Fred Trump Was a Front for the Genovese Crime Family
Donald Trump, Mayor Ed Koch, and Roy Cohn attend the Trump Tower opening in October 1983. | Getty
Investigation
Just What Were Donald Trump'southward Ties to the Mob?
I've spent years investigating, and here'due south what's known.
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 groundwork to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a twelvemonth. Trump argued that he was "make clean every bit a whistle"—young enough that he hadn't had time to get into whatever sort of problem. He got the sped-upwards background check, and eventually got the casino license.
But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he'd hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Belfry 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. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also ended that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza flat building most probable benefited from connections to racketeering. Trump too failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a chiliad jury directed past the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, who wanted to acquire how Trump obtained an choice to buy the Penn Cardinal railroad yards on the W Side of Manhattan.
Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn't investigators look whatsoever harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals actually become?
These questions ate at me as I wrote about Atlantic City for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and and so went more deeply into the issues in a book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business. In all, I've covered Donald Trump off and on for 27 years, and in that fourth dimension I've encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime. Some of Trump's unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in courtroom; some haven't. And some of those links have continued until recent years, though when confronted with evidence of such associations, Trump has frequently claimed a faulty retentiveness. In an April 27 telephone telephone call to reply 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 fourth dimension agone." He also said that I had "sometimes been fair, sometimes not" in writing most him, calculation "if I don't like what you write, I'll sue y'all."
I'g not the merely one who has picked upwardly signals over the years. Wayne Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump'southward existent-estate dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.
No other candidate for the White House this yr has anything close to Trump's record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical instance would be President Warren One thousand. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a primal difference: Harding'south associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.
This is office of the Donald Trump story that few know. Every bit Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn't simply do business concern with mobbed-up physical companies: he likewise 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 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.
From the public record and published accounts like that ane, it's possible to assemble a clear picture show of what nosotros do know. The picture shows that Trump's career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful endeavor to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with summit mobsters, organized law-breaking associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-fourth dimension drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.
Now that he's running for president, I pulled together what's known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, courtroom records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett's files. What emerges is a pattern of business concern dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.
Neither Trump'south entrada spokesperson, Promise Hicks, nor Jason Greenblatt, the executive vice president and chief legal officeholder at the Trump Organization, responded to several emailed requests for comment on the issues raised in this commodity.
Here, every bit close as we tin get to the truth, is what really happened.
***
After graduating in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania, a rich young man from the outer boroughs of New York City sought his fortune on the isle of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made friends with the metropolis's most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had get famous equally lead counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among other things Cohn was now a mob consigliere, with clients including "Fat Tony" Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the nearly powerful Mafia grouping in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.
This business connection proved useful when Trump began work on what would become Trump Tower, the 58-story high-ascension where he still lives when he'southward non at his Florida estate.
In that location was something a little peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Almost skyscrapers are steel girder construction, and that was especially truthful in the 1980s, says John Cross of the American Atomic number 26 & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete. Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete. Ready-mix has some advantages: information technology can speed upward structure, and doesn't require costly fireproofing. Only it must be poured apace or it will harden in the delivery truck drums, ruining them besides as creating costly problems with the building itself. That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the worksite gate is spousal relationship controlled, and so even a brief labor slowdown can plough into an expensive disaster.
Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures controlled the ready-mix business organisation in New York, and everyone in construction at the time knew information technology. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob, urged on by major developers such every bit the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump ended up not but using ready-mix concrete, but too paying what a federal indictment of Salerno subsequently concluded were inflated prices for it – repeatedly – to S & A Concrete, a house Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts, and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, past choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself "at the mercy of a legion of physical racketeers."
Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled both the physical business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer, the general contractor who congenital Trump Tower. Fischer said physical wedlock "goons" once stormed his offices, property a pocketknife to throat of his switchboard operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show jobs during structure of Trump Tower.
But with Cohn equally his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano—at least, non one time he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never confront costly construction or delivery delays.
The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $viii one thousand thousand contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment edifice, as i of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise. (While the concrete business was fundamental to the example, the trial also proved extortion, narcotics, rigged spousal relationship elections and murders by the Genovese and Gambino criminal offence families in what Michael Chertoff, the principal prosecutor, called "the largest and most cruel criminal business in the history of the The states.'')
FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement every bit a very close acquaintance of the Gambino criminal offense family unit. The FBI believed that Cody previously had obtained gratis apartments from other developers. FBI agents suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get a costless Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. Simply a female friend of Cody's, a woman with no job who attributed her lavish lifestyle to the kindness of friends, bought three Trump Tower apartments right below the triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed in that location on occasion and invested $500,000 in the units. Trump, Barrett reported, helped the woman get a $3 million mortgage without filling out a loan application or showing financials.
In the summer of 1982 Cody, then nether indictment, ordered a citywide strike—but the concrete piece of work continued at Trump Belfry. Afterwards Cody was convicted of racketeering, imprisoned and lost control of the union, Trump sued the woman for $250,000 for amending piece of work. She countersued for $20 one thousand thousand and in court papers accused Trump of taking kickbacks from contractors, asserting this could "be the basis of a criminal proceeding requiring an attorney general's investigation" into Trump. Trump then speedily settled, paying the adult female a half-1000000 dollars. Trump said at the fourth dimension and since then that he hardly knew those involved and in that location was nil improper his dealings with Cody or the woman.
***
There were other irregularities in Trump'south first big construction projection. In 1979, when Trump hired a demolition contractor to take down the Bonwit Teller section shop to make way for Trump Tower, he hired every bit many as 200 non-union men to piece of work alongside about 15 members of the House Wreckers Union Local 95. The non-spousal relationship workers were mostly illegal Polish immigrants paid $4 to $half-dozen per hour with no benefits, far below the marriage contract. At least some of them did not apply power tools simply sledgehammers, working 12 hours a solar day or more than and often seven days a week. Known equally the "Smooth brigade," many didn't vesture hard hats. Many slept on the construction site.
Normally the use of nonunion workers at a wedlock chore site would take guaranteed a lookout line. Not at this site, however. Work proceeded considering the Genovese family principally controlled the wedlock; this was demonstrated by all-encompassing testimony, documents and convictions in federal trials, besides equally a later written report by the New York State Organized Law-breaking Task Force.
When the Polish workers and a spousal relationship dissident sued for their pay and benefits, Trump denied any knowledge that illegal workers without hard hats were taking downwards Bonwit with sledgehammers. The trial, notwithstanding, demonstrated otherwise: Testimony showed that Trump panicked when the nonunion Polish men threatened a piece of work stoppage because they had not been paid. Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a labor fixer and FBI informant, who told him to burn down the Polish workers.
Trump knew the Polish brigade was composed of underpaid illegal immigrants and that S&A was a mob-owned firm, according to Sullivan and others. "Donald told me that he was having his difficulties and he admitted to me that — seeking my advice — that he had some illegal Smooth employees on the chore. I reacted by saying to Donald that 'I think you are basics,'" Sullivan testified at the fourth dimension. "I told him to fire them promptly if he had whatsoever brains." In an interview after, Sullivan told me the same thing.
In 1991, a federal estimate, Charles E. Stewart Jr., ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate a fiduciary duty, or duty of loyalty, to the workers and their union and that the "breach involved fraud and the Trump defendants knowingly participated in his breach." The judge did non find Trump's testimony to be sufficiently credible and set damages at $325,000. The case was subsequently settled past negotiation, and the understanding was sealed.
***
While Trump'south buildings were going upwards in Manhattan, he was inbound a highly regulated industry in New Bailiwick of jersey – one that had the responsibleness, and the means, to investigate him and bring the facts to calorie-free.
From the beginning, Trump tried to have information technology both ways. While he leveraged Roy Cohn'south mob contacts in New York, he was telling the FBI he wanted goose egg to exercise with organized crime in Atlantic City, and fifty-fifty proposed putting an undercover FBI agent in his casinos. In Apr of 1981, when he was considering building a New Jersey casino, he expressed concern about his reputation in a meeting with the FBI, according to an FBI document in my possession and which the site Smoking Gun too posted. "Trump advised Agents that he had read in the press media and had heard from diverse acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City," the FBI recorded. "Trump too expressed at this meeting the reservation that his life and those around him would be field of study to microscopic test. Trump advised that he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City but he did not wish to tarnish his family'due south name."
Function of the licensing process was supposed to exist a deep investigation into his background, taking more a year for would-be casino owners, but Trump managed to cut that short. As he told the story in The Art of the Deal, in 1981 he threatened to not build in Atlantic City unless New Jersey's chaser full general, John Degnan, limited the investigation to 6 months. Degnan was worried that Trump might anytime go approval for a casino at the G Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, which could have crushed Atlantic City'due south lucrative gaming manufacture, so Degnan agreed to Trump's terms. Trump seemingly paid Degnan dorsum by becoming an ardent foe of gambling anywhere in the Eastward except Atlantic City—a position that apparently protected his newfound business concern investment every bit well, of course.
Trump was required to disembalm whatever investigations in which he might have been involved in the by, even if they never resulted in charges. Trump didn't disclose a federal grand jury inquiry into how he obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan. The failure to disclose either that inquiry or the Cody research probably should accept disqualified Trump from receiving a license under the standards fix by the gaming government.
Once Trump was licensed in 1982, critical facts that should accept resulted in license denial began emerging in Trump'southward own books and in reports past Barrett—an embarrassment for the licensing commission and state investigators, who were supposed to have turned these stones over. Forced after the fact to look into Trump's connections, the 2 federal investigations he failed to reveal and other matters, the New Jersey Partition of Gaming Enforcement investigators circled the wagons to defend their work. Start they dismissed as unreliable what mobsters, decadent spousal relationship bosses and Trump's biggest customer, among others, had said to Barrett, to me and other journalists and filmmakers virtually their dealings with Trump. The investigators' reports showed that they and then put Trump under oath. Trump denied whatever misconduct or testified that he could not remember. They took him at his word. That meant his casino license was secure even though others in the gambling industry, including low-level licensees like carte du jour dealers, had been thrown out for far less.
This lapse illustrated a cardinal truth about casino regulation at the time: Once the state licensed an owner, the Division of Gaming Enforcement had a powerful incentive non to overturn its initial judgment. State officials recited like a mantra their promise that New Jersey casinos were the most highly regulated business in American history, more tightly regulated than nuclear power plants. In Temples of Chance I showed that this reputation often owed less to careful enforcement than to their willingness to look the other way when bug arose.
***
In 1986, three years later Trump Belfry opened, Roy Cohn was disbarred for attempting to steal from a client, lying and other conduct that an appellate court found "particularly reprehensible."
Trump testified that Cohn, who was dying from AIDS, was a man of good character who should proceed his license to practice law.
This was non the just fourth dimension Trump went to bat publicly for a criminal. He has also spoken up for Shapiro and Sullivan. And then there was the case of Joseph Weichselbaum, an embezzler who ran Trump's personal helicopter service and ferried his nigh valued clientele.
Trump and Weichselbaum were so close, Barrett reported in his book, that Weichselbaum told his parole officer about how he knew Trump was hiding his mistress, Marla Maples, from his first wife, Ivana, and tried to persuade Trump to end their years-long affair.
Trump's casinos retained Weichselbaum'southward firm to fly high rollers to Atlantic City. Weichselbaum was indicted in Ohio on charges of trafficking in marijuana and cocaine. The caput of one of Trump's casinos was notified of the indictment in October 1985, but Trump continued using Weichselbaum—carry that once more could have cost Trump his casino license had state regulators pressed the thing, because casino owners were required to altitude themselves from whatsoever hint of crime. Just two months after Trump rented an flat he endemic in the Trump Plaza flat building in Manhattan to the pilot and his brother for $7,000 a calendar month in cash and flight services. Trump also continued paying Weichselbaum's firm fifty-fifty afterwards information technology went bankrupt.
Weichselbaum, who in 1979 had been caught embezzling and had to repay the stolen coin, pleaded guilty to two felonies.
Donald Trump vouched for Weichselbaum before his sentencing, writing that the drug trafficker is "a credit to the customs" who was "careful, forthright, and diligent." And while Weichselbaum's confederates got every bit many as 20 years, Weichselbaum himself got merely three, serving 18 months before he was released from the urban prison that the Bureau of Prisons maintains in New York Urban center. In seeking early release, Weichselbaum said Trump had a job waiting for him.
Weichselbaum so moved into Trump Tower, his girlfriend having recently bought two bordering apartments there for $2.4 million. The cash buy left no public tape of whether any money actually inverse hands or, if information technology did, where information technology came from. I asked Trump at the time for documents relating to the auction; he did non respond.
Equally a casino owner, Trump could take lost his license for associating with Weichselbaum. Trump has never been known to use drugs or fifty-fifty drink. What motivated him to gamble his valuable license by standing upwards for a drug trafficker remains unclear to this day.
Trump, in his telephone call to me, said he "hardly knew" Weichselbaum.
***
The facts above come from court records, interviews and other documents in my ain files and those generously fabricated available by Barrett, who was the beginning announcer to accept a serious investigative wait at Trump. Our files show Trump connected in various deals to many other mobsters and wise guys.
There was, for instance, Felix Sater, a senior Trump advisor and son of a reputed Russian mobster, whom Trump kept on long after he was convicted in a mob-connected stock swindle. And in that location was Bob Libutti, a racehorse swindler who was quite possibly Trump'southward biggest customer at the casino tables at the time. Libutti told me and others about arrangements that went across the "comps"—free hotel rooms and services, for example—that casinos can legally give to loftier-rollers. Among these was a deal to sell Trump a less-than-fit horse at the inflated cost of $500,000, though Trump backed out at the terminal minute. Libutti accused Trump of making an improper $250,000 payment to him, which would take cost Trump his license. The DGE dismissed Libutti equally unreliable and took Trump at his word when he denied the allegations. (Libutti was a major figure in my 1992 volume Temples of Chance.)
Some of the dealings came at a remove. In Atlantic Metropolis, Trump built on property where mobsters controlled parts of the adjoining land needed for parking. He paid $1.1 million for about a 5,000-square-foot lot that had been bought v years earlier for but $195,000. The sellers were Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci Jr., a pair of hitmen for Atlantic Urban center mob boss Nicky Scarfo who were known as the Young Executioners. For several bordering acres, Trump ignored the principal possessor of record and instead negotiated directly in a deal that likewise likely concluded up benefiting the Scarfo mob. Trump arranged a 98-year charter deal with Sullivan, the FBI informant and labor logroller, and Ken Shapiro, described in regime reports as Scarfo's "investment banker." Eventually the lease was converted into a sale after the Division of Gaming Enforcement objected to Sullivan and Shapiro being Trump's landlords.
Trump after boasted in a sworn affidavit in a civil case that he made the deals himself, his "unique contribution" making the land deals possible. In formal hearings Trump later defended Sullivan and Shapiro as "well idea of." Casino regulators idea otherwise, and banned Sullivan and Shapiro from the casino industry. But the Casino Command Committee was never asked to look into FBI reports that Trump was involved, via Shapiro, in the payoffs at the fourth dimension of the land deals that resulted in Mayor Michael Mathews going to prison.
Thank you in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators, Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on. For instance, Barrett reported in his book that Trump was believed to have met personally with Salerno at Roy Cohn'due south townhouse; he found that there were witnesses to the meeting, 1 of whom kept detailed notes on all of Cohn's contacts. But instead of looking for the witnesses (ane of whom had died) and the office diary i kept, the New Bailiwick of jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) took an easier path. They put Trump under oath and asked if he had ever attended such a meeting. Trump denied information technology. The inquiry concluded.
Taking Trump at his word that he never met with the mobsters in Cohn's townhouse saved the casino investigators from having to acknowledge their before failure—that from the start, they had never properly investigated Trump and his connections to criminals. They certainly had the leverage to push harder if they chose. Indeed, two of the five Casino Control commissioners in 1991 declared that the DGE showed official favoritism to Trump. Commissioner David Waters complained that DGE did not go nearly far enough in seeking a $xxx,000 fine against Trump for taking an illegal loan from his father, which could be grounds to revoke Trump's casino licenses. Waters called it "an outrage that the Division of Gaming Enforcement would take this position and fail to comport out what I understand to be its responsibility to enforce the provisions of the Casino Control Act."
***
Even after he got his license, Trump continued to have relationships that should have prompted inquiries. For example, he made a deal to have Cadillacs dolled up with fancy interiors and exteriors showtime in 1988, marketing them equally Trump Aureate Serial and Trump Executive Series limousines. The modifications were made at the Dillinger Coach Works, which was owned by a pair of convicted felons, bedevilled extortionist Jack Schwartz and convicted thief John Staluppi, who was so shut to mobsters that he was invited to the wedding of a mob capo'southward daughter. New York liquor regulators proved tougher than those in New Jersey, denying Staluppi, a rich auto dealer, a license because of his rap sheet and his extensive dealings with mobsters, equally Barrett'south former reporting partner Pecker Bastone found in public records. So why did Trump repeatedly practise business with mob owned businesses and mob-controlled unions? Why go down the aisle with an expensive mobbed-up physical firm when other options were available?
"Why'd Donald do it?" Barrett said when I put the question to him. "Because he saw these mob guys equally pathways to money, and Donald is all about money."
From a $400 million tax giveaway on his showtime big project, to getting a casino license, to collecting fees for putting his proper noun on everything from bottled water and buildings to neckties and steaks, Trump's life has been dedicated to the next big score. Through Cohn, Trump made choices that—gratuitously, information technology appears—resulted in his commencement known business organization dealings with mob-controlled companies and unions, a pattern that connected long after Cohn died.
What Trump has to say about the reasons for his long, shut and wide-ranging dealings with organized offense figures, with the role of mobsters in cheating Trump Tower workers, his dealings with Felix Sater and Trump's seeming leniency for Weichselbaum, are questions that voters deserve total answers about before casting their ballots.
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910
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