Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.įrom the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men. I’m not the only one who has picked up signals over the years.
In an April 27 phone call to respond to my questions for this story, Trump told me he did not recall many of the events recounted in this article and they “were a long time ago.” He also said that I had “sometimes been fair, sometimes not” in writing about him, adding “if I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.” And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has often claimed a faulty memory. Some of Trump’s unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court some haven’t. In all, I’ve covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that time I’ve encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. These questions ate at me as I wrote about Atlantic City for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then went more deeply into the issues in a book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn’t investigators look any harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals really go? attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S.
That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.īut Trump was not clean as a whistle. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”-young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Since 2009 he has taught the business, property and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s law and graduate business schools. David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting on the American tax system.
0 kommentar(er)
