By
David Cay Johnston
In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald
Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he
persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his
background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than
a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he
hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background
check, and eventually got the casino license.
But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning
three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his
Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly
overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat
Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal
investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated
with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited
from connections to racketeering. Trump also failed to disclose that he was
under investigation by a grand jury directed by the U.S. attorney in Brooklyn,
who wanted to learn how Trump obtained an option to buy the Penn Central
railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan.
