Donald Trump Mafia Connections: Career Filled With Mob Business Deals, ‘Washington Post’ Columnist Claims
Donald Trump built his career on real estate deals in New York City, and the surrounding areas, deals mostly made through his connections to the organized crime syndicate popularly known as the Mafia, and even in his most famous project — the building that made his reputation as a major player in New York real estate — Trump Tower, Trump made a deal with a company controlled by a top New York mob boss, according to a new report by Washington Post national affairs columnist David Von Drehle.
Von Drehle’s Friday column summarizes years of reporting by numerous investigative journalists, including the late Wayne Barrett who followed Trump more closely than perhaps more than any other reporter, according to a Politico profile of the Village Voice reporter last year — after Barrett died just one day before Trump’s inauguration.
The WaPo column also draws on the reporting of David Cay Johnston, a financial journalist who as the Inquisitr has reported, writes that Trump vastly exaggerates is own wealth and that “there is not now and never has been a shred of verifiable evidence that Trump is or ever was a billionaire.”
According to Johnston, who wrote an exposé of Trump’s organized crime connections for Politico in 2016, rather than build Trump Tower from steel, Trump chose to use concrete as his main building material, “buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul Castellano.”
As a 2016 Washington Post story exposed, Trump’s first and most influential political mentor was mob lawyer Roy Cohn, who also represented — at least unofficially — Salerno, the boss of New York’s Genovese Mafia family in the 1970s, and Carmine Galante who headed the Bonnano Family during that same period. Castellano was boss of the Gambino Family until he was gunned down in 1985 in a mob hit arranged by his own underling John Gotti, according to the National Crime Syndicate site.
In his column, Von Drehle goes on to report how Trump then entered the Atlantic City casino business, negotiating to buy land for one of his casinos there with “Little” Nicky Scarfo, the psychopathic crime boss who ran Atlantic City for the Philadelphia mob family, and eventually became boss of the Philly mob himself, according to Biography.com.
Trump bought the Atlantic City land from a Scarfo associate for an inflated price estimated to be twice the actual market value of the property, The National Memo reports.
Trump also attempted to get into the boxing promotion business through an association with boxing promoter Don King, who according to an FBI investigation reported by Sports Illustrated, had deep ties to the Cleveland, Ohio, mob and before entering the boxing business had been a numbers racket “runner” for Cleveland mobsters — and served four years in prison for manslaughter after he beat another man to death.
