salerno, fat tony

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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">salon manafort:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div class="text-40 text parbase section" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><strong>Early 2000s: </strong>Manafort begins working for Donbas billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch.</font></p></div><div class="text text-41 parbase section" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong>2001:</strong> Paul Cohen and Julius Nasso <a href="http://variety.com/2001/film/news/nasso-cohen-make-theirs-manhattan-1117792003/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">launch</a> Manhattan Pictures International, a New York-based motion picture distribution and production company. Manafort is part of the team behind the new company.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> Nasso is arrested in 2002 by federal agents, and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/feb/18/news1" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">pleads</a> guilty in 2003 for using<b> Gambino family mob enforcers to extort money from the actor Steven Seagal</b>. He spends more than a year in prison.</span></font></p></div><div class="text-42 text parbase section" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Nasso was friendly with Trump.</b> In a story in the <em>New York Post</em> from December 1999, Nasso says he asked Trump’s opinion of Abe Hirschfeld before deciding to do business with him on the film <em>The Prince of Central Park</em>.</font></p></div><div class="text-43 text parbase section" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I checked him out with Donald Trump. Donald said he was a nice guy,” Nasso told the paper.</font></p></div><div class="text parbase text-44 section" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="margin: 1em 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Julius Nasso has an uncle who is also named Julius Nasso. The elder Nasso owned the Julius Nasso Concrete Company, which, in 1975, entered into a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/16/nyregion/convicted-crime-chief-charged-in-bid-rigging.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">joint venture</a> with the S&A Concrete Company, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-swam-in-mob-infested-waters-in-early-years-as-an-nyc-developer/2015/10/16/3c75b918-60a3-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html?utm_term=.7abe35825fc6" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">owned by</a> Anthony “<b>Fat Tony” Salerno,</b> boss of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family. Cohn was Salerno’s lawyer. At the time, most of Manhattan’s major development projects had mob involvement, Trump’s included. S&A Concrete “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/trump-swam-in-mob-infested-waters-in-early-years-as-an-nyc-developer/2015/10/16/3c75b918-60a3-11e5-b38e-06883aacba64_story.html?utm_term=.7abe35825fc6" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">supplied </a>building material to the Trump Plaza on Manhattan’s East Side.”</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s go back again to Roger Stone, young eager NixonJugend. After Nixon was tossed out, Stone found work as National Chairman for the Young Republicans, and doing black bag jobs for Reagan in the 1980 election against incumbent president Jimmy Carter. Stone’s proudest achievement in that election was working with Joe McCarthy’s henchman, Roy Cohn, and a mobster named Fat Tony Salerno to bribe New York’s biggest third party, the Liberal Party, to put on the ballot that election’s most popular third party candidate, John Anderson. Decades later, Stone still remembered Roy Cohn fondly:

     He didn't give a shit what people thought, as long as he was able to wield power. He worked the gossip columnists in this city like an organ.

Roger Stone wanted to get the main third-party candidate on the New York state ballot. John Anderson was one of those earnest midwestern centrist Republicans who’d pass for liberal Democrats today. Conventional wisdom at the time held that Anderson drew votes from fellow Republican Reagan, but private polling, and Roger Stone’s experience running “third party patsies” told him the real story: Anderson drained votes from the Dem Party president, Jimmy Carter.

Stone’s problem was that John Anderson waited too long to get his name on New York state’s ballot. So working with Roy Cohn and Fat Tony, the Reagan campaign official bribed Liberal Party leaders to get them to place Anderson’s name on the ballot for them. Here is how Stone tells his story to the Weekly Standard:

    Stone, who going back to his class elections in high school has been a proponent of recruiting patsy candidates to split the other guy's support, remembers suggesting to Cohn that if they could figure out a way to make John Anderson the Liberal Party nominee in New York, with Jimmy Carter picking up the Democratic nod, Reagan might win the state in a three-way race. “Roy says, 'Let me look into it.'” Cohn then told him, “'You need to go visit this lawyer'—a lawyer who shall remain nameless—‘and see what his number is.’ I said, ‘Roy, I don't understand.’ Roy says, ‘How much cash he wants, dumbfuck.’” Stone balked when he found out the guy wanted $125,000 in cash to grease the skids, and Cohn wanted to know what the problem was. Stone told him he didn't have $125,000, and Cohn said, "That's not the problem. How does he want it?"

    Cohn sent Stone on an errand a few days later. “There's a suitcase,” Stone says. “I don't look in the suitcase . . . I don't even know what was in the suitcase . . . I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they're endorsing John Anderson for president. It's a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don't know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal Party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

    [In retrospect, Stone] seems to feel pretty good—now that certain statutes of limitations are up. He cites one of Stone's Rules, by way of Malcolm X, his “brother under the skin”: “By any means necessary.” “Reagan got the electoral votes in New York State, we saved the country,” Stone says with characteristic understatement. “[More] Carter would've been an unmitigated disaster.”

In other words, Roger Stone is boasting about buying American democracy, using the mob and third party candidates. It’s funny, because during last week’s GOP debate, Trump bragged about buying off half the GOP candidates as well as Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, and gaining all the access he wanted by giving them cash...and he also refused to rule out running as a third party candidate.

* * * *

In 1988, Roger Stone was a Big DC lobbyist, working for Black, Manafort & Stone, whose list of dictator-clients included Zaire’s Mobutu, deposed dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s deposed dictator, and the apartheid-backed Angolan death squad thug and witch burner, Jonas Savimbi. Stone got partial credit in creating the most notorious racist political ad in modern times to help elect George Bush Sr in 1988 — the Willie Horton ad, used to frighten white American voters into believing that a President Dukakis would open up the prisons and jails on weekends, allowing sexually-charged black criminals to run wild in white suburban neighborhoods, raping and strangling white women for kicks.

By this time, Trump had already started working with Roger Stone. Both were big fans of Roy Cohn; both enjoyed talking like Goodfellas characters in public and watching the normals swoon over their macho act. But more than anything, both were interested in cashing in on the booming casino business.

Sometimes this meant buying favors from politicians to get casinos opened; sometimes it meant running dirty campaigns to get rival casinos closed. This is what happened in 2000, when Trump and Stone were fined $250,000 for setting up a fake “family values” front group in New York, the Institute for Law and Society, to run a series of racist ads against a planned Indian casino in the Catskills that Trump feared would drain business from his casinos in Atlantic City.

mark ames 2015
<a href="https://pando.com/2015/08/11/behind-scenes-donald-trump-roger-stone-show/">https://pando.com/2015/08/11/behind-scenes-donald-trump-roger-stone-show/</a>

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