Trump Wonders Where Fat Tony Salerno Is When He Needs Him
You may have noticed that Trump is furious at unions lately, basically for rejecting him and endorsing Biden. After UAW president Shawn Fain spurned his advances, Trump called him “a ‘hopeless case’… a ‘dope’ and a ‘stiff,’ accused him of buying into Biden’s vision on EVs and selling the auto industry ‘right into the big, powerful hands of China. Shawn Fain doesn’t understand this or have a clue,’ Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. ‘Get rid of this dope & vote for DJT. I will bring the Automobile Industry back to our Country.’”
Fain reminded workers that Trump is a “scab” and said “Donald Trump is a billionaire, and that’s who he represents. If Donald Trump ever worked in an auto plant, he wouldn’t be a UAW member. He’d be a company man trying to squeeze the American worker. Donald Trump stands against everything we stand for as a union.” A few days later, on Face The Nation, Fain added that “Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class. And that’s contrary to everything that working-class people stand for.”
It was smart of Fain to bring up Trump’s history and it’s a very long history. In 2016 Ted Cruz picked up on Trump’s Mafia connections when he was a real estate developer and mobsters Fat Tony Salerno and Paul Castellano controlled the NYC building trades unions. PolitiFact checked out Cruz’s accusations.
"There have been multiple media reports about Donald's business dealings with the mob, with the mafia," Cruz said Feb. 28. "Maybe his taxes show those business dealings are a lot more extensive than has been reported."
…Trump was first tied to the mafia in the 1980s, when a $7.8 million subcontract for Trump Plaza was awarded to S&A Concrete, according to Fortune. The company, as Cruz correctly says, was partially owned by Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family.
Trump himself acknowledged as much in a December 2015 interview with the Wall Street Journal, admitting that S&A Concrete was "supposedly associated with the mob."
"Virtually every building that was built was built with these companies," he said, adding, "These guys were excellent contractors. They were phenomenal. They could do three floors a week in concrete. Nobody else in the world could do three floors a week. I mean they were unbelievable. Trump Tower, other buildings."
TIME and Daily Beast have speculated that Trump Tower was also built with mafia influence, though the evidence is less concrete.
Trump’s alleged mob dealings were not confined to New York. According to reports from the Huffington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump made a deal in Atlantic City with Kenneth Shapiro, an associate of mob boss Nicky Scarfo, and mob-connected labor boss Daniel Sullivan.
Trump seemed aware of this, calling Shapiro "a third-rate, local real estate mafia" and Sullivan "the guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa."
Nonetheless, in 1981, Trump leased a portion of the land for Trump Plaza and Casino from a company the two men controlled, according a report by New Jersey gaming regulators. The company refused to cooperate with the authorities, and Trump eventually ended the partnership and bought out their shares.
Later Trump brought on Sullivan as a labor negotiator at the Grand Hyatt Hotel and introduced the man to his own banker, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Through intermediaries Trump bought the property for the casino from the "crown prince" of the Philadelphia mob, Salvatore Testa, for $1.1 million in 1982. Multiple media reports and an unauthorized biography about Trump allege this was more than twice its market value. (Testa purchased the property in 1977 for $195,000.)
According to The Federalist, two construction companies controlled by Nicky Scarfo ended up building Trump Plaza and Casino.
"You had contractors that were supposedly mob-oriented all over Atlantic City," Trump said when the Wall Street Journal asked him about it, adding that "every single casino company used the same companies, just I hope you will say that."
A few years later, Trump’s organized crime connections extended overseas. In 1992, a Senate subcommittee named Danny Leung, who was then the vice president for foreign marketing at Trump Taj Mahal, as an associate of the Hong Kong-based organized crime group 14K Triad.
"Leung has also given complimentary tickets for hotel rooms and Asian shows to numerous members and associates of Asian organized crime," reads the report, which also identified three other triad-connected business associates or former employees of Trump’s gambling empire.
According to gaming regulators, Leung "flew in 16 Italian organized crime figures from Canada who stole more than $1 million from the casino in a credit scam," reported the New York Daily News in 1995. "The incident was never reported because Trump never filed charges."
…And there’s Felix Sater, "a twice-convicted Russian émigré who served prison time and had documented mafia connections" and the subject of the ABC story Cruz referenced.
Sater pleaded guilty to a charge of money laundering in 1998 and was indicted again in 2000 for taking part in a $40 million stock scheme involving four Mafia families, according to the New York Times report.
From 2003 to 2007, Sater traveled the country promoting projects for Trump, and his company was a partner in the Trump SoHo hotel. Trump told the Times he "never knew that."
Three years later, Sater returned to the Trump Organization and had business cards that described him as Trump’s "senior advisor," the AP reported. Trump told the AP that he’s "not familiar" with Sater.
…We rate the claim True.
Around the same time, tax expert, Trump expert and law professor David Cay Johnson wrote that “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s 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: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers… Trump’s career has benefited from a decades-long and largely successful effort to limit and deflect law enforcement investigations into his dealings with top mobsters, organized crime associates, labor fixers, corrupt union leaders, con artists and even a one-time drug trafficker whom Trump retained as the head of his personal helicopter service.”
With [Mafia attorney Roy] Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano— at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery delays.
…FBI agents subpoenaed Trump in 1980 to ask about his dealing with John Cody, a Teamsters official described by law enforcement as a very close associate of the Gambino crime family. The FBI believed that Cody previously had obtained free apartments from other developers. FBI agents suspected that Cody, who controlled the flow of concrete trucks, might get a free Trump Tower apartment. Trump denied it. But a female friend of Cody’s, a woman with no job who attributed her lavish lifestyle to the kindness of friends, bought three Trump Tower apartments right beneath the triplex where Donald lived with his wife Ivana. Cody stayed there on occasion and invested $500,000 in the units. Trump, Barrett reported, helped the woman get a $3 million mortgage without filling out a loan application or showing financials.
In the summer of 1982 Cody, then under indictment, ordered a citywide strike— but the concrete work continued at Trump Tower. After Cody was convicted of racketeering, imprisoned and lost control of the union, Trump sued the woman for $250,000 for alteration work. She countersued for $20 million and in court papers accused Trump of taking kickbacks from contractors, asserting this could “be the basis of a criminal proceeding requiring an attorney general’s investigation” into Trump. Trump then quickly settled, paying the woman a half-million dollars. Trump said at the time and since then that he hardly knew those involved and there was nothing improper his dealings with Cody or the woman.
There were other irregularities in Trump’s first big construction project. In 1979, when Trump hired a demolition contractor to take down the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower, he hired as many as 200 non-union men to work alongside about 15 members of the House Wreckers Union Local 95. The non-union workers were mostly illegal Polish immigrants paid $4 to $6 per hour with no benefits, far below the union contract. At least some of them did not use power tools but sledgehammers, working 12 hours a day or more and often seven days a week. Known as the “Polish brigade,” many didn’t wear hard hats. Many slept on the construction site.
Normally the use of nonunion workers at a union job site would have guaranteed a picket line. Not at this site, however. Work proceeded because the Genovese family principally controlled the union; this was demonstrated by extensive testimony, documents and convictions in federal trials, as well as a later report by the New York State Organized Crime Task Force.
When the Polish workers and a union dissident sued for their pay and benefits, Trump denied any knowledge that illegal workers without hard hats were taking down Bonwit with sledgehammers. The trial, however, demonstrated otherwise: Testimony showed that Trump panicked when the nonunion Polish men threatened a work stoppage because they had not been paid. Trump turned to Daniel Sullivan, a labor fixer and FBI informant [and, remember, according to Trump, “the guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa”], who told him to fire the Polish workers.
Trump knew the Polish brigade was composed of underpaid illegal immigrants and that S&A was a mob-owned firm, according to Sullivan and others. "Donald told me that he was having his difficulties and he admitted to me that— seeking my advice— that he had some illegal Polish employees on the job. I reacted by saying to Donald that 'I think you are nuts,'" Sullivan testified at the time. "I told him to fire them promptly if he had any brains." In an interview later, Sullivan told me the same thing.
In 1991, a federal judge, Charles Stewart Jr., ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate a fiduciary duty, or duty of loyalty, to the workers and their union and that the “breach involved fraud and the Trump defendants knowingly participated in his breach.” The judge did not find Trump’s testimony to be sufficiently credible and set damages at $325,000. The case was later settled by negotiation, and the agreement was sealed.
More recently— during his occupation of the White House— Trump implemented policies that weakened unions, such as appointing anti-labor judges— particularly Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh— and rolling back regulations that protected workers' rights. He engaged in public feuds with specific unions, including the United Steelworkers and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, during contract negotiations for his businesses. He rescinded Obama's Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, which required federal contractors to comply with certain labor standards and banned mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts and he weakened the “persuader rule” which aimed to prevent companies from hiring consultants to discourage unionization efforts. Trump, union members recall, dissolved the National Labor Relations Board's Division of Program Studies, which conducted research on labor relations and trends. He also issued an executive order making it easier for federal employees to be fired, potentially weakening job security and making them less likely to unionize.
Even more recently, Ron Filipkowski reported that when Biden became the first president to join a picket line this past September for the UAW, the Trump campaign scrambled to do something to counter the move. Michigan is a critical state for both campaigns, and when auto workers went on strike last fall, Biden made it clear that he was on the side of the workers, and for that he was recently rewarded with the UAW endorsement. What did Trump do? He did what he always does— used money and stagecraft to create the illusion of substance while doing absolutely nothing to help anyone… The Trump campaign paid Drake Enterprises, a non-union auto parts shop in Clinton Township, $20,000 to stage a fake event with people holding up ‘Union Members for Trump’ signs behind him to make it look like he was holding a rally with union auto workers on strike. During the rally, he rambled nonsense that if he wasn't elected the entire American auto industry was going to move to China. Reporters interviewing attendees at the rally learned that virtually none of the people holding signs belonged to any union— they were just told to hold them behind Trump while he spoke. Some participants interviewed said that they did not see any striking workers in attendance. Now, we learn that the entire thing was a paid, fake production from the Trump campaign, just like everything else they do.”
