The Making of Donald Trump (8 page)

Damin soon filed for bankruptcy and reorganized as Nimad (
Damin
spelled backward). The new firm kept Trump’s business,
which is not unusual in itself; when a debtor retains possession of a firm, as the Weichselbaums did, the debtor often retains contracts with customers. But the firm went bankrupt again, and again reorganized, this time as American Business Aviation.

Why did Trump Plaza continue to pay $100,000 per month and Trump’s Castle $80,000 a month for helicopter services from a firm that was so financially unstable when Trump could have hired any its better-financed and more experienced competitors? One obvious question is whether Weichselbaum was perhaps providing some other valuable service sub rosa.

Trump himself was no drug user. He didn’t even drink or smoke. But it was open knowledge in Atlantic City that high rollers could get anything they wanted as long as it was done discreetly. For those who brought lots of cash, signed big markers, or were assigned complimentary suites, certain butlers were known to provide, for a price, whatever the customer wanted—be it illicit sex, drugs, or anything else. As a state casino lawyer told me shortly after I arrived in Atlantic City in 1988, “We regulate what goes on involving gaming, not what people do in the privacy of hotel rooms.”

Another glaring question is whether Trump financed any of Weichselbaum’s activities. Trump was known to be an avid investor seeking big returns, whether through greenmailing competing casino companies—buying controlling shares in rival casino companies and selling back those shares at a higher price—or using Roy Cohn’s influence with mob-owned companies and mob-controlled unions.

Joey Weichselbaum’s pay and perks were unusual.
Even though he had officially left the twice-failed helicopter company, Weichselbaum continued to receive his $100,000 annual salary. He also retained his company car and driver. All the while, he was deeply involved in drug trafficking in Florida,
Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee, according to his 1985 indictment by a federal grand jury in Cincinnati. One shipment alone involved three-quarters of a ton of marijuana.

In addition to his helicopter business, Joey Weichselbaum was an officer at a used-car dealership north of Miami—Bradford Motors, which he also owned in partnership with his brother. Couriers from Colombia delivered drugs there, which were sometimes sold on the spot. According to the indictment, Weichselbaum put cocaine in vehicles himself or handed it over to couriers who delivered it to buyers. The dealership, essentially a front for drug trafficking, paid phony commissions for the sale of cars in an effort to hide the real business, as court records show.

As a casino owner in Atlantic City, Trump had every reason to avoid business dealings with known criminals, which Weichselbaum was even before the drug trafficking and tax evasion charges in Cincinnati. Under the New Jersey Casino Control Act, Trump and all casino owners were “required to establish by clear and convincing evidence” his or her “good character, honesty and integrity. Such information shall include, without limitation, information pertaining to family, habits, character, reputation, criminal and arrest record, business activities, financial affairs, and business, professional and personal associates.”

Yet, instead of dropping the helicopter service, Trump retained American Business Aviation for his casino shuttles and to service his personal helicopter. Trump later acquired three helicopters when he divvied up the old Resorts International casino company in a deal with entertainer Merv Griffin. Trump got the unfinished Taj Mahal casino hotel, Merv the aging Resorts hotel (the original Atlantic City casino). Despite having these three choppers, Trump kept paying more than $2 million per year for Weichselbaum copters.

Two months after Weichselbaum was indicted, the Weichselbaum brothers rented apartment 32-C at the Trump Plaza condominiums on East 61st Street in Manhattan. Trump personally owned apartment 32-C. The rental terms were unusual. Rent was $7,000 per month, which was at the low end of a reasonable rate. The brothers paid $3,000 a month in cash—using checks made out to Donald J. Trump personally—and paid the rest in helicopter services. Short of a costly forensic audit, it would be impossible for any law enforcement agency, including New Jersey casino regulators, to ascertain whether the brothers actually paid any more than the cash rent. What motivated Trump to agree to this arrangement has never been explained.

When Weichselbaum made a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to one of the eighteen counts in the Cincinnati case, something very suspicious happened. His case was transferred out of Ohio for the guilty plea and the sentencing. Logically, the case might have gone to South Florida, where Bradford Motors was located, or to New York, where Weichselbaum lived. Indeed, that is exactly what
Weichselbaum’s Ohio lawyer, Arnold Morelli, sought in a January 30, 1986, motion requesting his case be transferred to either Manhattan or Miami for “the convenience of human beings such as the defendant and witnesses.” Instead, the Weichselbaum case was moved to New Jersey. There it was assigned to Judge Maryanne Trump Barry—Donald Trump’s older sister.

Judge Barry recused herself three weeks later, as judicial ethics required, but the mere act of removing herself from the case came with a powerful message: a sitting federal judge, as well as her husband (lawyer John Barry) and family, repeatedly flew in helicopters connected to a major drug trafficker. Any new judge assigned to the case, including the district’s
presiding judge, was on notice that this case had the potential to embarrass the bench.

When Judge Harold A. Ackerman replaced Trump’s sister, Trump wrote him a letter seeking leniency for Weichselbaum on the drug trafficking charge.
Trump characterized the defendant as “a credit to the community” and described Weichselbaum as “conscientious, forthright and diligent” in his dealings with the Trump Plaza and Trump’s Castle casinos. When asked about the letter under oath in a private 1990 meeting with New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement lawyers, Trump testified that he could not recall whether “he had written any letters of reference to the federal judge who sentenced Weichselbaum.” Subsequently, the division obtained such a letter, and Trump acknowledged that it bore his signature.

Two years later, the DGE had to explain itself publicly after journalist Wayne Barrett’s unauthorized 1992 biography of Trump revealed the letter. The DGE, citing my reporting on the issue, published a report on fourteen issues raised by Barrett. Its report said nothing about what would prompt Trump to write such a letter, whether he actually believed what he wrote, and what his purpose was in writing it. The DGE lawyers merely recorded Trump’s denial, then later his admission that he had in fact signed the letter. That was typical of the DGE lawyers, who declined again and again to ask probing questions that might raise deeper issues about Trump’s fitness to hold a license.

Likewise, the DGE’s response to Barrett’s book did not request an explanation of the unusual terms under which Trump rented an apartment he personally owned to the Weichselbaum brothers. As with other matters—like the accusations made by high roller Bob Libutti—the DGE took
Trump at his word and avoided asking questions that might require more investigation.

Judge Ackerman gave Weichselbaum a sentence that stood in stark contrast to the sentences levied on the others named in the Cincinnati indictment. The small fish got sentences of up to twenty years; Weichselbaum, the ringleader, got three. He served only eighteen months. When
he was up for early release, Weichselbaum told his parole officer that he already had work lined up. He was Donald Trump’s new helicopter consultant. He also said he would be moving into Trump Tower. While he was behind bars, Weichselbaum’s girlfriend bought two adjoining thirty-ninth-story Trump Tower apartments (numbered 49-A and 49-B because Trump skipped tenth-floor numbers to inflate the apparent height of his signature building erected a few years earlier). The price was $2.4 million. Trump confirmed to the DGE that he believed Weichselbaum moved into Trump Tower and lived with a girlfriend after he was released from prison, but said he had no contact with him except for seeing him in the building.

Weichselbaum also told his probation officer that he had known about Marla Maples, Trump’s mistress, long before that relationship became public knowledge. He said he tried to talk Trump into ending the affair. He said Trump asked him to let Marla stay at the Trump Plaza high-rise apartment the Weichselbaum brothers rented from him, just a few blocks from Trump Tower. The DGE dismissed this, saying simply that it was “not in possession of any credible information which would suggest that DJT asked Weichselbaum to permit his friend Marla Maples to reside in the Weichselbaum condominium. DJT has emphatically denied this allegation.”

The report offered no indication that the DGE had interviewed Weichselbaum, his brother, Maples, the probation officer,
or anyone else who might have contradicted Trump’s denial. Again, not asking questions was key to how the DGE protected its own reputation while simultaneously protecting casino owners from themselves.

As a casino owner, Trump could have lost his license for associating with Weichselbaum. But the DGE never asked whether he had any financial entanglement, obviously undisclosed, with Weichselbaum or anyone connected to him, including whether he had staked any of the drug deals, based on its publicly released reports. Without the DGE putting into the public record the very obvious questions, together with the answers, about what motivated Trump to make such risky moves—including denying the letter he wrote seeking soft treatment for Weichselbaum—we can only speculate about what may have influenced Trump’s conduct regarding the drug trafficker.

Trump called my home in spring 2016, when I was working on a long piece for
Politico
magazine about his ties to various criminals. After a few questions about what I was up to, Trump asked what I wanted to know, even though he already had my twenty-one questions in writing. I asked what motivated him to write the letter for Weichselbaum. Trump said he “hardly knew” the man and didn’t remember anything about him. When I reminded Trump that he said on national television just a few months earlier that he has “the world’s greatest memory,” Trump just said that “that was long ago.”

As Trump often does in calls to journalists, he told me he liked some of my work and that I had been fair at times. Then, with a pause, he added that if he didn’t like what I was about to publish he would sue me. That last comment surprised me a bit. Trump knows that I am not intimidatable. I reminded him that he is a public figure. Under the law, that means a libel
suit would require him to show that I wrote something with reckless disregard for the truth—something no one has ever accused me of in nearly fifty years of investigative reporting.

“I know I’m a public figure but I’ll sue you anyway,” he said before ringing off.

Weichselbaum was not the last unsavory character Trump got close to. Much more recently, Trump chose to work with a convicted art thief who goes by the name “Joey No Socks,” as well as with the son of a Russian mob boss, a man with a violent history … and there’s video to prove it.

B
efore Donald Trump could erect Trump Tower—his signature building—on Fifth Avenue, he had to knock down the Bonwit Teller department store, which had catered to fashionable women since 1929.

Bonwit’s twelve-story façade was adorned with a pair of giant bas-relief panels considered priceless examples of the Art Deco era: two naked women with flowing scarves, dancers perhaps, cut in limestone. The building’s entry featured an immense grillwork made from Benedict nickel, hammered aluminum, and other materials, which gave it the impression of a lusciously large piece of jewelry when backlit at night.
American Architect
magazine’s 1929 appraisal of the building described it as “a sparkling jewel in keeping with the character of the store.”

Trump assured those worried about the architectural treasures that he would give them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art if removal was not prohibitively expensive, a promise he would not keep.

Instead of hiring an experienced demolition contractor, Trump chose Kaszycki & Sons Contractors, a window washing business owned by a Polish émigré. Upward of two hundred men began demolishing the building in midwinter 1980. The men worked without hard hats.
They lacked facemasks, even though asbestos—known to cause incurable cancers—swirled all around them. They didn’t have goggles to protect their eyes from the bits of concrete and steel that sometimes flew through the air like bullets. The men didn’t have power tools either; they brought down the twelve-story building with sledgehammers.

Trump kept an eye on the project, not just when visiting the site (where photographs show him smiling under a hard hat), but from an office he rented directly across Fifth Avenue, which offered him an unobstructed view.

The demolition workers were not American citizens, but “had recently arrived from Poland,” a federal court later determined. The court also found that “they were undocumented and worked ‘off the books.’ No payroll records were kept, no Social Security or other taxes were withheld and they were not paid in accordance with wage laws. They were told they would be paid $4.00 or in some cases $5.00 an hour for working 12-hour shifts seven days a week. In fact, they were paid irregularly and incompletely.”

Many members of the demolition crew, which became known as the Polish Brigade, lived at the work site,
sleeping through the bitter cold on bare concrete floors. The crew numbered about thirty or forty in the daytime, but swelled to as many as two hundred at night, when few people would be around the tony business district to observe the demolition work.

Fed up that their paychecks kept bouncing, some of the
workers corralled Thomas Macari, Trump’s personal representative. They showed him to the edge of one of the higher floors and asked if he would like them to hang him over the side. The workers, likely hungry, demanded their pay. Otherwise, no work.