![]() Some of Trump’s unsavory connections have been followed by investigators and substantiated in court some haven’t. 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. These questions ate at me as I wrote about Atlantic City for The Philadelphia Inquirer, and then went more deeply into the issues in a book, Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Why did Trump get his casino license anyway? Why didn’t investigators look any harder? And how deep did his connections to criminals really go? 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. Trump also failed to disclose that he was under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. 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. 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. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.īut Trump was not clean as a whistle. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”-young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. 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. Since 2009 he has taught the business, property and tax law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s law and graduate business schools. David Cay Johnston won a Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times reporting on the American tax system.
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