"A "small" $1 million LOAN from my father, which I paid back in full."
No evidence that he ever paid Fred back a penny, and the actual amount was $420 million. He also was given direct access to every one of Fred's business contacts. And while he was running casinos into the ground, Fred found a way to bail him out when he was set to default on a payment to the bank. He had an employee go to the casino with $3.5 million in poker chips.
Politics
September 23, 2020
The Trump Files: The Shady Way Fred Trump Tried to Save His Son’s Casino
https://www.motherjones.com/2020-elections/2020/09/trump-files-fred-trump-funneled-cash-donald-using-casino-chips/
Donald Trump’s career was built on help from his father, Fred, whether it was the years Trump spent managing his dad’s apartment building or the political connections and multimillion-dollar loan guarantee that made cash-strapped Donald’s first deals possible. So it’s no surprise that Fred tried to bail his son out of trouble when Donald’s Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was about to miss an interest payment in December 1990.
By then, Trump had already defaulted on the debt from his Taj Mahal casino. If Fred simply wrote Donald a check, the money would be used to pay off that debt. So, as the Washington Post‘s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe in their new book, Trump Revealed, the elder Trump sent a lawyer to the Trump Castle to sneak money straight into the ailing casino’s coffers.
The lawyer, Howard Snyder, approached the casino cage and handed over a certified check for $3.35 million, drawn on Fred’s account. Snyder then walked over to a blackjack table, where a dealer paid out the entire amount in 670 gray $5,000 chips. The next day, the bank wired another $150,000 into Fred’s account at the Castle. Once again, Snyder arrived at the casino and collected the full amount in 30 more chips.
That let Trump use the de facto loan in whatever way he needed. “Sure enough, the Castle made its bond payment the day Fred’s lawyer bought the first batch of chips,” Kranish and Fisher wrote. The tactic also had a nice financial benefit. “Not only did he avoid default on the bonds—and the risk of losing control of Trump Castle as a result—but patrons who hold gaming chips normally are not paid interest,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time.
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