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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJust What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910?o=0In 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 whistleyoung enough that he hadnt 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, hed 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.
(snip)
No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trumps 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: Hardings associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.
(snip)
Whyd Donald do it? Barrett said when I put the question to him. Because he saw these mob guys as pathways to money, and Donald is all about money.
(end snip)
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Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob? (Original Post)
deminks
May 2016
OP
moondust
(19,993 posts)1. Kind of odd
that his mob ties haven't received more scrutiny from the "press." I've even wondered if media are scared of pursuing that line of questioning knowing that he loves to sue and threaten to sue people, plus they wouldn't want to take down their headline cash cow if that's what he has become.
One of the ongoing problems with extreme wealth concentration is that corrupt oligarchs can afford to hire armies of well-dressed lawyers to bend the law to their advantage and defend most anything, while the good guys may have limited funds available to make their case and thus may be afraid to even try.
Thanks for posting.
Raine1967
(11,589 posts)2. The entire thing is worth a read.
I Can see why he got away with it for so long.
It really has to stop now.
libodem
(19,288 posts)3. Sweet
Greed and graft.