Tom Robbins talking:
Roy Cohn is a figure in American history who is well known to people at least of our generation, probably not so much to the one that’s casting a lot of ballots now. But Roy Cohn was the sidekick and chief witch hunter for Senator Joseph McCarthy, a guy who reminds a lot of people of Ted Cruz. You know, they both look alike, and they talk alike. And after Roy—after Roy Cohn had left the Senate, he went into private practice, and he set himself up basically as the house counsel to a couple of the crime bosses in New York City—the Genovese crime family and the Gambino crime family. And at the same time, he adopted a young developer from Queens looking to make his first mark as a developer in Manhattan named Donald J. Trump. And Donald J. Trump will tell you, to this day, that he learned how to play politics and he learned how to play development from Roy Cohn, while he was sitting in Roy Cohn’s East Side townhouse next to “Fat Tony” Salerno and “Big Paul” Castellano.
to be a developer in New York City, to be fair, you had to, in those days—this is talking about the late ’70s and 1980s, early ’90s—you had to brush up against the mob. They were a force both on the employer side and particularly on the union side. But despite that problem, Don Trump seemed to keep running into them over and over again. They bought apartments in his Trump Tower, in Trump Plaza. You know, they kept showing up as people that he was carousing with.
And then, when he went to Atlantic City—and one of the things I did recently in this piece for The Marshall Project was I put up this old FBI memo that I’ve had for many years, in which Donald Trump met with a couple FBI agents, protesting that he was concerned that in Atlantic City there might be organized crime figures, and what could he do to protect himself from this, which is a little like saying, “Is it true that there was a guy named Al Capone once who didn’t pay his taxes?” And he did go to Atlantic City. He probably got in bed with half a dozen mobsters who he bought land from down there.
The memo says, “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. 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.”
it didn’t just stop in Atlantic City. Right up until recently, this latest Trump hotel in New York—at least it has his name on it, even though he’s not the owner—the Trump SoHo down on Spring Street, as The New York Times revealed a few weeks ago, his partners in that were a bunch of Russian mobsters. And when he was asked about it, Donald Trump had the same thing that he said about the mobsters in Atlantic City, about the ones in development that he’d dealt with in New York: He wouldn’t know them if he met them.”
Polish immigrant workers that Trump employed. Dan Sullivan. rank-and-file member of the house records union who had sued Donald Trump for the fact that in making way for Trump Tower—and that is his signature accomplishment, is his high-rise condo palace right in the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue—and to do that, he had to knock down a building that was a former famous New York City department store called Bonwit Teller. And he was in such a rush to do it, he got himself a contractor who had a union signatory to a union contract, but in fact was using all undocumented workers from Poland, hardly paying them at all. They were getting so little money that they were literally sleeping on the job site. And he, of course, made none of the donations to the union benefit fund, which he was supposed to do. So, this rank-and-file member filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump for the fact that he had cheated his union out of these benefits. And Trump ended up settling. Even though he claimed throughout the debates, “I never settle lawsuits,” he settled that one, out of court. We never knew how much he settled for, but I can tell you that that crusty, old, rank-and-file guy and his lawyers were very happy with how it went.
Bill Bastone at SmokingGun.com. In 1988, when Trump was at the peak of his days in Atlantic City, he teamed up with a guy named John Staluppi, who was a very successful and wealthy auto dealer out of Long Island, to create a new stretch limousine, kind of a Trumpmobile, that would be so lavish, with these leather seats and with paper shredders and bars and everything in the world you’d ever want. John Staluppi, according to the FBI, is a made member of the Colombo crime family. You know, I’m not saying that; the FBI says that. And again, when Donald Trump was asked about it, he said, “Well, I never knew anything about that. In fact, I didn’t know John Staluppi very well at all.”
The problem that’s come is that no one has really compelled Trump to answer the questions, you know, in that he gets away with simply saying things like, “Well, I never heard of that guy,” or, “I wouldn’t know him.” No one ever—he’s never been forced to sit down in a chair and really answer the kind of questions that he would have to presumably do as the Republican nominee. And I think that will really be a telling point for the American media, is like, OK, we know all this stuff about him—and, look, he’s a gold mine of these kinds of stories. We’re only talking—we’re just scratching the surface here, the ones I just mentioned. There’s a lot more. This has been a deal maker in New York and across the world for 40 years. He’s come up against some incredibly shady characters. So now the question is: Will people get him to actually answer questions and try to get down below the level? So far, none of these stories, I think, have scratched the surface. The reason that he can win a state like Indiana is because nobody thinks badly of him.
Donald Trump says he’s running for president in a very different way, and that’s one of the ways it’s going to be different. You’re not going to see his tax forms.
He kept saying, “I knew. I was the guy who said I was against the Iraq War.” And he kept saying it over and over again, and nobody challenged him on it, until people went back and they started looking at the public record and realized, well, wait a minute, that’s not really true. He was for the war in Iraq, until he was clever enough—and grant him this: He’s a smart man; he recognized a disaster in the making when he saw one, and he changed his position, and he started saying that—and very mildly at first. It wasn’t until much later, when the tide had turned, that he started really saying it was a bad idea. But I think that’s a really good example of like trying to get him to own up, is: “Well, what were you thinking? What were you saying at that time?”
And his ability to slide through this stuff is astonishing. You know, I mean, recently, Politico brought together all the people who had written biographies of Trump, just to sit down at a table and swap stories. And I commend that piece to everybody who wants to read it. My friend Wayne Barrett is one of them, Tim O’Brien is one of them, Gwenda Blair—folks who had written really most in-depth biographies of him. And they tell wonderful stories, I mean, one after another. But my favorite one was about Trump and the draft, which for people of our generation was a very big deal as to what you did during the draft. And Donald Trump has always claimed that his—he got out of the draft simply because of the fact that like they didn’t need him at that point. And he talked about having a high number, which was a lottery at one point. But one of the biographers went back and checked, and he said, “Well, actually, you know, your date was before they were even using the lottery. How did you get out of the draft?” At which point Donald Trump says, “Heel spurs. I got a 4-F because of my heel spurs.” And the guy who wrote this book said, “You know, I can’t imagine how many miles on a golf course this fellow has walked, and he had too many heel spurs to walk in Vietnam.” I mean, that’s those kind of stories which are out there waiting to be picked.
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Tom Robbins
investigative journalist in residence at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He was a longtime columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice and the New York Daily News.
— source democracynow.org