Tuesday, May 24, 2016

“The Business We’ve Chosen”

It’s hard to imagine someone being in the real estate and casino business and not crossing paths or making connections with organized crime.  It’s part of the business.  So I suppose that’s why it’s no surprise that David Cay Johnston, an investigative reporter at Politico, would be able to track down Donald Trump’s connections with people who are, to quote Hyman Roth, in the business we’ve chosen.

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.

[…]

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.

It would be really naive to think that we’ve never had a president with at least acquaintances with organized crime: think JFK and his Las Vegas Rat Pack buddies as well as his father’s business dealings going back to the Prohibition era.  But Mr. Trump’s deal-making and business past is on a whole other level.

One bark on ““The Business We’ve Chosen”

  1. I wonder if there is a handy meat locker with a few fresh horses’ heads on tap. In Jersey maybe? Trump’s bosom buddy Chris probably has the concession maybe? Yeah, that’s it.
    No problemo, big guy.

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