The History of Terrorism
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1990 Codicil
1990 Fred Trump's declining health and his reluctance to relinquish ownership of his empire.
Fred Trump
Fred Trump's will
US Judge Maryanne Trump Barry
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1990 "Protect assets from DJT, Donald's creditors." The lawyers quickly drafted a new codicil stripping Donald Trump of sole control over his father's estate. Fred Trump signed it immediately.
1990 The Trumps' plan, executed over the next decade, blended traditional techniques - such as rewriting Fred Trump's will to maximize tax avoidance.
1990-1999 As a result, the Trump children would gain ownership of virtually all of their father's buildings without having to pay a penny of their own. They would turn the mountain of cash into a molehill of cash.
1990-1999 With every passing year, the actuarial odds increased that Fred Trump would die owning apartment buildings worth many hundreds of millions of dollars, all of it exposed to the 55 percent estate tax.
1992 One of the first steps came on Aug. 13, 1992, when the Trumps incorporated a company named All County Building Supply & Maintenance.
1992-? All County Building Supply & Maintenance
1992-? Mr. Walter's computer systems, meanwhile, churned out All County invoices that billed Fred Trump's empire for those same services and supplies, with one difference:
1993 This added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the cost of the 60 boilers, money that then flowed through All County to Fred Trump's children without incurring any gift tax.
1994-? Apartment Management Associates Inc.
1995 According to Fred Trump's 1995 gift tax return, obtained by The Times, the Trumps claimed that properties including 25 apartment complexes with 6,988 apartments - and twice the floor space of the Empire State Building - were worth just $41.4 million.
1995 For the Trumps, getting the I.R.S. to agree that Fred Trump's properties were worth only $57.1 million was a triumph.
1995 Fred Trump's 1995 gift tax return valued the Fiesta Apartments, left, in Brooklyn, at $18.30 per square foot. A similar building a few minutes away sold the next year for nearly four times as much: $67.08 per square foot.
1995 In May 1995, with an unsteady hand, he signed documents granting Robert Trump power of attorney to act "in my name, place and stead."
1995 In September 1995, the Trumps formed seven new limited liability companies. Between Oct. 31 and Nov. 8, they transferred the deeds to the seven properties into their respective L.L.C.'s.
1995 Six months later, on Nov. 22, the Trumps began transferring ownership of most of Fred Trump's empire. (A few properties were excluded.)
1995-1997 Then Fred and Mary Trump gave their children roughly two-thirds of the assets in their GRATs. The children bought the remaining third by making annuity payments to their parents over the next two years.
1997 As for gift taxes, the Trumps found a way around those, too.
1997 By Nov. 22, 1997, it was done, the Trump children owned nearly all of Fred Trump's empire free and clear of estate taxes.
1997 Indeed, every $10 million reduction in the valuation of Fred Trump's empire would save the Trumps either $10 million in annuity payments or $5.5 million in gift taxes.
1997 The entire transaction turned on one number: the market value of Fred Trump's empire. This determined the amount of gift taxes Fred and Mary Trump owed for the portion of the empire they gave to their children.
1998 By 1998, records show, All County and Apartment Management were generating today's equivalent of $2.2 million a year for each of the Trump children.
1999 Robert Trump, the youngest sibling and the beta to Donald's alpha, was given the task of overseeing day-to-day details. After years of working for his brother, Robert Trump went to work for his father in late 1991.
1999- It's story in which Donald Trump played a central role. He took the lead in strategy sessions where the plan was devised with the consent and participation of his father and his father's closest advisers, people who attended the meetings told The Tim
1999-2005 The result: They claimed that the five apartment complexes and two strip malls were worth $15 million. In 2004, records show, bankers would put a value of $176.2 million on the exact same properties.
2000 Fifteen months later, Fred Trump's executors - Donald, Maryanne and Robert - filed his estate tax return. The return, obtained by The Times, vividly illustrates the effectiveness of the tax strategies devised by the Trumps in the early 1990s.
2000 It wasnt until after Fred Trump's wife, Mary, died at 88 on Aug. 7, 2000, that the I.R.S. completed its audit of their combined estates.
2000 The audit concluded that their estates were worth $51.8 million, 23 percent more than Donald Trump and his siblings had claimed.
2004 Even more extraordinary was this unreported fact: The banks financing Mr. Schron's purchase valued Fred Trump's empire at nearly $1 billion.
2004 On May 4, 2004, the Trump children spent most of the day signing away ownership of what their father had doggedly built over 70 years.
2004 The implausibility of this claim would be made plain in 2004, when banks put a valuation of nearly $900 million on that same real estate.
2018 And there is one more Fred Trump windfall coming Donald Trump's way. Starrett City, the Brooklyn housing complex that the Trumps invested in back in the 1970s, sold this year for $905 million.
All County was not the only company the Trumps set up to drain cash from Fred Trump's empire.
All County's main purpose, The Times found, was to enable Fred Trump to make large cash gifts to his children and disguise them as legitimate business transactions, thus evading the 55 percent tax.
Armed with Mr. Von Ancken's $93.9 million appraisal, the Trumps focused on slashing even this valuation by changing the ownership structure of Fred Trump's empire.
As Robert Trump acknowledged in his deposition, "The higher the markup would be, the higher the rent that might be charged."
As with the Trump Village appraisal, the Trumps appear to have hidden key facts from the I.R.S. Tysens Park, like Trump Village, had operated for years under an affordable housing program that by law capped Fred Trump's profits.
Better still for the Trump children, they did not have to pay out a penny of their own. They simply used their father's empire as collateral to secure a line of credit from M&T Bank.
But Fred Trump had exercised total control over his empire for more than seven decades. With rare exceptions, he owned 100 percent of his buildings.
But records reveal that the other seven were split up just before the GRATs were established.
For the Trumps, it meant putting half the properties to be transferred into a GRAT in Fred Trump's name and the other half into a GRAT in his wife's name.
Fred Trump's Blank Tax Form
If he used his "expert negotiating ability" to buy a $350 refrigerator for $200, he could raise the rent based only on that $200, not on the $350 sticker price "a normal person would pay, Mr. Walter explained.
In the end, the transfer of the Trump empire cost Fred and Mary Trump $20.5 million in gift taxes and their children $21 million in annuity payments.
Mr. Harder, the president's lawyer, defended the tax returns filed by the Trumps. "The returns and tax positions that The Times now attacks were examined in real time by the relevant taxing authorities," he said.
Mr. Von Ancken appraised the 25 apartment complexes and other properties in the Trumps' GRATs and concluded that their total value was $93.9 million, tax records show.
Mr. Walter, asked during a deposition why Fred Trump chose not to make himself one of All County's owners, replied, "He said because he would have to pay a death tax on it."
Recycling the legally dubious techniques they had mastered with the GRATs, they dodged tens of millions of dollars in estate taxes on the remnants of empire that Fred Trump still owned when he died, The Times found.
Robert Von Ancken
So the Trumps set out to create the fiction that Fred Trump was a minority owner. All it took was splitting the ownership structure of his empire.
That enabled the Trumps to slash Mr. Von Ancken's valuation in a way that was legally dubious.
The man who paid himself $50 million in 1990 died with just $1.9 million in the bank. He owned not a single stock, bond or Treasury bill.
The methods the Trumps used to pull off this incredible shrinking act were hatched in the strategy sessions Donald Trump participated in during the early 1990s, documents and interviews show.
The more Fred Trump paid, the more All County made, which was precisely the plan.
This claim, combined with $18.3 million more in standard deductions, completed the alchemy of turning real estate that would soon be valued at nearly $900 million into $41.4 million.
Tysens Park Apartments