[Vision2020] Trump: "Democrats are con artists." Pulitzer Prize Winner Johnston on Mobster Con-Man Roy Cohn & Trump

[Ted Moffett]

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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plus 70 years, Ted Moffett.  Do not copy, forward, excerpt, or reproduce
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"Democrats are con artists"

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/09/26/trump-democrats-con-artists-sot-vpx.cnn
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Wow!  Coming from one of the most influential con artists in history, Trump
labels democrats "con artists."

It is instructive in this context to examine the history of Trump's
association with a con-man of significance, Roy Cohn.

I copied the article below (I hope accurately) absent annoying ads...

*David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his *New York Times* reporting
on the American tax system. Since 2009 he has taught the business, property
and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s law and graduate
business schools.*

*https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910>*

Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?

I've spent years investigating, and here's what's known.

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

May 22, 2016

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. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump
argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had
time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up 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 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. 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. Trump also failed to disclose that he was
under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. 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.

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?

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. 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 time I’ve encountered multiple threads linking
Trump to organized crime. Some of Trump’s unsavory connections have been
followed by investigators and substantiated in court; some haven’t. 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. 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.”

I’m not the only one who has picked up signals over the years. Wayne
Barrett, author of a 1992 investigative biography of Trump’s real-estate
dealings, has tied Trump to mob and mob-connected men.

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. 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.

This is part of the Donald Trump story that few 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 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 one, it’s possible
to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. 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.

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. What
emerges is a pattern of business 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’s campaign spokesperson, Hope Hicks, nor Jason Greenblatt,
the executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump
Organization, responded to several emailed requests for comment on the
issues raised in this article.

Here, as close as we can 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 island of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made
friends with the city’s most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had
become famous as 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 most powerful Mafia group
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-rise where he still lives when he’s
not at his Florida estate.

There was something a little peculiar about the construction of Trump
Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are
steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says
John Cross of the American Iron & 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: it can speed up construction, and
doesn’t require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it
will harden in the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating
costly problems with the building itself. That leaves developers vulnerable
to the unions: the worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor
slowdown can turn into an expensive disaster.

Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures controlled the
ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at the time
knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob, urged
on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump ended
up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal
indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it –
repeatedly – to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through
fronts, and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by
choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials,
Trump put himself “at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.”

Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled both the concrete
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 built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union
“goons” once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his
switchboard operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which
included no-show jobs during construction of Trump Tower.

But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally
fear Salerno or Castellano*—*at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated
concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace.
That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery
delays.

The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison,
where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump
Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts
establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise. (While the
concrete business was central to the case, the trial also proved extortion,
narcotics, rigged union elections and murders by the Genovese and Gambino
crime families in what Michael Chertoff, the chief prosecutor, called “the
largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United
States.'')

FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John
Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement as a very close
associate of the Gambino crime family. The FBI believed that Cody
previously had obtained free apartments from other developers. FBI agents
suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get
a free Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. But 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 beneath the
triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed there 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 under indictment, ordered a citywide
strike—but the concrete work continued at Trump Tower. After Cody was
convicted of racketeering, imprisoned and lost control of the union, Trump
sued the woman for $250,000 for alteration work. She countersued for $20
million 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
quickly settled, paying the woman a half-million dollars. Trump said at the
time and since then that he hardly knew those involved and there was
nothing improper his dealings with Cody or the woman.

***
*There were other irregularities* in Trump’s first big construction
project. In 1979, when Trump hired a demolition contractor to take down the
Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower, he hired as
many as 200 non-union men to work alongside about 15 members of the House
Wreckers Union Local 95. The non-union workers were mostly illegal Polish
immigrants paid $4 to $6 per hour with no benefits, far below the union
contract. At least some of them did not use power tools but sledgehammers,
working 12 hours a day or more and often seven days a week. Known as the
“Polish brigade,” many didn’t wear hard hats. Many slept on the
construction site.

Normally the use of nonunion workers at a union job site would have
guaranteed a picket line. Not at this site, however. Work proceeded because
the Genovese family principally controlled the union; this was demonstrated
by extensive testimony, documents and convictions in federal trials, as
well as a later report by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force.

When the Polish workers and a union dissident sued for their pay and
benefits, Trump denied any knowledge that illegal workers without hard hats
were taking down Bonwit with sledgehammers. The trial, however,
demonstrated otherwise: Testimony showed that Trump panicked when the
nonunion Polish men threatened a work stoppage because they had not been
paid. Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a labor fixer and FBI informant, who
told him to fire 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 Polish employees on the
job. I reacted by saying to Donald that 'I think you are nuts,'" Sullivan
testified at the time. "I told him to fire them promptly if he had any
brains." In an interview later, Sullivan told me the same thing.

In 1991, a federal judge, 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 not
find Trump’s testimony to be sufficiently credible and set damages at
$325,000. The case was later settled by negotiation, and the agreement was
sealed.

***

* While Trump’s buildings were going up in Manhattan,* he was entering a
highly regulated industry in New Jersey – one that had the responsibility,
and the means, to investigate him and bring the facts to light*.*

>From the beginning, Trump tried to have it both ways. While he leveraged
Roy Cohn’s mob contacts in New York, he was telling the FBI he wanted
nothing to do with organized crime in Atlantic City, and even proposed
putting an undercover FBI agent in his casinos. In April 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 also posted. “Trump advised
Agents that he had read in the press media and had heard from various
acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in
Atlantic City,” the FBI recorded. “Trump also expressed at this meeting the
reservation that his life and those around him would be subject to
microscopic examination. Trump advised that he wanted to build a casino in
Atlantic City but he did not wish to tarnish his family’s name.”

Part of the licensing process was supposed to be a deep investigation into
his background, taking more than 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 attorney general, John Degnan, limited the investigation to six
months. Degnan was worried that Trump might someday get approval for a
casino at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, which could have crushed
Atlantic City’s lucrative gaming industry, so Degnan agreed to Trump’s
terms. Trump seemingly paid Degnan back by becoming an ardent foe of
gambling anywhere in the East except Atlantic City—a position that
obviously protected his newfound business investment as well, of course.

Trump was required to disclose any investigations in which he might have
been involved in the past, 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 inquiry probably should
have disqualified Trump from receiving a license under the standards set by
the gaming authorities.

Once Trump was licensed in 1982, critical facts that should have resulted
in license denial began emerging in Trump’s own books and in reports by
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 two federal
investigations he failed to reveal and other matters, the New Jersey
Division of Gaming Enforcement investigators circled the wagons to defend
their work. First they dismissed as unreliable what mobsters, corrupt union
bosses and Trump’s biggest customer, among others, had said to Barrett, to
me and other journalists and filmmakers about their dealings with Trump.
The investigators’ reports showed that they then put Trump under oath.
Trump denied any 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 card
dealers, had been thrown out for far less.

This lapse illustrated a fundamental truth about casino regulation at the
time: Once the state licensed an owner, the Division of Gaming Enforcement
had a powerful incentive not 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 problems arose.

***

*In 1986,* three years after Trump Tower 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 keep his license to practice law.

This was not the only time 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 most 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’s firm to fly high rollers to
Atlantic City. Weichselbaum was indicted in Ohio on charges of trafficking
in marijuana and cocaine. The head of one of Trump’s casinos was notified
of the indictment in October 1985, but Trump continued using
Weichselbaum—conduct that again could have cost Trump his casino license
had state regulators pressed the matter, because casino owners were
required to distance themselves from any hint of crime. Just two months
later Trump rented an apartment he owned in the Trump Plaza apartment
building in Manhattan to the pilot and his brother for $7,000 a month in
cash and flight services. Trump also continued paying Weichselbaum’s firm
even after it went bankrupt.

Weichselbaum, who in 1979 had been caught embezzling and had to repay the
stolen money, pleaded guilty to two felonies.

Donald Trump vouched for Weichselbaum before his sentencing, writing that
the drug trafficker is “a credit to the community” who was “conscientious,
forthright, and diligent.” And while Weichselbaum’s confederates got as
many as 20 years, Weichselbaum himself got only three, serving 18 months
before he was released from the urban prison that the Bureau of Prisons
maintains in New York City. In seeking early release, Weichselbaum said
Trump had a job waiting for him.

Weichselbaum then moved into Trump Tower, his girlfriend having recently
bought two adjoining apartments there for $2.4 million. The cash purchase
left no public record of whether any money actually changed hands or, if it
did, where it came from. I asked Trump at the time for documents relating
to the sale; he did not respond.

As a casino owner, Trump could have lost his license for associating with
Weichselbaum. Trump has never been known to use drugs or even drink. What
motivated him to risk his valuable license by standing up for a drug
trafficker remains unclear to this day.

Trump, in his phone call to me, said he “hardly knew” Weichselbaum.

***

*The facts above come from court records,* interviews and other documents
in my own files and those generously made available by Barrett, who was the
first journalist to take a serious investigative look at Trump. Our files
show Trump connected in various deals to many other mobsters and wise guys.

There was, for example, Felix Sater
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-mafia-linked-figure-describes-association-with-trump/2016/05/17/cec6c2c6-16d3-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html?postshare=8261463505936319&tid=ss_tw>,
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
there was Bob Libutti, a racehorse swindler who was quite possibly Trump’s
biggest customer at the casino tables at the time. Libutti told me and
others about arrangements that went beyond the “comps”—free hotel rooms and
services, for example—that casinos can legally give to high-rollers. Among
these was a deal to sell Trump a less-than-fit horse at the inflated price
of $500,000, though Trump backed out at the last minute. Libutti accused
Trump of making an improper $250,000 payment to him, which would have cost
Trump his license. The DGE dismissed Libutti as unreliable and took Trump
at his word when he denied the allegations. (Libutti was a major figure in
my 1992 book *Temples of Chance.*)

Some of the dealings came at a remove. In Atlantic City, 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 five years earlier for just $195,000. The sellers were Salvy
Testa and Frank Narducci Jr., a pair of hitmen for Atlantic City mob boss
Nicky Scarfo who were known as the Young Executioners. For several
adjoining acres, Trump ignored the principal owner of record and instead
negotiated directly in a deal that also likely ended up benefiting the
Scarfo mob. Trump arranged a 98-year lease deal with Sullivan, the FBI
informant and labor fixer, and Ken Shapiro, described in government 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 later 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 thought
of.” Casino regulators thought otherwise, and banned Sullivan and Shapiro
from the casino industry*.* But the Casino Control Commission was never
asked to look into FBI reports that Trump was involved, via Shapiro, in the
payoffs at the time of the land deals that resulted in Mayor Michael
Mathews going to prison.

Thanks 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’s townhouse; he found that there were
witnesses to the meeting, one of whom kept detailed notes on all of Cohn’s
contacts. But instead of looking for the witnesses (one of whom had died)
and the office diary one kept, the New 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 it. The inquiry ended.

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
earlier 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 $30,000 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 carry 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 beginning in 1988,
marketing them as Trump Golden Series and Trump Executive Series
limousines. The modifications were made at the Dillinger Coach Works, which
was owned by a pair of convicted felons, convicted extortionist Jack
Schwartz and convicted thief John Staluppi, who was so close to mobsters
that he was invited to the wedding of a mob *capo’s *daughter. New York
liquor regulators proved tougher than those in New Jersey, denying
Staluppi, a rich car dealer, a license because of his rap sheet and his
extensive dealings with mobsters, as Barrett’s former reporting partner
Bill Bastone found in public records.
<http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/celebrity/trump-and-staluppi-092157>
So why did Trump repeatedly do business with mob owned businesses and
mob-controlled unions? Why go down the aisle with an expensive mobbed-up
concrete 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 as pathways to money, and Donald is all about money.”

>From a $400 million tax giveaway on his first big project, to getting a
casino license, to collecting fees for putting his name 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, it appears—resulted in his first known business dealings
with mob-controlled companies and unions, a pattern that continued long
after Cohn died.

What Trump has to say about the reasons for his long, close and
wide-ranging dealings with organized crime 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 full answers about before casting their ballots.
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