Don chief’s new term
Moneyman gets 5 mos. at Rikers for lies at trial
Donald Trump’s loyal longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg headed back to Rikers Island for five months on Wednesday for perjuring himself during the New York attorney general’s civil fraud case against the ex-president.
Weisselberg, 76, was sentenced days before Trump is set to face his first criminal trial on Monday in an unrelated criminal case regarding alleged hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and others.
He was led into a Manhattan Criminal Court holding cell wearing handcuffs and a black windbreaker just after 9:30 a.m. following a brief sentencing where he told the judge he had nothing to say.
In a statement to the Daily News, Weisselberg’s attorney Seth Rosenberg said he had “accepted responsibility for his conduct and now looks forward to the end of this life-altering experience and to returning to his family and his retirement.”
Weisselberg will serve out his term at Rikers’ West Facility, originally built to house people with infectious diseases. It’s mainly used today to detain high-profile prisoners or those believed to pose a security risk.
The retired Trump Organization chief financial officer, who decamped to Florida following his last jail stint for tax fraud, copped on March 4 to two counts of perjury — admitting he lied during the bombshell civil fraud case and the investigation that preceded it, culminating with almost half a billion dollars in fines against Trump and his executives.
Weisselberg, who once described himself as Trump’s financial “eyes and ears,” lied three times about his prior knowledge of the actual value of Trump’s Manhattan penthouse at Trump Tower during depositions in 2020 and 2023 and on the witness stand in October. Evidence showed that Trump and execs at his real estate empire falsely logged the triplex as 33,000 square feet in business deals — three times its actual size — inflating its worth by up to $200 million.
At various points, Weisselberg claimed that he didn’t “delve into the numbers,” that the triplex wasn’t his concern, and that he wasn’t aware of the bogus valuation until Forbes reported on it in 2017. His trial testimony, mostly filled with “I don’t remember,” was first called into question when Forbes reported Weisselberg had for years been trying to convince the magazine that the apartment was worth more than it was.
In truth, “Weisselberg was significantly involved in determining what methodology and numbers were used to value properties,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office wrote in the criminal complaint filed last month.
With prosecutors agreeing not to try him for more crimes, Wednesday’s sentencing caps a disastrous few years for Weisselberg, who was first hired by the Trump family as a bookkeeper by Donald’s father, Fred Trump, in the early 1970s.
The Brownsville, Brooklyn, native became entangled in Trump’s legal troubles in the spring of 2021. A year later, he retired and pleaded guilty to charges alleging he reaped lavish offthe-books benefits while guarding the Trump Organization’s coffers. As part of his plea deal, Weisselberg testified against the company at its criminal tax fraud trial, leading to its December 2022 conviction. He served 99 days of a five-month sentence.
Following the civil trial, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron found him liable for committing intentional, large-scale fraud alongside Trump and his top executives and barred him from handling a company’s finances again. He was ordered to pay $1 million in fines — half of his $2 million severance package.
In his devastating Feb. 16 judgment, Engoron said Trump’s company kept Weisselberg on a “short leash” and described his testimony as “highly unreliable.” The judge determined his golden parachute was illicitly secured to ensure he didn’t cooperate against his former employer.
In the years since the DA began investigating Trump, prosecutors sought to persuade the fiercely loyal money manager to flip on his longtime boss more than once, to no avail. Unlike in his last criminal case, Weisselberg’s latest plea deal in the perjury case didn’t require him to testify at the upcoming hush money trial despite his known involvement.
The chief financial officer received immunity to testify in the 2018 federal grand jury investigation that led to the conviction of Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen for arranging hush money payments to Daniels and others on Trump’s behalf before the 2016 presidential election.
Cohen told Congress the following year that Weisselberg determined how Trump would pay him back.
“I obviously wanted the money in one shot. I would have preferred it that way,” Cohen said. “But in order to be able to put it onto the books, Allen Weisselberg made the decision that it should be paid over the 12 months so that it would look like a retainer.”