Sam Vaknin, Mystery Man

Vaknin’s military service in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is another enigma. His military dossier shows that in 1979 he served as a private first class in Golani , an infantry unit. He was a witness for the prosecution in a war crimes trial after he documented atrocities committed by his Golani superiors and soldiers in the West Bank town of Halhul. But then he went to study computer programming and to be a parachuted medic. After that, he became a kitchen hand (!) in Bik’at Ha’yareakh (“ Moon Valley ”), Israel’s remotest air base not far from Eilat, the Red Sea resort. Three months among pots and pans and he is in the Air Force in Sde Dov (AFB 15) in the center of Tel-Aviv. There, he teaches physics and mathematics to air force pilots and mechanics. He also manages the Air Force library in the base. Yet, our research discovered that Vaknin was secretly working with all the intelligence arms of the IDF. He was nominally under the command of Brigadier General Zusia Knia...

Vaknin constantly appears in countries where there is a crisis. After he appears, there is always some big change in the politics of those countries. In 1990, Sam Vaknin was arrested and interrogated several times by the new securities fraud squad of the Israeli police. He was suspected of (and, in 1995, convicted of) securities fraud in a strange affair involving the purchase of a state-owned bank, Agriculture Bank.  His brokerage house, Mikbats Tesuah, was closed and he paid millions to banks, the tax authorities, and individuals he owed money to, including some very dangerous crime personalities. He went to live with his new wife, Nomi, who was just out of the Israeli army, in Ramat-Gan, not far from the Diamond Exchange and the Elite chocolate factory (Lean st. 24). Yet, in 1991, Vaknin was back. By 1994, he had enough money to buy big part of the state-owned IT company (Malmata”m) and a HVAC factory, Omega as well as temp agency employing 8000 people. In 199...

Sam Vaknin claims to have done time in prison in 1995-6. We checked the records of the courts and the prison system in Israel. It is true. He was first put in Eyal, now a closed prison camp, mostly for white-collar criminals. There he worked in the library of the prison (the books were for the students at the warden school nearby). Nadav Nackan , the convicted hitman, was also working there with him. Then, after he verbally attacked during his appeal process the all-powerful Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak and gave an interview on the radio against the Israeli court system, he was expelled from Eyal and put in a much worse and more dangerous prison in Ramla, among murderers, rapists, Arab terrorists, and armed robbers. He described this setting in one of his short stories, “Write Me a Letter” . During this period that he was supposed to be in a maximum security facility, he was giving lectures in the Tel-Aviv University Law Faculty with Prof. Shlomo Giora Shoham ....

Sam Vaknin, Mystery Man My name is Patrick Martin Benoit (not real name). I am a private investigator in Geneva and Brussels and former journalist in Geneva. I met Vaknin in Geneva many years ago, in 1983. At age 21 he was friends with the richest billionaires in the world: Shivdasani, Gaon, Taman, Raccah, Cornfeld. He had a private jet he allegedly bought from Adnan Khashoggi and later sold to Donald Trump (more about it in a later post). In Russia, in a public lecture recently, he boasted that the jet was "bigger than Trump’s". He went skiing in Gstad. He established a literary association in Geneva with someone like Peter Ustinov. I could not understand what was going on. Just 2 years before he was a very poor Israeli from a slum! I started to be interested in Mr. Vaknin. I asked my people (now I have more than 20 workers) to begin to look into him, make a dossier. Almost first thing they found was this leak from Wikileaks . It reminded me of what Brenda...