As David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who won the award for reporting on the American tax system, has detailed, Donald Trump has had strong ties to organized crime, building his famous Trump Towers and Trump Plaza apartment building with the help of mafia kingpins Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. A federal investigation found a federal investigation showed the Trump Plaza apartment building’s construction was aided by racketeering.
Johnston, who was threatened by Trump with a lawsuit if what he wrote didn’t please the businessman, has covered Trump for 27 years. When Johnston interviewed him for the article on April 27, Trump disingenuously commented that he couldn’t remember he the events Johnston spoke of as they “were a long time ago,” warning, “If I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.”
As Johnston’s in-depth report, published by Politico, states, “Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.”
Johnston notes that Wayne Barrett, who wrote Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate dealings, explained that Trump likely met with Salerno at the very time other developers in New York were begging the FBI to get the mob out of their businesses.
Johnston traces Trump’s career, starting with Trump’s friendship with lawyer Roy Cohn, whose clients included Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, who ran the second most powerful crime family: the Gambinos. The crime families engaged in extortion, narcotics, rigged union elections and murder, according to Michael Chertoff, who prosecuted Salerno; he called them “the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.”
In the 1980’s when Trump Tower was built, most skyscrapers used steel girder construction or pre-cast concrete in their construction, but Trump used ready-mix concrete. Ready-mix has to be poured in haste, because it can harden in the delivery truck drums; thus a labor slowdown could raise costs astronomically. As a result, developers using ready-mix were at the mercy of the unions.
Salerno, Castellano and other mob bosses controlled all of the ready-mix business in New York; government investigators, urged by major developers, wanted to break up the mob’s influence. As Irving Fischer, the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Revealed, concrete union “goons” once held a knife to the throat of his switchboard operator to make the point that they were dead-serious; one of their demands included no-show jobs during construction of Trump Tower.
But Trump paid inflated prices for the concrete over and over to S & A Concrete, which Salerno and Castellano owned. Through his connection with Cohn, Trump reportedly received guarantees that the workers would not strike or create problems.
Additionally, John Cody, a Teamsters official close to the Gambino crime family, who supervised the concrete trucks, had an unemployed female friend who somehow managed to buy three Trump Tower apartments directly beneath the triplex where Trump lived with his wife Ivana. Trump, according to Barrett, aided the woman in obtaining a $3 million mortgage without even completing a loan application or showing her financial wherewithal.
Rather than expose his dealings by going to court, Trump paid the woman a half-million dollars.
Even more suspiciously, in 1982, Cody, who was already under indictment, ordered a citywide strike, yet the workers pouring concrete at Trump Tower did not participate. After Cody was convicted of racketeering and lost his job at the union, Trump sued the woman for $250,000 for alteration work. She counter-sued for $20 million, charging Trump of taking kickbacks from contractors.
Rather than expose his dealings by going to court, Trump paid the woman a half-million dollars.
For much more on Trump’s dealings with the mob, see here.