May 12, 2017

An investigative reporter looks into the Trump empire six years ago

Daily Beast -  [In 2011] Wayne Barett reported shady business deals ahead of Trump's flirtation with a White House run. After first exposing Trump’s ties to organized crime in his 1992 book, Barrett looked into his most recent business dealings and discovered the following:

• One associate who was an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a massive 2000 stock swindle—and escaped prison only by helping to convict 19 others, including six members of New York crime families

• Two associates who served prison time on cocaine charges• Another partner prosecuted for trafficking underage girls after a dramatic helicopter raid on a yacht off the Turkish coast• A pending lawsuit against Trump Soho that alleges daughter Ivanka, among others, made fraudulent misrepresentations

Wayne Barett - In the days before Trump dropped out [of the 2012 race], he could certainly not have been too happy to hear from me again. We met in the late '70s for hours of taped interviews, and The Village Voice stories I wrote then resulted in a federal grand jury probe of his early deals, though, in the end, no indictment. When I published the first biography of the Donald in 1992, the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, which oversees casino licensing in Atlantic City, put Trump under oath and issued a 34-page report, confirming some of the ties to organized crime I described in the book and stating that they could not verify others. I was later visited repeatedly by gaming officials from Missouri when Trump applied for a riverboat casino license there; he wound up withdrawing the application.

While I was reporting that book in 1990, I was muscled out of Trump Castle and handcuffed overnight to a wall at the Atlantic City jail. I haven’t done much reporting about him since the book, but when his numbers shot to the top in recent presidential polls, I took another look and asked his office for an interview. His response was a letter threatening a libel suit.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

'DENNY CRANE'