in a piece in Politico dated May 22, with the title Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob? with a subtitle that reads I’ve spent years investigating, and here’s what’s known.
Before getting into what Johnson offers, which I strongly urge people to read, bookmark and pass on to any reachable Trump supporters (I know some are not), anyone paying attention in New York City when Trump was getting started, and really starting to build a fortune, knew that building in New York City meant dealing with the mob, particularly if you were building with concrete, as Trump did.
Johnson starts with Trump’s boast that when he got his license for Atlantic City gambling, he had been investigated and found “clean as a whistle” except he was only investigated for 6 months instead of the usual one year.
The very next paragraph really sets the stage:
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.
Johnston, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, has been on the Trump beat for some time. As he writes,
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.”
He tells us well known investigative reporter Wayne Barrett has also covered this aspect of Trump’s not so savory past.
There is so much crammed into this relatively brief piece. Johnston has tied together everything he can, from the public record, from his notes, from the research that Barrett has done.
One key connection for Trump was the late Roy Cohn, who first came to public notice as a close assistant to Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, and who by the end of his life was clearly doing a lot of his legal work in association with the mob and mob-related enterprises.
Johnston traces Trump’s rise from when he graduated to Wharton on. One key factor is that Trump chose to build Trump Tower and other Trump projects not as others were doing, with steel girder construction, or in a few cases with pre-cast concrete. He writes
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.
Two key mobsters controlled the concrete companies and the unions. Trump apparently did not have trouble, even when a chunk of his work crews were non-union (like the Polish workers he imported and paid far less to) because he overpaid for the ready-mix concrete sufficiently that apparently the two key mob figures made sure he had no union problems.
There is a lot more in this article.
I cannot fully explore it without violating the limits of fair use.
You will read about the FBI issuing a subpoena to Trump. You will read about a corrupt Teamsters’ official who apparently set up a woman with no visible means of support to buy 3 apartments in Trump Tower immediately beneath the triplex occupied by The Donald and the first wife who gave him that moniker.
That boss ordered a city-wide strike but the concrete work on Trump Tower continued without disruption.
Here is one thing to note. Trump brags how he never settles law suits, remember? Then consider this paragraph, about the woman mentioned and the Teamsters official, one John Cody, considered very close to the Gambino mob family:
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.
Yeah, right.
Trump lies about his past all the time.
I really, really hope he makes the mistake of suing David Cay Johnston or Politico over this piece, because that would give leverage to depose Trump — and possibly others in his organization — under oath, and it might require production of relevant business records.
My wife worries that having stuff like this on Trump come out now is “too soon” because people are not paying attention, and it will simply be considered old news and no longer relevant.
I don’t agree. But the question is whether MAJOR media outlets are willing to follow up on this and the other stories that are available about Trump.
Read the piece.
Pass it on.
Including to any journalists you know.