door, go to sleep, and don’t do any deals, because that’s the only way. The only way you’re going to do it is the other way.”

It is unclear how the Trump Administration plans to approach F.C.P.A. enforcement. Jay Clayton, Trump’s choice to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, co-authored a paper in 2011 arguing that American companies were at a severe disadvantage because of the U.S. government’s “singular strategy of zealous enforcement.” But Jeff Sessions, the new Attorney General, told the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings that he will continue to uphold the F.C.P.A.

After 9/11, prosecuting financial corruption acquired new political importance. The C.I.A. and other intelligence services came to believe that preventing illicit money from flowing through the global financial system was a necessary tactic in preventing future terrorist attacks, and the U.S. led an international effort to enforce financial transparency. Banks and other financial entities were required to vet their clients aggressively and to report any suspicious activity. Prosecutions for money laundering, bribery, and other financial crimes rose significantly. In 2000, the government launched three prosecutions under the F.C.P.A. Last year, it initiated fifty-four.

Investigators of financial fraud like to say that government corruption, money laundering, and other illicit behavior often form a “nexus” with even more troubling activity, such as financing terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. This appears to be true in the Baku deal. As the Mammadovs were preparing to build the tower, the family patriarch, Ziya, was cementing his financial relationship with the Darvishis, the Iranian family with ties to the country’s Revolutionary Guard.

At least three Darvishis—the brothers Habil, Kamal, and Keyumars—appear to be associates of the Guard. In Farsi press accounts, Habil, who runs the Tehran Metro Company, is referred to as a sardar, a term for a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guard. A cable sent on March 6, 2009, from the U.S. Embassy in Baku described Kamal as having formerly run “an alleged Revolutionary Guard-controlled business in Iran.” The company, called Nasr, developed and acquired instruments, guidance systems, and specialty metals needed to build ballistic missiles. In 2007, Nasr was sanctioned by the U.S. for its role in Iran’s effort to develop nuclear missiles.

The cable said that Kamal and Keyumars were frequent visitors to Azerbaijan; Kamal had recently established “a close business relationship/friendship” with Ziya Mammadov, and, with Mammadov’s assistance, had been awarded “at least eight major road construction and rehabilitation contracts, including contracts for construction of the Baku-Iranian Astara highway.” (Keyumars also seems to have been involved in these deals.) The cable added, “We assume Mammedov [sic] is a silent partner in these contracts.”

Iran has two militaries. The Iranian Army is a conventional force whose mission is to protect the country. The Revolutionary Guard is an independent force of about a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers, whose duty is to protect the country’s Islamic system and to preserve the power of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Revolutionary Guard has its own air force and navy, and it has a unit known as the Quds Force, which the United States has identified as a major supporter of Hezbollah and other international terrorist groups. The Guard has developed a shadow economy within Iran to fund its activities and expand its power. It controls all official border crossings and runs several unofficial ports, solely for its own use. The Revolutionary Guard smuggles into the country everything from consumer goods blocked by sanctions to drugs. It also owns seemingly legitimate companies in construction, energy, telecommunications, auto manufacturing, and banking. According to the United States Institute of Peace, the Guard is linked “to dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of companies that appear to be private in nature but are run by [Revolutionary Guard] veterans.”

J. Matthew McInnis, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute, who served as a consultant to Michael Flynn when Flynn was the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told me that owners of Revolutionary Guard-related businesses often become rich. But there is a catch: from time to time, they should expect to be asked to serve the needs of the Guard. “When the Revolutionary Guard says, ‘We need to move some illicit stuff,’ or ‘We need new parts for our missiles,’ they reach out to these guys,” McInnis explained. “It’s a soft network that can do all sorts of things that are very hard to trace.”

Keyumars Darvishi once ran Raman, a construction firm that is owned by the Islamic Revolution Mostazafan Foundation. According to the United Nations, the foundation is a major financial arm of the Revolutionary Guard. Keyumars left Raman to run Azarpassillo, the putatively independent construction company that received multiple road contracts in Azerbaijan. According to Azarpassillo’s Web site, it was incorporated in 2008. In recent years, Keyumars has also served as the acting director of the Tehran Metro Company, filling in for his brother Habil.

Mehrzad Boroujerdi, a political scientist at Syracuse University, who studies the political, economic, and military élite of Iran, said, “It looks like Azarpassillo is a front organization for the Revolutionary Guard.” He found it inconceivable that Keyumars Darvishi, after working for years in a company controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, would quit, raise large amounts of capital on his own, and then become the head of a fully independent company that competed against Revolutionary Guard fronts for contracts. Khatam Al-Anbia, an Iranian construction giant that is controlled by the Guard and is under U.S. sanctions, has subcontracted Azarpassillo on at least two major infrastructure projects in Iran. The Tehran Metro Company is also involved in both projects. McInnis told me, “If you see a connection with Khatam Al-Anbia, you would assume the connections to the Revolutionary Guard are there. The suspicion of Azarpassillo being a front company is certainly worth investigating. It would fit a normal pattern.”

Alan Garten told me that the Trump Organization checks to see if potential Trump partners are on “watch lists and sanctions lists,” and that the company knew nothing of Ziya Mammadov’s relationship to the Darvishis until 2015, when it learned that “certain principals associated with the developer may have had some association with some problematic entities.” And yet, by that point, the U.S. Embassy cables had been online for four years. Garten insisted that the Trump Organization still has no idea if the association between the Mammadovs and the Darvishis is real, or if it’s simply an allegation “spread by the media.” I recently spoke with Allison Melia, who until 2015 was one of the C.I.A.’s lead analysts of Iran’s economy; she now works for the Crumpton Group, a strategic advisory firm whose services include conducting due diligence for companies. She told me that her team could have compiled a dossier on the Mammadovs and their connection to the Revolutionary Guard in “a couple of days.” She said that any reputable investigative firm conducting a risk assessment would have advised a U.S. company to avoid a deal with a family connected to the Revolutionary Guard.

The U.S. has imposed various sanctions on Iran since the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. In recent years, U.S. and international efforts have focussed on isolating Iran from the global financial system, in order to prevent it from funding terrorist groups and contributing to worldwide instability. In 2015, the U.N., spurred by the Obama Administration, reached an agreement with Iran, and lifted some sanctions in return for a slowdown of the country’s nuclear program. However, according to the Congressional Research Service, many sanctions against Iran remain in effect, because of the country’s “support for terrorism, its human-rights abuses, its interference in specified countries in the region, and its missile and advanced-conventional-weapons programs.” In December, 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives imposed additional sanctions on the Revolutionary Guard and its associated businesses.

American companies must insure that they are not receiving funds that originated with any sanctioned entity. Ignorance is not a defense, especially if there is ample warning that a foreign partner could have a link to such an entity. Most firms, upon hearing of even a slight chance of Iranian involvement, conduct due diligence that is much more extensive than what is typical for F.C.P.A. compliance. Erich Ferrari, an attorney who specializes in sanctions-related legal cases, said that before the Trump Organization cashed any checks it should have been certain of “the source of the funds”—“not only the bank it was remitted from but how the Mammadovs actually earned the money they paid.” He said of the Baku deal, “It takes a lot to shock a lawyer, but I’ve had very few clients do so little due diligence.”

The nexus between the Mammadovs and the Darvishis suggests both opportunism and desperation. Ziya Mammadov is sixty-four, and in recent years the family’s position in Azerbaijan has begun to weaken. President Aliyev has systematically isolated, and then fired, longtime members of the regime in order to make way for his own cronies. From 2008 to 2014, Ziya Mammadov, perhaps fearing his ejection from political office, vastly increased his personal wealth.

During the same period, mounting international sanctions made it far more difficult for Iran to sell oil abroad, receive foreign funds, and import products. International banks became increasingly reluctant to accept funds from businesses owned by the Revolutionary Guard, severely limiting its ability to support allies such as Hezbollah and the Syrian government. At a moment when Iran was struggling to find ways to send money outside the country, Keyumars Darvishi joined Azarpassillo and began making one deal after another in Azerbaijan.

Ziya Mammadov apparently had complete discretion with regard to Azarpassillo’s projects. On April 6, 2007, Anne Derse, then the U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, wrote in a cable that Charles Redman, at the time a senior vice-president for the American construction firm Bechtel, had recently met with Ziya Mammadov. Redman was looking for business, and knew that Azerbaijan was planning several major new roads. Bechtel could build them, he said, at an average cost of six million dollars per kilometre. Mammadov complained to him that this was too expensive. Bechtel ended up building nothing. Instead, much of the roadwork was done by Azarpassillo—at a much higher cost. According to a 2012 report by Azerbaijan’s Center for Economic and Social Development, an independent think tank, road construction during Mammadov’s tenure was “the most expensive in the world,” costing an average of eighteen million dollars per kilometre. (Derse declined to comment; Redman did not respond to e-mails.)

The available evidence strongly suggests that Ziya Mammadov conspired with an agent of the Revolutionary Guard to make overpriced deals that would enrich them both while allowing them to flout prohibitions against money laundering and to circumvent sanctions against Iran. Based on Ziya Mammadov’s past, it seems reasonable to assume that his main motive was profit. Like most Azerbaijanis, he is a secular Shiite Muslim, and he has no known ties to hard-line factions in Iran. Why did the Darvishis want to work with the Mammadovs? It might have caught their attention that the Mammadovs had their own private bank—one that had unfettered access to the global financial system.

While Azarpassillo was making deals with the Transportation Ministry, the Mammadovs were investing heavily in a series of large construction projects. Money launderers love construction projects. They attract legitimate funds from governments and private investors, and they require frequent payouts to legitimate subcontractors: cement factories, lumberyards, glass manufacturers, craftsmen. In the Trump Tower Baku project, money was going in and out of the U.S., the United Kingdom, Turkey, Romania, the United Arab Emirates, and several other countries. With such projects, it can be exceedingly difficult to detect the spread of illicit funds.

At the same time, the Mammadovs’ money was flowing through holding companies in offshore banking centers. According to leaked documents in the Panama Papers, companies controlled by the family have opened accounts in such places as the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, and Panama. The shell companies that list Mammadovs as beneficiaries or officers have bland names such as Trans-European Leasing Group and 1st Rate Investment, and many of them are owned by other shell companies.

In 2009, a year after Baku XXI Century began building the tower, the company opened the Baku International Bus Terminal, an enormous station that includes a shopping mall and a hotel. During this period, the Mammadov family also began building a hotel, a golf course, and a spa in the mountains north of Baku.

Meanwhile, the Mammadovs spent lavishly on themselves. Ziya built a mansion in one of the most expensive neighborhoods of Baku, and, on the beach, a villa whose walls are decorated to resemble ancient Egyptian bas-reliefs. Elton’s son, Aynar, became famous for having a collection of expensive cars, including a Ferrari, a Maserati, and a Lamborghini. Anar began using the Gulfstream G450, which typically costs forty-one million dollars, and bought a seven-bedroom home in London. He also spent millions of dollars on an effort to promote Azerbaijan in Washington, D.C., hosting galas for members of Congress and other powerful figures. A former associate of the Trump Organization told me that in 2012, on one of Anar’s trips to America, he visited Trump Tower, in New York, to meet with Donald Trump and company executives. (The Trump Organization would not confirm the visit.) Around this time, the contracts for the Baku project were issued.

Between 2004 and 2014, Mammadov family businesses spent more than half a billion dollars on large construction projects. They also poured money into a major construction-materials company, an insurance firm, and a new headquarters. It’s not clear how the Mammadovs funded such enormous investments while spending so much on themselves. They may have received loans, or secretly owned profitable businesses that supported the flurry of spending. Another explanation is that some of the investment money came from the Revolutionary Guard, through Azarpassillo.

Calls and e-mails to Azarpassillo, the Iranian Mission to the U.N., and the Azerbaijani government were not returned. Ziya and Anar Mammadov did not respond to requests for comment. Donald Trump has not addressed the Baku deal since becoming President. A Department of Justice spokesperson would not comment on the possibility of its investigating the Trump Tower Baku deal. The White House declined to comment.

If, as Alan Garten told me, the Trump Organization learned in 2015 about “the possibility” that the Mammadovs had ties to the Revolutionary Guard, it is striking that the company did not end the Baku deal until December, 2016. During this period, Garten told me, the Trump Organization never asked its Azerbaijani partners about the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, but it did send several default notices for late payments.

Throughout the Presidential campaign, Trump was in business with someone that his company knew was likely a partner with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. In a March, 2016, speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Trump said that his “No. 1 priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.” Calling Iran the “biggest sponsor of terrorism around the world,” he promised, “We will work to dismantle that reach—believe me, believe me.” In the speech, Trump lamented that Iran had been allowed to develop new long-range ballistic missiles. According to Iran Watch, an organization that monitors Iran’s military capabilities, much of the technology to make the missiles was provided by Nasr, the company once run by Kamal Darvishi.

I asked Garten why the Trump Organization hadn’t cancelled the Baku contract in 2015. He said that there was “no rush,” because “the project had already stalled and was showing no signs of moving forward.” The Azerbaijani lawyer who worked on the project has seen the hotel’s interior, and told me that it is almost finished. In an interview with the magazine Baku, published in April, 2015, Ivanka Trump said that she was eager to enjoy the hotel’s “huge spa area,” and promised that the hotel would open “in June.”

Moreover, Garten said, the Trump Organization had signed binding contracts with the Mammadovs and couldn’t simply abandon its agreements. But Jessica Tillipman, the law-school assistant dean, told me, “You can’t violate sanctions just because you have a contract with someone.” According to Erich Ferrari, the lawyer who specializes in sanctions, companies that learn of a possible sanctions violation typically commission a “look-back” investigation that “reviews all payments you received, to make sure they didn’t originate with a sanctioned entity.” He added, “All the big four accounting companies do them routinely.” The Trump Organization did not commission a look-back.

The Baku deal appears to be the second time that the Trump Organization has turned a blind eye to U.S. efforts to sanction Iran. In 1998, when Donald Trump purchased the General Motors Building, in Manhattan, he inherited as a tenant Iran’s Bank Melli. The following year, the Treasury Department listed Bank Melli as an institution that was “owned or controlled” by the government of Iran and that was covered by U.S. sanctions. (The department later labelled Bank Melli one of the primary financial institutions through which Iran was funnelling money to finance terrorism and to develop weapons of mass destruction.) The Trump Organization kept Bank Melli as a tenant for four more years before terminating the lease.

The Baku project is hardly the only instance in which the Trump Organization has been associated with a controversial deal. The Trump Taj Mahal casino, which opened in Atlantic City in 1990, was repeatedly fined for violating anti-money-laundering laws, up until its collapse, late last year. According to ProPublica, Trump projects in India, Uruguay, Georgia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have involved government officials or people with close ties to powerful political figures. A few years ago, the Trump Organization abandoned a project in Beijing after its Chinese partner became embroiled in a corruption scandal. In December, the Trump Organization withdrew from a hotel project in Rio de Janeiro after it was revealed to be part of a major bribery investigation. Ricardo Ayres, a Brazilian state legislator, told Bloomberg, “It’s curious that the Trumps didn’t seem to know that their biggest deal in Brazil was bankrolled by shady investors.” But, given the Trump Organization’s track record, it seems reasonable to ask whether one of the things it was selling to foreign partners was a willingness to ignore signs of corruption.

To this day, the Trump Organization has not provided satisfying answers to the most basic questions about the Baku deal: who owns Baku XXI Century, the company with which they signed the contracts; the origin of the funds with which Baku XXI Century paid the Trump Organization; whether the Mammadovs used their political power to benefit themselves and the Trump Organization; and whether the Mammadovs used money obtained from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to fund the Trump Tower Baku.

At one point, Garten allowed me to review the Trump Organization’s original contract with the Mammadovs. It authorizes the company to order an independent audit of Baku XXI Century’s financial records at any time—a provision likely included to insure that the Mammadovs didn’t hide profits that were supposed to be shared with the Trump Organization. Such an audit could well have exposed illicit activity. Garten refused to say if an audit had been conducted.

In dealing with the Mammadovs, the Trump Organization seems to have taken them entirely at their word. Garten pointed me to a provision in one contract in which Anar Mammadov represented himself as the sole owner of Baku XXI Century. Given that Elton Mammadov told me that he controlled the company, and that its ownership was a “commercial secret,” what proof did the Trump Organization have that Anar’s claim was true? Garten could not say.

Garten has been the company’s chief legal officer only since January. His predecessor was Jason Greenblatt, whose name appeared on the contract I reviewed. Greenblatt was in charge of the Trump Organization’s due diligence and contracting work. He is now employed at the White House, as the President’s special representative for international negotiations. He did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

In recent months, American officials have expressed concern that Trump Administration figures might be blackmailed by foreign entities. U.S. law-enforcement investigators and congressional staffers have probed claims that Russian government officials possess compromising information about President Trump, which might be used to blackmail him. (The President maintains that there is no such information.) In January, the Department of Justice informed the White House that Michael Flynn—then the national-security adviser—was vulnerable to being blackmailed by the Russians because he had lied about having spoken with the Russian Ambassador. Flynn subsequently resigned.

In Azerbaijan, the power and the influence of the Mammadovs has declined sharply. Elton lost his seat in parliament in 2015. In February, Ziya was abruptly removed from his ministry. Anar has settled in London, an associate of his told me, and is living on a fraction of his former wealth. Meanwhile, in Iran, government officials are likely facing additional sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. If the Mammadovs or powerful Iranians have evidence that the Trump Organization broke laws, they might be tempted to exploit it.

The best way to determine if a crime was committed in the Baku deal would be a federal investigation, which could use the power of subpoena and international legal tools to obtain access to the contracts, the due diligence, internal e-mails, and financial documents. The Department of Justice routinely sends investigators to other countries to pursue possible F.C.P.A. and sanctions violations.

Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, who is the ranking Democratic member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said, in an e-mail, that a federal investigation was warranted: “The Trump Organization’s Baku project shows the lack of ‘extreme vetting’ Mr. Trump applied to his own business dealings in corruption-plagued regimes around the globe. . . . Congress—and the Trump Administration itself—has a duty to examine whether the President or his family is exposed to terrorist financing, sanctions, money laundering, and other imprudent associations through their business holdings and connections.”

More than a dozen lawyers with experience in F.C.P.A. prosecution expressed surprise at the Trump Organization’s seemingly lax approach to vetting its foreign partners. But, when I asked a former Trump Organization executive if the Baku deal had seemed unusual, he laughed. “No deal there seems unusual, as long as a check is attached,” he said. ♦

Adam Davidson is a staff writer at The New Yorker.