Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: I rapporti di Trump con la mafia

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-swam-in-mob-infested-waters-in-early-years-as-an-nyc-developer/2015/10/16/3c75b918-60a3-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html
 
 
Investigations
 
Trump swam in mob-infested waters in early years as an NYC developer
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. October 16, 2015
 
As billionaire developer Donald Trump became the toast of New York in 
the 1980s, he often attributed his rise to salesmanship and verve. 
“Deals are my art form,” he wrote.
 
But there is `another aspect to his success that he doesn’t often 
discuss. Throughout his early career, Trump routinely gave large 
campaign contributions to politicians who held sway over his projects, 
and he worked with mob-controlled companies and unions to build them.
 
Americans have rarely contemplated a candidate quite like Trump, 69, who 
has become the unlikely leader among Republican Party contenders for the 
White House. He is a brash, Queens-born scion who navigated through one 
of the most corrupt construction industries in the country to become a 
brand-name business mogul.
 
 
Keep Reading
Much has been written about his early career, but many details have been 
obscured by the passage of time and overshadowed by Trump’s success and 
celebrity.
 
A Washington Post review of court records, testimony by Trump and other 
accounts that have been out of the public eye for decades offers 
insights into his rise. He was never accused of illegality, and 
observers of the time say that working with the mob-related figures and 
politicos came with the territory. Trump declined repeated requests to 
comment.
 
One state examination in the late 1980s of the New York City 
construction industry concluded that “official corruption is part of an 
environment in which developers and contractors cultivate and seek 
favors from public officials at all levels.”
 
Trump gave so generously to political campaigns that he sometimes lost 
track of the amounts, documents show. In 1985 alone, he contributed 
about $150,000 to local candidates, the equivalent of $330,000 today.
 
Officials with the New York State Organized Crime Task Force later said 
that Trump, while not breaking any laws, “circumvented” state limits on 
individual and corporate contributions “by spreading his payments among 
eighteen subsidiary companies.”
 
At the first Republican debate in August, Trump alluded to his history 
of political giving, bragging that he gave money with the confidence 
that he would get something in return.
 
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And 
you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three 
years later, I call them. They are there for me,” he said. “And that’s a 
broken system.”
 
 
As he fed the political machine, he also had to work with unions and 
companies known to be controlled by New York’s ruling mafia families, 
which had infiltrated the construction industry, according to court 
records, federal task force reports and newspaper accounts. No serious 
presidential candidate has ever had Trump’s depth of documented business 
relationships with mob-controlled entities.
 
The companies included S&A Concrete , which supplied building material 
to the Trump Plaza on Manhattan’s East Side, court records show. S&A was 
owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, 
and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family. The men required that 
major multimillion-dollar construction projects obtain concrete through 
S&A at inflated prices, according to a federal indictment of Salerno and 
others.
 
Salerno eventually went to prison on federal racketeering, bid-rigging 
and other charges. His attorney, Roy Cohn, the former chief counsel to 
Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.), was one of the most politically connected 
men in Manhattan. He was also Trump’s friend and occasionally his 
attorney. Cohn was never charged over any dealings with the mob, but he 
was disbarred shortly before his death in 1986 for ethical and financial 
improprieties.
 
“The construction industry in New York City has learned to live 
comfortably with pervasive corruption and racketeering,” according to 
“Corruption and Racketeering in the New York City Construction 
Industry,” a 1990 report by the New York State Organized Crime Task 
Force. “Perhaps those with strong moral qualms were long ago driven from 
the industry; it would have been difficult for them to have survived. 
‘One has to go along to get along.’ ”
 
James B. Jacobs, the report’s principal author, told The Post that Trump 
and other major developers at the time “had to adapt to that 
environment” or do business in another city.
 
“That’s not illegal, but you might say it’s not a beautiful thing,” said 
Jacobs, a law professor at New York University. “It was a very sick system.”
 
Business in his blood
Trump entered the real estate business full-time in 1968, following his 
graduation from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He 
worked in Queens with his father, Fred Trump, who owned a development 
firm with apartment buildings and other holdings across the country. 
Donald Trump, who had worked part-time for the firm for years, learned 
the business from the inside.
 
When he joined his father, Donald Trump examined the books and found 
tens of millions in untapped equity. Trump urged his father to take on 
more debt and expand the business in Manhattan. “At age twenty-two the 
young baron’s dreams had already begun to assume the dimensions of an 
empire,” Jerome Tuccille wrote in a biography of Trump.
 
Donald Trump took over in 1971 and began cultivating the rich and 
powerful. He made regular donations to members of the city’s Democratic 
machine. Mayors, borough presidents and other elected officials often 
were blunt in their requests for campaign cash and “loans,” according to 
the commission on government integrity. Donald Trump later said that the 
richer he became, the more money he gave.
 
After a series of scandals not tied to Trump, campaign finance practices 
in the state came under scrutiny by the news media. In 1987, Gov. Mario 
Cuomo (D) and New York Mayor Ed Koch (D) appointed the state commission 
on government integrity and gave it subpoena power and a sweeping 
mandate to examine official corruption.
 
 
The commission created a database of state contribution records that 
previously had been kept haphazardly in paper files. It called on 
politicians and developers to explain the patterns of giving identified 
by the computer analysis.
 
Trump appeared one morning in March 1988, according to a transcript of 
his appearance obtained by The Post. He acknowledged that campaign 
contributions had been a routine part of his business for nearly two 
decades. He repeatedly told the commission that he could not remember 
the details.
 
“In fact, in 1985 alone, your political contributions exceeded $150,000; 
is that correct?” Trump was asked.
 
“I really don’t know,” he said. “I assume that is correct, yes.”
 
A commission member said that Trump had made contributions through more 
than a dozen companies.
 
“Why aren’t these political contributions just made solely in your name?”
 
“Well, my attorneys basically said that this was the proper way of doing 
it,” Trump said.
 
Trump told the commission that he also provided financial help to 
candidates in another way. In June 1985, he guaranteed a $50,000 loan 
for Andrew Stein, a Democrat who was running to be New York’s City 
Council president.
 
Six months later, Trump paid off the loan.
 
“I was under the impression at the time it was made that I would be 
getting my money back,” Trump told the commission.
 
“And when were you disabused of that notion?”
 
“When it was time to get my money back,” Trump said.
 
Asked whether he considered such transactions as a “cost of doing 
business,” Trump was equivocal. “I personally don’t,” he said. “But I 
can see that some people might very well feel that way, sir.”
 
Stein told The Post he did not recall the loan, but he said developers 
were close to city officials at the time.
 
“The Donald was a supporter, as well as a lot of the real estate people 
were,” Stein said. “They have a huge interest in the city and have their 
needs.”
 
Trump’s donations were later cited by the organized crime task force’s 
report as an example of the close financial relationships between 
developers and City Hall. “New York city real estate developers revealed 
how they were able to skirt the statutory proscriptions,” the report 
said in a footnote. “Trump circumvented the State’s $50,000 individual 
and $5,000 corporate contribution limits by spreading his payments among 
eighteen subsidiary companies.”
 
Trump, then in his early 40s, said he made some donations to avoid 
hurting the feelings of friends, not to curry favor.
 
“You will have two or three friends running for the same office and they 
literally are all coming to you asking for help, and so it’s a choice, 
give to nobody or give to everybody,” he testified at a 1988 hearing 
before the New York State Commission on Government Integrity.
 
John Bienstock, the staff director of the Commission on Government 
Integrity at the time, recently told The Post that Trump took advantage 
of a loophole in the law.
 
“They all did that,” Bienstock said. “It inevitably leads to either the 
reality, or the perception, that approvals are being bought by political 
contributions.”
 
Heady days for crime cartels
As his ambitions expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, Trump had to contend 
with New York’s Cosa Nostra in order to complete his projects. By the 
1980s, crime families had a hand in all aspects of the contracting 
industry, including labor unions, government inspections, building 
supplies and trash carting.
 
“Organized crime does not so much attack and subvert legitimate industry 
as exploit opportunities to work symbiotically with ‘legitimate’ 
industry so that ‘everybody makes money,’ ” the organized crime task 
force’s report found. “Organized crime and other labor racketeers have 
been entrenched in the building trades for decades.”
 
In New York City, the mafia families ran what authorities called the 
“concrete club,” a cartel of contractors that rigged bids and squelched 
competition from outsiders. They controlled the Cement and Concrete 
Workers union and used members to enforce their rules.
 
Nearly every major project in Manhattan during that period was built 
with mob involvement, according to court records and the organized crime 
task force’s report. That includes Trump Tower, the glittering 58-story 
skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, which was made of reinforced concrete.
 
“Using concrete, however, put Donald at the mercy of a legion of 
concrete racketeers,” the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett wrote 
in “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall.”
 
For three years, the project’s fate rested in part with Teamsters Local 
282, the members of which delivered the concrete. Leading the union was 
John Cody, who “was universally acknowledged to be the most significant 
labor racketeer preying on the construction industry in New York,” 
according to documents cited by the House Subcommittee on Criminal 
Justice in 1989. Using his power to disrupt or shut down major projects, 
Cody extracted millions in “labor peace payoffs” from contractors, the 
documents said.
 
“Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn,” Cody said, according to 
Barrett.
 
Trump was subpoenaed by federal investigators in 1980 and asked to 
describe his relationship with Cody, who had allegedly promised to keep 
the project on track in exchange for an apartment in Trump Tower. Trump 
“emphatically denied” making such a trade, Barrett wrote.
 
Cody was later convicted on racketeering and tax-evasion charges.
 
The mob also played a role in the construction of Trump Plaza, the 
luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side. The $7.8 million 
deal for concrete was reserved for S & A Concrete and its owners, court 
records show. The crime families did not advertise their role in S & A 
and the other contractors. But it was well known in the industry.
 
“They had to know about it,” according to Jacobs, the lawyer who served 
on the organized crime task force. “Everybody knew about it.”
 
While these building projects were underway in the early 1980s, the FBI 
and New York authorities carried out an unprecedented investigation of 
the five New York crime families. Investigators relied on informants, 
court-authorized wiretaps and eavesdropping gear. Over five years, they 
gathered hundreds of hours of conversations proving the mob’s reach into 
the construction industry.
 
On Feb. 26, 1985, Salerno and 14 others were indicted on an array of 
criminal activity, including conspiracy, extortion and “infiltration of 
ostensibly legitimate businesses involved in selling ready-mix concrete 
in New York City,” the federal indictment said. Among the projects cited 
was Trump Plaza. Salerno and all but one of the others received terms of 
100 years in prison.
 
Trump also dealt with mob figures in Atlantic City, where he was 
pressing to go into the casino business, according to court records, 
gaming commission reports and news accounts. One of these figures, Kenny 
Shapiro, was a former scrap metal dealer in Philadelphia who became a 
real estate developer on the Jersey Shore. Shapiro also was an associate 
of the Scarfo crime organization, serving as a financier of mob 
activities in South Jersey and Philadelphia, according to a report by 
New Jersey authorities.
 
Shapiro worked closely with Daniel Sullivan, a Teamster who also was an 
FBI informant, documents show. Trump’s brother once described him as a 
“labor consultant” on Trump projects in New York.
 
Shapiro and Sullivan leased land to Trump for the Trump Plaza Hotel and 
Casino. They also agreed to help bankroll the campaign of Michael 
Matthews, a mayoral candidate the mob considered to be friendly to its 
interests. Matthews was elected, but he later went to prison on 
extortion charges related to an FBI sting operation and a $10,000 bribe.
 
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After questions surfaced about the mob’s possible involvement in Trump’s 
proposal, the state gaming commission delayed approval of Trump’s casino 
license and eventually told him to buy the land outright to avoid 
trouble. In commission hearings, Trump defended Shapiro and Sullivan, 
according to “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
 
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these people,” he said. “Most 
of them have been in Atlantic City for many, many years and I think they 
are well thought of.”
 
Records show that Trump was aware of mob involvement in Atlantic City. 
In confidential conversations with FBI agents who contacted him about 
his casino deal, Trump said “he had read in the press media and had 
heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were 
known to operate in Atlantic City,” according to a copy of a an FBI memo 
obtained by the Smoking Gun.
 
Trump told the FBI that “he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City 
but he did not want to tarnish his family name.”
 
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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