Exposing Trump's Decades of Deep Ties to Organized Crime [View all]

[Octafish]

What gets The Mouth hot and bothered.

Exposing Trump's Decades of Deep Ties to Organized Crime

Trump's real estate empire and casinos have mob roots.

By Steven Rosenfeld / AlterNet May 23, 2016

The first decades of Donald Trump’s career as a New York City builder and Atlantic City casino magnate are filled with lasting and documented ties to organized crime—including mobsters who went to federal prison, according to a recent series of detailed investigative reports.

“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,” wrote David Cay Johnston for Politico.com. “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.”

“Well, 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,” Tom Robbins, who covered organized crime, labor and politics for decades for The New York Daily News and Village Voice, told Democracy Now, when talking about his report for TheMarshallProject.org. “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.”

Robbins, who called Trump, “the slickest con-man out of New York City,” said the Republicans had no idea who their presidential nominee was. But as he reported for the Marshall Project, which covers criminal justice issues, and Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning business reporter wrote for politico.com, Trump knew he wanted to make a fortune soon after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968 and found a role model in one of the sleaziest lawyers in America—Roy Cohn. In the 1950s, Cohn helped Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy persecute Hollywood figures for allegedly supporting Communism. Years later when Trump met Cohn, he had moved to New York City and was advising the city’s leading organized crime figures.

“Trump’s mentor on issues of politics and business was Roy Cohn, a lawyer whose other clients included a passel of mobsters, among them the bosses of the Genovese and Gambino crime families,” wrote Robbins. “Cohn… operated out of a townhouse on East 68th Street where clients Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul ‘Big Paul’ Castellano were regular visitors. Besides getting advice on their legal problems, as a former secretary later recalled to [Village Voice reporter] Wayne Barrett in his 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” the visits by the mob titans to their lawyer's office allowed them to talk shop without having to worry about FBI bugs. Cohn told a reporter that Trump called him ‘fifteen to twenty times a day, asking what’s the status of this, what’s the status of that,’ according to Barrett’s book.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/exposing-trumps-decades-deep-ties-organized-crime

Roy Cohn.