THE DIAMOND DON OF CONMEN
Mafia links, 4,500 lawsuits, a jewellery scandal and a string of unpaid bills... how Trump blagged his way to the top
Illegal workers and Mob firm built Trump Tower
DONALD TRUMP has been swept into power by millions of ordinary Americans who feel angry that their standard of living has declined as the Wall Street and Washington elites get richer. But if they think Trump is the answer, they are in for a rude awakening. Over nearly four decades, he has built up his fortune by conning ordinary workers and small business owners.
He has been implicated in a sales tax scandal at the fancy Bulgari jewellery store in New York, wriggled out of a promised million-dollar prize for a hole-in-one at a Trump golf course, and failed to pay people who work for him.
When they complain, he often tells them: ‘Sue me.’ As a result, Trump has been party to an astonishing 4,500 lawsuits, 75 of which are still outstanding, including three civil fraud cases over Trump University.
I have investigated Trump for 28 years and have learned the staggering scale of his dubious business practices, his links with the Mafia and his exploitation of the little man.
Trump’s murkiest dealings involved drug-trafficker Joseph Weichselbaum, who already had convictions for car theft and embezzlement when Trump hired him to provide a helicopter service to shuttle high-rollers to his casinos in Atlantic City in 1982.
Trump is no drug user, but it was open knowledge that big spenders could get anything they wanted, and in 1985 Weichselbaum was indicted for cocaine and marijuana trafficking, including one shipment of threequarters of a ton of marijuana.
Strangely, Trump retained the firm for his casino shuttles and to service his personal helicopter, called Ivana after his then-wife, paying more than £1.6million a year.
Trump wrote a letter to Weichselbaum’s trial judge asking for leniency. While Weichselbaum was serving a three-year jail term, his girlfriend bought two adjoining apartments on the 39th storey of Trump Tower. Yet Trump once told me he ‘hardly knew the man’.
More recently, Trump chose to work with convicted art thief Joey ‘No Socks’ Cinque. He is president of the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences which awarded the Trump golf links in Aberdeen its Six Star Diamond Award. The awards are granted by its board of trustees – which happen to have included Donald Trump, his daughter Ivanka, and son Donald Jr. In 1989, New York Police found a trove of stolen art in Cinque’s apartment. When Trump was recently asked about his association with Cinque, the tycoon said he barely knew him.
Trump also struggled to recall Felix Sater, a violent conman who has been convicted of stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a margarita glass, and admitted taking part in a £25million stock swindle in 1998 on behalf of the Genovese and Gambino Mafia families.
Trump is a material witness and potential defendant in a huge tax fraud case currently pending in Manhattan. The case, which involves profits from the Trump SoHo hotel and apartments, alleges that Trump authorised a multi-million dollar fraud run by Sater, who was based in an office in the main suite of the Trump Organization HQ. Trump’s lawyer says his client did not authorise the transaction.
Trump and Sater flew together on Trump’s Boeing 757 and the two men have been photographed and interviewed in four states. In Moscow, Sater was seen with two of Trump’s children during his attempt to build a Trump Tower there. Yet asked under oath about Sater, Trump said he would not recognise him.
But Trump is well used to dealing with Mafia-connected businessmen.
An early mentor was his lawyer Roy Cohn, who also represented two powerful Mafia figures who controlled key unions in New York City.
In 1978, Trump hired mobbed-up construction firms to erect Trump Tower using ready-mix concrete instead of steel girders. It was