AMY GOODMAN: We turn now
to Donald Trump.
DONALD TRUMP: It’s not been easy
for me. It has not been easy for me. And, you know, I started off in Brooklyn.
My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars. I came into Manhattan. And
I had to pay him back, and I had to pay him with interest. But I came
into Manhattan. I started buying up properties, and I did great. And then I
built the Grand Hyatt, and I got involved with the convention—so, I did a good
job. But I was always told that that would never work. Even my father, he said,
“You don’t want to go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory,” because he was
from Brooklyn and Queens, where we did, you know, smaller things. And he said, “Don’t
go to Manhattan. That’s not our territory.” But he was very proud of me. But
all my life, I was told no.
AMY GOODMAN: Those were
the words of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during a town hall
event last year in New Hampshire. Well, today we look back at Trump’s
rise to power and how he profited from his father’s deep pocketbook and
political connections. Decades before Donald Trump became a household name, his
father Fred Trump emerged as one of New York’s most prolific real estate
developers, building more than 27,000 homes in Brooklyn and Queens. In 1927,
Fred Trump made news when he was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan riot in Queens.
Earlier this week, [27 Jun 2016 – 30 Jun 2016] Democracy
Now!’s Juan González and I spoke with Wayne Barrett, considered the
preeminent journalist on Donald Trump. As a reporter at The Village Voice,
Barrett began reporting on Donald Trump in the late ‘70s. Barrett’s 1991
biography of Donald Trump was just republished as an ebook with the title Trump:
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. We
spoke to Wayne Barrett at
his home in Brooklyn, where he has largely been confined due to his battle with
lung cancer. I began by asking Wayne Barrett why he’s tracked Donald
Trump for so long.
WAYNE BARRETT: When I
started, in the ‘70s, he was this golden boy, you know, and he had not had much
press, but it had all been very supportive, because he was doing the Grand
Hyatt, which was his first big project in Manhattan. And the city was down in
the dumps, you know, near broke during the ‘70s, and he looked like the
embodiment of a rising city. And he was getting that kind of press, though not
much of it. And I was at The Village Voice, and so I took on—I was a
rookie, he was a rookie. We’re about the same age; I’m a little older. And so,
I took on this whole notion of, well, let’s take a look at this guy who appears
to be the answer to the city’s very grave financial problems at the time. And I
started working on him in the maybe ‘77 period. I worked on him intensely in ‘78
while the Hyatt was under construction, had not completed yet. And that’s when
I first got to know him. And I did about 10 hours of taped interviews with him
as a young guy and wrote a two-part series that led to the impaneling of a
federal grand jury, actually, because he was engaged in all kinds of
machinations, even as a rookie. I mean, he started out playing games. So, there
was a federal grand jury here in the Eastern District in Brooklyn, that did not
lead to an indictment, but may have been the toughest ride he’s ever had,
really, with a prosecutor.
WAYNE BARRETT: Unbelievably crucial. When he opened his first office in
Manhattan, the rent was paid by his father’s company out here on Avenue Z in
Brooklyn. And everything that he did, whether it be the Grand Hyatt—the Grand
Hyatt, for example, to get the financing, he got the financing from two banks
that his father had used, used his father’s relationship banker. And the father
had to sign the financing agreements. I mean, they’re not going to give a
30-year-old kid $35 million in 1978 to build a hotel. It has to be done with
Fred’s resources. And Fred Trump was a great outer borough builder and
really built good housing, 20,000 units totally, all over Queens, all over Brooklyn,
some of them towers, like Trump Village, many of them single-family homes, that
he had a great reputation as a builder. He was
politically wired, as his son was. I mean, they played the political game, both
of them, expertly, but Fred Trump was indispensable. I mean, even Trump Tower,
which comes along later in Donald’s career, could not have been done without
Fred coming in and supporting the financing of it. When he opened his first
casino in Atlantic City, when he bought the first properties, the lease holds
for the first properties for Trump Plaza, his casino in Atlantic City, Fred
rode down in the limo with him and signed all the lease hold documents. Nobody
was going to be financing this kid developer, kid casino operator. It was Fred
who was the key to all of it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you—in the book, you refer to both of them, both Fred and Donald, as state capitalists.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you talk about
the political connections and the degree to which they depended on government
officials or politically connected leaders, to build their empire.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah.
Well, that’s the irony of his current run. I interviewed a guy named Joe
Sharkey for the book. And this is not actually in the book, because I’m not in
the book, but—so I don’t tell this tale. But Sharkey was the county leader of
the Brooklyn Democratic Party years ago. And I interviewed him. He was in his
eighties and a little hard of hearing. And I said to him, “When did you first
see Fred Trump at the FHA?” The FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, had financed
virtually everything that Fred Trump ever built in the early phase of his
career. He later latched onto Mitchell-Lama, which, you know well, is a state
subsidy program similar to FHA. And so I said to—I said to him, “When did you
first see Fred at the FHA?” And he said, “I went down to Roosevelt’s inaugural. And then,
after the inaugural, I went over to the FHA, and Fred was already there.” And so,
these guys were living at the trough, you know? They’d been living at the
trough their whole lives.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain
what you mean by that.
AMY GOODMAN: And the FHA
and the Mitchell-Lama were subsidies of the housing?
WAYNE BARRETT: Subsidy
programs, yeah. So these were the things that—you know, that Donald learned at
the foot of the master. Fred was a master at this. You know, there were two
different investigations—one by the State Investigations Commission of New York
and one by Congress—of the FHA program, and Fred figured prominently in
national scandals of the misuse of FHA funding. And he figured—he was the
number one target of the State Investigations Commission for ripping off the
Mitchell-Lama program here in New York. And so, they had a long history of
this.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You also
talk about the
political leaders Donald Manes and Stanley Friedman and their role in
the rise of Trump, as well.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah,
well, Stanley Friedman
became the boss of the Bronx. He was the first deputy mayor under Abe
Beame. He was the one who did the legwork. Abe Beame said, “Anything you want,
you got.” Stanley Friedman, as the deputy mayor, shepherded, right to the last
day—on the last day of the Beame administration, Stanley Friedman personally
approved the award of the Garden Room, which hangs over 42nd Street, which was
unprecedented at the time, that they would allow a major hotel to build
something literally hanging over a street as prominent as 42nd Street—very
controversial decision done on the final day of the administration. He walks
out of the office that day, and the next week he starts at Roy Cohn’s law firm.
And Roy was Donald’s attorney on the Grand Hyatt. And he goes right as a
partner into Roy Cohn’s law firm. So, and Stanley Friedman ultimately is
convicted by Rudy Giuliani, became the most powerful Democratic boss in the
state of New York and did all kinds of things for Donald Trump.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of
that unfortunate term “linchpin,” what do you know of Fred Trump’s involvement with the
Ku Klux Klan?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well, you
know, I didn’t know about that at the time of the book. It’s not in the book. I’ve
read about it since. I can’t understand how Donald Trump denies that this is
true. There’s, I think, Washington Post clips—
AMY GOODMAN: The New
York Times.
WAYNE BARRETT: —you
know, which clearly say he was involved with the Ku Klux Klan. What I did write
about in the book and what I actually wrote about at the Voice in the ‘70s
was the race discrimination case that Richard Nixon’s Justice Department
brought against Fred and Donald Trump for racially excluding blacks and Latinos
in a systematic way, with a color-coded system where if a black came in seeking an
apartment, they got a certain color folder, where if a Latino came in, they got
a different color folder, of where the application was put—the easiest way to
exclude people. And, you know, the federal government established that
during the course of protracted hearings. And ultimately, Fred and Donald
settled the case.
And Donald does an affidavit in
the case in which he claimed that he didn’t have anything to do with the actual
rentals personally, actual rentals of the apartment. But I found, and wrote it
in the Voice and then examined it a little bit more in the book, that he
was simultaneously seeking a real estate broker’s license in New York state and
that he had to file sworn statements. And then, in his sworn statements, he
claimed he was in charge of all the rentals of the apartments. So, there was a
sworn statement saying, from him, “I don’t have anything to do with it,” and
almost simultaneously a sworn statement saying, “I run it.” You know, so the
racial discrimination pattern at Fred Trump developments was really quite
extraordinary.
AMY GOODMAN: He was
found guilty?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well, it
was—he signed a consent decree. This was a civil lawsuit, and he signed a
consent decree. And he and Donald signed the consent decree. And then they
violated it. They were not in compliance with it. And they had to go back, the
feds did, in ‘78 and do it again a second time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, you
talk about Trump Towers, in the new introduction to the book, as basically housing for a
rogues’ gallery of felons—
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —that’s
never been really touched upon. Could you expound on that?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well, you
know, in the book itself, I added to the list that’s in the book. I have a
couple dozen felons who wind up getting apartments in Trump Tower. In fact, one
of the remarkable things about Donald is how he has avoided being indicted in
the course of his career. One of the tales that I tell there involves a guy
named Robert
Hopkins, who was then running the biggest illegal gambling operation in the
Bronx—and a client of Roy Cohn’s. He’s one of the early buyers, this
guy Robert Hopkins, of an apartment in Trump Tower, paid about $2 million for
it. And so, at the closing, Ted Teah,
who you must remember, Juan—he was the City Planning Commission member
from the Bronx appointed by Stanley Friedman, an associate in Roy Cohn’s law
firm with Stanley Friedman, and he’s representing this guy Hopkins at the
closing. And Hopkins is sitting there, with Trump in the room, mind you, with a
briefcase filled with cash.
AMY GOODMAN: This is
Donald Trump?
WAYNE BARRETT: Yes,
counting the money out, hundreds of thousands of dollars, paying for the
apartment in cash. And he had partial mortgages, which a guy named Robert Lamagra, a
semi-wise guy kind of guy, who gets subsequently prosecuted in the Eastern
District of New York—Hopkins was under indictment for murder of another mob
guy, which that case wound up going nowhere, but he was convicted in other
cases. And that’s just one of the many tenants that were drawn—it was like a
magnet for bad guys, Trump Tower.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: “Baby Doc”
Duvalier?
WAYNE BARRETT: Yes, “Baby Doc”
Duvalier is there. Yes, you’ve got—
AMY GOODMAN: While he
was still in office in Haiti, the dictator?
WAYNE BARRETT: No—well,
yes, he started this. That’s absolutely right. Yes, he was looking at it as a place to dump some of his booty from
Haiti. He gets an apartment in there.
And it’s just a long list, an incredibly long list. Joe Weichselbaum, who is an
extraordinary side of Donald, he not only has an apartment in Trump Tower, he
has one in Trump Plaza. And he’s like a several times convicted felon as a
cocaine trafficker, and he flew Donald’s high rollers down to his casinos in
Atlantic City. He’s got an apartment there. It’s just a laundry list of bad guys drawn to this—this temple of
greed.
When we come back, we’ll be joined by Karenna
Gore, the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore. She was just arrested in
Roxbury, Massachusetts, protesting against climate change. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: “Old Man
Trump” by Ryan Harvey, with Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello. The song was written,
but never recorded, by Woody Guthrie, about his landlord, Donald Trump’s father
Fred Trump. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and
Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I—
TRUMP SUPPORTER: I’ve
seen them myself.
DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, I
understand that. Yeah.
TRUMP SUPPORTER: We need
the veterans back in there to take it. They’ve fought for this country and
defended it. They’ll still do it.
DONALD TRUMP: OK.
TRUMP SUPPORTER: Thank
you.
DONALD TRUMP: You know,
and we are looking at that. And we are looking at that. We’re looking at a lot
of things.
AMY GOODMAN: At that same town
hall in New Hampshire, Donald Trump joked about Mexico attacking the United
States.
DONALD TRUMP: Mexico—and
I respect Mexico. I respect their leaders. What they’ve done to us is
incredible. Their leaders are so much smarter, so much sharper. And it’s
incredible. In fact, that could be a Mexican plane up there. They’re getting
ready to attack.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to
Part 2 of our in-depth look at Donald Trump. Last week, [27 Jun 2016 – 30 Jun 2016] Democracy Now!’s Juan
González and I visited Wayne Barrett, considered the preeminent journalist on
Donald Trump. He has been tracking Trump for decades. His 1991 biography of
Donald Trump was just republished as an ebook with the title Trump: The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. On Thursday, we
aired Part 1 of the interview.
Today we bring you Part 2 for the hour. We visited Wayne Barrett at his
home. He talked about Trump’s longtime lawyer and mentor, Roy Cohn, who once
served as a top aide to the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy.
WAYNE BARRETT: I knew Roy Cohn. I knew him very well. And you just cannot understand how Donald could have
been this close. I write in the book that they talked 15 times a day. One of
the two stories here—I can’t remember which one—said it was five times a day.
It’s probably somewhere in between. Roy himself told me they talked 15 times a
day. But there’s no question that next to Fred Trump, Roy Cohn was the single
greatest influence in Donald’s life. And Roy is incandescent evil. I mean, I would sit with him, and
I—you know, it was enough to make you rush back to church, the Satanic feeling
that he would give you. He would eat with his fingers. And we would be at 21. He
would eat with his fingers. He would—he carried a little glass in his jacket
that he would take out and drink in this little glass. He would pop a white
pill when he didn’t think you were looking. And he—his house was filled with
frogs. He was the weirdest guy. He was into the strangest stuff. He was a
chicken hawk after little boys, and yet he was the most virulently anti-gay guy
you could imagine. And so, that was Donald’s mentor and constant sidekick, who
represented all five of the organized crime families in the City of New York.
AMY GOODMAN: For young
people who don’t know Roy Cohn’s background, back to McCarthy—
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —can you
explain who he is and what it meant for Donald Trump to learn at his knee?
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah,
well, he starts out as—I think he was 23 years old when he was the chief
counsel to Joe McCarthy doing all those hearings. He was extremely wired into
the Reagan White House. He helped make Donald Trump’s sister Maryanne a federal
judge in 1983. He was the ultimate fixer power player in New York for a whole
period of time. He died of AIDS in 1986. But for a particular block of time, he
was extremely influential with the Beame administration, because, even more so
than Fred Trump, he was totally wired into Abe Beame, because he had knocked Mario Biaggi out of
the race. Mario Biaggi
was a very popular, charismatic congressman from the Bronx. And Roy leaked
that he had been before a federal grand jury. And initially Biaggi denied it,
and ultimately it was established that he had been. And that’s why he couldn’t
run. And that was Roy getting Biaggi out of the race for Beame. So Beame was
incredibly beholden to him. So he had enormous influence in the city
underground.
I would write stories about his parking lots. Strangely
enough, his cash cow was city-owned parking lots by the water, which were
leased by the Bureau of Marine and Aviation, and he controlled the companies
that had the parking lots that were city-owned. And it was just an enormous
amount of money. He never paid any taxes. He pretended to have no
income. He had an incredible cash empire. And the guy who actually leased those
parking lots to him, Rick Mazzeo, wound up under federal investigation, and they
found his body in the trunk of a car. And all he did was give parking lots to
Roy Cohn. That’s what he did for a living.
And so, you just look at the—as
I said, you know, he was the middle man between Donald and all these mob guys.
You asked about the apartments at Trump Tower. John Cody gets an apartment at
Trump Tower. John Cody is a Gambino crime family associate who I had lunch with
while I was doing the book. I had lunch with him at Windows on the World. And—
AMY GOODMAN: On top of
the World Trade Center.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yes. And it must have
been under federal surveillance, because, two weeks after the lunch, they
busted him for trying to kill the guy who—Bobby Sasso, who had taken over Local
282, which was his union. That was the concrete delivery men. They delivered
all the concrete to all the sites in New York, totally mob-controlled. And so
they busted him for trying to kill a guy. He had already been in
jail. He goes back to jail. Well, he had a—he denied it was a mistress, but he
certainly told me that they were very close, Verina Hixon. I talk about her in
the book. She got not only an apartment in Trump Tower, it’s the only apartment
with a pool. It’s right underneath Donald’s apartment, right? And all of it
built for John Cody, because Trump Tower is a total concrete structure. It was
the first concrete structure like that built in New York. So, John Cody had
complete control over this. And so he gets this apartment. He actually invested
in the apartment himself, as I established in the book. And Verina Hixon is
there, who I met with a few times. She used to meet me in Central Park. She
didn’t want to meet me in Trump Tower. But we talked many times. And, you
know—and there’s John hanging out in Trump Tower all the time, right underneath
Donald Trump’s apartment. And he’s a total wise guy. He’s a total wise guy.
And, you know, he said to me—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean by
that a mob guy.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah. He
said to me, “Oh, I always used Roy as the go-between with Donald. Roy was the
guy who—Roy Cohn was the guy who set us up.” You know, so this is the
relationships that flowed through—you know, the FBI did an affidavit saying
that the heads of—the commission, the heads of the five crime families, would
meet in Roy Cohn’s office, because the government couldn’t eavesdrop. It was a
lawyer-client relationship. That’s what they did.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you’re
talking here about the five families in New York, but, of course, Donald Trump’s
signature developments occurred in Atlantic City, where, as I recall, the Philadelphia mob was
in charge of whatever happened in Atlantic City. Can you talk about his
relationship there in Atlantic City?
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah,
well, no question. I mean, Nicky Scarfo—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Nicky
Scarfo.
WAYNE BARRETT: Nick Scarfo, that’s
the bloodiest crime family in the history of the United States. It’s
undervalued because it wasn’t based in New York. It didn’t get the coverage,
you know? But they controlled Local 54, which was the hotel workers’ union.
This is not me talking, this is a finding in federal court, that Nicky Scarfo
controlled the hotel workers’ union. And when they would strike all the casinos
in Atlantic City, they wouldn’t strike Donald. You know, when he first goes
down there into Atlantic City to acquire his first parcels, he buys them at a
premium, overpays, from underbosses of the Nicky Scarfo crime family. He has a
relationship with these guys throughout the early days of his time down there.
And it’s—it was really a pretty remarkable set of deals that he did. Now, you
had—Mike Matthews was the mayor of Atlantic City, who was totally—proven in
court, went to jail—totally owned by the Nicky Scarfo crime family. And he was
Donald’s number one ally. They were feeding him money, contributions, illegal
contributions, but they were feeding Matthews money. And that’s just one part
of this intricate relationship that gave birth to Donald’s casino empire in
Atlantic City.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, I
did. I did.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you
get to? Because he’s refusing to reveal them.
WAYNE BARRETT: Well,
they were—they were part of the record of the Casino Control Commission in the ‘70s.
He would have to submit his tax returns for the first casino that he did down
there, at least, Trump Plaza. I mean, one of the great ironies is that his second casino,
Trump Castle, was actually built by the Hiltons. And the Hilton family,
out of Chicago, was denied a license by the Casino Control Commission, which
was all done to benefit Donald. Donald then gets Trump Castle. And the
rationale for denying it, which is what they stated in their decision, was that
he was—that the Hilton family was represented by a mob lawyer out of Chicago.
Here he’s got Roy Cohn, and that’s no bar at all. That’s no bar at all. And so,
the irony of it, that’s how he got his second casino.
And so, the casino empire
there, what’s so interesting to me is, you know, when we had the Nevada
primary, he was always at the Trump Hotel down in Las Vegas. But that’s only a
hotel. You know, there’s no casino there. Right? Why is there no casino there?
His partner in it, Phil Ruffin, already owns a different casino, so he can
qualify for a license. But they build a hotel without a casino—in the heart of
Las Vegas. Because—I mean, my only conclusion is that he couldn’t get a license
in Nevada. The guy might be president of the United States, but here they have
this hotel without a casino in the heart of Vegas. Right?
I mean, I had—when my book came
out, I started getting visited by these state troopers from Missouri,
because he had applied for a riverboat casino license in Missouri. And these
guys were so thorough. They came, and they met me in my house in Ocean City,
New Jersey—we call it the house Trump bought, with the book advance, you know.
And then they would meet me in my house and at The Village—I mean, my
office at The Village Voice. They’d go through all my—they were—they
came back and forth. They denied him—they were about to deny him, I should say,
a riverboat license in Missouri.
You realize he’s not gotten a
casino license since he got one for the Taj. He had the DGE, the Division of
Gaming Enforcement, and the Casino Control Commission in New Jersey fixed. He
had a—it was rigged for Donald. I don’t think there’s any question in my mind
about that. And what wouldn’t be? It’s a company town. The only thing in it is
casinos. He owned four of them. He was only legally allowed to own three of
them, so when he bought the fourth one, that just became a hotel, and, you
know, they closed down the casino in it and just ran it as a hotel. But, to me,
there’s no other explanation that I can find as to why he does not have a
casino in his hotel in Las Vegas, other than he couldn’t go through the
licensing procedure. He was given in 2004 some kind of a clearance by the
casino regulators there of suitability. But that’s just a preliminary step. If
you’re actually going to get a license, you’ve got to go through an intensive
background. And he withdrew before he was going to be denied in Missouri. And
he’s never applied for a license in Nevada, where he has a giant hotel. It’s
kind of ironic to me that a guy who wants to be president of the United States
is afraid to go through a gaming commission licensing procedure.
AMY GOODMAN: Wayne Barrett,
Donald Trump offered you an apartment, the man who’s dogged him for decades?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well,
that was very early. I hadn’t started dogging him yet. That was to induce me
not to dog him. When I started out on the trail of the Hyatt, I filed a Freedom
of Information request with both the state and the city. And I was at the State
Urban Development Corporation offices reading all the files, which was a table
full of documents related to the Hyatt. And I was alone in a conference room,
and the phone starts ringing in the conference room. I don’t know whether to
pick up or not. I finally pick up.
“Wayne, this is Donald. I
understand you’re going to write a story about me.” I never met the guy in my
life at that point; it was like we were old friends. And so, I met with him early in the reporting process. I always use this
with journalism students as an example of what not to do. If you’re
circling—circling a subject, you don’t want to, you know, go face to face with
him, because you never know whether you’re going to get a second shot. You don’t
want to go face to face with him until you’ve got all of your ducks in a row. But because he interrupted, very early, the reporting
process, I met with him before I really had many of the ducks in a row, and I
could only ask softball questions. He loved me then.
You know, it was—Ivana was
walking around the apartment. It was on a Saturday or a Sunday; I know it was a
weekend. And Ivana’s walking around the apartment. It’s on Fifth Avenue, but it’s
long before Trump Tower. And, you know, so in the midst
of that, I had not told him that I lived in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, which was
then the poorest community in the City of New York. It would be
unfathomable to him that I lived there by choice, because I wanted to live
there. So he said to me, “Wayne, you don’t have to live in Brownsville.
I have plenty of apartments.” And so, then, at another time—it was not at that
first interview, but sometime subsequent to that—he started talking to me about
how he had broken this other journalist by suing him and driving him into
bankruptcy. So it was the carrot and the stick, and they were both jokes.
AMY GOODMAN: Wayne
Barrett, investigative reporter who worked with The Village Voice for 37
years. Wayne’s 1991 biography of Trump has just been republished as an ebook;
the title, Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the
Reinvention. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman,
as we continue our look at Donald Trump. About a thousand housekeepers, cooks,
bellmen and others at Trump’s Taj Mahal Atlantic City casino went on strike
Friday and through the weekend, demanding reinstatement of health, pension and
other benefits eliminated during one of Trump’s bankruptcy proceedings. We
return now to our conversation with Wayne Barrett, considered the preeminent
journalist on Donald Trump. Wayne Barrett has been tracking Trump for decades,
his 1991 biography just republished as an ebook—its title, Trump: The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. Juan
González and I spoke to Wayne Barrett at his home, where he’s largely been
confined due to his battle with lung cancer. We asked Wayne Barrett about Donald Trump’s
unkept promise to build affordable housing in Atlantic City in order to build
larger projects.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah,
well, I mean, I think that’s one of the undercovered parts of the Atlantic City
story. And I actually think that the Times and The Washington Post
have done excellent stories on his—and Politico—on his Atlantic City
debacle, really. But he made a commitment in Atlantic City. And you remember
Tony Gliedman. Tony Gliedman was the city’s housing commissioner who went to
work for Donald. Housing was his specialty, and Gliedman helped negotiate these
agreements with Atlantic City. Four out of five of the mayors went to jail
during the period that Donald was dominant there, and he had incredible
relationships with most of them. But he signed these agreements, because he was
getting city-owned property near the Taj. He was getting all kinds of
agreements from the city regarding roadways and access to Trump Castle, which
is out at the marina. It’s not on the boardwalk. And so, for these favors from
the city government, he agreed to build low-income housing. And he had the guy
to do it. He had the guy who’d done it in New York. And they made all kinds of
commitments that were written right into agreements with the city of Atlantic
City.
And then he failed on all of
them. I mean, you know, people don’t realize it, but, you know, you drive into
Atlantic City, you can go right into—Trump Plaza is right off of the highway.
It’s really the best site in Atlantic City. You can drive right into the
garage. You walk out of the garage, they have this moving platform that will
carry you right into the casino. Now, it doesn’t exist anymore, but I’m talking
about when it did. And then there’s no windows. So, you don’t even have to look
out at this poverty that’s just cataclysmic. And it’s right outside the window.
It’s like an alternative universe located right within a city that’s decimated,
that’s desolate—right?—and with—so poverty-stricken. And he never built any of
the units. And he leaves town. From being the king of Atlantic City, here’s a
guy who now laughs about how he got out and, you know, with all of his cash
flow, got out just in time.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask
you about a subject that’s been raised quite a bit during the campaign, even by
some of the top Republican leaders—Mitt Romney, for one—Donald Trump’s tax
returns. Why do you think he’s resisting so much being able to make his tax
returns public?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well, I
don’t think we have to speculate about it. And the reason I say that is Tim O’Brien, who was my
research assistant on my book and subsequently wrote his own TrumpNation,
and he is now at Bloomberg. He’s the editor of the opinion section of Bloomberg
Media. And he has seen the tax returns. Now, he hasn’t seen them for the most
recent year, but he saw them for a number of years. Donald Trump sued him over
his book. And, you know, it was sort of—when my book came out, he publicly
threatened to sue me, but he never did. Now, I name 25 mob associates of Donald
Trump or whatever, and that doesn’t motivate him to sue. But if you say he’s
not worth what he claims to be worth, that’s what Tim—he sued Tim because Tim
said he was only worth $200-$300 million. Now, Tim was a business editor
at the Times. He was a young guy, just got an MBA from Columbia when he
was my assistant, but he has an incredible business head. And so, he sued Tim
over that. The litigation went on for six or seven years. And Tim prevailed.
But during the course of the litigation, Tim’s lawyers demanded that Donald
make the tax returns available. And they did for a number of years. And so, Tim
signed a confidentiality agreement, so he can’t specifically reveal what is in
the tax returns, but he wrote a piece
for Bloomberg very recently that said Donald’s not releasing his tax returns
because the income will be far less than he claims it is, the assets will be
worth far less than what he says it is, and his charitable contributions are
virtually nonexistent. So those are the three primary reasons why he won’t
release these returns.
You know, he has made a career—when I say
I don’t know why he’s never been prosecuted, maybe the prime time that he could
have been prosecuted was at the time of his downfall in 1990 and ‘91. Well, you
know, the banks kept him alive, as he was too big to fail. So they kept him
alive. But I wrote in
the book—he certainly didn’t sue when I said it—I didn’t say that he had
made—submitted false financial statements to the bankers to get a billion
dollars in personally guaranteed loans. I said he submitted fraudulent ones.
Right? And I lay out a case for that in the book. He was engaged in completely
defrauding the banks, and the banks knew it. OK? And they
were giving him the loans anyway. So, they kept him alive. But even more so
than that, the House Banking Committee wanted to do public hearings about it;
the banks wouldn’t cooperate. The district attorney of Manhattan was a big
friend of Donald’s. Donald was his second-biggest giver. Robert Morgenthau’s
second-biggest giver was Donald Trump. Donald was the chairman of the Police
Athletic League, which was Morgenthau’s biggest charity. So he was extremely
close. He hired—Andy Maloney was the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District.
He hired Maloney’s brother. Right? Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, and
we know how close they got. I wrote a whole story about how their relationship
developed. I
was at Rudy Giuliani’s first fundraiser when he decided to run for mayor, and
there’s Donald at the main table. He’s the co-chair of the first Rudy
Giuliani fundraiser for the mayorality in 1989. So his relationships with
prosecutors and the fact that the bankers—they were embarrassed by what they
had done; they didn’t want any investigation of this. So the combination of the
two gave—gave them a pass—gave him a pass.
AMY GOODMAN: You talk about his
relationship with prosecutors—Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey,
formerly a prosecutor. What about this close alliance? As so many
Republicans are running away from Trump, Chris Christie has wrapped himself
around Trump.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, I
don’t think Chris Christie, you know, has had—Donald has had extraordinary
relationships, when he was the power in Atlantic City, with a series of
governors, and it didn’t matter which party. I mean, he had an incredibly close
relationship with Tom Kean. But remember his—you know, his political adviser
all these years has been Roger Stone, who ran Tom Kean’s campaign for governor the
first time down in New Jersey. And so, he’s always had an in. Roger has always
had a special relationship with Jersey politicians. I don’t know if he has one
with Chris Christie. I frankly don’t know. But he has a long history of that. And
so, Roger Stone, who is really the walking, living son
of Roy Cohn—I mean, absolutely raised by Roy Cohn—lived in the town—or spent a
great deal of time in the townhouse that Roy Cohn ran the law firm out of.
And so, but as to Christie and
Donald, it sort of has surprised me. I can’t really quite figure out why this
embrace. I mean, I think the ultimate thing, since he’s already said Christie
will be his chief of staff, I’m predicting that Rudy will be his
vice-presidential candidate. And so, then, between the three of them, you know,
we’ll have this—you know, maybe Newt figures in there somewhere. I don’t know.
But, you know, Newt, Rudy—Rudy has already said he’s going to be in charge of
homeland security. This is a group I—the relationship with Rudy is deep and
very disturbing.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah,
yeah. Well, I think it’s—the thing that maybe disturbs me the most about the
media coverage of him, particularly television, is to call him a populist. You
know, we’re now saying that what just happened in Britain was supposedly a
populist expression. Well, the whole history of populism is against elites, you
know, and what’s driving the Trump campaign, and what I think drove the Brexit
vote, is not animosity towards elites. That may be a small part of it, but what’s
really driving it is antagonism towards immigrants, mostly minorities. That’s
what’s driving the Trump campaign. I thought it was
pretty remarkable, when you will listen to the Dana Bashes and the other
commentators on CNN, one election after another, when he carried all but Texas
of the old Confederacy, and they would, one night after another, say, “Isn’t it
remarkable that a kid from Queens is winning in Alabama?” instead of offering
the logical explanation for it, which is that it’s naked racism that he is
appealing to. They instead say, “It’s the thirst for an outsider. It’s—what’s
driving this is the thirst for an outsider,” when on the same day they
renominated Richard Shelby, who actually had a right-wing opponent and who was
the chair of banking in the Senate and who was getting all of his money from
Goldman Sachs and every other house, you know, contributing to him. He’s an
embodiment of the insider, and they nominated him overwhelmingly, so he didn’t
even face a runoff. There were two candidates running against him. And
they—so, these people who were attracted by an outsider were all apparently
simultaneously attracted by the ultimate insider.
Well, what explains that? I
mean, I think it is so clear that race is the driving motive of this campaign,
the driving cause for its success. The scapegoating of everybody who’s not a
white male is what’s—is what’s driving this candidacy, and it’s led to its
success so far. Whether or not there’s enough of that to elect him president, I
mean, this still is the same country that elected Barack Obama twice and, after
four years of experience with him, re-elected him in 2012. It’s not a
dramatically different country than it was in 2012, so I got to believe that
there are limits to this race card. But that’s the only explanation, to me, for
going from one unbelievably manipulative, contrived, false statement after
another, attacking a judge—I actually think that attacking the judge may have
been not a mistake on his part, but something very consciously done to say, “Look,
even a big guy like me, they’re screwing with even me, these Mexicans. You
know, look, I know what you’ve got. I know you got a problem back there, but
they can even take me on!” You know, and so I think that race is the absolute
undercurrent of this. It shouldn’t be an undercurrent. For a brief period of time
there, when the Mexican judge thing appeared, the television media seemed to be
willing to talk about race. I think, you know, we’re seeing that change again.
But they have to keep this—television people have to keep this thing alive. If
she’s ahead by 13 points, how many millions do they lose?
AMY GOODMAN: Wayne
Barrett is an investigative reporter. He worked with The Village Voice
for 37 years. His biography of Donald Trump has just been republished as an
ebook; it’s called Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the
Downfall, the Reinvention. We’ll be back with Wayne Barrett in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: That’s “Old
Man Trump” by Ryan Harvey and Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello, the song written
but never recorded by Woody Guthrie about his landlord, Donald Trump’s father,
Fred Trump. Our first break was another Woody Guthrie song. This is Democracy
Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
AMY GOODMAN: We conclude
our conversation with Trump biographer Wayne Barrett, who has tracked the
Republican presumptive presidential nominee for decades. His biography of Trump
has been republished as an ebook; it’s called Trump: The Greatest Show on
Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. Juan González and I
interviewed him last week at his home in Brooklyn. I asked Wayne about those harmed by Trump’s
business practices, from the Polish workers who built Trump Tower to the
investors in the casino he never built in Mexico.
WAYNE BARRETT: His
pathway to success is littered with bodies. You know, I hear him talk about the
thousands of Latinos he’s employed. You know, I don’t know what he’s talking
about. I’m sure, Juan, you’re aware there are almost no Latinos in Atlantic
City. You couldn’t employ Latinos in Atlantic—there’s a lot of black people
there, but it has no significant Latino population. I was in and out of his
casinos all the time. I never saw many Latino workers. I don’t know where these
thousands of Latinos that have supposedly worked for him have worked for him,
but it wouldn’t be Atlantic City, and I don’t know where else he ever employed
thousands of people.
And certainly, the Taj, for
example—just talk about the Taj, which was, at the time, you know, this is—he
had this incredible downfall where his personal life—this is when he dumps his
wife and children, and goes with Marla. At the same
time, when he was on this fast track, ‘87, ‘88—’88 was the disaster year, you
know, where he makes one bad judgment after another. So, he is trying to
get the City of New York, Ed Koch, to support the building of the tallest
skyscraper in the history of the country on the West Side Yards for NBC
headquarters, and at the same time he takes on the Taj, which will be the
largest casino in the history of the world. So he doesn’t get the approvals
from Koch, so he doesn’t build the NBC tower on the West Side, but he goes
ahead and tries to build the Taj. And
he so overleverages everything—junk bonds, adding to cost all over the place,
just one bobble after another. It was just—so it was doomed from the day it
opened. It could never make the payments. It could never make the bond
payments. And so they stiffed all the bondholders. But they also stiffed all the small contractors in
Atlantic City, you know, guys—you know, mom-and-pop shops who did all the work
there. I used to walk through it while it was under construction, and the place
was just filled with contractors. I talked to many of them. And they didn’t
know they were all going to get stiffed in the end, but they got 20 cents, 30
cents on the dollar or nothing. And he just stiffed so many of them. So, small
businesses went out of business.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the
Polish workers at Trump Tower?
WAYNE BARRETT: The
Polish workers at Trump Tower became a kind of famous case. And the Bonwit
Teller building was part of the site. And this—you know, when you look at that
site, this is the genius of Donald Trump, how he managed to assemble that site.
You know, I don’t think he can find a better site in America, maybe in the
world, than the location that he had. So, that was part of his genius at the
time, was assembling these kinds of sites and making these acquisitions. But he
was completely unconcerned about the workers who worked in the demolition of
the Bonwit Teller building, who literally slept there. And they were all
immigrant Polish workers, hundreds of them, many of whom got very sick as a result of working on that site. He’s always tried to put some distance
between, but his office was right across the street. His office was—you
know, how he could claim that he didn’t know what was going on in that site,
which has been his claim—and there’s no question but that these workers were
abused to an enormous degree.
AMY GOODMAN: Wayne
Barrett, we wanted to ask you about Donald Trump’s wives. He’s married three
people: Ivana Trump, Marla Maples and Melania Trump. They factor in
significantly in his campaign. Ivana Trump actually accused him of raping her.
Can you talk about the significance, especially as he moves into attacking Bill
Clinton, not because of Bill Clinton’s behavior with his wife per se,
but with other women?
AMY GOODMAN: Explain
what you mean.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yeah, I
mean, that’s—you know, Donald milked the divorce, the break-up with—part of his
schtick, one of the reasons white males love him so much in this campaign is
they think he’s a stud. Right? I mean, Marla Maples was a beauty, classic American beauty. You know? So, the whole thing that he fed during
that divorce, which was—
AMY GOODMAN: His divorce
with Ivana.
WAYNE BARRETT: With
Ivana, yes—was just so incredibly ugly, and it was damaging to the children.
And then he got into a fight with Ivana over who gets what in the end. And,
like, he wanted Eric’s computer. They fought over Eric’s computer.
AMY GOODMAN: His son.
WAYNE BARRETT: Yes. I
mean, and so, his treatment of Ivana, the mother of his first three children,
was just deplorable. And then Marla already has the child before they get
married, right? And so, when he breaks up with her, she signs a confidentiality
agreement. So, you know, the two of them, their lips are sealed. But when she
thought he was running for president in 2011, she was doing an interview in
Britain, in London, and she said, “If he runs for president, I’m going to have
to tell the world what he’s really like.” And the lawyers, Trump’s lawyers, go
immediately into court. And then they actually stood out, after they got some
sort of an order from the court, and she’s completely silenced—and we’ll never
hear from her again—you know, they actually stood in front of the courthouse
and said she had proven that she was a bimbo. That’s what they said. So, I
mean, the way in which he has treated his wives is just—it’s really deplorable.
I wrote in the book that Donald took the Fifth Amendment a hundred
times during the course of the divorce proceedings in his deposition,
questioned by Ivana’s lawyers about other women.
And the Division of Gaming Enforcement down in New Jersey reviewed my
book. And they actually got his deposition, which I didn’t have. I had an
estimate that came from a very knowledgeable source. And so, I said a hundred,
and they corrected me and said, “No, he only took the Fifth Amendment 97 times.”
Keep that in mind when you hear from Donald Trump about the deposition that
Bill Clinton did about Paula Jones, yeah, which was the basis of the
impeachment. And so here’s Donald, apparently not committing perjury, but
refusing to answer 97 questions about other women, which I think says an awful
lot about his marital life.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Wayne, you’ve
been doing this work for decades. And here you are, after following Donald
Trump for almost half a century, publishing a book again, a revised and updated
book, on Donald Trump. What keeps you going?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well,
Donald does, these days. I’ve been very sick. And so, I decided, when he
started emerging, which was a total surprise to me, really, that he would be
this big—so I’ve opened my door here. I’ve had 50, 60 reporters come through
here. I kept all my old Trump files. Most of them are in this basement. Some of
them are down in the house in Ocean City. And reporters have come through here.
One team of two spent three days in my basement. And so, I’ve been an open door
to every reporter. I haven’t written much myself—one little piece, but I intend
to write some. And, you know, I think it’s a civic duty.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
WAYNE BARRETT: Well, he’s
not—it’s more than that he’s something unlike anything—I mean, you know, I’m a
Democrat. I’m a liberal Democrat. I have voted in my life for candidates on the
Republican line—not often, but sometimes. But I think that this is a man who
is—he’s really not qualified to run the Trump Organization. He’s not fit to run
the Trump Organization. So he’s certainly not fit to run America. The Trump
Organization is a fairly substantial real estate company—certainly not one of
the biggest in Manhattan, as the Times demonstrated. But it’s—you know,
it has some impact on some lives. And he’s so unconcerned about the impact that
he has on some lives, whether there’s any positive element to it, that I don’t
even think he’s fit for that. But I think he represents not just a danger to
America, but because we are such an influence in the world, it’s really a
shocking threat to the world. And so, you know, I’m in a sickbed a lot, but he
gets me up out of it.
AMY GOODMAN: Wayne
Barrett, investigative reporter who worked at The Village Voice for 37
years and continues to report. Juan González and I spoke to him last week at his home, where he’s
largely been confined due to his battle with lung cancer. Wayne Barrett’s
biography of Trump was just republished as an ebook; its title, Trump: The
Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention. Visit our
website at democracynow.org to watch, listen to or read Part
1 of our interview with Wayne Barrett that we ran last week.
We have several job openings: a
news
producer and a senior
video news producer, as well as an office
coordinator. They’re all full-time jobs based here in New York City. Find
out more at democracynow.org.
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