mafia / org crime

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refers to organized criminal orgs, see russian

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https://www.ecowatch.com/brazil-amazon-wildlife-criminal-networks-2646841421.html

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AN 7 25 PROSECUTED HUMAN TRAFFIC AND EPSTEIN PAL gISANE

Firing of 'high-profile' prosecutor shows Trump 'is not thinking clearly': analysis

https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.

:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:

There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:

And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.

So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?

Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...

That’s right.

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.

Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.

Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.

And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.

But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.

I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.

That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.

So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.

There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.

And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.

And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.

So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?

Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.

Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.

That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.

Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

It’s odd.

The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.

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Lew Wasserman - Wikipedia

According to Dan Moldea's survey Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (which inspired Clara and Julia Kuperberg's 2017 TV documentary Ronald Reagan: un Président Sur Mesure), Wasserman was the link between the Mafia, the Hollywood film industry and Reagan, who obtained very lucrative deals as an actor with Wasserman as his agent. By 1947, just after Al Capone died, and still with the help of his alliance with the underworld, Wasserman was instrumental in helping Reagan to become president of the Screen Actors Guild, which kicked-off Reagan's rise to power. Reagan allowed MCA to work both as a producer as well as an agent, which enabled the Mafia to earn a huge income.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/giuliani-trump-corruption/

no lnx

Rudy Giuliani

Donald Trump

Corruption

Giuliani and Trump: Bound by Corruption From the Beginning?

To understand how the onetime odd couple became partners in political crime, you have to go back to 1980s New York and a tale of money laundering, mortgage fraud, and, yes, an election.

By Tom Robbins

October 11, 2019

Then-President-elect Donald Trump poses with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in New Jersey on November 20, 2016. (AP / Carolyn Kaster, File)

It is a musty notion from a bygone era, but once upon a time the idea that Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump could be a tag team in search of political dirt on common enemies was as foreign as the Ukrainian soil they now till.

In the New York of the 1980s, when both rose to prominence, they were at opposite poles of the civic landscape.

One was a swaggering crime-buster taking down Mafia bosses, Wall Street predators, and corrupt politicians. The other was a rules-bending real estate tycoon, a shiny emblem of the age of Greed Is Good, bent on success at any cost.

Yet both reveled in public brazenness. Giuliani walked stockbrokers off the trading floor in handcuffs. Trump ripped down precious landmarks to make way for his buildings. Both were also fluent in the language spoken among the elite of New York deal-makers, where favors are traded, punches are pulled, and the public interest always finishes a dismal last.

And as laughingly obvious as it is today, those of us back then who cheered on the prosecutor, while raking the muck on the developer, eventually learned the hard way that these two were cut from the same cloth, destined for a partnership far more enduring than their many marriages.

The first glimmerings of that lesson surfaced one night in an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village as Jack Newfield, the legendary investigative digger, and I dined with a federal agent named Tony Lombardi.

Although technically employed by the Internal Revenue Service, Lombardi’s only apparent duties were to serve as the trusted special investigator for Giuliani, then the hard-charging United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

While Giuliani had at his beck and call a squad of FBI agents and other investigators, he preferred Lombardi for sensitive assignments. It was Lombardi, a dapper man given to double-breasted suits and pocket hankies, who was asked to look afte the unstable daughter of a judge facing corruption charges, who had been persuaded to provide testimony for the prosecution against her own mother. It was Lombardi who was detailed to work on an investigation into city contracts granted to a health consultant rumored to have been the lover of Mayor Ed Koch, against whom Giuliani was then pondering a campaign.

Along with a bevy of other local reporters, we knew that Tony Lombardi was, as our friend and Village Voice colleague Wayne Barrett dubbed him, “the eyes, ears and mouth of Rudy Giuliani.”

That night, amid the opening pleasantries, Lombardi shot the French cuffs from his suit jacket, leaned forward on the table, and announced: “I have another year or so to go with the department, and then I’m going to be head of security for Donald.”

No last name was needed to explain this promising exit plan from public service. This was 1988, and Donald Trump had forced himself into public consciousness like the car alarms that blared mercilessly without stop. He had already put his name on a soaring tower in midtown, repaired an ailing city skating rink in Central Park, launched casinos in Atlantic City, and publicly toyed with the idea of running for president.

Lombardi’s comment was decidedly off-kilter with what was on the menu that evening. Two years earlier, Giuliani had won convictions against a ring of scoundrels who had been happily looting city coffers under the nose of the Koch administration. Most prominent among his scalps was that of Stanley Friedman, the goateed Democratic Party chieftain from the Bronx who had been nailed while attempting a flimflam worth millions on the city’s transportation department.

A former deputy mayor, Friedman had been a partner in the law firm of Roy Cohn: Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Iago, a master of the legal dark arts, and lawyer to some of the biggest mobsters Giuliani was simultaneously pursuing. While Friedman had worked from the top floor of Cohn’s East Side townhouse and law office, Cohn had been on the ground floor offering lessons in the use of bluster, bravado, and outright lies to his prize client and pupil, Donald Trump.

If Rudy Giuliani was the anti-corruption scourge of New York, Cohn’s budding protégé should have been a likely suspect, even a prized quarry.

At the table, Lombardi offered no details about how his richly rewarding job offer had arisen. In the course of business, he said, he had come to know Trump. The two had grown friendly. The discussion then moved on to more pressing matters.

It wasn’t until several years later, thanks to the steady drilling of Barrett and fellow Voice reporter William Bastone, that we learned the back story: At the time of our meeting, Lombardi had recently finished a quiet inquiry on behalf of his boss into allegations that organized crime figures had laundered hefty sums of cash as they bought apartments in Trump Tower, the flagship of the developer’s then-growing empire.

The charge had come from a mob-tied financial consultant facing a federal tax fraud indictment looking to help himself by offering to tell a far more interesting story. The consultant said he had helped the underworld figures—most notoriously, Robert Hopkins, a numbers kingpin working for the Luchese crime family—buy the apartments at Trump’s complex with fraudulent mortgages. The developer himself, the consultant alleged, had been present as suitcases of cash had changed hands at Hopkins’s closing.

The purchase landed Hopkins two apartments worth $2 million on the upper floors of Trump Tower. That’s where the Manhattan DA found him when he was arrested in 1986, charged with orchestrating a mob hit. Hopkins’s defense lawyer? Another partner of Roy Cohn.

This was potentially rich Giuliani territory: the Mafia, bank fraud, and a possibly complicit high-profile figure. But the investigation ended before it even began. Instead of building a case by working his way through knowledgeable witnesses and records, Lombardi went straight to Trump himself with the allegation. He was quickly won over. As the agent later told Barrett in a 1993 Voice story about the episode, he was so impressed with Trump’s openness and honesty that he decided there was nothing to investigate. “The guy met me without an attorney,” Lombardi said. “He answered all my questions. There was never any hesitation.”

All of this, Lombardi insisted, was done with the approval of higher-ups at the US Attorney’s office. “[E]veryone that should have known about this thing knew,” he said.

There was another possible reason for the sudden lack of prosecutorial interest. That spring, Trump began touting Giuliani as a would-be mayor, claiming he could raise $2 million in a half hour if the US Attorney decided to run.

Of course, that was just Trump spin. He did briefly back Giuliani and raised a few thousand for his failed 1989 race, but by 1993 Trump was hedging his bets, hoping for approvals by David Dinkins, the sitting mayor, for his pending projects.

Things didn’t work out for Tony Lombardi in the end. An internal investigation by the IRS faulted him for engaging in prohibited fundraising for Giuliani and abusing his authority with sources. He wound up jilted by Trump, who gave the security job to someone else, and by Giuliani, who never offered him even a nominal post in City Hall. Lombardi died in 2015.

Giuliani now works feverishly on behalf of the man he once investigated. Eyes bulging, waving his phone with McCarthy-like flair as he insists it holds all the damning information he has discovered, he thunders away on the talk shows. Once-loyal fans say they hardly recognize that man. But he’s not the one who has changed. He is the same zealous, win-at-any-cost inquisitor he always was, a genuine “Made in New York” schemer. Just like his client.

Tom Robbins has been investigative journalist in residence at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY since February 2011. He has been a columnist and staff writer at The Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and The New York Observer.

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https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/rudy-giuliani-southern-district-us-attorney/

gIULIANI SECURED a dubious distinction earlier this month when he became the second known ex-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York to face investigation by his former office.

The news followed a succession of incriminating allegations against Giuliani. The sources of these leaks are not public, but the information behind them comes from the U.S. Attorney’s office, where Giuliani himself introduced the media leak as one of the most devastating tools in a prosecutor’s arsenal.

The fact that Giuliani — who has advocated a distinct brand of lawlessness as President Donald Trump’s TV lawyer — merits the attention of federal investigators only emphasizes the through-the-looking-glass quality of Attorney General William Barr’s Department of Justice. The only other Southern District U.S. Attorney to be implicated in a potential crime by his own office was Morton S. Robson, who was accused of receiving a bribe from :{Roy Cohn:(style="background-color:#ffcc66ff"):}: to drop a case. (The prosecutor was never charged and Cohn was acquitted.)

All sorts of melodramatic language has been deployed to describe Donald Trump’s presidency over the last couple of years: It’s a treasonous conspiracy to undermine American democracy and install a puppet regime controlled by our enemies; it’s a slow-motion fascist coup, seeking to undo civil rights and cultural diversity and institute a white-supremacist theocracy.

What if it was never anything quite so grandiose? Now that the Trump regime is beginning to crack and crumble — one piece at a time, and without the satisfying, cathartic crash so many people have longed for since the fall of 2016 — it looks a lot like something more familiar: a second-rate mob drama.

There’s nothing original about this metaphor, which quite likely isn’t even a metaphor. It’s been there all along: Pulitzer-winning reporter David Cay Johnston, who has followed Donald Trump’s career for four decades, has written extensively about Trump’s longtime connections to organized crime, as have numerous other journalists, including Salon's Heather Digby Parton. Those connections clearly go back to Trump’s early days of doing shifty deals in the bottomed-out market of 1970s Manhattan real estate, where the only way to build anything, buy anything or make anything happen was to work with the made men and their allies.

Investigative reporter Craig Unger’s new book "House of Trump, House of Putin," which does indeed allege a sinister relationship between the Russian president and our own (and endorses the theory that embarrassing sexual kompromat plays a role), largely traces the link through Trump’s byzantine business empire and his dealings with the Russian mob. Unger’s case is complicated and a lot of it is circumstantial; he believes, for example, that Trump was a person of interest to Russian intelligence clear back to the Soviet period. His contention that the Russian crime lords and oligarchs who began arriving in New York in the ‘80s used real estate in Trump Tower and other Trump properties as vehicles for money-laundering, and that this arrangement was more than mere coincidence or convenience, is pretty convincing.

Of course the mob-boss analogy exploded back into the headlines this week, after Paul Manafort’s conviction on eight charges of financial fraud (entirely unrelated to his work for Trump, in fairness) and Michael Cohen’s plea-bargain admission that he had orchestrated payments to the president’s alleged former lovers (or two of them, anyway), in a blatant end-around of campaign finance laws. As the New York Times observed in a front-page article — as usual, after everyone else had said the same thing — Trump’s embittered responses about who had been a “rat” and who hadn’t, and whether “flipping” to cooperate with prosecutors ought to be illegal, seemed straight out of the mobbed-up New York of 1980s Hollywood movies.

I can’t even say it was startling to encounter the president of the United States talking (or tweeting) like some goombah two notches below John Gotti holding forth in a Queens Boulevard diner. Can you? It should be obvious by now that this is a person with no perception of boundaries, so massively narcissistic that he either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care what people from the more respectable quadrants of society think of him. Indeed, Trump’s ability to shock the bourgeoisie — to use that term very loosely — is an important aspect of his supposed mass appeal. Just as his fans celebrate his shameless vulgarity, I think they also love his evident criminality, which may bespeak profound cynicism not just about politics but about human nature.

What I found amusing, and perhaps oddly revelatory, was that Trump felt the need to explain to Fox News viewers what the term “flipping” meant. Because there is literally no one in America — not the 86-year-old retired school-bus driver in North Dakota, not anyone — whose consciousness has not been shaped by endless hours of gangland dramas and police procedurals and zany mobster comedies produced since “The Godfather” was released in 1972. Everybody knows what flipping is, and everybody knows that’s what Michael Cohen just did to his former boss; the possibility had been discussed in the media for weeks beforehand.

But Trump has no idea what people know and don’t know, which strikes me as an important insight. His cultural references and his reality framework are decades out of date, which is probably why he’s so obsessed with violent crime (which in the real world is at historically low levels, especially in the city where he has lived his entire life). No matter what Trump says or what his devotees pretend to believe about him, he has virtually no contact with the lives of ordinary people, and perceives them only as hazy extras in a mid-century movie where he, of course, is the hero. Perhaps he understands them as innocents or rubes or marks or lovable pets — and those are the ones he claims to like! — although it’s not healthy to venture too far into speculative Trumpian psychology. But he presumes they know nothing about the stuff tough guys like him have to deal with, such as having your longtime personal attorney "flip" on you and "rat" you out.

The simpler way to say this is that Donald Trump is a mobster, and he’s been a mobster all his life. He’s sitting inside a vast palace of corruption, looking down at the peasants gathered at the gates. How should he know what non-mobsters think or believe? Why should he even be interested?

This isn’t an idle observation. It might be a key to understanding this strange moment in American history. I’ve devoted a lot of mental effort over the last couple of years to making sense of the “Donald Trump era,” suggesting that it inaugurated a new age of revolutionary chaos, or marked the next stage of what Jean Baudrillard called World War IV, the post-9/11 internal conflict within the Western world. I still believe those big-think questions have some salience, but in terms of the current specific situation in American politics, it might be a lot simpler than that. Maybe Trump is just a big old crook, and the lawmen are now hunting him in classic fashion, by following the money.

It’s worth noting that Robert Mueller and several members of his team have considerable experience in tracking and cracking both organized crime and white-collar crime (which are highly similar in structural terms, albeit with more broken bones and dead bodies attached to the former). They’ve been trying to find a way into the criminal edifice of the Trump empire, which is guarded by mist, shadows and dragons, and now they’ve got one: The blatantly stupid mishandling of some payoffs to old girlfriends, which probably happened that way because nobody involved even understood they were illegal. As Donald Trump undoubtedly knows, Al Capone was probably responsible for dozens of murders. He was never even charged with any of them, but wound up in federal prison for tax evasion.

Who, we might add, did Trump hire as his personal attorney, after jettisoning Cohen and John Dowd and Ty Cobb and whoever else? Rudy Giuliani, of course, who has made a monstrous hash of his TV appearances. But Rudy got elected mayor of New York in the first place because he had broken up the mob as U.S. attorney in the early ‘90s. If there’s one area where he has unquestioned legal expertise, it’s the strengths and weaknesses of criminal enterprises.

Trump’s mob-boss outburst on Fox News, we might add, came even before we learned two more mob-style news items. A pair of Trump’s most trusted confidants, American Media CEO David Pecker (effectively the publisher of National Enquirer) and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, were granted immunity in the Michael Cohen investigation. This was presumably so they could tell federal prosecutors in New York exactly how Trump funneled money through Cohen to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal.

Weisselberg, a man who stays out of the limelight and is believed to know almost everything about Donald Trump's finances, is obviously a figure of enormous concern to the president. There’s been a whole lot of overheated speculation from the likes of Chris Cillizza at CNN and Trump ghostwriter Tony Schwartz about what Weisselberg (or Pecker) might have to say about other matters to other investigators, now that he can’t be prosecuted (or pardoned, for that matter) for whatever less-than-legal stuff he may have signed onto. But Weisselberg has not spoken to Mueller or his grand jury, as far as we know, and I suspect that’s missing the point.

What the media's many students of scandal-ology keep assuming, or hoping, is that some huge and dramatic reveal is coming, the proverbial smoking gun that will definitively prove that Donald Trump conspired with the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails, spread lies on the internet and “steal” the election. Trump will be hauled away in chains, every elected Republican in the country will resign in disgrace and Nancy Pelosi will unanimously be elected emperor for life. Or something. I have a prediction to make: Nope. I am fairly well convinced that Robert Mueller has concluded no such evidence exists, and that the 2016 Trump campaign's collaboration with Russian agents — while dubious and sleazy as all get-out — was pretty much a freelance or impromptu sideline endeavor to the much larger criminal project of House Trump.

When Trump protests, in public and apparently in private, that the criminal conspiracy in which Michael Cohen has implicated him was an obscure technical violation of campaign finance law and had nothing to do with Russian collusion, he is 100 percent correct. He too is missing the point. Turning Cohen against the guy who believed he was the unassailable capo di tutti capi —and to some extent turning Pecker and Weisselberg too — was less about the specific charges in the Cohen case than about a demonstration of prosecutorial power. If you're looking for some reassurance about the enduring force of American institutions, there it is: The man who has consistently maintained he is above the law is not. Now the mob boss in the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue knows that his enemies have him encircled and have identified his weak spots, and that even his most trusted lieutenants can be trusted no longer.

This may well be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, although its endgame could take a long while yet. I have a further prediction, which is that we will probably never know for sure what happened between Donald Trump and the Russians, or exactly what kind of leverage Vladimir Putin has over Trump. That will be endlessly disappointing to those who want the real world to have the plot points of a miniseries (which, in fairness, is almost everyone), but it doesn’t mean Trump will get off scot-free.

Craig Unger’s book, which overtly seeks to prove the most grandiose case for collusion (and gets at least part of the way there), is full of so much arcane back story and rampant speculation that it reads like a first draft abandoned by John le Carré as too hard to follow. Mueller appears to have given up on pursuing those fairytales and legends, and is following a much simpler narrative. He believes Donald Trump is running a moderately successful but not very efficient crime family, which blundered into pulling off the biggest con job in history. He knows what to do in that situation: Keep on squeezing the money and sooner or later it talks.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genovese_crime_family

Genovese crime family (pronounced [dʒenoˈveːze]) is one of the "Five Families" that dominate organized crime activities in New York City and New Jersey as part of the Mafia (or Cosa Nostra). Often nicknamed the "Ivy League" and "Rolls Royce" of organized crime, the Genovese crime family are rivaled in size only by the Gambino crime family, and are unmatched in terms of power. They have generally maintained a varying degree of influence over many of the smaller mob families outside New York, including ties with the Philadelphia, Patriarca, and Buffalo crime families.

The current "family" was founded by Charles "Lucky" Luciano, and was known as the "Luciano crime family" from 1931 to 1957, when it was renamed after boss Vito Genovese. Originally in control of the waterfront on the West Side of Manhattan and the Fulton Fish Market, the family was run for years by "the Oddfather", Vincent "the Chin" Gigante, who feigned insanity by shuffling unshaven through New York's Greenwich Village wearing a tattered bath robe and muttering to himself incoherently to avoid prosecution.

The Genovese family is the oldest and the largest of the "Five Families". Finding new ways to make money in the 21st century, the family took advantage of lax due diligenceby banks during the housing bubble with a wave of mortgage frauds. Prosecutors say loan shark victims obtained home equity loans to pay off debts to their mob bankers. The family found ways to use new technology to improve on illegal gambling, with customers placing bets through offshore sites via the Internet.

Although the leadership of the Genovese family seemed to have been in limbo after the death of Gigante in 2005, they appear to be the most organized family and remain powerful.^[3] Unique in today's Mafia, the family has benefited greatly from members following the code of Omertà. While many mobsters from across the country have testified against their crime families since the 1980s, the Genovese family has only had 8 members turn state's evidence in its history.^[4]

History

Origins

One of Giuseppe Morello's strongest allies was Ignazio "the Wolf" Lupo, a mobster who controlled Manhattan's Little Italy. In 1903, Lupo married Morello's half sister, uniting both organizations. The Morello-Lupo alliance continued to prosper in 1903, when the group began a major counterfeiting ring with powerful Sicilian mafioso Vito Cascio Ferro, printing $5 bills in Sicily and smuggling them into the United States. New York police detective Joseph Petrosino began investigating the Morello family's counterfeiting operation, the barrel murders and the black hand extortion letters. On November 15, 1909, Morello, Lupo and others were arrested on counterfeiting charges. In February 1910, Morello and Lupo were sentenced to 30 years in prison.The Genovese crime family originated from the Morello gang of East Harlem, the first Mafia family in New York City.^[5] In 1892, Giuseppe Morello arrived in New York from the village of Corleone, Sicily, Italy. Morello's half brothers Nicholas, Vincenzo, Ciro and the rest of his family joined him in New York the following year. The Morello brothers formed the 107th Street Mob and began dominating the Italian neighborhood of East Harlem, parts of Manhattan, and the Bronx.

Mafia-Camorra War

...

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,,.obody who has followed Donald Trump's career, dating back many years before he entered politics, should be surprised by these events. Nor should anyone be surprised that Trump would express "regret" over the fall of Manafort for his many crimes against the United States. As Craig Unger explains in his new book, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia, the developer/casino magnate/reality TV star has cultivated connections with the underworld for decades. He built Trump Tower with illegal immigrant labor and concrete supplied by the Mafia — and gave an apartment there to the girlfriend of a mobbed-up Teamster boss. Millions of dollars have been poured into Trump properties from gangsters around the world in massive money-laundering operations.

He has always felt most comfortable with unsavory figures like Manafort, who should have been indicted and sent to prison for blatant influence peddling during the Housing and Urban Development scandal back in the Ronald Reagan era, and Cohen, who has long done business with crooks in the taxi and real estate sectors in New York City. His infamous attorney Roy Cohn was a mob lawyer indicted three times, who was lucky to escape imprisonment for tax evasion and many other alleged crimes.

The Trump outfit is going down in the time-honored style that marked the decline of La Cosa Nostra. A tough guy like Michael Cohen folds up and squeals exactly the same as Sammy the Bull. And a smart guy like Manafort, who has gotten away with everything and thought he always would, is put away exactly the same as Al Capone, convicted of tax evasion on the testimony of an accountant.

No doubt Trump and his choir will remind us that none of these charges touch on campaign collusion with the Russians, but that is a feeble rejoinder. Special counsel Robert Mueller has already filed preliminary indictments on that aspect of his investigation, of which there will be more to come. Meanwhile, the special counsel will present evidence concerning Trump's Nixonian attempts to obstruct his investigation.

But regardless of what Mueller eventually reveals about the president, the Cohen deal has placed Trump in grave jeopardy. In pleading guilty to felony violations of federal campaign finance statutes, Cohen has said that he paid off Stormy Daniels and another woman in a criminal conspiracy with Trump.

Remember, that plea deal was reached not with Mueller but with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, headed by Trump appointee Geoffrey Berman, and the Department of Justice, headed by Trump appointee Jefferson Beauregard Sessions. While his aides whisper to Fox News that "the president cannot be indicted," Americans will soon realize that the man in the Oval Office is an unindicted co-conspirator — just like Nixon.

The question that faces every member of Congress, and for that matter, every voter, is what to do about it.

To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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salon manaFORT

Early 2000s:Manafort begins working for Donbas billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest oligarch.

2001: Paul Cohen and Julius Nasso launch Manhattan Pictures International, a New York-based motion picture distribution and production company. Manafort is part of the team behind the new company. Nasso is arrested in 2002 by federal agents, and pleads guilty in 2003 for usingGambino family mob enforcers to extort money from the actor Steven Seagal. He spends more than a year in prison.

Nasso was friendly with Trump. In a story in the New York Post from December 1999, Nasso says he asked Trump’s opinion of Abe Hirschfeld before deciding to do business with him on the film The Prince of Central Park.

“I checked him out with Donald Trump. Donald said he was a nice guy,” Nasso told the paper.

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 joint venture with the S&A Concrete Company, owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, 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 “suppliedbuilding material to the Trump Plaza on Manhattan’s East Side.”

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910

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his is part of the Donald Trump story that few know. As Barrett wrote in his book, Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn, in a meeting recounted by a Cohn staffer who told Barrett she was present. This came at a time when other developers in New York were pleading with the FBI to free them of mob control of the concrete business.

From the public record and published accounts like that one, it’s possible to assemble a clear picture of what we do know. The picture shows that 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.

Now that he’s running for president, I pulled together what’s known – piecing together the long history of federal filings, court records, biographical anecdotes, and research from my and Barrett’s files. What emerges is a pattern of business dealings with mob figures—not only local figures, but even the son of a reputed Russian mob boss whom Trump had at his side at a gala Trump hotel opening, but has since claimed under oath he barely knows.

Neither Trump’s campaign spokesperson, Hope Hicks, nor Jason Greenblatt, the executive vice president and chief legal officer at the Trump Organization, responded to several emailed requests for comment on the issues raised in this article.

Here, as close as we can get to the truth, is what really happened.

***

After graduating in 1968 from the University of Pennsylvania, a rich young man from the outer boroughs of New York City sought his fortune on the island of Manhattan. Within a few years Donald J. Trump had made friends with the city’s most notorious fixer, lawyer Roy Cohn, who had become famous as lead counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Among other things Cohn was now a mob consigliere, with clients including “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family, the most powerful Mafia group in New York, and Paul Castellano, head of what was said to be the second largest family, the Gambinos.

This business connection proved useful when Trump began work on what would become Trump Tower, the 58-story high-rise where he still lives when he’s not at his Florida estate.

Anthony 'Fat Tony' Salerno, boss of the Genovese Crime Family, is photographed leaving the U.S. federal courthouse in Manhattan, New York, on February 28, 1985 after his arraignment for two counts of racketeering. | Getty

There was something a little peculiar about the construction of Trump Tower, and subsequent Trump projects in New York. Most skyscrapers are steel girder construction, and that was especially true in the 1980s, says John Cross of the American Iron & Steel Institute. Some use pre-cast concrete. Trump chose a costlier and in many ways riskier method: ready-mix concrete. Ready-mix has some advantages: it can speed up construction, and doesn’t require costly fireproofing. But it must be poured quickly or it will harden in the delivery truck drums, ruining them as well as creating costly problems with the building itself.That leaves developers vulnerable to the unions: the worksite gate is union controlled, so even a brief labor slowdown can turn into an expensive disaster.

Salerno, Castellano and other organized crime figures controlled the ready-mix business in New York, and everyone in construction at the time knew it. So did government investigators trying to break up the mob, urged on by major developers such as the LeFrak and Resnick families. Trump ended up not only using ready-mix concrete, but also paying what a federal indictment of Salerno later concluded were inflated prices for it – repeatedly – to S & A Concrete, a firm Salerno and Castellano owned through fronts, and possibly to other mob-controlled firms. As Barrett noted, by choosing to build with ready-mix concrete rather than other materials, Trump put himself “at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers.”

Salerno and Castellano and other mob families controlled both the concrete business and the unions involved in delivering and pouring it. The risks this created became clear from testimony later by Irving Fischer, the general contractor who built Trump Tower. Fischer said concrete union “goons” once stormed his offices, holding a knife to throat of his switchboard operator to drive home the seriousness of their demands, which included no-show jobs during construction of Trump Tower.

But with 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.

The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise. (While the concrete business was central to the case, the trial also proved extortion, narcotics, rigged union elections and murders by the Genovese and Gambino crime families in what Michael Chertoff, the chief prosecutor, called “the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.'')

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, 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 E. 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.

***

While Trump’s buildings were going up in Manhattan, he was entering a highly regulated industry in New Jersey – one that had the responsibility, and the means, to investigate him and bring the facts to light.

From the beginning, Trump tried to have it both ways. While he leveraged Roy Cohn’s mob contacts in New York, he was telling the FBI he wanted nothing to do with organized crime in Atlantic City, and even proposed putting an undercover FBI agent in his casinos.In April of 1981, when he was considering building a New Jersey casino, he expressed concern about his reputation in a meeting with the FBI, according to an FBI document in my possession and which the site Smoking Gun also posted. “Trump advised Agents that he had read in the press media and had heard from various acquaintances that Organized Crime elements were known to operate in Atlantic City,” the FBI recorded. “Trump also expressed at this meeting the reservation that his life and those around him would be subject to microscopic examination. Trump advised that he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City but he did not wish to tarnish his family’s name.”

Part of the licensing process was supposed to be a deep investigation into his background, taking more than a year for would-be casino owners, but Trump managed to cut that short. As he told the story in The Art of the Deal, in 1981 he threatened to not build in Atlantic City unless New Jersey’s attorney general, John Degnan, limited the investigation to six months. Degnan was worried that Trump might someday get approval for a casino at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, which could have crushed Atlantic City’s lucrative gaming industry, so Degnan agreed to Trump’s terms. Trump seemingly paid Degnan back by becoming an ardent foe of gambling anywhere in the East except Atlantic City—a position that obviously protected his newfound business investment as well, of course.

Trump was required to disclose any investigations in which he might have been involved in the past, even if they never resulted in charges. Trump didn’t disclose a federal grand jury inquiry into how he obtained an option to buy the Penn Central railroad yards on the West Side of Manhattan. The failure to disclose either that inquiry or the Cody inquiry probably should have disqualified Trump from receiving a license under the standards set by the gaming authorities.

Once Trump was licensed in 1982, critical facts that should have resulted in license denial began emerging in Trump’s own books and in reports by Barrett—an embarrassment for the licensing commission and state investigators, who were supposed to have turned these stones over. Forced after the fact to look into Trump’s connections, the two federal investigations he failed to reveal and other matters, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement investigators circled the wagons to defend their work. First they dismissed as unreliable what mobsters, corrupt union bosses and Trump’s biggest customer, among others, had said to Barrett, to me and other journalists and filmmakers about their dealings with Trump. The investigators’ reports showed that they then put Trump under oath. Trump denied any misconduct or testified that he could not remember. They took him at his word. That meant his casino license was secure even though others in the gambling industry, including low-level licensees like card dealers, had been thrown out for far less.

This lapse illustrated a fundamental truth about casino regulation at the

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http://billmoyers.com/story/donald-trump-story-youre-not-hearing/

no link

To readers who follow taxes and finance — subjects often introduced with the adjective “arcane” — David Cay Johnston is one of America’s best-known reporters. Johnston has worked on the staffs of Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and from 1995 to 2008, The New York Times, where his writing on taxes won him a 2001 Pulitzer Prize. He’s branched out to other subjects too: His first book, published in 1992, wasTemples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business.

In a web post last July, Johnston asked 21 questions about Donald Trump’s finances. One pertained to Trump University, subsequently the object of close scrutiny in many venues. Others concerned mysteries about Trump’s charitable donations, his years paying zero income tax, his more recent — and undisclosed — tax returns and some his acquisition of casino licenses and his reputed connections with organized crime.

While there are some financial subjects on which the media has dared to grill the billionaire — ABC’s George Stephanopoulos last month got Trump to deliver a blunt “no” when he asked about the Republican nominee-apparent’s repeated refusal to release his recent tax returns, something every other recent presidential candidate has done — there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.

One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.” As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition called Trump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention.

As Trump cements his leads atop the polls, questions about how he made his billions, and who helped him make them, are starting to take center stage.

Barrett’s quote appeared in a July 31, 2015, CNN online piece by investigative reporter Chris Frates, who added:

The allegations are getting new scrutiny as Trump runs for president, largely on his record as a successful and extraordinarily wealthy businessman. As Trump cements his leads atop the polls, questions about how he made his billions, and who helped him make them, are starting to take center stage.

While the story ran on CNN’s website, it never got any air time on the cable network. I tried to ask Frates why his investigation didn’t get onto TV, but didn’t hear back from him. In any event, nearly 11 months later, those questions about Trump’s financial life have still not reached that elusive center stage. The question is why.

Unlike its TV competitors, ABC News has raised some questions about Trump’s mob relations. Last December, a Good Morning America piece by the network’s investigative master Brian Ross touched on one tendril:Trump’s relationship with a twice-convicted felon, the Russian émigré Felix Sater, who (along with several other felons) occupied office space in Trump Tower. On air, Ross reported that Donald Trump had testified under oath in a civil lawsuit that Sater “helped develop the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium in New York City.” Online, in a simultaneous piece co-written with Matthew Mosk, Ross noted that in 1991, Sater got into an argument with a commodities broker at the bar of a New York restaurant, smashed a margarita glass and with the broken-off stem, slashed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, severing nerves and lacerating his face and jaw. The victim required 110 stitches. Sater was convicted of first-degree assault and sent to prison in 1993. Then, in 2000, he pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges for running a $40 million “pump and dump” stock scam and for, as Mosk and Ross wrote, “collaborating with members of four New York mob families.” Sater served no time, however, because the FBI testified at his sentencing hearing that he was “an important witness on both mob-related and national security matters.”

The BBC had pressed Trump on why he didn’t tell Sater ‘You’re fired!’ after reports surfaced alleging that the Trump associate had organized crime connections.

To date, Trump has danced away from straight answers about his former associates. In a 2013 video deposition for a civil lawsuit, Trump said: “If he [Sater] were sitting in the room right now, I really would not even know what he looked like.” This, Mosk and Ross noted, from a man who “touts his outstanding memory.” During the same deposition, “when asked about how much he knew about Sater’s past,” Mosk and Ross wrote, “Trump said he knew Sater had ‘got into trouble because he got into a barroom fight which a lot of people do.’” Trump added: “I don’t know him very well, but I don’t think he was connected to the Mafia.”

In his on-air piece, Ross pointed out that the BBC had pressed Trump on why he didn’t tell Sater “You’re fired!” after reports surfaced alleging that the Trump associate had organized crime connections. Trump rose from his chair mid-interview.“I hate to do this, but I do have that big group of people waiting so I have to leave,” he said. With that, he walked out of the room. “Trump later said under oath he did not remember being interviewed by the BBC,” Ross went on. In February, Trump’s then-rival Ted Cruz picked up the Trump-Sater story, but the issue died, at least temporarily, with Cruz’s campaign.

In April, The New York Times picked up the baton with a front-page investigation by Mike McIntire about Trump’s close collaboration with Felix Sater and other investors from the former Soviet Union.In McIntire’s words, “What sort of due diligence Mr. Trump did before jumping in with his new partners is unclear. But he, as well as many others, apparently missed some dark spots on Mr. Sater’s résumé.”

Beyond ABC News’ Ross, TV has been even less eager to press inquires about Trump’s history of relations with organized crime. Nor have questions of Trump’s mob ties been much explored in other major news outlets. A notable exception: Johnston, who, in Politico last month, raised yet more questions. One was why Trump relied on ready-mix reinforced concrete construction (mob-controlled) to build his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower and subsequent New York buildings, although steel girders were the usual choice. Another was why, when seeking a license to build casinos in Atlantic City, Trump received special treatment from New Jersey gaming investigators, “Thanks in part to the laxity of New Jersey gaming investigators,” Johnston wrote, “Trump has never had to address his dealings with mobsters and swindlers head-on.” Wayne Barrett calls Trump Tower “a monument to the mob.” He writes of the “sweetheart deals” that delivered the concrete, and the special tax abatements that have continued to roll in for Trump. There, so far as the public is concerned, the matter has rested. Why do the major media, ordinarily eager to fight for their own angles on big stories, lag? Why do the dogs not bark and the chambers not echo?

Trump’s financial dealings, by his own account, constitute his credential for the highest office in the land. They establish his proficiency at running a large organization, and therefore his ability to preside over the United States of America. That these dealings have not made a big story may partly be understood as a shortage of experienced newsroom eyes. Investigative reporting is labor-intensive. Skilled reporters have to be detached from everyday beats and set loose to follow trails that may, in the end, go nowhere. Newsroom buyouts and layoffs have made that harder to do. Experienced old hands are gone. Yet, even as advertising revenue has been slashed, newspaper profits remain at the 15- to 20-percent level. If coverage of Trump’s finances has been thin, that might well be because it’s too expensive — though the cost to democracy of not pursuing such obvious leads is a question that publishers might well be asking themselves.

One hypothesis, broached to me by an experienced reporter, is that news organizations fear Trump’s hair trigger when it comes to lawsuits. In the course of an April interview for his Politico piece, Trump bestowed one of his choice honors on Johnston: “if I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.”

“I’ll sue you” may yet become Trump’s second-most famous line, after “You’re fired.” The litigious Trump is indeed a sensitive fellow. He speaks frequently about “opening up the libel laws.” When pressed by the Washington Post editorial board to explain what he meant, in March, he disappeared into a haze of gobbledygook. But at least so far, it would seem that when it comes to journalists, his greatest sensitivity concerns his net worth. There, the defamation he worries about is to make him out to be smaller than he claims.

Trump Nation book cover

In 2006, Trump sued the financial reporter Timothy O’Brien — once Barrett’s research assistant — as well as the publisher of O’Brien’s book Trump Nation: The Art of Being the Donald, for understating Trump’s wealth. O’Brien wrote of what he called Trump’s “verbal billions.” O’Brien reported that three people close to Trump had estimated his worth at between $150 million and $250 million. Trump claimed to be worth between $4 billion and $6 billion, and maintained that O’Brien’s low estimate had hurt his reputation and cost him specific business deals. Foreshadowing his later outbursts against women who do not meet his standards, Trump told O’Brien: “You can go ahead and speak to guys who have 400-pound wives at home who are jealous of me, but the guys who really know me know I’m a great builder.”

But in 2009, a New Jersey judge threw out Trump’s suit, and in 2011, an appeals court sustained that decision. For, according to New York Times v. Sullivan, statements about public figures have to overleap a very high bar (or, in Trump parlance, wall), to be considered defamatory. They must be made with “actual malice” — that is, “with knowledge that [they are] false or with reckless disregard of whether [they are] false or not.”

So seriously, what do big news organizations, all outfitted with deep pockets, have to fear? One reporter I contacted notes that threats of lawsuits can chill investigations because, even in cases newspapers win, the legal bills can run into millions of dollars. Even deep pockets have limits. It’s also remotely conceivable that the TV networks, already aware of how juicy Trump has been for their bottom lines, are mindful of the possibility, however slim, that if he made his way to the White House he would appoint unfriendly members of the Federal Communications Commission — the officials who license the vastly profitable broadcast stations the networks own in the most lucrative markets.

I doubt it. But various reporters I’ve spoken with offer different explanations for the relative paucity of serious Trump investigations. Wayne Barrett thinks editors downplay Mafia stories because they think the subject is worn out: “The mob is so depleted,” he said. “Editors think it doesn’t feel real anymore. It feels historical.” Still, tabloids know that front pages mentioning mobsters sell papers. Another theory is that journalists are overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of Trump material. One major network news figure told me as much. A reporter with another major news organization said, “In one 24-hour news cycle there can be three different Trump story lines going. That sucks all the oxygen out of the room. It’s ADD on our part.” He added that TV stories needs pictures. But pictures of Trump with his erstwhile collaborators are not hard to come by, and surely there are more than enough news cycles left in the months to come. Indeed, this reporter tells me, “We have some things in the works.”

Reporters have collected dots, but it remains to connect them. As Walter Lippmann wrote, the mission of journalism is “to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act.”

TOPICS: MEDIA

TAGS: 2016 ELECTION, DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, ECONOMIC INEQUALITY, INCOME TAX, MAFIA, MAINSTREAM MEDIA, MEDIA CRITICISM

Mayor Fiorella, artichokes M@M

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Lansky

BS?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meyer-lansky-ii/dinner-with-lucky-luciano_b_5143501.html

lucky luc

On March 30, 2014, my Aunt Sandi -- Sandra Lansky Lombardo -- celebrated the launch of her book *Daughter of the King: Growing Up in Gangland*, about her life as Meyer Lansky's youngest child, and only daughter.

Her book's launch, hosted by the Jewish Museum of Florida in South Beach, Miami, had a packed house. After Aunt Sandi read excerpts, she offered her audience a fully open forum for questions.

Many queries centered in on World War II, including Grandpa's involvement in the American pro-Nazi rally breakups; rumors of planned assassinations of Hitler and Mussolini; and the assistance Grandpa, Charlie Luciano, and Joe "Socks" Lanza provided to the U.S. Navy in New York Harbor through the Longshoreman's Union during wartime. Questions about Israel ranged from Grandpa's financial support of Israeli statehood, to his denial of citizenship under Israel's Law of Return, to which he was entitled.

Aunt Sandi was asked about her favorite actor who has portrayed Grandpa (Patrick Dempsey in Mobsters), her relationship with Dean Martin, and her two marriages; the first, as a teenage bride, and her second, to the love of her life of 50 years, Vince Lombardo, who raised her son, Gary.

Her heyday as a young barhopping socialite, where she was constantly watched (and followed) by Grandpa's associates, was of great interest. I learned Grandpa would try to catch Aunt Sandi out in the early morning hours, knocking on her apartment door at 7:00 a.m. She shared with us the times she would change clothes in the ladies' room at a local service station on her way home (a sort of 1950's-style walk of shame), to be ready for Grandpa's "surprise" visits.

What I enjoyed most about Aunt Sandi's Q&A, followed by a kosher reception, was the opportunity her audience was given to share their stories of Grandpa in Miami Beach, of the days when he walked his dog along Collins Avenue, played pinochle in his cabana at the Eden Roc, and the curiosity about his dear friend and business partner Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, who was never once photographed with Grandpa in public.

Before Aunt Sandi's book launch, I asked a few questions of my own:

So Aunt Sandi, what do you remember discussing at the dinner table with family?

We had set menus each night, and my girlfriend Terry would often join us, and at different restaurants on many occasions. Terry was like family. My brothers often had their friends over. Daddy, Buddy and Paul would discuss politics and sports, and your grandpa would include math problems for me. We all had guests for dinner, and parties at one time or another.

You spent time with "Charlie Lucky" Luciano twice, in Italy. What was he like?

It was wonderful meeting Charlie in Naples! At first sight I thought your grandpa had flown to Italy, it was uncanny how striking the resemblance between the two men, in person. He greeted me with a huge hug and kisses. He was so affectionate I immediately called him Uncle Charlie, which made him quite happy.

He dressed beautifully, and had a slight Italian/New York accent.

For dinner we joined Uncle Charlie at his restaurant called The Californian, the best restaurant in Naples. His miniature pinscher, Bambi, also joined us.

A maître d' led us to the table, which had been professionally prepared and decorated. We had over a dozen courses including ravioli, rigatoni, salad, meats, vegetables, clams, mussels, and more, followed by dessert. But all Uncle Charlie wished for was a plate of linguine at Angelo's on Mulberry Street! He spoke about how much he missed New York. (A full narrative is included in Aunt Sandi's book.)

During our meal Uncle Charlie told stories about your grandpa, saying he was the bravest and finest man he had ever met. He also told me how he and Frank (Costello) first met your grandpa and Benny (Siegel), and asked about your grandmother, hoping she was better.

My takeaway: Remarkable stories of an era through a fascinating memoir. A real page-turner!

Daughter of the King: Growing Up in Gangland, is available through:www.officialmeyerlansky.com.

Anthony 'Little Tony' Ferrari Guilty Of Murder In Florida Slaying

By CURT ANDERSON 10/25/13

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari was convicted Friday of first-degree murder and murder conspiracy in the 2001 gangland-style slaying of a well-known South Florida businessman in a case that featured professional hit men, a bitter fight over lucrative casino gambling ships and a corrupt Washington lobbyist.

The jury returned the verdict after just over seven hours of deliberation in the death penalty case. They had been sequestered since testimony began Sept. 30.

Ferrari, 56, was accused along with Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello of orchestrating the slaying of former SunCruz Casinos owner Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis. Trial testimony showed that Boulis, 51, was fatally shot by a mob hit man Feb. 6, 2001, after the car he was driving was blocked in by another vehicle on a Fort Lauderdale street.

Jurors will return Dec. 16 for the penalty phase of the trial. Circuit Judge Ilona Holmes is not bound by the jury's recommendation on the death penalty but must give it great legal weight.

Ferrari showed no reaction when the verdict was read. Some members of the Boulis family broke down in tears as the long-running case neared its end.

The murder occurred during an increasingly acrimonious dispute over SunCruz, which Boulis had sold a few months earlier to businessman Adam Kidan and his partner, once-powerhouse lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Boulis had kept a 10 percent stake in the lucrative 11-ship fleet and wanted to regain control.

Kidan testified he contacted Moscatiello, whom he said was a member of New York's Gambino crime family, for protection and for his mob connections. Ferrari, witnesses said, was Moscatiello's main operative in South Florida and even claimed to be related to the infamous Gambino "Teflon Don," John Gotti.

Both Ferrari and Moscatiello had well-paying SunCruz contracts with Kidan in charge, arrangements that Assistant State Attorney Brian Cavanagh said they were willing to kill Boulis to keep.

"This is a case about greed. Muscling in to get their piece of the pie," Cavanagh said in a closing argument. "It's also about no regard for human life."

Moscatiello, 75, is also charged with murder but got a mistrial when his attorney became ill. Prosecutors said they will retry Moscatiello at a later date. A third defendant, James "Pudgy" Fiorillo, pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy charges and testified against both Ferrari and Moscatiello. He will likely be sentenced to the six years he has already spent in jail.

The cast of witnesses included convicted felons, admitted mob enforcers and professional killers. One of them, Peter "Bud" Zuccaro, is in the witness protection program after turning on his Gambino confederates; he testified under the false name "Nick DiMaggio." Zuccaro said he had committed numerous violent acts over a long mob career and that Moscatiello had offered him $100,000 to kill Boulis, which he refused.

The actual Boulis hit man, John "J.J." Gurino, was later shot and killed in a dispute with a Boca Raton deli owner. Before that, witnesses said he had bragged about being the "SunCruz Kid" and that he had gotten "the work" from Moscatiello.

Ferrari's attorney, Christopher Grillo, urged jurors to consider the checkered pasts of many witnesses and what they had to gain by testifying for the state, such as reduced prison terms.

"The state wants you to believe a bunch of drug dealers, killers and thieves," Grillo told jurors.

But Cavanagh had a ready reply: "Plots hatched in hell don't have angels for witnesses."

Ferrari testified in his own defense — against Grillo's advice — and claimed that Fiorillo had confessed to Boulis' murder and that Kidan was the one behind the plot. Fiorillo testified that his main role was surveillance and getting rid of the murder weapon, and Kidan said Ferrari and Moscatiello confessed the plot to him.

Kidan and Abramoff both did federal prison time after pleading guilty to fraud in the $147.5 million purchase of SunCruz from Boulis. Abramoff, who did not testify in the Boulis case, was the main figure in a separate Washington influence-peddling case that resulted in charges against 21 people on corruption charges.

SunCruz went bankrupt in the wake of the slaying of Boulis, a Greek immigrant who worked his way up from dishwasher to founding the successful Miami Subs restaurant chain.

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mafia / org crime

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Mafia-Camorra War