Trump's Mob Connections

Click here for an article at Politico, by David Cay Johnston, dated May 22, 2016 -- why didn't it get more interest? -- entitled "Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties To the Mob?"



The picture is of Trump, NY mayor Ed Koch, and Trump's friend and mob lawyer Roy Cohn,

The article details a long history of Trump's association with mob figures, and mob-controlled businesses and unions, in the building industry in New York and the casino business in Atlantic City -- specifically his friendship with his lawyer, Roy Cohn, and dealings with businesses and unions controlled by "Fat Tony" Salerno (the Genovese family) and Paul Castellano (the Gambino family). It's long article; lots of interesting stuff.

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. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.

The article says:

From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.

Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.