Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob? I've spent ye

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Obama Union Pledge Raises Questions
By John B. Judis
May 19, 2008

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The Wall Street Journal recently reported that last summer, Illinois Senator Barack Obama told officials in the Teamsters union that he favored ending the Independent Review Board (IRB) that was created in 1989 by the federal government to rid the union of organized crime. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Obama, confirmed the story, saying that the candidate believed that the IRB had "run its course" because "organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined." The Teamsters subsequently endorsed Obama for president, in late February.

Obama and the Teamsters bristled at suggestions that any deal was made. The Obama campaign also circulated a tape of a speech that Senator Hillary Clinton made last March to the Teamsters saying "at some point the past has to be opened," but Clinton's statement, like those made by Senator John Kerry in 2004, stopped well short of committing her to end oversight of the Teamsters. Based on the statements the newspaper quoted, it is fair to assume that The Wall Street Journal got the details right.

There are two reasons to be concerned about Obama's actions here. The first is procedural. Obama's promise to close down the IRB suggests a Bush-like contempt for the customary relationship between government and the judicial process. The president himself can't shut down the IRB. He can only recommend to his attorney general that he recommend to the U.S. Attorney in New York that it be shut down. But in these kind of touchy matters, presidents usually defer to the judgment of their attorney generals. By coming close to promising a shutdown, Obama was putting politics above judicial procedure - which is just the kind of "Washington" behavior that he likes to criticize his opponents for doing.

The second reason for concern is more substantive. Labor leaders have made plausible arguments for shutting down the IRB, but a Chicago politician should be extremely wary of acceding to them. If there is continuing mob influence in the Teamsters, it is probably centered in the Chicago area. And in the last decade, the Teamsters in Chicago have shown little enthusiasm for rooting out corruption in their ranks. As a veteran Chicago politician surrounded by a veteran Chicago campaign staff, Obama had to have known this - and that makes his warm words to the Teamsters all the more disturbing.

The IRB achieved some success in policing the Teamsters. In its first decade, it suspended or ousted more than 500 individual Teamsters and recommended that the union place 27 locals under "trusteeship," which consists of replacing the local's leadership with outsiders appointed by the international. It also instituted democratic elections of the top officers in the union, and ordered the ouster of former Teamster president Ron Carey for accepting illegal campaign donations in his 1996 election defeat of James P. Hoffa, who succeeded Carey three years later, and continues to lead the union today.

But Hoffa and the Teamster leadership have chafed under government supervision. To build an argument for getting rid of the IRB, Hoffa set up his own internal oversight group. It was called RISE (or Respect, Integrity, Strength, and Ethics) and was run by a former federal prosecutor and organized crime expert Ed Stier. In August 2001, Hoffa said, "It's time for the government to move out. We've created programs where the union is clean, and it's time for us to get from under government supervision." And Hoffa, President Bush and Representative Peter Hoekstra, a conservative Republican who chaired a key House subcommittee, began an elaborate courtship aimed on Hoffa's part at disbanding the IRB.

But Hoffa's efforts were derailed by a sensational IRB report that appeared late that year detailing the efforts of Chicago Teamsters, working with a Chicago labor broker, Richard Simon, whom Stier would later describe as "having ties to organized crime," to undermine a Teamster local in Las Vegas by negotiating non-union, low-wage agreements to service the city's numerous business conventions. (I wrote an article, "Dirty Deal," about this investigation in The New Republic on April 1, 2002.) The arrangement was a clear breach of the union's commitment under the National Labor Relations Act to offer "fair representation" to its members. Yet Hoffa and his top leadership initially aided the scheme by firing Las Vegas Teamster officials who objected. Finally, the IRB expelled William Hogan, the President of local 714, the most powerful Teamster in Chicago, and forced the Teamsters to put a stop to the collusion between the Chicago officials and Simon in Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, Stier did feel that he was making progress in his first years on the job, and it was not out of the question to imagine that RISE could not merely supplement, but supplant the IRB. In 2002, Teamster Spokesman Bret Caldwell told me that once the IRB was shut down, RISE will "ensure that corruption is fully eliminated from the union." For Stier, however, those hopes were dashed the next year when he began investigating Chicago-area Teamster locals for corruption. As he later detailed in a report, Stier discovered "multiple issues related to organized crime [and] corruption" in Local 714, and similar issues in five other area locals. The report concluded, "Issues related to organized crime infiltration and associated corruption in the Chicago area are numerous and cut across jurisdictional lines." But in the fall of 2003, as Stier was still in the midst of his investigation, the Teamster leadership began objecting vociferously to it, and in February 2004, Hoffa shut it down.

That April, Stier and 20 other investigators and lawyers involved with RISE resigned in protest. In the report that Stier subsequently issued, he put the blame for his departure on Hoffa's Executive Assistant and on the president of Chicago Joint Council 25 of the Teamsters. He accused them of bowing to present from "the Chicago organized crime family - known as the Chicago 'Outfit' - [which] concluded that its interests in Teamster matters were threatened by IBT investigative activities and had ordered those activities shut down."

Hoffa and the Teamsters released a report of their own in 2005 dismissing Stier's charges. And that's where matters would have stood - except for the IRB. Last October, the IRB recommended that the Teamsters remove the leadership of the main target of Stier's probe, Local 714, and place the union in trusteeship. It detailed numerous abuses by the union's leadership. Stier told the Chicago Tribune, "I'm glad to see that the IRB is pursuing these corruption issues in Chicago. I think there is more to do." The IRB's actions, taken in the wake of Stier's resignation and the end of RISE, made a pretty good case that the IRB was still needed.

All of this may be new information for people who don't live in Chicago, but it can't have been unknown to Obama and the Chicagoans who run his campaign. Stier's resignation and the IRB investigation, and the charges of corruption and organized crime have been covered over the years by Chicago Tribune reporter Stephen Franklin and other local journalists. Yet the taint of corruption and of ties to organized crime seemed not to ruffle Obama and his campaign. According to the Journal report, the Obama campaign brokered the candidate's promise to end the IRB with John Coli, the Chicago-area chairman of Joint Council 25, whom Stier identified in his report as one of the people responsible for shutting down his investigation. (Obama's Federal Election Commission records also show a hefty contribution to his senatorial and presidential races from the same Richard Simon who hatched the Vegas scheme to undercut local union workers and who, according to Stier, has mob ties.)

Voters, of course, understand that in order to get endorsements, politicians often turn a blind eye to corruption. They employ lobbyists who have worked for nefarious domestic or foreign clients or whose private activities contradict the politicians' public pronouncements. But if Barack Obama wants to run as the candidate of good government and higher morality, the place to start may not be Washington, but his home town of Chicago.

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Trump Casinos are Mobbed Up! Shocker!
by Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik, MD, PhD
September 2, 2016

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For those of you who have never heard of the ‘mob’, I can assure you that it did exist. It is still extant. Equally important, it will continue to flourish in America, especially in the concrete/construction business.

Contrary to the nonsensical FBI tales of “Donnie Brasco” [Johnny Depp] where an Italian American FBI agent infiltrated the Italian Mob, for the most part the Jewish/Italian mob worked with the FBI as an informants,as depicted in the film, “The Departed” [DiCaprio,Damon]. More importantly, it is crucial to understand that not one real estate development company in the NYC/NJ area can exist without utilizing the “S&A Concrete”, a company owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, the ‘boss’ of the Genovese crime family. [March 2,2016, Linda Qiu, PolitiFact].

Trump admitted his association:

“Virtually every building that was built with these companies… these guys were excellent contractors…. They were phenomenal.. Trump Tower… other buildings”.

In order to develop Trump World Tower, Donald needed to work with the Quadrozzi Concrete Company, owned by John Quadrozzi Sr, a member of the Lucchese family.Trump admitted that he had to work with Kenneth Shapiro, ‘a third-rate,local real estate mafia’ [NJ] and a close friend of mob boss, Nicky Scarfo. He had to also utilize the services of Daniel Sullivan, “a guy who killed Jimmy Hoffa.”

Sullivan had helped the novitiate real estate developer Donald to buy the Grand Hyatt which was his first property that he developed in NYC. Philadelphia mob boss, Salvatore Testa, sold the NJ land for Trump’s first casino for only a mere $1.1 million at more than 3X the original market value of $195,000.

Donald attempts to explain his affiliation with the NJ Mob accordingly:

“..every single casino company in NJ used the same [mob] companies..”

Despite accusations that Trump is xenophobic, his association with the notorious Chinese 14 K Triad Gang proves that he is willing to deal with any ethnic group which can help him make money. In 1992, Donald appointed Danny Leung as VP of Foreign Marketing at the Las Vegas Taj Mahal. Danny was a major associate of the Hong Kong based14K Triad Group.

Trump used a Russian emigre, Felix Sater, to promote Trump’s SoHo hotel.Needless to say, Sater was subsequently indicted for taking part in a $40M stock scheme involving four Mafia families.

By now, you get the idea that Trump is definitely “mobbed up”.

What does that really mean?

From my point of view, it places Donald Trump right in the same “mobbed-up corner” with our illustrious predecessors: FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Reagan, Clintons, Bushs, and Obama.In other words, we, Americans, will have to deny him the election for what he did according to the elementary rules of major city real estate development: work with the mob or die!

I can’t condone this type of activity because he clearly had a choice. So did: Hillary, Bill, Obama, W., FDR, JFK, LBJ, et. al.

We have to decide: Are we better off with Trump or someone [Hillary] who pretends to be above the sanctity of Mother Teresa [she will receive Sainthood status this Sunday]?

As Al Capone said so insightfully:

“You get much further with a kind word and a gun then you can with a kind word.”

However, in the perspicacious words of Carlo Gambino, who places all irrelevant observations into perspective, let me quote you what he had said:

“Judges, lawyers, and politicians have a license to steal, we don’t need them.”
The choice is ours once again, America!

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Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta Tied to Russian Mafia, Money Laundering: Emails released by Wikileaks show Podesta shared in the Clintons' corrupt schemes via the Clinton Foundation and oligarch Viktor Vekselberg's Skolkovo Foundation
by Roger Stone
Oct 16, 2016

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The attack on me by Clinton campaign chief John Podesta is an attempt to deflect attention from his criminal activities in the former Soviet Union. Podesta is at the heart of a Russian-government money laundering operation that financially benefits Podesta personally and the Clintons through the Clinton Foundation.

To be clear, although I have had some back-channel communications with Wikileaks I had no advance notice about the hacking of Mr. Podesta nor I have I ever received documents or data from Wikileaks.

The charge that I am working for Russian intelligence or any Russian interest is also false. Don’t confuse me with John Podesta’s brother, Tony Podesta, who runs the firm that got $180,000 from Uranium One, the Russian government’s uranium company to which Hillary Clinton transferred 20 percent of U.S. uranium.

Just how much money did Viktor Vekselberg, a controversial Russian billionaire investor with ties to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government, launder through Metcombank, a Russian regional bank owned 99.978 percent by Vekselberg, with the money transferred via Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City, with the money ending up in a private bank account in the Bank of America that is operated by the Clinton Foundation?

Wikileaks emails tie John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, into the money-laundering network with the confirmation Podesta had exercised 75,000 shares out of 100,000 previously undisclosed stock options he was secretly issued by Joule Unlimited, a U.S. corporation that ties back to Vekselberg connected Joule Global Stichting in the Netherlands – a shady entity identified in the Panama Papers as an offshore money-laundering client of the notorious Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca.

As a clear indication of guilty conscience, the Wikileaks Podesta file further documents that Podesta made a serious effort to keep the transaction from coming to light as evidenced by his decision to transfer 75,000 common shares of Joule Unlimited to Leonidio LLC, another shady shell corporation – this one listed in Salt Lake City at the home apartment of the gentlemen who registered the company.

Further research has documented that Viktor Vekselberg arranged for two transfers of unknown amounts to a private Clinton Foundation account in the Bank of America, with the funds passing though a pass-through account at Deutsche Bank and Trust Company Americas in New York City – with the first transfer made on Feb. 10, 2015, and the second on March 15, 2016.

Neither transaction shows up in any Clinton Foundation press releases or publicly disclosed financial statements.

Further research is that Viktor Vekselberg, in true Russian Mafia fashion, also owned Skolkovo, the Russian foundation set up to be a Silicon Valley counterpart Russia, designed to be Russia’s major player in the “reset” technology transfer scheme engineered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011.

Millions skimmed off Skolkovo in Russia

Russian news reports have documented that all Skolkovo Foundation money was deposited in Viktor Vekselberg’s Metcombank.

“Metcombank was the only commercial bank willing to accept the Foundation’s liquid assets in a bank account with the ability to immediately withdraw them without receiving a fine and with interest at a rate higher than the market average,” the Skolkovo Foundation http://rbth.com/news/2013/03/01/skolkov ... 23414.html said in statement made public in 2013.

That same year, Russian investigators analyzing Federal Security Service, FSB, data in Russia determined the Skolkovo Fund misappropriated 3.5 billion rubles (approximately $55 million) allotted from the Russian government’s budget for the Skolkovo technology cluster’s development – a sum that was documented to have disappeared after it was deposited with Metcombank.

In reporting the disappearance of these funds, the Russian media reported Cyprus-based Winterlux Ltd. holds nearly 100 percent in Metcombank registered in Kamensk-Uralsky, the Sverdlovsk region, and Winterlux is controlled by Vekselberg through a chain of other companies including Mendo Portfolio, Renova Industries, and Renova Holding – confirming that Vekselberg is the primary beneficiary of a chain of offshore corporations involved in international money laundering that stretch from Cyprus to the Bahamas, ending up in the British Virgin Islands.

It turns out http://www.ewdn.com/2013/03/04/skolkovo ... stigation/ that of the 31.6 billion rubles (approximately $1 billion) the Skolkovo Foundation received from the state budget from 2010 through October 2012, just 18.9 billion, or less than 60 percent, was actually spent.

Predictably, the Skolkovo Foundation, http://sk.ru/news/b/pressreleases/archi ... lkovo.aspx in an official statement, denied any wrongdoing, arguing that once Russian government budget funds are transferred to the Foundation, they can no longer be considered as budget means, such that the funds can be used in any way the Foundation deems legitimate, according to Russia’s budget code.

“Among the offers made [to the Skolkovo Foundation] by several banks, Metcombank’s terms were just unprecedented,” Skolkov Foundation’s Vice President for External Communications Alexander Chernov elaborated in an exchange with Kommersant, a nationally distributed newspaper published in Russia, dealing mainly with business and politics.

Metcombank provided a 5.65 percent interest rate when the average market average was around 4 percent. This permitted Chernov to argue as follows: “The extra-high rate allowed the Skolkovo Foundation to earn around 80 million rubles ($2.6 million) in interest, so what violations are we talking about?”

In April 2013, Russian government authorities raided Skolkovo, arresting executive Aleksey Belyukov for graft, in a move that clearly looked like a scapegoat had been found, https://www.rt.com/politics/vice-presid ... graft-932/ allowing the Skolkovo Foundation and Metcombank to continue their serendipitous relationship.

To date, the Russian government has not given an accounting what happened to the missing funds supposedly once deposited in the Skolkovo Foundation’s account at Metcombank

A Johnny Chung replay?

Between 1994 and 1996, Johnny Chung was a major player in Washington political finance and a star guest of the Bill Clinton White House, as a result of his donating some $366,000 to the Democratic National Committee, until it became public knowledge Chung’s funds traced back to military intelligence sources in the Chinese government.

What is suspicious about the Vekselberg connections to the Clintons and Podesta is not only Vekselberg’s generous donations to the Clinton Foundation but also his close ties to Russian military intelligence.

“Skolkovo’s link to the Russian military-intelligence apparatus is not in dispute,” noted the Government Accountability Institute’s http://www.g-a-i.org/u/2016/08/Report-S ... 012016.pdf report entitled “From Russia With Money: Hillary Clinton, the Russian Reset, and Cronyism,” issued in August this year.

The Government Accountability Institute report continued:

The U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth issued a report in 2013 (written in 2012) about the security implications of Skolkovo. The report declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a “vehicle for worldwide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.” Of course, technology can have multiple uses—both civilian and military. And the report noted that “the Skolkovo Foundation has, in fact, been involved in defense-related activities since December 2011, when it approved the first weapons-related project—the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.

Security expert and former National Security Analyst Agency analyst John R. Schindler picked up the theme http://observer.com/2016/08/hillarys-se ... nraveling/ in an article published in the Observer on Aug. 25, 2016, entitled “Hillary’s Secret kremlin Connection is Quickly Unraveling.”

“Schweizer shows that John Podesta sat on the board of a Dutch-registered company that took $35 million from the Kremlin [Joule, the same company from which Podesta got the undisclosed stock options],” Schindler wrote. “The company was a transparent Russian front, and how much Podesta was compensated—and for what—is unclear. In addition, Podesta failed to disclose his position on that board to the Federal government, as required by law.”

Schindler next turned his attention to Secretary of State Clinton.

“Even worse is how Clinton, Inc. profited from the Russian ‘reset’ that was one of the big achievements of Hillary’s tenure at Foggy Bottom,” Schindler continued. “Never mind that the reset was a disaster, culminating in Kremlin aggression against Ukraine. Hillary’s signature program at the State Department ended in unambiguous failure. Yet Clinton, Inc. did very well out of the temporary warming of relations with Moscow.”

Peter Schweizer, in his bestselling book entitled “Clinton Cash,” noted that of the 28 U.S., European, and Russian companies that participated in Skolkovo, 17 of them were Clinton Foundation donors or had hired former President Clinton to give speeches, concluding that Skolkovo benefactors ended up giving Clinton, Inc. somewhere between $6.5 million and $23.5 million – a figure that is indeterminate, and could yet be higher, because the Clinton Foundation has yet to reveal all its donors.

Finally, Schindler agreed Skolkovo was merely an extension of Russia’s military intelligence network.

“Therefore, it’s no surprise that Western intelligence considers Skolkovo to be an extension of Russia’s military-industrial complex—and its intelligence services,” Schindler wrote.

“A July 2013 unclassified study by U.S. European Command that surveyed Skolkovo activities http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/Collab ... olkovo.pdf suggested, in delicate language, that Russia’s Silicon Valley is ‘an overt alternative to clandestine industrial espionage,’” Schindler noted. “Stealing the West’s hi-tech secrets has long been a Kremlin forte, and Skolkovo is merely the newest effort to purloin our advanced technology.”

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Part 1 of __

RESEARCH ON RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE BLACK HAND MAFIA (La Mano Nera); DOMINIC DE AGOSTINO & THE NIAGARA FALLS MAFIA [NY]; THE PRODUCER OF "THE SOPRANOS" [January 10, 1999, to June 10, 2007] DAVID HENRY FUSCO BUCCO DE AGOSTINO DE CESARE MALFI; THE CULTURE & FUNDING OF "THE SOPRANOS" & "THE APPRENTICE" [2004 to 2017]; DONALD TRUMP AND THE MAFIA
8/3/24

-- "The World's Most Dangerous Man": Mary Trump on Her Uncle, President Trump, & Why He Must Be Ousted, by Amy Goodman

[ongoing]

*******************

David Chase [David Henry Fusco Bucco DeAgostino De Cesare Malfi]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 8/3/24

David Henry Fusco Bucco De Agostino De Cesare Malfi

MOTHER: Norma Bucco
GRANDMOTHER 1: Marian De Agostino
GRANDFATHER 1: Vito Bucco
STEPFATHER: Enrico Henry De Cesare [took surname: "Chase"]
STEP-GRANDMOTHER 2: Teresa Malfi
STEP-GRANDFATHER 2: Giovanni De Desare
FATHER: Giuseppe Joseph Fusco
GRANDMOTHER 2: [X]
GRANDFATHER 2: [X]

[x]
Chase at the U.S. embassy in Dublin, January 2015

Born: David Henry Chase [David Henry Fusco Bucco DeAgostino De Cesare Malfi], August 22, 1945 (age 78), Mount Vernon, New York, U.S.
Education: New York University (BA); Stanford University (MA)
Occupations: Screenwriter showrunner director producer
Years active 1974–present
Known for Creator of The Sopranos [January 10, 1999, to June 10, 2007]
Spouse: Denise Kelly
Children: 1

David Henry Chase[1][2] (born August 22, 1945) is an American writer, producer, and director. He is best known for being the creator, head writer, and executive producer of the HBO drama The Sopranos, which aired for six seasons between 1999 and 2007. Chase has also produced and written for shows such as The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away, and Northern Exposure. He created the original series Almost Grown which aired for 10 episodes in 1988 and 1989. He has won seven Emmy Awards. Chase's film debut came in 2012 with Not Fade Away, followed by The Many Saints of Newark (2021), a prequel film to the TV series The Sopranos.

Early life and education

Chase was born into a working-class Italian American family in Mount Vernon, New York, as an only child to Norma (née Bucco) and Enrico "Henry" Chase, both born in 1908. Norma was born in Essex County, New Jersey, as one of eleven children to Marian D'Agostino and Vito Bucco, who immigrated from Fossacesia, Abruzzo.[3][4] Henry was born in Providence, Rhode Island, as one of seven children, the son of Teresa Melfi, who was married to Giovanni DeCesare, 17 years her senior. Henry and his sister Evelina (Evelyn), however, were the biological children of Giuseppe "Joseph" Fusco, a 23-year-old Italian immigrant who was lodging with the DeCesares since 1904. Following Evelyn's birth in 1910, Melfi and Fusco eloped to Newark, New Jersey, with their two biological children, whose surnames Melfi subsequently changed from DeCesare to Chase to obscure their background; the couple kept their own surnames and raised another five children under Fusco's name (although the 1940 census lists both their surnames as "Fusca").[5][6][7]

His father owned Wright's Hardware in Verona, New Jersey.[8][9][10] He grew up in a small garden apartment in Clifton, New Jersey,[8] and in North Caldwell, New Jersey.[11] He grew up watching matinée crime films and was well known as a creative storyteller.[12]

He has stated that he had many problems with his parents when he was a child.[8] He says that his father was an angry man who belittled him constantly, and his mother was a "passive-aggressive drama queen" and a "nervous woman who dominated any situation she was in by being so needy and always on the verge of hysteria." He based The Sopranos character Livia Soprano on his mother, naming her after a maternal aunt.[13][14]

Chase struggled with panic attacks and clinical depression as a teenager, something that he dealt with into adulthood. He graduated from high school in 1964 and attended Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where his depression worsened. "I slept 18 hours a day," he stated. He described his problems as "normal, nagging, clinical depression."[8] He also worked as a drummer during this period and aspired to be a professional musician.[12] After two years, he transferred to New York University where he chose to pursue a career in film—a decision that was not well received by his parents. He went on to attend Stanford University's School of Film, earning a Master of Arts degree in 1971.[15]

Career
Chase started in Hollywood as a story editor for Kolchak: The Night Stalker and then produced episodes of The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure, among other series. He also worked as a writer of 19 episodes while on The Rockford Files—a show which he worked on in various capacities for more than four years.[8] He won several Emmy awards, including one for a television movie, Off the Minnesota Strip, the story of a runaway he scripted in 1980.[8] His first original created series was Almost Grown in 1988, with Eve Gordon and Timothy Daly.[16] Although the one-hour series was well received by critics,[17] only 10 episodes aired from November 1988 to February 1989.[18]

The Sopranos
Chase worked in relative anonymity before The Sopranos debuted.[8] The story of The Sopranos was initially conceived as a feature film about "a mobster in therapy having problems with his mother".[19] Chase got some input from his manager Lloyd Braun and decided to adapt it into a television series.[19] He signed a development deal in 1995 with production company Brillstein-Grey and wrote the original pilot script.[8][15][20] He drew heavily from his personal life and his experiences growing up in New Jersey, and has stated that he tried to apply his own "family dynamic to mobsters".[14] For instance, the tumultuous relationship between series protagonist Tony Soprano and his mother Livia is partially based on Chase's relationship with his own mother.[14] He was also in psychotherapy at the time and modeled the character of Jennifer Melfi after his own psychiatrist.[21]

Chase had been fascinated by organized crime and the mafia from an early age, witnessing such people growing up. He also was raised on classic gangster films such as The Public Enemy and the crime series The Untouchables. The series is partly inspired by the Richard Boiardo family, a prominent New Jersey organized crime family when Chase was growing up, and partly on New Jersey's DeCavalcante family.[22] He has mentioned American playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams as influences on the show's writing, and Italian director Federico Fellini as an important influence on the show's cinematic style.[23][24][25] The series was named after high school friends of his.[26][21]

Chase and producer Brad Grey pitched The Sopranos to several networks; Fox showed interest but passed on it after Chase presented them the pilot script.[20] They eventually pitched the show to Chris Albrecht, president of HBO Original Programming, who decided to finance a pilot episode[8][15] which was shot in 1997.[27][28] Chase directed it himself. They finished the pilot and showed it to HBO executives, but the show was put on hold for several months. During this time, Chase, who had long experienced frustration at being unable to break out of TV and into film,[8] considered asking HBO for additional funding to shoot 45 more minutes of footage and release The Sopranos as a feature film. In December 1997, HBO decided to produce the series and ordered 12 more episodes for a 13-episode season.[8][15][29] The show premiered on HBO on January 10, 1999, with the pilot "The Sopranos".

Thirty episodes of The Sopranos are explicitly credited to Chase; however, as the show's creator, showrunner, and head writer, he had a major role in all the scripts, including producing and touching up each script's final draft.[30] He also directed the pilot episode and the series finale (both of which he also wrote).

Of the intentionally ambiguous final scene of the series finale, Chase said, "I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there."[31]

In 2022, Chase and Phil Abraham created a 2022 Super Bowl spot for Commonwealth / McCann with two characters from the show who appear in a 2021 New York City/New Jersey setting.[32]

The Sopranos credits
Not Fade Away
Not Fade Away (2012), Chase's feature film debut, was released on December 21, 2012. It centers on the lead singer of a teenage rock 'n' roll band (played by John Magaro) in 1960s New Jersey.[33][34] Described as "a music-driven coming-of-age story," the film reunites Chase with James Gandolfini (former star of Sopranos), who co-stars as Magaro's father.[33] Other cast members include Bella Heathcote, Christopher McDonald, Molly Price, Lisa Lampanelli, Jack Huston and Brad Garrett. Chase himself has described the film as about "a post-war, post-Depression-era parent who has given his kid every advantage that he didn't have growing up, but now can't help feeling jealous of the liberated, more adventurous destiny his son is able to enjoy." Another former Sopranos cast member, Steven Van Zandt, served as music supervisor and executive producer.[35]

The Many Saints of Newark
Although Chase was "against [the movie] for a long time",[36] Deadline Hollywood reported in March 2018 that New Line Cinema had purchased the script for The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos written by Chase and fellow screenwriter Lawrence Konner. Chase said of the storyline, which centers on the 1967 Newark riots and racial tensions between the Italian-American and African-American communities, "I was interested in Newark and life in Newark at that time... I used to go down there every Saturday night for dinner with my grandparents. But the thing that interested me most was Tony's boyhood. I was interested in exploring that."[36] Chase served as producer, and in July 2018, Alan Taylor, who previously directed episodes of the series, was hired to direct the film.[37] The film was initially scheduled to be released on September 25, 2020,[38] however, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, its release date was rescheduled to March 12, 2021[39] and later September 24, 2021[40] before ultimately being released on October 1, 2021.

In October 2021, he and his Chase Films production company struck a deal with WarnerMedia.[41] In March 2024, it was revealed that he will be directing an untitled horror movie for New Line Cinema.[42] The screenplay will be written with Terrence Winter.

Unrealized projects
A Ribbon of Dreams
Chase has previously developed A Ribbon of Dreams, a miniseries for HBO. According to an HBO press release, the series' pilot would "begin in 1913 and follow two men, one a college-educated mechanical engineer, the other a cowboy with a violent past, who form an unlikely producing partnership and together become pioneers and then powers for a time in motion pictures." Specifically, the two men would "begin as employees of D.W. Griffith, and then cross career paths with John Ford, John Wayne, Raoul Walsh, Bette Davis, Billy Wilder and others who gave shape to Hollywood as it grew from the age of rough-hewn silent Westerns, to the golden era of talkies and the studio system, to the auteur movement, to television, and finally to the present day." In 2021, Chase revealed that HBO agreed to proceed with the production of the miniseries but with "a cheesy budget", to which Chase refused to agree. Therefore, Chase and HBO parted ways on the project and A Ribbon of Dreams fell through.[43]

Personal life
After graduating from NYU in 1968, Chase moved to California and married his high school sweetheart Denise Kelly.[8] He is the father of actress Michele DeCesare, who appeared in six of The Sopranos episodes as Hunter Scangarelo.[44]

Chase once stated that he "loathed and despised" television shows, watching only The Sopranos and movies.[45] However, he said in later interviews that he watched Boardwalk Empire and Mad Men, the work of former Sopranos writers and producers Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner, respectively. He said that he previously made those negative comments in part because he had been frustrated working within the confines of 1990s network television.[46][47]

Select filmography
Television
Year Title Director Writer Producer Creator Notes
1971 The Bold Ones: The Lawyers No Yes No No Episode: "In Defense of Ellen McKay"
1974 The Magician No Yes No No 7 episodes
1974–1975 Kolchak: The Night Stalker No Yes No No 8 episodes
Also story consultant
1975–1976 Switch No Yes No No 6 episodes
Also story consultant
1976–1979 The Rockford Files No Yes Yes No 20 episodes
1980 The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo No Story No No Episode: "Perkins Bombs Out"
Off the Minnesota Strip No Yes Yes No Television film
1982 Palms Precinct No Yes Executive Yes Pilot episode
Moonlight No Yes Executive No Television film
1986 Alfred Hitchcock Presents Yes Yes No No Episode: "Enough Rope for Two"
1988–1989 Almost Grown Yes Yes Executive Yes
1991–1993 I'll Fly Away Yes Yes Executive No 4 episodes
1993–1995 Northern Exposure No Yes Executive No Wrote 1 episode
1996 The Rockford Files: If the Frame Fits... No No Supervising No Television film
The Rockford Files: Godfather Knows Best No Yes Supervising No
The Rockford Files: Friends and Foul Play No No Supervising No
The Rockford Files: Punishment and Crime Yes Yes Supervising No
1999–2007 The Sopranos Yes Yes Executive Yes Directed 2 episodes, wrote the script for 24 episodes and the story for 5 episodes
Also uncredited appearances in three episodes
Film
Year Title Director Writer Producer Notes
1972 Grave of the Vampire No Yes No Based on his novel The Still Life
2012 Not Fade Away Yes Yes Yes
2021 The Many Saints of Newark No Yes Yes Also cameo appearance as Ercole "Eckley" DiMeo a.k.a. "Old Man"
TBD Untitled Horror Movie Yes Yes Yes
Other credits
Year Title Role
1969 The Cut Thorats Production manager
1972 Winter Love Unit manager
2017 BoJack Horseman Voice role: Himself
Episode: "See Mr. Peanutbutter Run"
Awards and recognition
Primetime Emmy Awards
Year Category Nominated work Result Ref.
1978 Outstanding Drama Series The Rockford Files (season 4) Won [48]
1979 Outstanding Drama Series The Rockford Files (season 5) Nominated [49]
1980 Outstanding Drama Series The Rockford Files (season 6) Nominated [50]
Outstanding Writing in a Limited Series or a Special Off The Minnesota Strip Won
1992 Outstanding Drama Series I'll Fly Away (season 1) Nominated [51]
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series I'll Fly Away (episode: "Pilot") Nominated
1993 Outstanding Drama Series I'll Fly Away (season 2) Nominated [52]
1994 Outstanding Drama Series Northern Exposure (season 5) Nominated [53]
1999 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 1) Nominated [54]
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "College") Won
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Pilot") Nominated
Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Pilot") Nominated
2000 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 2) Nominated [55]
2001 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 3) Nominated [56]
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Funhouse") Nominated
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Amour Fou") Nominated
2003 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 4) Nominated [57]
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Whitecaps") Won
2004 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 5) Won [58]
2006 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 6 - Part 1) Nominated [59]
2007 Outstanding Drama Series The Sopranos (season 6 - Part 2) Won [60]
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Kennedy and Heidi") Nominated
Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series The Sopranos (episode: "Made in America") Won

References
[edit]
1. Chase says his name was not David DeCesare at birth in this interview: https://interviews.televisionacademy.co ... vid-chase# Archived March 31, 2019, at the Wayback Machine
2. Fleming, Mike Jr. (September 7, 2021). "David Chase On Reviving 'Sopranos' Spirit With 'The Many Saints Of Newark' And High Interest In Another Prequel Film". Deadline. Retrieved September 8, 2021.
3. "David Chase: «I Soprano? Una famiglia 'disfunzionale'…»". il manifesto (in Italian). September 5, 2014. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
4. "TELEVISION / RADIO; The Son Who Created A Hit, 'The Sopranos'". The New York Times. June 6, 1999. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020. Retrieved January 29, 2021.
5. "Boss of Bosses". The Star-Ledger. Archived from the original on April 26, 2007.
6. Zoller Seitz, Matt (September 27, 2021). "How Do You Follow The Sopranos?". Vulture. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
7. Feinberg, Scott (November 2, 2021). "'Awards Chatter' Podcast: 'Sopranos' Creator David Chase Finally Reveals What Happened to Tony (Exclusive)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
8. Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l Biskind, Peter (April 4, 2007). "How David Chase and The Sopranos Changed Television Forever". Vanity Fair. Archived from the original on August 24, 2020. Retrieved May 1, 2020.
9. Citrano, Virginia (January 10, 2019). "'The Sopranos' And Verona". MyVeronaNJ.
10. Maurer, Mark (December 11, 2012). "David Chase looks to the past for his first film". NJTrueJersey. Retrieved July 4, 2024.
11. DeCaro, Frank (April 4, 1999). "No Longer the Punch-Line State; Lauryn Hill, the Sopranos and others are unapologetic New Jerseyans". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 29, 2018. Growing up in Clifton and North Caldwell, Mr. Chase said, New Jersey seemed "very exciting and very mysterious, not dull and predictable as many New Yorkers like to believe.
12. Jump up to:a b David Chase: Creator Archived February 19, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, HBO.com, accessed May 6, 2007.
13. Martin, Brett (October 30, 2007). ""Once You're in this Family, There's No Getting Out:" Meet the Sopranos". The Sopranos: The Complete Book. New York City: Time Inc. pp. 54–55. ISBN 978-1-933821-18-4.
14. Jump up to:a b c Dougherty, Robin (January 20, 1999). "Chasing TV". Salon.com. Archived from the original on September 22, 2009. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
15. Jump up to:a b c d Oxfeld, Jesse (September 2002). "Family Man". Stanford Magazine. Archived from the original on January 27, 2013. Retrieved September 22, 2007.
16. Baker, Kathryn. (November 23, 1988) Wichita Eagle. "Almost Grown: tells story of growing up. Section:Lifestyle; Page 9A.
17. Bark, Ed. (October 2, 1988) Dallas Morning News A critic picks the season's top ten. Section: Arts & Entertainment; page 1C.
18. Vero Beach Press Journal (November 12, 2000) Pipline. Section: TV Journal; Page 32.
19. Jump up to:a b Lee, Mark (May 2007). "Wiseguys: A conversation between David Chase and Tom Fontana". Writers Guild of America, west. Archived from the original on November 16, 2007. Retrieved November 14, 2007.
20. Jump up to:a b Chase, David; Bogdanovich, Peter (1999). The Sopranos – The Complete First Season: David Chase interview (DVD). HBO.
21. Jump up to:a b Dana, Will (March 10, 2006). ""Sopranos" Creator Shoots Straight". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on November 8, 2008. Retrieved December 6, 2013.
22. Malanga, Steven (May 13, 2007). "Da Jersey boys who inspired The Sopranos". Chicago Sun-Times. Archived from the original on May 16, 2007.
23. The Sopranos – The Complete Series: Alec Baldwin interviews David Chase (DVD). HBO. 2008.
24. Levine, Stuart (April 23, 2008). ""The Sopranos": David Chase fesses up". Variety. Archived from the original on December 16, 2013. Retrieved November 23, 2008.
25. Martin 2007, p. 160.
26. "David Chase profile at HBO.com". HBO. Archived from the original on February 19, 2012. Retrieved November 14, 2007.
27. It was originally referred to as "Pilot" but was renamed "The Sopranos" on the DVD release.
28. Flaherty, Michael (June 8, 2007). "Sopranos signoff marks end of era". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on September 21, 2007. Retrieved November 11, 2007.
29. Martin 2007, p. 16.
30. Wolk, Josh (April 6, 2007). "Burying the Sopranos". Entertainment Weekly. Archived from the original on October 9, 2007. Retrieved July 19, 2007. [Chase] oversees everything, from writing the final polish on all scripts to supervising the editing of each episode.
31. Alan Sepinwall (June 11, 2007). "David Chase speaks". The Star-Ledger. Archived from the original on August 10, 2011. Retrieved May 14, 2009.
32. "A 'Sopranos' Expert Analyzes Chevy's Meadow and AJ Super Bowl Commercial". Rolling Stone. February 13, 2022.
33. Jump up to:a b McNary, Dave (January 24, 2011). "Gandolfini, Chase reconnect at 'Twylight'". Variety. Archived from the original on January 31, 2011. Retrieved February 1, 2011. Gandolfini's on board to portray the father of a teen in a rock band, set in 1960s suburbia. John Magaro will play his son. ... Chase, creator of 'The Sopranos,' signed on in 2008 to write, direct and produce the feature.
• Andreeva, Nellie (January 24, 2011). "'Sopranos' Big-Screen Reunion: James Gandolfini Joins David Chase's New Movie". Deadline Hollywood. Mail.com Media Corporation. Archived from the original on January 5, 2020. Retrieved February 1, 2011. The Paramount-produced Twylight Zones is described as a drama about a New Jersey Rock'n'Roll band and the musical renaissance of the 1960s. It centers on Douglas (John Magaro), a socially awkward teen who begins to shine as lead singer in his band, The Twylight Zones. Gandolfini will play his father...
34. Jay A. Fernandez (March 8, 2010). "'Sopranos' creator to direct coming-of-age film". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on March 12, 2010. Retrieved April 13, 2010.
35. "Brad Garrett Moves To David Chase's Musical Movie". NextMovie. February 3, 2011. Archived from the original on March 15, 2012. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
36. Jump up to:a b Fleming, Mike Jr. (January 7, 2019). "'The Sopranos' Creator David Chase Offers Glimpses Of Prequel Movie As Groundbreaking HBO Series Turns 20". Deadline. Archived from the original on January 22, 2019. Retrieved January 23, 2019.
37. Galuppo, Mia (July 3, 2018). "'Sopranos' Prequel Movie Taps Former Series Director Alan Taylor". The Hollywood Reporter. Archived from the original on April 3, 2019. Retrieved April 3, 2019.
38. D'Alessandro, Anthony (March 15, 2019). "Warner Bros Dates 'Sopranos' Prequel 'The Many Saints Of Newark' For Fall 2020 – Update". Deadline. Archived from the original on March 15, 2019. Retrieved March 25, 2019.
39. D'Alessandro, Anthony (April 20, 2020). "'The Batman' Flies To Fall 2021, 'Sopranos' Prequel Moves To March & More As Warner Bros. Makes Release Date Changes Due To COVID-19 Climate". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on April 20, 2020. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
40. Rubin, Rebecca (January 13, 2021). "'Many Saints of Newark' Delayed to Fall 2021 (EXCLUSIVE)". Variety. Archived from the original on January 14, 2021. Retrieved January 13, 2021.
41. White, Peter (October 1, 2021). "David Chase Strikes Five-Year First-Look TV & Film Deal With WarnerMedia". Deadline. Retrieved October 2, 2021.
42. Jr, Mike Fleming (March 19, 2024). "'The Sopranos' Creator David Chase & EP Terence Winter Set Up Untitled Horror Film At New Line; Chase To Direct". Deadline. Retrieved March 20, 2024.
43. "David Chase on 'The Sopranos' Legacy & 'The Many Saints of Newark'". YouTube. August 19, 2021. Archived from the original on November 7, 2021.
44. Oxfeld, Jesse (September–October 2002). "Family Man". Stanford Magazine. Archived from the original on February 20, 2012. Retrieved February 13, 2012.
45. Pearson, Roberta (2011). "Cult Television as Digital Television's Cutting Edge". In Bennett, James; Strange, Niki (eds.). Television as Digital Media. Duke University Press. p. 113. ISBN 978-0-8223-4910-5.
46. Marlow, Stern (September 4, 2014). "thedailybeast > September 2014> Feature Entertainment>". The Daily Beast. thedailybeast.com. Archived from the original on September 17, 2014. Retrieved September 17, 2014.
47. Collins, Andrew (May 21, 2013). "The Week in TV: Game of Thrones, Mad Men and The Fall – video". The Guardian. Archived from the original on November 4, 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
48. "Nominees / Winners 1978". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
49. "Nominees / Winners 1979". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
50. "Nominees / Winners 1980". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
51. "Nominees / Winners 1992". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
52. "Nominees / Winners 1993". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
53. "Nominees / Winners 1994". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
54. "Nominees / Winners 1999". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
55. "Nominees / Winners 2000". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
56. "Nominees / Winners 2001". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
57. "Nominees / Winners 2003". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
58. "Nominees / Winners 2004". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
59. "Nominees / Winners 2006". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.
60. "Nominees / Winners 2007". Television Academy. Retrieved May 28, 2024.

External links



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Part 2 of ___

As ‘The Apprentice’ Seeks Cannes Sale, Trump Team Sends Cease and Desist Letter to Block Film’s Release (EXCLUSIVE)
by Brent Lang, Katcy Stephan
Variety Magazine
May 24, 2024 11:48am

[x]
“The Apprentice”, Courtesy of Tailored Films

Attorneys for Donald Trump have sent a cease and desist letter to the filmmakers behind “The Apprentice” [2004 to 2017] in an effort to block its U.S. sale and release. It warns the team behind the film not to pursue a distribution deal, according to two people who have read the letter. “The Apprentice,” which looks at Trump’s early years as a real estate developer and his relationship with Roy Cohn, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this week.

“The film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president,” the producers of the film said in a statement regarding the cease-and-desist letter. “We want everyone to see it and then decide.”

The movie, which was independently produced, stars Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Cohn. It presents a damning portrait of the former president as an ethically compromised, philanderer who stiffs contractors and cuts deals with the mob to get his buildings completed. It includes other controversial details, including a scene where Trump rapes his first wife, Ivana, and depicts him abusing amphetamines to lose weight, as well as undergoing liposuction and plastic surgery.

Trump’s camp responded with a blistering note, threatening legal action. “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a statement.

When reached for comment about the letter, the Trump campaign referred to its earlier statement on the film.

“The Apprentice” was directed by Ali Abbasi, the Iranian-Danish filmmaker behind “Holy Spider” and “Border,” and features a script by Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who covered the Trump administration.

At a press conference in Cannes for “The Apprentice,” Abbasi responded to Trump’s legal threats. “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” he said. He also offered to screen the movie for Trump, saying, “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.”

*****************

https://archive.org/details/templesofch ... up?q=trump
Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business
by David Cay Johnston
1992

Page n1

While newspaper accounts and bestselling books focused on the excesses of Wall Street in the 1980s, another industry driven by greed was expanding right under the noses of middle America. Today the casino industry has passed from the hands of old-style gangsters to a new generation of "respectable” businesspeople — the heads of well-known publicly traded corporations, as well as junkbond kings like Donald Trump, Merv Griffin and Steve Wynn. Temples of Chance is a compelling documentation of this passage: the little-publicized transformation of one of the country's fastest-growing, most lucrative industries.

Page n10

Trump Beaches a Whale

Page 1

Donald Trump couldn't sleep. He was so nervous that he insisted A1 Glasgow call him every thirty minutes until right before dawn, when his three Atlantic City casinos closed.

Page 1

Glasgow, a gravel-voiced concrete contractor who used to drink mob lawyers under the table in the days before he became one of Trump's closest advisers, stepped from behind the low black marble wall that separated the high-roller tables from the rest of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino. He rang the boss.

Page 1

"Make it four point four," Sonny Nathans whispered to Glasgow, who passed the number on from his post on the floor at Trump Plaza, the mighty cash machine that powered the Trump empire, throwing off more than $80 million in 1988.

Page 1

What had kept Trump up all night was a Japanese businessman with a serene smile, a white shirt open at the collar and gray wool slacks with pockets as big as bank vaults.

Page 1

Akio Kashiwagi was one of the world's five biggest gamblers, literally a one-in-a-billion customer, who at this very moment in May 1990 was sitting at a green-felt table at Trump Plaza calmly wagering $14

Page 2

For three and a half years Trump Plaza had been trying to lure Kashiwagi from his mansion near the foot of Mount Fuji, a house known locally as Kashiwagi Palace, to this low-lying island on the New Jersey shore where the South Bronx meets Las-Vegas-by-the-Sea. When Trump flew to Japan in his own Boeing 727 for the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas world heavyweight championship fight he presented this fellow real estate speculator with an autographed copy of his myth-making autobiography The Art of the Deal, a gift Trump would later regret.

Page 3

Trump Beaches a Whale

Page 3

But the biggest loser of them all was Robert Libutti, who blew $12 million in more than three hundred trips to the craps tables, mostly at Trump Plaza. Once Trump Plaza had emptied his wallet, the casino regulators took their turn at making Libutti's life miserable and ultimately banned him from the casinos.

Page 4

two hundred thousand dollars on each hand at the rate of seventy hands an hour. His bet never varied from the moment Trump Plaza's casino opened at ten in the morning until it closed just before dawn, a legal requirement in New Jersey at that time. The intention was to give gamblers a chance to get a grip on their pocketbooks before the casinos picked them clean. Kashiwagi had no such concerns. He left the table only for meals, accompanied by his own aides and a squad of casino security guards, and to visit a nearby restroom that had been closed to all other patrons with an "out of order" sign on the handle of a mop stuck in a bucket outside the door.

Page 4

Kashiwagi told Ernie Cheung, Trump's specialist in Asian marketing, that he was on a round-the-world gambling spree during which he was willing to risk $50 million. Other casinos desperately wanted a piece of that action. Caesars Atlantic City Hotel-Casino, which vied with Trump Plaza as the top money-winner on the Boardwalk, had invited Kashiwagi to drop in. Steve Wynn, the golden boy of Las Vegas gaming, wanted Kashiwagi to visit the Strip and try his luck at the brand-new Mirage, a giant ivory-trimmed gold box featuring a volcano out front, white tigers just off the casino floor and, lest anyone forget its elemental purpose, a huge aquarium behind the registration desk where sharks lurked. But at this moment it was Trump who had Kashiwagi's action — and all the risks that go with it.

Page 4

The Warrior had visited Trump Plaza once before, twelve weeks earlier, when he beat Trump for $6.4 million in ten hours. Two months before that Kashiwagi had flown to Darwin, where he had won the Australian equivalent of $19 million at the Diamond Beach Casino, bankrupting it.

Page 4

Trump figured it was now his turn to win. But just to make sure, he paid five thousand dollars to secure the advice of a man who knew as much about baccarat and the numbers that rule the gaming business as anyone else on earth. Hardly a soul besides the executives at the highroller houses in Atlantic City and Las Vegas has ever heard of Jess Marcum. An owlish little man who in his youth had helped invent radar, he was a founder of the RAND Corporation, the Air Force think tank, and later worked on the neutron bomb. The casino executives all trusted his mathematical genius. Stories abounded among the small circle who

Page 5

Trump Beaches a Whale

Page 5

Kashiwagi and his entourage had arrived in Atlantic City on a Thursday. The next day he began demonstrating that he understood that the art of the deal in high stakes casino gaming occurs in the casino cage, the gambling hall's financial office, where players buy their chips. He had told Cheung when he arrived that he wanted to gamble $22 million at Trump Plaza. He was told to bring checks that could be verified easily and cleared through the banks. Instead Kashiwagi brought a $6 million check drawn on a Singapore bank and a $4 million instrument that could be cashed only in Japan. He asked for $12 million in credit.

Page 5

Mike Mullen, the Trump Plaza cage manager, confirmed that the $6 million Singapore check was good. He sent it to Manufacturers Hanover

Page 6

Kashiwagi was ready. The Warrior strolled across the bold red-andgold Trump Plaza carpet to the high-roller area. An aide carried the fortune in chips in boxes under his arms, uniformed security guards making sure the path was clear and that others saw how royally big players were treated.

Page 6

Marcum, in a confidential written report to Trump, calculated that even with Kashiwagi's bold and smart betting style, the odds were fiveto-one that the high roller would lose his bankroll before doubling it. That meant if Kashiwagi made six visits and bought $12 million in chips each time. Trump could expect to win five times, collecting $60 million, and lose once, leaving Trump with a net win of $48 million.

Page 7

Trump Beaches a Whale

Page 7

Those statistical slivers grow in importance as the play continues, eroding the player's remaining bankroll. The house advantage works like the reverse of compound interest, which makes a dollar saved grow over time. After 10,000 hands, Marcum's calculations showed. Trump could expect to win 5,125 bets to Kashiwagi's 4,875. At that point Kashiwagi theoretically would be out $50 million. In reality his $12 million stake would have been lost long before them.

Page 7

Trump flew down from Manhattan that Saturday accompanied by arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi, four vivacious blondes and an Arab prince. Khashoggi was well known in gambling circles, especially for all the unpaid markers he had left behind at the Sands in Las Vegas, which its chief executive blamed for that casino's collapse in 1983.

Page 7

The deal artist, the arms merchant and the Arab prince checked into Trump Castle and that evening limoed over to Trump Plaza. Trump introduced Khashoggi to Kashiwagi, saying they must have met because they traveled in the same circles. They had not.

Page 7

Trump hung around, pumping hands and cocking his ears to hear how great he was. Some saw Trump's behavior as nervous pacing.

Page 8

rather than his usual glad-handing. Casino owners, favored by the odds, are not supposed to begrudge lucky players their winnings, are not supposed to "sweat the action." And if they do sweat, they should do it from their executive offices, watching on a remote television screen, their anxiety hidden from the player. Within a quarter hour. Trump had grown restless and left.

Page 8

Finally Trump panicked. He wanted the game stopped. Now. He could stop the game at any time by lowering the maximum bet that the house would accept. Glasgow and everyone else involved knew that lowering the limit would be an insult, that Kashiwagi would almost certainly storm out and probably never return — and he would be leaving with all that money.

Page 8

And they knew word would get around that Donald Trump was not a worthy opponent but a coward. This was an extremely sensitive subject with Trump. While he gloried in his image as a fearless capitalist, he surrounded himself with bodyguards. And while he sponsored heavyweight fights, he had also acknowledged that he could not imagine a physical blow and recoiled from the thought of being struck. That Trump's image could descend from all powerful into fancy-pants wimp vexed some of his executives and advisers.

Page 8

Glasgow put Marcum on the phone to Trump.

Page 8

"He's on a winning streak," Trump insisted, his voice gathering force for one of his frequent temperamental storms. Is Kashiwagi cheating? he asked. No, Marcum said, Kashiwagi is no cheat.

Page 8

"Be patient," Marcum counseled. "He wants to keep playing, and soon the wave will run the other way." Trump said he would let the game go on a bit longer, but he wanted to know at once if Kashiwagi's pot continued to grow.

Page 10

Fly east to Atlantic City and the story is similar. Hilton, Holiday and Ramada all came here, although Hilton had to sell out to Donald Trump when it was refused a New Jersey casino license in 1985 because of past

Page 11

The Atlantic City market is dominated, though, by Donald Trump. He owns three of the area's twelve casinos and controlled Resorts, the first Boardwalk gambling hall, until Merv Griffin bought it in a hostile takeover that grew from stock market manipulation. Shares of two Trump casinos and Resorts trade on the American Stock Exchange, as do the bonds of all four casinos.

Page 11

Brand name hotel chains — Hilton, Holiday, Ramada — moved into the gambling business in the seventies. Meanwhile, New Jersey casino regulators forced men tainted by dealings with mobsters to resign as the chief executives of Bally Manufacturing and Caesars. These five firms, plus Wynn's Mirage, Circus Circus and Trump dominate the casino business in America today.

Page 14

Milken addicted casino executives to junk, not the kind heroin addicts shoot into their veins in the burned-out buildings a block from the Boardwalk casinos, but the kind companies inject onto their books. Junk bonds catapulted Steve Wynn from a mere millionaire to a fortune two hundred times that size, commanding a company with a billion dollars in annual revenue. Hilton, Holiday, Ramada, Circus Circus and Merv Griffin all loaded up on Drexel debt while Donald Trump and others relied on junk sold by Drexel's imitators. Casino companies sold more than $5 billion worth of junk bonds in the eighties, some of which was never paid back despite the supposedly intense regulation of modern casinos by the states of New Jersey and Nevada.

Page 17

Just outside the little seaport of Mystic, Connecticut, the Mashantucket Pequot Indian tribe's Foxwoods High Stakes Bingo and Casino offers craps, poker, blackjack and other table games, but not slot machines. Within a month of opening, the table drop at Foxwoods — the amount of chips sold — exceeded that at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. The Pequots plan to add hotels, restaurants and other amenities. Other Indian nations from Nebraska to California are moving to copy all or part of this format, some with professional management.

Page 35

"Bett^ to have a little joint and a big bankroll than a big joint and a little bankroll," was Binion's sage advice to the ambitious young Wynn, who would later become the king of the world's gamblers. It was the kind of advice no one ever gave to Donald Trump or Merv Griffin.

Page 52

At night, a halo often seems to hover over Atlantic City as moist sea air gathers into low clouds that reflect the floodlights and the brightly lit signs of high-rise casino hotels. From a distance this halo looks appealing, and as one motors along the Atlantic City Expressway's last four miles, through the flat marshlands, the sudden appearance of an urban skyline with bright lights heralding Caesars, TropWorld and, again and again. Trump, is strangely engaging. But the halo effect is deceiving. Atlantic City is no heaven on earth, but an urban hell that brings together the filthy poor and the filthy rich.

Page 55

But not all of Atlantic City's dozen temples of chance stand by the city's slums. Harrah's Casino Hotel is on the northwestern edge of Atlantic City just off another road across the marsh to Absecon Island, the White Horse Pike. Just before reaching the public housing projects that stretch for block after block, players can turn north and head through the stands of phragmites and sedges to Harrah's or its sole marina neighbor, Trump Castle Hotel & Casino Resort by-the-Bay.

Page 56

The affluent suburbanites Harrah's targets are often as boring as their beige Buicks and maroon Mercurys. But typically they own their cars outright, unlike the leased Mercedes and BMWs of many Trump Castle players. Mostly Harrah's gamblers are fifty or older, with grown children and houses bought and paid for long before escalating real estate prices prompted the phrase "affordable housing." They had picked the right time to be born, and as their hair thinned their wallets thickened so much that they could afford literally to play with their money.

Page 57

could be seen on the garage's top deck. Blotches of dripped oil mottled the cement floor, while the top deck of the neighboring Trump Castle garage was nearly spotless years after it was finished.

Page 58

players could get a Trump Card, become an Island Ambassador at the Sands, or join the Officer's Club at the Showboat.

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The prospect of making millions and millions fast and easy drew lots of potential investors into the casino business once Atlantic City opened up the market and, with the state lotteries, whetted the natural appetite for gambling. Steve Wynn came to Atlantic City early on and in 1982 Merv Griffin came for the first time. Before long Jack Bona and Donald Trump would seek fortunes there. Meanwhile, Holiday's chief hotel competitor, Ramada, was going into the gaming business in both Las Vegas and Atlantic City. And an eccentric rich Californian named Mitzi Briggs was getting out.

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A1 Glasgow, the contractor turned casino newsletter publisher and later Donald Trump consultant, stood on the Boardwalk one day looking

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The interest on the existing Playboy casino debt was at floating rates that had risen to the point where the casino's balance sheet began to tip, the interest costs pouring onto its books like seawater weighing down a stricken ocean liner. The new obligation to Hefner only weighted the casino down with more interest burdens. But it set a pattern for financial manipulations that would long plague Atlantic City and that would extract a heavy price from investors whose money went into future deals by Donald Trump and Merv Griffin.

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The crowds with designer suits and silk blouses moved on to Wynn's Golden Nugget and the newer places like Trump Plaza next door. Replacing them were the down-at-the-heels gamblers who didn't play enough to make them worth a free Coca-Cola. But even when the crowds shrank the place appeared to be busy. The casino had been designed so that the first floor offered slots, the second table games with a few slots, and the third was a lavish salon for high-rollers. Except for busy weekend nights in the summer the salon stayed closed. Because the building's layout made the salon level accessible by escalator and elevator, the Atlantis had to post guards around the clock to turn away the few people who wandered onto the third floor. It also meant that instead of having fifty thousand square feet of gaming area the Atlantis effectively had only thirty-four thousand square feet, barely half the size of most Atlantic City casinos. On all but the slowest winter days it appeared that the Atlantis was packed.

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Worse, while every successful business is organized to bring in more cash than it spends, dollars began flowing out of this enterprise at an increasing rate. No matter. Before long the Atlantis would become the property of another junk bond addict: Donald Trump.

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Although he polished his image as a self-made billionaire, Donald Trump grew up riding through New York's outer boroughs in his mother's Rolls-Royce. His father, Fred Trump, was reportedly Chase Manhattan's biggest depositor in Queens. Fred built working-class apartment complexes, huge brick fortresses often financed with government subsidies that he arranged in part through his close ties to politicians, notably New York mayor Abe Beame and Meade Esposito, who for decades ran the Brooklyn Democratic party organization.

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Donald Trump wanted more than his father's obscure wealth. He lusted for the glamour of Manhattan. He wanted to build with marble, not brick. He wanted to house the glitterati, not their servants.

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Like Holiday Inn's Mike Rose, Trump realized in the mid-seventies that the profits in hotels and even development deals pale beside the potential return from a casino. He boasted in 1978 that the Grand Hyatt was designed so that when it opened it could accommodate a casino. But when efforts to legalize casinos in New York faltered, and Resorts proved a phenomenal success after it opened in 1978, Trump started scouting Atlantic City and became an ardent foe of casinos in New York.

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Dealing with unsavory characters was not new to Trump. He bragged that his projects always came in on time and under budget (Trump's public budget pronouncements were inflated so it was easy to meet them), and it was remarkable how Trump always had labor peace, especially with the mob-controlled cement workers union, which took charge at most of his projects, including the concrete colossus known as Trump Tower. What Trump did not boast about or even publicly mention was that he hired mob-owned firms like S & A Concrete, whose secret owners were the two top Mafia figures in New York: Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, and Paul Castellano, head of the Gambinos. Trump also made extensive use of attorney Roy Cohn, the notorious fixer, whose clients included Salerno.

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Trump boasted in his first autobiography that when he sought a casino license he persuaded John Degnan, the New Jersey attorney general, to limit his probe to six months. Trump became the first applicant that the attorney general's Division of Gaming Enforcement recommended for licensing. The division had either opposed or taken no position on the others.

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That Trump was not fully investigated by the enforcement division was obvious to anyone who read its 1982 licensing report. But it was almost a decade later that investigative reporter Wayne Barrett's biography of Trump revealed that the developer also had been the target of a 1979 federal bribery investigation. No charges resulted from the probe, which had been inspired by one of Barrett's disclosures in the Village Voice newspaper. But Trump had not listed the probe in his license application, and the Casino Control Act mandates license denial for anyone who omits a relevant fact. The key court case upholding the disclosure provision involves a woman denied a license as a blackjack dealer — a much lower level of license than casino owner — because she did not report that she had been forced to resign from a retail clerk job for selling frietids a few items below their ticketed prices, a matter handled in court as misdemeanor shoplifting.

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The licensing report did reveal that Trump had failed to list on his application an investigation of alleged racial discrimination against tenants. Still, the enforcement division recommended Trump for approval because he disclosed this matter just before he was to be questioned under oath about the omission.

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The report also gave a glimpse into his efforts to avoid income taxes by owning his properties through partnerships. At first Trump cut his siblings Maryanne and Robert in on some deals, but in his casinos and many other of his celebrated deals Trump was almost always both the sole general partner and the sole limited partner, a strategy designed to reduce income taxes. It worked fabulously to lighten the burden of supporting the United States government. By 1978 Trump had yet to build Trump Tower or any of his casinos, which together created opportunities for multimillion dollar deductions each year, by vastly enlarging his opportunities to report a negative income to the government while at the same time living the vaunted Trump lifestyle on cash flow.

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Although his tax returns have not been publicly disclosed since 1979, Donald Trump has had such enormous write-offs available to him that he probably did not pay a penny in federal income taxes through at least 1986, when an overhaul of the Internal Revenue Code made it modestly more difficult to avoid paying income taxes.

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The Casino Control Commission licensed Trump in March 1982, after a perfunctory public hearing. The terms of his license were both extraordinary and prophetic, finding on the basis of the incomplete investigation only that he had established, by clear and convincing evidence, his good character and integrity, while his business ability and financial stability were found in need of further proofs.

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No matter, Trump now had the extraordinary privilege of a New Jersey casino license in hand, and he got busy developing his narrow Boardwalk site. Since his Grand Hyatt and Trump Tower were not yet finished, he needed a partner. He turned to Mike Rose. The Holiday corporation enjoyed such phenomenal success with Harrah's Marina that coordinating operations with a Boardwalk casino seemed like a good marketing strategy.

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Immediately Trump set out on a course that, by his own account, raised questions about the one favorable finding in his casino license. He set out to deceive his prospective partners: In his first autobiography Trump wrote that Holiday's board wanted to "assess our progress in construction," which worried him "since we had yet to do much work on the site."

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To create the illusion of progress Trump jammed the site with bull-

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dozers and dump trucks, not caring if they accomplished any work so long as they looked busy. Trump's construction chief told him it was the strangest request he had ever received. One Holiday director asked Trump why a hole was dug and then filled. "This was difficult for me to answer," Trump wrote, "but fortunately this board member was more curious than he was skeptical." The deception worked.

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Although Trump claimed that Holiday came to him seeking a partner, Holiday put up the financing and was to run the place. All Trump brought to the table was his lease and his extraordinary ability to escape the usual union work stoppages. This was enough, though, to provide Trump with an incredible deal. All he had to do was build the 614-room casino hotel and then sit back and collect half the profits. He was even guaranteed against any losses in the first five years.

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The Boardwalk lots Trump leased were so narrow that the only way to make a hotel and casino attractive was to build not only skyward, but to create a wider space out of thin air. Here his Atlantic City real estate lawyer, Patrick McGahn, proved invaluable.

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Marine Corps days in Korea, where as a young officer he led troops up bullet-raked hills and claims to have personally strangled communist soldiers, a tale that has earned him the moniker "piano-wire Paddy." Other walls held photographs of McGahn with Donald Trump, President John F. Kennedy and the Pope. Friends said McGahn's connections went all the way to God; enemies regarded him as the devil incarnate.

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McGahn realized that the solution to Trump's narrow lot problem was to build out over Mississippi Avenue, which separated the site from the Atlantic City Convention Hall. Trump had no right to build beyond the curb, however. McGahn solved this by persuading Convention Hall officials to lease a one-foot strip of its property for ninety-nine years in return for a one-hundred-dollar fee. At City Hall McGahn argued that control of both sides of the street gave Trump air rights, and the people he had cultivated went along. Above this thin air Trump built the highroller area where Akio Kashiwagi, Bob Libutti and others would later blow millions of dollars.

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The enforcement division, which originally agreed to Trump's plan that Shapiro and Sullivan be his landlords without getting licensed, suddenly changed its stance in 1983 and demanded they apply for licenses as financial sources. This shift occurred after prosecutors had publicly detailed the depth of Shapiro's ties to mob boss Scarfo. But Sullivan noted that it was also after he notified Trump that he was in default on his lease, jeopardizing Trump's lucrative deal with Holiday. Knowing they would never be licensed, Sullivan, Shapiro and their partners sold the land to Trump. Later, Sullivan sued the enforcement division, alleging that it had improperly helped Trump gain an advantage in a business dispute. He lost on a technicality before a trial could be held on the merits of his claim.

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When Harrah's at Trump Plaza opened in May 1984, it was as prosaic as Harrah's Marina. To support its thirty-nine floors the lobby sprouted a forest of tall columns covered with red cloth and mirrors.

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The tallest building in town also suffered from a costly omission. While Harrah's Marina prospered in good measure because of its luxurious garage, Harrah's at Trump Plaza opened with only a surface lot across Pacific Avenue. Donald Trump had bought up most of that block, with half the money coming from Harrah's. But he balked at building a garage, threatening at one point to sell the land while insisting that the casino be renamed only Trump Plaza in his honor. The difference parking made showed up on the bottom line. Each week Harrah's Marina earned a bigger net profit than Harrah's at Trump Plaza earned in all of 1985.

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Trump had a good reason not to want a garage. He wanted to buy out Holiday's half, which would cost a lot more with a garage helping to pump up profits. He did persuade his partners to rename the hotel, removing the Harrah's name and calling it Trump Plaza Casino Hotel. Mike Rose was unhappy at Trump's actions, but he would not sell, confident that eventually Trump would have to fulfill his obligation by building the garage.

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But a series of events no one could have seen coming — involving the Casino Control Commission, the prime minister of the Bahamas, junk bond king Milken, and the late Conrad Hilton's eloquent will — changed Rose's mind. These events nourished the myth of Trump as an artist whose medium is deals.

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The commission found that Hilton's major sin was hiring Chicago attorney Sidney Korshak, whom law enforcement agencies said was a key tie between the legitimate business world and the underworld. Korshak's power lay in his supposed ability to insure labor peace for Hilton Hotels. The focus on Korshak, who was paid fifty thousand dollars a year and worked far from Hilton's headquarters in Beverly Hills, California, was a sharp departure from the policy followed with Trump, who worked closely with attorney Roy Cohn. The fact that Cohn, who had been indicted four times, was acceptable while Korshak, who had never even been indicted (much less convicted, or disbarred, as Cohn later was), would not be acceptable showed the capriciousness of the casino regulators and added to the growing evidence of official favoritism toward Trump.

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Hilton's greater sin, one not found on the official record, was its haughtiness. Barron Hilton would not bow and scrape before the casino commissioners, as Jim Crosby did at Resorts' hearings. Hilton neither confessed errors nor thanked the commissioners for showing his firm the light, promising never to repeat any mistakes, as Crosby had done, nor did he meekly listen to criticism, as Trump soon would. Hilton failed to grasp that humility fostered the appearance of regulation.

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Milken and Wynn failed, although they inadvertently helped impoverished children by raising the price Barron ultimately would have to pay for his father's stock. Meanwhile, Donald Trump was busy working on a deal that would leave Barron Hilton employed at Hilton Hotel while extricating the company from Atlantic City, and without destroying Barron's efforts to buy his father's estate at a discount.

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Barron Hilton took the Trump deal. Afterward, Trump publicly savaged Hilton, as he would others who did deals with him. In The Art of the Deal* Trump dismissed Barron Hilton as a member of the "lucky sperm club" who owed his lofty position to his father. Trump wrote that after the license denial Hilton "ended up selling to me at the last minute, under a lot of pressure, and without a lot of other options."

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Trump borrowed every penny for the deal and then some. Manufacturers Hanover loaned him his $70 million capital contribution. Bear Stearns, a New York securities firm anxious to get in on the casino junk business Milken had developed at Drexel, peddled $353 million worth of mortgage bonds. The deal was so fat that Trump even sliced off a $5 million fee for himself.

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The Casino Control Commission certified the deal, which required finding that Trump had demonstrated his financial stability and his business ability. The latter finding came even though Trump had no experience running a casino, only building one and sharing in the profits. The commission also found that the casino would be financially stable, meaning it could pay its bills as they came due, an important consideration for prospective bond buyers who want to get their principal back.

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To run his first casino Trump picked someone who knew even less than he did about the casino business*— his wife. Trump boasted that Ivana was "a natural manager" and the commissioners went along even though there was no way Ivana could prove by clear and convincing

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Mike Rose was not happy to see Donald Trump with his own casino, especially since it was across the road from Harrah's Marina. Earlier Rose had reluctantly agreed to remove the Harrah's name on the Boardwalk. Now Rose calculated that Holiday spent $8 million promoting Trump's name while his erstwhile partner was competing head-on for players with Holiday's most valuable asset, Harrah's Marina.

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The day Trump's Castle opened Mike Rose took Donald Trump to court. Holiday's lawsuit sought to block Trump from using his name in the marina, saying it would confuse patrons, and to bar Trump from using its confidential list of players. The suit charged that Trump's delays in repairing the Boardwalk casino's many construction defects, his threat to sell the parking site, and his failure to build the garage were predatory and "unmistakably" part of a plan to drive down the value of the Boardwalk partnership to force Harrah's to sell its stake cheap.

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Trump countersued, alleging Harrah's management was so sloppy that it had "badly bloodied" the Trump name.

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U.S. District Judge Stanley Brotman brought Trump and Rose to his court in Camden, New Jersey, in an attempt to forge a settlement. Brotman noted that nothing in their contract barred Trump from opening his own casino.

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Nine months later, in March 1986, Rose threw in the towel and sold Holiday's half of the Boardwalk casino. Trump paid $223 million, two thirds of what he paid for the Hilton, but then he already owned half of the Boardwalk casino. Again, Trump borrowed every penny and then some. The day the deal closed Trump announced the property would now be known as Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino.

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Trump also announced that work would begin right away on a badly needed garage.

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Donald Trump looked on Atlantic City as a real-life monopoly game where he wanted all the choice pieces. In Monopoly imprudence can lead to bankruptcy. Luck and other players' mistakes can also be more important than skill.

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Once Trump got full ownership of Trump Plaza on the Boardwalk in May 1986, he cast aside Mike Rose's concept of coordinating marketing between a marina operation primarily outfitted with slots and a Boardwalk house geared to table players, a strategy intended to give a pair of jointly owned casinos an advantage against everyone else. Instead Trump started his two casinos competing against each other. They not only vied for the same players, they competed for entertainment talent, executives and sales staff to entice players. The economies possible by jointly purchasing supplies and advertising were ignored in favor of duplicate, competing operations. *

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smooth-running Team Trump and his claimed ability to promote people like Ivana into positions far above their experience and make them winners. So did the cold reality that the Trump Organization operated in constant chaos, his empire run on office intrigues. Long-range planning consisted not of how to build for next year and the year after that, but of how best to vanquish the executive in the next office.

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A1 Glasgow, Trump's loyal casino consultant, shook his head in disbelief at the costly warfare, which he called "disorganized crime," among the Trump executives. "Instead of bringing in the business and making money they're all stabbing each other in the back, all busy trying to figure out how to fuck the other guy and get on Donald's good side," said Glasgow, himself a skilled veteran of the in-fighting whose sensitive antennae detected early on which executives were rising and which were heading for the door.

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In such a battle a novice like Ivana, working with the Castle, ordinarily would be no match for the competition at Trump Plaza, which was run by the experienced and steady hand of Steve Hyde. But ordinary was poison in the Trump Organization, where ability or even success at bringing money to the bottom line was sometimes less important than one's relationship with Donald. Minor talents sometimes rose to great heights, briefly, before Donald abandoned them. When it came to intimacy with Donald, Hyde was no match for Ivana, at least not at first.

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Trump planted stories that Ivana had been on Czechoslovakia's Olympic ski team. She had not, nor had she ever made such a claim. He called her a top Canadian fashion model. She had been an anonymous runway model. He did not mention that Ivana Zelnickova Winklmayr Trump had married before.

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Hilton had designed for the mass market, but Trump did not want his name associated with the common men and women whose steady play earned a million dollars a week in profits for neighboring Harrah's Marina.

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To the eternal high-roller question, "Whaddya gonna gimme?" Trump Castle needed an answer. The really suite deals were at Atlantic City's twcr high-roller houses, Caesars and Steve Wynn's Golden Nugget. Caesars marketing offices in Medellin, Hong Kong and other cities where great fortunes were being accumulated provided a steady flow of people who demanded the most luxurious and flamboyant lodging.

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Hyde returned to Atlantic City and joined the Golden Nugget, where Wynn regarded the big bear as a solid executive, but not a star. Wynn did admire Hyde's ability to smooth stormy waters, to not confuse personal tiffs with getting the job done. This ability, this willingness to absorb verbal assaults and go on about the job, became crucial once Hyde moved to Trump Plaza.

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During this time Trump suddenly faced his first major problem with casino regulators. One of them accused him of lying under oath.

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The issue grew out of Hilton's promise to help finance part of a $40 million project to improve the only road into Brigantine, the island town immediately across an inlet from the marina. Trump lawyer Nick Ribis promised the casino commissioners that Trump would stand in Hilton's shoes, but once the casino changed hands Trump renounced the commitment and filed a lawsuit.

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Valerie Armstrong, an ambitious young Republican lawyer who had lived in Brigantine and who was recently appointed to the Casino Control Commission, pressed the matter. Attorney David Sciarra of New Jersey's Public Advocate office said seven days of testimony made it clear that Trump never intended to build the roadway, a charge which, if true, could cost Trump his license because it would show he lacked integrity.

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But while Armstrong believed Trump had failed the Casino Control Act's integrity and character tests, she had only one vote. By June 1986, Trump had already become a powerhouse, owning two of Atlantic City's eleven casinos. His license was renewed on a 4 to 1 vote.

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With his license renewed the deal artist made his first major foray onto Wall Street. In his first autobiography Trump told how Daniel Lee, the casino analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert, and some colleagues came to his Trump Tower office at 4 o'clock on a summer afternoon "to discuss being my investment bankers on a deal to purchase a hotel company."

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The unnamed hotel company Lee and Trump discussed was the Holiday Corporation. Trump bought 1.1 million shares of his former partner in the summer of 1986, borrowing every cent from his bank credit lines and his broker, Bear Stearns.

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Trump had plenty of motivation both to weaken Holiday financially and to divert management's attention from its smoothly running Harrah's Marina next to his Castle. Far more than Hilton, Holiday's real

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Mike Rose was already working on strategies to restructure Holiday, including having management acquire the firm from shareholders in a leveraged buy-out, when Trump came hunting.

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I really didn't believe Donald Trump was a serious corporate raider. This was before he had established his reputation as a greenmailer. I just couldn't quite picture him as running a big company. But he had put us in play clearly, and our stock was moving, and arbitrageurs were taking big positions, and something had to happen, so we got hard to work with Goldman Sachs [Holiday's investment banker], and we started talking about alternatives. And frankly I wasn't satisfied with whether we were exploring all the alternatives; it seemed we got sort of a canned response from them.

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The meeting convinced Rose that he wanted Drexel working for Holiday, never against it. Of course, Drexel had already been working against Holiday, with Lee recommending that Trump buy the stock and bringing Drexel's mergers and acquisitions experts in to advise Trump on Holiday's prospects as a takeover candidate.

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To thwart Trump, Drexel recommended that Holiday take on $2.4 billion of junk bond and bank debt. Most of the money went to pay a special dividend of sixty-five dollars per share.

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Not only was management's attention diverted, but the company had little money to reinvest in Harrah's Marina, a prospect that thrilled Trump.

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Trump, meanwhile, sold his Holiday stock in November for a gross profit of $18.8 million, made entirely with borrowed money.

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But the commission ignored these duties. Trump got the implicit message. Within days of cashing in his Holiday position Trump started buying stock in another competitor, Bally Manufacturing.

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bond deals, and Drexel didn't even have to pay Trump a finder's fee.

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Trump liked Bally's Park Place. Its magenta-and-green casino produced the largest cash flow in Atlantic City and Bally's Park Place also profited from a classy-sounding address. Boardwalk and Park Place, the most expensive squares on the Monopoly board. Like Harrah's, Bally's also had steady management under former stockbroker Richard Gillman and his crew. But its corporate parent did not do nearly so well — except when it came to extraordinary pay and perks for executives and directors. The price of Bally Manufacturing stock was low relative to the company's value, making it attractive to raiders.

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Trump, again using borrowed money, bought nearly 10 percent of Bally Manufacturing in the last two months of 1986. Drexel's Dan Lee advised Trump as he made these stock purchases.

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Within days Bally sued Trump, accusing him of antitrust and securities law violations, and Trump countersued. Bally also hired Drexel.

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In February 1987, Bally settled the litigation with Trump by buying back his stock at an inflated price and paying him a $6.2 million fee to go away for ten years. Trump's gross profit, including the fee, was $21 million. Drexel made much more and this time Trump not only saddled a strong competitor with debt, he got a bonus when an even tougher competitor, Steve Wynn, quit Atlantic City altogether.

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Because Trump owned two casinos. Bally could block a takeover by buying a second gambling hall. That's because New Jersey law limited him to three. Bally bought the Atlantic City Golden Nugget, paying a wildly inflated price of $440 million. Wynn's company had only $255 million invested in the baroque palace at the south end of the Boardwalk, whose early profits had not been sustained. Over the previous three years combined it had lost more than $6 million.

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Bally's spendthrift reaction to Trump's raid left Bally drowning in red ink, unable to compete effectively in Atlantic City (or Nevada) and the raid prompted Wynn, one of the two high roller specialists, to leave town. For Trump it was a straight win-win. He had eliminated one tough competitor, Wynn, and he had saddled two more casinos with the oppressive debt loads that held back Harrah's from expansion.

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Right after Wynn left town the badly needed garage was finished at Trump Plaza. On the side facing the casino were a few potted plants and two black hansom cabs, each drawn by a life-size bronze horse. Displaying the kind of chutzpah that Trump relished, Hyde claimed that the garage was a work of art and that its entire $30 million cost should be credited against Trump obligations under a city ordinance requiring investments'^ public art. (The ploy became moot when the ordinance was gutted.)

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Despite the hansom cab many thought the garage an architectural and urban planning atrocity, for it confronted motorists coming off the Atlantic City Expressway with a gigantic blank wall, to which were added huge red lights declaring the name Trump Plaza. More than any other structure in town the Trump Plaza garage demonstrated that the casinos were in Atlantic City, but not of it, that the casinos wanted to be walled off from the rest of the city.

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Whatever its aesthetic values the garage gave Hyde the tool he needed to outshine Ivana's Castle. In 1986, Trump Plaza's net profit was four times Trump Castle's. In 1987, with the garage open only seven months. Trump Plaza's net ballooned to more than ten times the Castle's.

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Still, during the last week of July 1987, Ivana nearly won her fight with Hyde. Ivana hired Christian Mari from the old Golden Nugget. But he wasn't coming to work at the Castle. Mari's contract read "senior vice president, hotel operations. Trump Plaza." Mari was to be Ivana's Trojan horse.

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Having won this battle Hyde renewed his efforts to make Trump Plaza the successor to the Golden Nugget as high-roller heaven. Among those Golden Nugget players he lured up the Boardwalk was Robert Libutti, a compulsive gambler with a hair-trigger temper and a habit of using vulgar street language when addressing women and minorities, habits that the Mormon Hyde ignored so long as Libutti was willing to while away hours risking up to twenty thousand dollars on each roll of the dice.

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What Hyde discouraged was the lusty interest Trump took in Libutti's only daughter, a stylish divorcee named Edie.

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Libutti said he was furious that a married man would want to bed his daughter and he finally confronted Trump, ordering him to stop asking her out.

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Hyde had another reason to want to keep Trump away from Libutti's daughter and it had nothing to do with his religion's rigid morality.

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Hyde had gained in the competition with Ivana by helping Donald hide his mistress, Marla Ann Maples. The bosomy Georgia blonde stayed at Trump Plaza, signing for anything she desired in its restaurants and shops. So long as Donald stayed focused on Marla, Trump kept his wife away from Trump Plaza, which meant Hyde and his team remained secure in their cushy jobs.

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Although Trump always surrounded himself with bodyguards, sometimes he abandoned them and drove himself to Trump Plaza to reduce the number of mouths that might spread stories about his secret liaisons. This precaution was not perfect, though, for a few insiders could not keep the secret.

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To really win Donald's heart Hyde and his team needed to establish Trump Plaza as the premier high-roller joint. Like Harrah's Marina, Trump Plaza was built as a prosaic place. Hyde remade it, covering the floors, walls and the columns with Italian marble and arranging Mike Tyson's fights next door at the Convention Hall, as well as other glamour events.

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Meanwhile, Donald had his own plan to attract high rollers to Trump Castle. (The 's had been dropped from the name, a grammatical refinement that Trump claimed cost a half million dollars.) Trump wanted suites. Ivana could spend lavishly on dinners, fine wines and gifts, but high rollers still wanted their egos fed by spending their hours away from the table in fantasy lodgings with marble and tapestries or brass and gauche colors, depending on their taste.

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This monument finished. Trump did something that was absolutely amazing given his practice of claiming wildly inflated values for his properties. At the start of 1988, Trump had paid Appraisal Group International to value the Castle. It settled on $636 million. Nearly two years later, just as the Crystal Tower was about to open, Trump's confidential net worth statement valued the Castle at $635 million.

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Perhaps Trump never compared the two statements, but nonetheless by his own account he had written off the entire $110 million expansion as less than worthless — it sliced a million bucks off the Castle's value.

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Shortly after he closed the deal Trump flew in his black Super Puma helicopter from Manhattan to the Castle helipad to close the book on the competition between Ivana and Hyde. He gathered a dozen Castle executives around the mahogany-and-granite conference table in the windowless executive boardroom and called Manhattan on the speakerphone.

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"Ivana, I'm here with some of your friends in the room," Trump announced, according to two of those present. Then Trump told Ivana that she was no longer their boss.

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Executives seated around the table, even those who detested Ivana, were aghast that Trump would publicly demean his wife instead of talking to her in private. The cruelty of it was mitigated when Donald continued, saying that he was promoting her to a new position in the Trump Hotel Corporation and putting her in charge of his newest property, the Plaza Hotel on Central Park in Manhattan. Over the speakerphone Ivana's whimper could be heard. One witness to this exchange recalled thinking: This man has freon in his veins.

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Trump, who often said money was the measure of success in business, had told the world how much he valued Hyde and Ivana. He paid

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But instead of focusing on his two casinos, on building the business, the easily distracted Trump would soon cast his eye on another casino — one that would soon entomb his presumed fortune.

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To Jack Davis, Donald Trump looked like a better bet than Jack Pratt. Trump was near the peak of media adoration. He had gone to Wharton, his lifestyle indicated deep pockets, and his ego would drive him to finish the Taj, Davis figured. Davis lined up the Crosby family for Trump and in March 1987, Donald Trump arranged to buy the B shares held by the Crosby estate, Crosby's relatives and some others. For $96 million they would give him stock controlling 88 percent of the votes. Trump, of course, borrowed all the money.

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Trump rewarded Davis with a lucrative new employment contract

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All Trump needed to close the deal was the Casino Control Commission's approval. The Casino Control Act limits an owner to three casinos. Since Trump already had the Plaza and the Castle, this posed a problem since Resorts already ran one casino and the commissioners also wanted the Taj finished. The logical choice was to close the casino in the existing Resorts while keeping open its restaurants and hotel rooms. Trump would then own three of the city's dozen casinos, but because the Taj casino was the size of the Plaza and Castle combined he would have as much floor space as four casinos. Would this much power in the hands of one owner diminish competition? Would it mean the kind of economic concentration the law prohibited? And was anyone willing to see a casino close?

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To make his case that buying Resorts would not result in undue economic concentration Trump relied on Marvin Roffman, the casino analyst at the Janney Montgomery Scott brokerage who reflected the views of Main Line investors by emphasizing capital conservation, not daring investments. Roffman testified that letting Trump buy Resorts would not cause undue economic concentration because there were so many other sites available for others to open casinos. Two days after Roffman testified the commission advised Trump he could finish his deal and could close Resorts when the Taj was completed. Almost immediately events began unfolding that made Roffman regret his testimony.

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Once in control Trump signed a "comprehensive services agreement" with Resorts that paid him a percentage of gross revenues in return for his management expertise. But Trump had no such expertise. The stock market saw immediately what the agreement meant that Trump would drain off money as an expense, insuring that he got his — even if nothing but red ink flowed to the bottom line.

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Trump asserted that he was only charging a fair price for his expertise. But the three independent directors of Resorts — whom the casino commissioners insisted upon to maintain a semblance of checks on Trump — were wary. They hired David Schulte, a savvy Chicago investment banker, to review its terms. Schulte quickly showed just what a

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steep price Trump wanted for his comprehensive services. Over the agreement's thirty-year term. Trump stood to collect about $1 billion, Schulte figured.

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The comprehensive services agreement required Casino Control Commission approval. Trump testified that the comprehensive services agreement was not his idea, but Jack Davis's. Some commission staffers argued internally that the agreement provided no benefit to the casino company and would weaken it, that it ran contrary to the commission's duties.

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That Trump knew next to nothing about how to actually run a casino, that Resorts already had or could buy on the open market far more qualified managers for much less money, and that the contract posed a direct conflict between Trump's pecuniary interests and his fiduciary duties to other shareholders was of no heed to Chairman Read, who stuck to his decidedly narrow view that it was not the commission's job to protect shareholders. So long as the agreement did not interfere with the integrity of casino gaming and did not threaten the financial stability of the casino. Read would go along.

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Emboldened by the laissez-faire approach that Read articulated on making money in what the law promised would be a "highly regulated" industry. Trump pressed on. Just five days after the commissioners rubber-stamped the services agreement Trump offered the rest of Resorts' owners fifteen dollars per share, or $85.6 million, to get out. It was the clearest possible evidence that Trump had not acted in the best interest of shareholders, whose stock was worth more than three times that just before Crosby died and more than five times as much the day after he died. Trump's fifteen-dollar price was for all shareholders, both the lowly A shares and the rest of the B shares, whose one hundred votes per share no longer carried any weight because Trump already had a majority of the voting power. Trump announced that unless he owned Resorts outright he would not risk his own money to finish the Taj, although anyone who had been following Trump's business style knew he would never risk his own money even if he won complete ownership of Resorts. (Trump later risked only the money of bank depositors and bond buyers on the Taj.)

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Trump had another tactic to get the other shareholders to sell out

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The fifteen-dollars-per-share price appalled Schulte, whose opinion Resorts' independent directors had sought to insulate themselves in the shareholder litigation. He called it "grossly inadequate." Schulte pronounced $22 per share fair, an opinion worth almost $40 million more to the other shareholders and worth a $1.8 million fee to his firm, Chilmark Partners. Presented with Schulte's appraisal on January 12, Trump did the expected. He said he wouldn't buy at any price.

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Scutti said he read in the newspapers that Trump would invest the $525 million needed to finish the Taj only if he could make Resorts his private property. How, Scutti asked himself, could it cost a half billion dollars to finish that building? Scutti was not in Trump's class financially, but he had built auto malls, strip shopping centers, and restaurants and had an idea of what construction cost.

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"Trump helped to make the stock price drop with threats of bankruptcy, with threats that no one could complete the Taj Mahal except him, and with threats that he was the only one who could finance the Taj Mahal," Scutti said. Shareholder suits making similar claims were already being heard in Delaware Chancery Court, where Resorts was officially organized. Trump denied the allegations.

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Dale Scutti said he left Atlantic City convinced that Donald Trump had stumbled onto a great real estate play. Scutti wanted in on it. On January 19, Scutti bought one hundred thousand Resorts Class A shares at $13.50. Soon he would invest more than $5 million until he owned nearly 6 percent of the one-share, one-vote Class A stock. But he needed someone to force up the stock price to make any real money.

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Meanwhile, Trump's withdrawn fifteen-dollar bid disturbed others and not all of them were shareholders dismayed at getting fifty dollars less per share than they could have had before Trump took charge. Casino Control commissioner Valerie Armstrong, who just months earlier had voted against renewing Trump's casino license because she believed he had lied, said Trump's conduct could be interpreted as intending to drive down the price of Resorts stock, which would be a violation of his fiduciary obligation to all shareholders.

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Trump's withdrawal of the fifteen dollars per share bid was a bit much even for the other four casino commissioners. When the commission announced that it would hold hearings in two weeks to reconsider the approval of the comprehensive services agreement. Trump realized that Armstrong might have allies willing to kill the lucrative services agreement.

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Trump got the unstated message, that an independent party had set a fair price for Resorts stock and Trump had better meet it or he could see his billion-dollar comprehensive services agreement voided. Two days later Trump said he would pay twenty-two dollars for the rest of the Resorts stock, which ended the commission's interest in any hearings.

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A minute later Connolly phoned Ernie's. His conversations with Peter Aiello would play a crucial role in the most celebrated business deal of 1988 — Merv Griffin's hostile takeover of Resorts International from Donald Trump. The battle of the moguls was a story dear to the hearts of the glitzmongers who pose as journalists at many of the nation's leading news organs. Before the deal was finished, exactly eight months later, network television would chronicle the fight, major newspapers would carry the exchanges of witty barbs on their front pages, and breathless magazine covers would herald how Merv had taught the deal artist a lesson. Virtually all of these accounts would be based on how the highly

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next day Donald Trump immediately faxed a copy to Nick Ribis, his casino lawyer.

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Trump had no interest in Merv's deal. Having paid $135 per share for his Resorts stock, it would be a disaster for him to sell. The market, however, pushed the price of Resorts shares from twenty-two dollars to near the thirty-five dollars Griffin was offering. To some it looked like a chance to recoup from some of the damage Trump had done. Connolly said he quickly got his clients out of their Resorts position and filled in his SEC pal.

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Over the following weeks Trump and Griffin fed the glitzmongers with cute one-liners, but no progress was made toward a deal. Griffin made a second offer, doomed from the start. Then the two moguls met at Trump Tower and afterward Griffin's aides designed an offer that showed he had come to appreciate a fundamental requirement of any deal with Trump: Donald's cash machine had to be fed.

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This third proposal bought Trump out of his management contract for $63 million cash, sold Trump the unfinished Taj at a fire-sale price of fifty cents on each dollar Resorts had invested in it, and paid Trump back every penny he spent to buy the controlling stock held by the Crosby estate, Crosby family and Jim Crosby's lady friends. The other Resorts stockholders saw their deal sweetened by a buck to thirty-six dollars per share.

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Jess Marcum dreamed up the "freeze-out" game to lure Kashiwagi back to Trump Plaza after he had won more than $6 million there. Marcum, a physicist who helped invent radar, was a lonely atheist in the temples of chance because he did not believe in Lady Luck. He had endeared himself to casino owners by inventing a lucrative new bet, one he admired Kashiwagi for being too smart to make.

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Donald Trump put his then wife Ivana in charge of his Trump Castle casino even though she had no management experience. He blew a fortune having Ivana compete for high rollers against his own Trump Plaza casino while ignoring Harrah's next door, which earned a million dollars a week in profits. To attract high-stakes play to the Castle, Trump offered rides on the world's sixth-largest yacht, the Trump Princess, but its $861,000 monthly cost just drained money.

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Steve Hyde was the Mormon accountant who briefly made Trump Plaza the highroller heaven his boss wanted. Ivana nearly forced Hyde out. After Hyde was killed in an October 1989 helicopter crash, the Trump casinos plunged into disarray and all three ended up in bankruptcy proceedings.

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Merv Griffin and his companion, Eva Gabor, triumphantly ride a hundred feet across the Atlantic City Boardwalk on November 16, 1988, the day he bought Resorts from Trump in Mike Milken's last big junk-bond deal. Griffin's takeover began as a stock manipulation, one of many run out of The Griffin Company president's office. Griffin said that he was unaware a reputed mob associate had a desk in*the president's office at The Griffin Company.

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Griffin's takeover of Resorts from Donald Trump was the looniest casino junk-bond deal of them all, involving more than one billion borrowed dollars. This chart shows the complicated flow of money needed to complete Griffin's side of the deal and preserve various tax breaks.

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Bob Signore argues his case that Trump Castle cheated him because its gaming guide was riddled with errors. New Jersey regulators knew about the mistakes, which cost Signore eight hundred dollars, but instead of ordering them fixed, let the Castle continue using them, then falsely told Signore the brochures had been corrected. Signore sued Trump Castle for fraud. The judge who threw the case out lectured him for having the temerity to question the integrity of casino regulation in New Jersey.

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Donald Trump talks at Merv Griffin in April 1990 during the grand opening of the Taj Mahal casino, which lacked a swimming pool and other amenities because Trump was on the edge of financial collapse and ignored memos warning about cost overruns.

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Trump outside the Taj, which cost a billion dollars but lacked any of the pizzazz that drew high rollers from around the world to Wynn's Mirage, which cost $630 million.

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Marvin B. Roffman accurately predicted that the Taj Mahal would be in bankruptcy soon after it opened. Robert Trump threw him off the property, and Donald Trump not only demanded he recant but tried to edit his forced letter of apology. Unable to tell a lie, Roffman refused and was fired by the Janney Montgomery Scott securities brokerage. Janney and Trump both later paid him big settlements.

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Fred Trump had his lawyer buy $3.5 million worth of chips so his son Donald could make the December 1990 mortgage bond interest payment on Trump Castle. The director of New Jersey's Division of Gaming Enforcement was tipped in advance about the loan but kept it to himself.

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Casino Control Commissioner Valerie Armstrong voted against renewing Trump's casino license once, saying he lacked integrity. Later she asked if the Division of Gaming Enforcement knew about Fred Trump's loan in advance and was told it did not. She complained about a double standard in regulation that benefited Trump, but cast the crucial vote in 1990 to renew his license.

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Steven P. Perskie sponsored the Casino Control Act as a New Jersey legislator in 1977. But after he became chairman of the Casino Control Commission in 1990, he refused to enforce its provisions against Donald Trump and voted to renew his license even though Trump did not meet the act's financial stability requirements.

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Hanlon had his own reasons for wanting a new job, even if leaving meant giving up Holiday stock worth $6 million. When Trump forced Holiday into restructuring Mike Rose arranged for the senior executives to receive 10 percent of Holiday's stock over eight years as an incentive to keep the team there and working hard. But the only executive showered with enough stock and other benefits to make leaving out of the question was Mike Rose. In one of the many accounts from which executives got special payments Rose one year received thirty-four times as much as Hanlon, who ran the property that generated 28 percent of Holiday's profits.

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The New Jersey Casino Control Commission, still smarting from the Hilton debacle three years earlier, was determined to license Merv Griffin. The commissioners did not want Trump to close the original casino in town and they wanted the Taj finished. They also wanted a new player in town to counter Trump's influence and the risk of what might happen to Atlantic City if Trump ever got into trouble. Griffin, with his Hollywood connections, held out the prospect of restoring to the Boardwalk some of the glamour that left when his buddy Steve Wynn returned to Las Vegas.

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For their part, Howard Goldberg and Tom Gallagher, Griffin's top lawyers, needed to focus attention on Griffin's promises and away from the financial realities of his deal with Donald Trump. They had to come up with a way to make the deal appear financially stable even though the added Drexel debt would push interest costs to $300,000 per day

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The actual terms of the Trump-Griffin deal were largely ignored in favor of obtuse testimony about side issues and inflated claims about cost savings. The dangerous Nigris and American Leisure matters were put off until the following year, when Griffin would have to undergo full personal license hearings. For the deal to close, both sides agreed, all he needed was a temporary license, which could be issued based on an incomplete investigation of Griffin's fitness since it appeared, or at least what was in the public record made it appear, that nothing was amiss.

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appear to be dumb, a guy who relied on experts for everything and who really did not understand his own deal with Trump. Hanlon's ability and integrity is what should be of greatest concern, the Griffin team said. Griffin contributed to this by claiming ignorance of some parts of the deal and by telling self-deprecating stories, like the one about the Vegas duck.

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Although the deal was far from done, Griffin flew to Atlantic City. The afternoon began with a clever remark by Griffin, a preemptive strike against Trump, whose style was to finish a deal and then denounce whoever sat on the other side of the table as a chump. Griffin, followed by his official companion, Eva Gabor, and by Brent Plott, who would later sue him for palimony, stood before a battery of television cameras in a Resorts ballroom that had been freshly painted and carpeted, unlike much of the rest of the deteriorating old hotel.

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Asked if he intended to put his name on Resorts hotels in Atlantic City and the Bahamas and on his recently acquired Beverly Hilton in California, Griffin replied with a reference to the huge red letters on another Boardwalk casino: "No, not unless I can get Merv to be as big as Trump — or get the T off Trump." Griffin's clever way of calling Trump an ass revealed the emnity between the two moguls that again and again threatened to blow up their deal over the following four months, a prospect the casino commissioners wanted to avoid.

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To raise the $85 million Resorts would have to sell land. Resorts was the largest private landowner in Atlantic City, controlling one third of the developable acreage. Griffin and his publicity machine set to work in June to create the impression that this could be done with ease. The Los Angeles Times Magazine even swooned about how in teaching Trump some new deal artistry, homeboy Griffin had won "150 acres of prime real estate in the heart of Atlantic City."

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Norton, a father of eight with a nervous twitch and eyes sunk deep in skin furrowed by years of worry, figured that buying just the Atlantic City casino would cost $200 million or so. Knowing the commission wanted to keep Resorts open, Norton figured the regulators would force Trump to accept such a proposal.

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Trump maintained that he could not understand why Griffin would do this deal. "Merv's the only guy I've ever done a deal with where 1 could not figure out why he would do it," he said. On the day the deal and the flow of money was laid out before the commission. Trump fretted. Leaving the hearing room he turned to an aide, Harvey Freeman, and said, "Now that they've explained it to him, he'll pull out."

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On November 16, eight months after Peter Aiello called from "Ernie's," the deal closed. Griffin owned Resorts and, for a day, the Taj, which then went to Trump for half what Crosby had squandered on it.

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Then Griffin took another dig at Trump when he was asked how it felt to owe nearly a billion dollars.

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Meanwhile, Trump was sailing toward his first date in Bankruptcy Court.

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Now the ship belonged to Donald Trump, another casino owner with an immense ego who had invented a game, this one named for himself, and who seemed to be on his way to dominating everything in Atlantic City and perhaps Manhattan as well, with all the daring buildings bearing his name and promises of many more to come.

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world's sixth largest private yacht. The journey from New York began with a scare for Trump, who feared they were sinking until someone explained that it was just the anchor being drawn into his ship. Trump was not a sailor and admitted that waves made his stomach queasy.

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When the waters calmed, the great white ship headed for the Atlantic City Inlet, cutting through a channel that separated two worlds, a channel dredged deeper just days before to accommodate her. Off starboard lay a clean white beach where waterfront land sold for ten thousand dollars per foot and perfectly sturdy little homes were routinely razed so opulent ones could be erected. Off port, though, the shore was blackened by the stinking muck that crews dredging the channel for Trump had dumped there illegally. Behind this fetid mess stood dilapidated houses that some occupants had acquired for as little as seven hundred dollars in the dark days before the casinos came to Atlantic City.

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The boat arrived hung with a huge green banner heralding its new name. Trump Princess, in gold letters, the words separated by a crown. Its sleek side opened, revealing a gold-and-green velvet throne bearing Donald Trump, wearing his usual dark suit and sheepishly holding an umbrella, and the elegantly dressed Ivana, a maid holding her parasol. As an elevator lowered the throne to the dock, crewmen rolled out a red carpet and pointed the couple to a waiting electric cart. Trump waved the cart off and the couple marched triumphantly several hundred feet on the squishy carpet, past the yachts of the merely rich, toward the patient throng, which surged toward them.

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swirling fans. The adored couple pressed on toward the building across the street. Trump waving, his wife smiling. As they rode the escalator up into Trump Castle Hotel & Casino a new crowd appeared and others flowed out of the gambling hall to join in the endless applause. "Be our next president, Donald," one man shouted before Trump and his entourage slipped into a ballroom, where two lines of women in scanty sailor suits greeted them.

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Inside Trump held a news conference during which he was asked three questions about the filth polluting the beach. The answers were classic Trump. He answered the first by denying any knowledge of dredge spoils dumped on the beach. He answered the second by saying that he had agreed to pay a fine. He answered the third by declaring the matter a nonstory.

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Then he stepped off the dais to shake hands. Before reaching Trump, though, the local officials and their spouses had to pass the muster of a stout man in a pink silk blazer. One or two at a time they approached Paddy McGahn and, after paying homage for having been invited, waited for him to decide when their turn would come to have their hand shaken and their picture taken with The Donald and his missus.

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The arrival of the ship and its owner in the tattered resort showed Donald Trump perfecting the art of being idolized. The crowds loved him for personifying the American Dream of success and the government officials basked in his glow. Trump's claim that the ship was his "personal yacht," suggesting it was an incredibly costly toy financed from his bottomless pockets, was uncritically repeated in print and television stories across the nation, adding to the Trump legend of unlimited wealth flowing from his deal-making artistry. For the rich kid from Queens who had taken Manhattan by audacious architecture, July 9, 1988, was a public relations triumph.

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glossed over its realities, that Trump was being treated as royalty, even urged to lead the world's oldest democracy, a suggestion he encouraged at every opportunity.

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To the discerning eye, though, much more went on that day behind the glitzy image the Trumps projected, for these same events also demonstrated how much Trump had come to believe his own myth of being a modern Midas, able to turn dross into gold merely by affixing his name to a casino, an airline or even bare ground. In less than a year his spendthrift ways and foolhardy management would tarnish the carefully polished Trump image and press him to the brink of uncontrolled bankruptcy, a horror he escaped only because of the extraordinary leniency of government, a bailout from six dozen banks and the hundreds of millions of dollars lost by hardworking people whose pension money was invested in the Trump name.

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Much of Trump's apparent wealth was illusory, the result of complex financial engineering that had come to resemble not the smooth-running money machine Trump endlessly hyped, but a Rube Goldberg contraption constantly in need of more cash to avoid collapse. It had been true almost from the start of his career. Now nothing showed this better than the Trump Princess, which added millions of dollars per year to the drain on his cash flow, plus $29 million in new debt since, as usual, he put no money down. He assumed these new obligations shortly before he was due to fulfill promises to pay down the balances on bank loans and on casino mortgage bonds — money he did not have.

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Ivana imposed odd restrictions that hampered its use as a device to draw high rollers. She wanted only white wine and champagne served on board in case anyone dropped their glass, which angered a few red wine drinkers among the gamblers given a ride. Trump Castle executive Christian Mari said. Ultimately that rule was rescinded. Mari and others

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also complained that it was difficult to get players on board. Ivana required that some guests remove their shoes and walk in stocking feet, though Casino Control commissioners and most gamblers were exempted from this rule. "Mrs. Trump does not want the carpets ruined," Captain Richard Cuckson explained, coughing lightly into his fist, as he stood beside two of the many maids who endlessly polished and cleaned every visible surface.

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The ship had been built in 1980 for arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi, a world-class gambler who had a habit of not paying his bills, as Steve Hyde had painfully learned at the Las Vegas Sands. Khashoggi claimed that the ship, which he named after his daughter Nabila, cost $90 million. Although Trump claimed to have spent $8 million refurbishing it, half of it on the interior, the fabrics and furniture were unchanged. Nor did Trump spend any money to remove the original logo, a black onyx triangle on a white background into which black stones are set in a design that looks like a wave and a whale, a play on the Arabic symbols for the name Nabila. While Nabila's name was a permanent fixture, Trump's presence was not. His name was visible mostly in the neat arrays of magazines on tables in every room, magazines that featured his smiling face and that inside treated whatever he said as gospel.

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Trump had bought the ship from its second owner, the Sultan of Brunei, who had foreclosed on Khashoggi when he failed to repay a loan. The Sultan was by far the richest person in the world, a man who owned his own country and who each year made far more money than even Trump claimed his empire was worth. Trump bought the ship the way the impulsive and profligate buy cars beyond their means: no money down and years of payments. Trump had two advantages, though, not available to most buyers.

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One was his influence in Trenton, where New Jersey tax officials decided that Trump did not have to pay the 6 percent sales tax of $1.74 million on the $29 million purchase price. Instead, Trump only had to pay 6 percent of the monthly lease payment of about $400,000. The state's reasoning ignored the fact that Trump owned the company that leased him the ship.

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Second, while the 1986 overhaul of the federal tax laws had taken away most deductions for boats. Trump did not pay for his "personal yacht" with his personal funds. While Trump bought the ship simply because he wanted it as a symbol of wealth, it was in fact a marketing tool for Trump Castle. Lose enough money and Trump would take you for a ride.

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The Crystal Tower, the $110 million suite expansion that was intended to draw high rollers to the Castle, was still under construction. Trump needed a draw for high rollers and a luxury ship seemed like an interim solution.

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The lease payments and all operating costs were charged to the Castle, which Trump owned in its entirety and which could deduct these costs on its tax return. The Castle would have turned a small profit in 1989 but for these costs. Instead, the Castle lost $6.7 million.

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The Princess was not the only drag on profits. The Castle's Monte Carlo high-roller slots area opened just before the 1989 gambling season began. Separated from the hoi polloi by low marble walls, brass railings and etched glass, the Monte Carlo denoted an area for favored players, the kind willing to pay one hundred dollars per pull at their choice of three machines. Dozens of other slots priced at $25, $5 and just a buck stood arrayed before plush seats. The hosts, called Monte Carlo ambassadors, wore tuxedos. So did the ever-present cleaning man, who swept cigarette butts into what Trump said was a gold dustpan. The casino even provided phone jacks for those who wanted to play and work at the same time. And when the slot tokens turned hands black from heavy play, the ambassadors provided moist, hot towels.

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Snyder was a certified high roller. He lost eight hundred thousand dollars at Trump Castle, according to the Division of Gaming Enforcement. To lose that much a player typically would have to pump about $13 million into the one-armed bandits, including recycled winnings.

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But the Monte Carlo arena, like the Trump Princess, failed to attract enough high rollers to pay for itself. In time, abandoning the Hilton marketing plan to chase high rollers proved disastrous.

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Trump Castle barely turned a profit in 1987 and lost $3.1 million in 1988, but its cash flow created a mighty river of greenbacks. This is because net profits take into account deductions that appear on tax returns bift that involve no cash outlay, notably depreciation on the hotel and its equipment.

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In 1987, the Castle's cash flow was $23.4 million, rising to $33.7 million in 1988. Trump tapped this flow of cash during the Castle's first four years to withdraw $38.5 million of capital, a neat maneuver, since he had borrowed his capital contribution from a bank.

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But in 1989 the failed high-roller strategy nearly dried up the flow of cash. The Princess, lavish comps for high rollers like Snyder, and the Crystal Tower overruns drained off so much money that cash flow slowed to a trickle — just $183,000 in 1989, which was less cash than flowed into the Castle every two days in 1988. Trump Castle was drifting toward Bankruptcy Court.

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Before it got there, in 1992, there would be a few stops along the way where laws would be deliberately broken and the promise that casinos would be "highly regulated" would be treated like the polluted spoils dumped on the beach. And Trump would flout more rules. He would even be accused of cheating Castle players — with the sanction of casino regulators.

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The testimony and many of the exhibits from the hearings were sent to the Division of Gaming Enforcement by JJ's lawyer, Nick Ribis, who was also Donald Trump's casino lawyer. Ribis, seeking an advantage in the dispute with the Sands, and no doubt hoping to weaken the Sands as a competitor to the Trump casinos, pointed to the flow of money in and out of the casino for Janna's benefit, to the huge sums of cash that had vanished, and to the testimony by Pattison that showed the Sands people had been told that the DEA had frozen Janna's bank account.

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The regulators, who saw nothing wrong with drug money subsidizing a casino company, faced other issues testing their diligence — issues that involved "little people," not high rollers with millions of dollars. The first test began with a roulette player who said Trump Castle deliberately cheated him out of eight hundred dollars.

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Bob Signore longed to be walking on the beach enjoying the warm, gentle breeze at the Jersey Shore one August evening in 1987. But the rest of the family wanted to get out of their summer place. Asko Sullivan, his favorite uncle, yearned for some action at Trump Castle. Reluctantly, the soft-spoken Signore tagged along. Signore, a slight man in his thirties with a mustache, had trained as an accountant, so while he did not gamble he understood numbers enough to know the family would probably lose all their stakes. At least, he figured, with all the state regulations anyone who gambled at Trump Castle would lose their money honestly. He figured wrong.

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Alone, Signore wandered through the half acre of Trump Castle slots, pulling the smooth handles here and there to try his luck. The slots just did not feel right to Signore, so eventually he ambled over to the roulette wheels to watch his uncle. Asko Sullivan played Trump Castle and the Claridge often enough to be a rated player, wise to the ways of being comped to dinner or a suite to soothe the pain of losing hundreds or even thousands of bucks on the gaming floor.

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The two-page spread on roulette featured a colored illustration of the betting table showing how thirteen different bets work. Signore studied the illustration and watched the dealer pay wins and take chips when players lost. At first he couldn't quite grasp the game. But soon his eyes opened wide. The dealers were not paying by the rules, at least not by the rules in the official Trump Castle gaming guide.

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through the opening. Bally's Park Place claimed it once had to spend a quarter million bucks on new carpeting because the regulators decided that there was not enough contrast in colors where the casino carpet was sewn to the hotel lobby carpet. Sullivan figured that all the mistakes in this booklet, the official book of rules, could mean serious and expensive trouble for Trump Castle.

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Go tell the casino manager about it, Sullivan advised his nephew, and after you explain to him what you found suggest that Trump Castle return the favor by buying us all dinner.

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As the manager in the sharp black suit walked off, Signore felt humiliated at the treatment and outraged that Trump Castle didn't give a damn that its gaming guide had the rules all wrong, that novices could be cheated.

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The following night Signore returned to Trump Castle. His uncle and a friend came along, but they entered the casino separately. Signore sat down at the roulette table and bought a stack of fifty-dollar chips. He also pulled out the official "Guide to Games at Trump's Castle Hotel & Casino" and a piece of paper. He made a show of looking at the guide for advice, explaining to the dealer and the other players this was his first time at a roulette table. On the p^per he wrote down each bet. On his nineteenth bet, when the ball fell on 17 black and the dealer reached for his chips. Signore spoke up.

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"No I didn't. I did bet red and even. And, yes, it did come up black and odd. I should win," Signore said. "Look," he implored, "just look at this official Trump Castle official gaming guide." The dealer's lips suddenly sealed tight.

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there are errors in it and you're the same person who handed me this booklet half an hour ago? This makes a lot of sense. But what he said was, "In that case. I'd like my money back. I'm out two hundred dollars, but according to this booklet I should have won six hundred dollars. Trump Castle owes me eight hundred dollars." The bureaucrat said she had no authority. She did call the casino shift manager on duty, James McDermott, and when he showed up twenty minutes later Signore showed him the guide.

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Finally commission inspector Louise O'Donnell wrote a brief notation of the incident and Signore left, almost vindicated. All he had to do now was get the state to return his money. After all, he reasoned, by removing all those official gaming guides Trump Castle had confirmed he was right.

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Signore thought that was ridiculous. The casinos were regulated industries. They do not kill people. This is not the mob, he said, this is Donald Trump. And besides, he said, waving a copy of the Casino Control Act, the law said that the overriding principle of casino regulation is honesty. People, the law says, can trust the "credibility and integrity of the regulatory process and casino operations."

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More than a year earlier, in 1986, a state Division of Gaming Enforcement agent had spotted the same mistakes and recommended that new guides be printed. The guides had been in use since Trump Castle opened in 1985. Before the first one was distributed proof sheets had been submitted to the regulators. But the toughest regulatory agency the world had ever seen had failed to notice that nearly half the roulette bets in the Trump Castle guide were wrong. And when the mistakes were first found the regulators did not order the brochures thrown out, but said the casino could keep distributing them.

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"But, still," Gushin said, recovering his argument, "there was no cheating because Trump Castle played the game according to the rules. If they had cheated anyone, we would have filed a complaint against them immediately."

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Signore hired a lawyer and wrote letters to the commission and to lawmakers seeking new gaming guides, an apology and restitution of his money or, at least, forfeiture of the eight hundred dollars by Trump Castle to the state or, better yet, his favorite charity. Sometimes he also asked for his legal fees.

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Hall of the New Jersey State Police wrote Daly a letter in January 1988 saying Signore's complaint lacked merit because when he played roulette he already knew the official gaming guide had errors. Hall also wrote that Trump Castle had placed corrective stickers on the gaming guides. Daly passed the major's letter on to Signore, who figured that ended his quest. It didn't.

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Three weeks later Signore decided to swing by Trump Castle and take a look at the corrective stickers. At the Casino Control Commission booth he found the gaming guides uncorrected and without stickers. Signore was livid.

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He started writing letters again. When they were ignored he filed a lawsuit charging Trump Castle and the Casino Control Commission with fraud. Nearly three years after he found the mistakes, Signore thought he was about to get his day in court. He showed up early at the modern red-brick courthouse in Atlantic City, as did a lawyer for the state and another for Trump Castle. The judge dispatched them to a windowless room with plain white walls where two local lawyers, Dara A. Quattrone and Michael R. Mosca, tried to settle the case.

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Trump's lawyer, Steven D. Scherzer, could not figure out why he was there. It struck him that Signore had a point, even if he had pushed it to ridiculous lengths, and that the amount of money at issue was not worth his time when the casino could have just written an eight-hundred-dollar check to a charity of Signore's choosing. But Scherzer knew Trump would never write a letter of apology, so he was there working on the clock to defeat Signore. Deputy Attorney General Franklin Widmann represented the regulators. Projecting an air of august contempt for Signore, he had a simple view of the case: not only was Signore not cheated, because he knew the brochure was flawed, but Widmann said the state was under no obligation to enforce any particular law. He also had an interesting defense of the faulty guides, arguing that the gaming guide's illustrations showed only "sample bets and did not say you would win, or lose, if you placed them."

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Vegas hamburger stands teenagers readily pop open their wallets to show off their frequent-gambler cards from Harrah's, Caesars, Trump Plaza, Resorts and other gambling halls.

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Debra was soon a rated player not just at Caesars, but also at the Atlantis, Harrah's, Resorts and Trump Plaza. They all plied her with

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During the time when Debra's case focused public attention on the problem hordes of other teenagers, including Joseph Bevan, continued wagering. He gambled at Harrah's, Resorts, Showboat and Trump Cas-

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The trial was held before Judge John G. Himmelberger, who had lectured Bob Signore for having the temerity to sue Trump Castle because it played roulette by a different set of rules than it handed out to novice gamblers. Cohen asked for a two-week delay, saying he had had trouble finding a lawyer without a conflict of interest because every one he approached did some work for the casinos. The day before the court appearance, one finally agreed to take the case, but he needed time to prepare. Himmelberger refused the request, forcing Cohen to act as his own counsel.

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Five months later, on December 12, 1990, Debra Kim Cohen got off work and started playing blackjack at Trump Plaza. She was twenty, still too young to gamble in a casino, although under New Jersey law she was old enough to be a cocktail waitress. You can't legally drink in New Jersey until you are twenty-one, but you can serve liquor at age eighteen. At eighteen you can also gamble with the state by playing the lottery.

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It would be easy to create powerful incentives for casinos to challenge youthful patrons. Every time an underage gambler is caught on the casino floor, gambling or not, Cohen favors a one-thousand-dollar fine, believing that sum is high enough to encourage diligence at the entrance. Repeat offenses should result in progressively larger fines with a casino that behaves as Trump Plaza did when it threw out O' Brick facing a fine of up to $1 million and a place that acts as Caesars did, laughing at a parent while continuing to give comps to a juvenile, losing its license.

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On July 4, 1988, the Atlantis declared its independence from coin giveaways. Players who wanted quarters could get sixty of them by riding a bus to Caesars, Trump Plaza, Showboat and the other casinos. Players who wanted to watch the reels spin twice as long could ride a bus to the Atlantis and get 120 tokens. Players could also get half tokens and half scrip, a deal the sharp players quickly recognized as the most lucrative in town because they could play the slots and get a free meal instead of choosing one or the other from the competition.

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His comments foreshadowed how three other debt-ridden and cashstarved casino owners — Donald Trump, Merv Griffin and Bally Manufacturing— would deal with financial instability. In essence Satz was proposing the equivalent of Chapter 11 protection from bills coming due by negotiation with creditors, a sort of privatizing of bankruptcy proceedings.

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In the audience watching all this was Nick Ribis, Donald Trump's gaming lawyer. Trump was not the only outsider interested in the Atlantis. Golden Nugget chairman Stephen Wynn flew into Atlantic City aboard his private jet — a DC-9 like Hefner's — to look over the Atlantis. The two casino moguls had very different ideas in mind. Trump wanted beds, Wynn wanted bets.

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The nearest casino to the Atlantis is Trump Plaza, three hundred paces up the Boardwalk. At the time Trump Plaza was the busiest casino in town and its hotel often had to turn away serious gamblers, many of whom had switched after Wynn sold the Atlantic City Golden Nugget in 1987 and returned to Las Vegas. Trump coveted the five hundred Atlantis rooms as an annex to Trump Plaza. He figured he could buy the property ^for much less once its casino closed because no one else could afford its $36 million annual operating cost, which came to more than three times what it could generate as a hotel alone, even assuming 100 percent occupancy. Besides, he wanted a place to stash Marla Maples and a permanent apartment at the Atlantis offered the best mix of access and privacy.

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When the license expired at midnight Hood had decided to stay open under conservator Nolan's aegis. Just before midnight she sold the Atlantis, for $63 million, to Donald Trump. Afterward, Nolan fought the deal, insisting he could get a better price. But the commission said he was not hired as a real estate broker and let the deal go through.

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When the sun rose over the sea in the morning Donald Trump seemed to be the only winner in the Atlantis debacle. In addition to his two existing casinos and his Taj Mahaf, where workers hurried to finish construction, he had bought up the abandoned Penthouse casino site between Trump Plaza and Caesars, taking a potential competitor out of

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the picture. Now he had taken over another casino, the Atlantis, removing it from the market while keeping its hotel rooms to serve Trump Plaza. Not many fully appreciated it, but from that day forward Atlantic City's destiny would be tied to Donald Trump's.

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In August 1989, just nine months after he closed his deal to buy Resorts from Donald Trump, Griffin had announced that Resorts would not continue paying interest on either the $325 million of Drexel bonds sold to finance his purchase or on the $605 million of Bear Stearns bonds

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The suspension of interest payments came after Griffin announced that in April, May and June of 1989 Resorts had lost $27.9 million, more than twice as much as it had the year before under Donald Trump. That meant that on the very days when the Casino Control Commission was moving to shut down the Atlantis because it was losing nearly a buck a second. Resorts was losing $3.54 with each tick of the clock.

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Trump boasted that he had shown Griffin a few renovated rooms and that Griffin had not asked to see rooms picked at random. Had Griffin shown such diligence he would have seen hundreds, priced at $150 a night, more suited to a Skid Row dump than a glamorous resort. Griffin also evidently failed to inspect all the costly and unseen systems that make a hotel work: the boilers and chillers, the wiring and ductways, the plumbing and elevators. Some of the elevators were so old, so jury-rigged that their jerks frightened many riders. Left unsaid was how the experts Griffin retained, the appraisers and attorneys and underwriters, could have failed to notice such things and to factor them into the numbers presented to the Casino Control Commission and to the prospectus for the Drexel junk. For that matter, how did such basic facts escape the casino regulators who supposedly investigated the deal thoroughly before the commission certified its financial stability? That

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From Griffin's perspective it was a brilliant proposal because it immediately set the two groups of bondholders at each other's wallets, fighting over whether the mortgages were valid or whether the deal with Trump involved a fraud in which money due the Bear Stearns bondholders had been wrongly diverted to Trump and other stockholders. Knowing this Griffin had set aside two meeting rooms, one for the Drexel crowd, composed entirely of sophisticated money managers, and the other for the Bear Stearns crowd, which included many retirees.

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From the day the game-show mogul first petitioned them for a license the commissioners had shown their willingness to go along to win Griffin both as a prospective source of glamour in Atlantic City and as a counter to Trump. They had swept aside the stock manipulation that had fathered the deal, rationalized Griffin's decision to retain Mike Nigris for nine months as head of his noncasino businesses, and dismissed Griffin's past association with casino-stock swindler Nate Jacobsen. They had also let Drexel peddle the junk for the deal even after it was clear it would be indicted for fraud.

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Two weeks after Griffin closed his deal with Trump on November 16, 1988, Hanlon had begun cutting costs furiously. The Treniers, who had performed in Resorts' lounge since it opened, had their contract abruptly canceled because their nine-thousand-dollar weekly fee was too high. So did other entertainers, all* replaced with the cheapest talent Hanlon could find. But for months Hanlon kept his polo team on Resorts' tab and he delayed selling its helicopters, which he often flew as

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Resorts did not fold, in large part because Griffin's statement that he would sew his pockets shut was only a negotiating ploy. The terms of the bankruptcy plan were mostly worked out in advance, prepackaged for Judge Rosemary Gambardella to review and sign with few hearings. "This is the harbinger of what restructurings will be like in the future," observed Tom Gallagher, the Gibson Dunn & Crutcher attorney who supervised the deal with Trump and for a time acted as Griffin's chief

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In a way the New Jersey Casino Control Commission and its favored licensee, Donald Trump, made this gaudiest of Las Vegas gambling palaces possible. Donald Trump's raid on Bally Manufacturing, which the commission could have stopped, resulted in Bally offering $440 million for the Atlantic City Golden Nugget. The nearly $200 million that Wynn took back to the Nevada desert provided the down payment so Milken could sell enough junk to build the Mirage. Without the Golden Nugget windfall even Wynn acknowledges the Mirage might have remained just an illusion shimmering dreamily in the future.

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Money alone, though, could not have created the Mirage, for even much larger sums could be squandered on a building lacking its magic touch, as Donald Trump would soon prove. Wynn is a master showman, a P. T. Barnum whose genius lies in his ability to see what the people want in entertainment even as he slowly loses his own vision to the degenerative eye disease retinitis pigmentosa.

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He has secrets to tell about boxing impresario Don King, with whom he has sparred for dominance over Buster Douglas, and about "that lightweight phony Donald Trump."

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As Resorts hurtled toward default so did the Taj — and Trump knew it. Walt Haybert, the gentle accountant he put in charge of the Taj's finances, sat down in his dark office in the collage of temporary buildings that served as Taj headquarters on Brigantine Island, six miles from the Boardwalk, and analyzed spending against the budget. Haybert warned Trump in a memo that at current spending levels the Taj would go $108 million over budget. Haybert hoped the memo would result in an end to the lavish spending spree, a thoughtful scaling back of the project, or else would prompt Trump to put in more money.

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Trump had no cash to put in, though. The $63 million Griffin paid him for the Taj management contract was gone. Although Trump had paid that same sum for the failed Atlantis, which he renamed the Trump Regency, none of the money went there. Trump borrowed every penny for the purchase price plus the modest sums he spent to replace the lumpy mattresses and worn carpets. He even charged the monthly mortgage payments on the loan, adding them to the balance owed Manufacturers Hanover until the debt soared to $81 million. Even if the Atlantis ran at full occupancy every day it would barely generate enough revenue to pay the mortgage interest. Why the bank, which foreclosed in 1992, made such a stupid loan was a mystery.

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Instead Trump used some of the Griffin money to plug other pressing financial holes and lost most of it in a feigned raid on American Airlines that his brother Robert said cost him some money, too. The deal fell apart when the market realized he was not a real raider and the stock of the airline's parent dropped like a jet out of power.

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It appeared that Trump had $75 million invested in the Taj, but that, too, was borrowed. First Fidelity Bank of New Jersey made the loan, which was guaranteed by Trump's management fee for the next decade. The fee gave Trump 1.75 percent of the Taj revenues.

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Haybert's memo did prompt Trump to seek more money. He persuaded NatWest, the British bank, to lend him $50 million for furniture, fixtures and equipment. That solved almost half the problem Haybert initially foresaw, but because the orders for chandeliers and carpets and art, and the innumerable costly change orders and mistakes, had continued, he projected that even with the First Fidelity money the casino would go more than $100 million over budget. Then tragedy struck.

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Steve Hyde, Taj president Mark G. Etess and Jonathan Benanav were flying in a chartered Italian helicopter back to Atlantic City from a Manhattan press conference promoting a boxing match when the main rotor and transmission broke loose and flew off on their own. The copter fell like a rock for a terrifying half mile, crashing into the pine trees that separate traffic on the Garden State Parkway. The three executives and the two pilots died instantly. It was a major catastrophe for Trump, who knew little about how his casinos actually operated and whose management style bred intrigue among his senior staff. Hyde had been a solitary, calm and competent force in this chaos, slowly building an organization of the best people he could persuade to work for Trump by promising them great pay, contracts and himself as a buffer.

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of the defendants but prosecuted them anyway. Usry plead guilty only to the least serious charge against him, one of the few successes in a prosecution that was largely a disaster for the state police and the attorney general's office, which publicly admitted to serious flaws in its own conduct. The political life of Atlantic City, such as it was, would go on after the arrests. But without Hyde's steady hand in the Trump casinos, the cash machines that financed the vaunted Trump lifestyle desperately needed a firm hand, one that Trump trusted and would largely leave be. With the Taj opening, one of every four casino jobs would be in a Trump casino, making his welfare the region's.

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Trump sent his brother Robert down to be his eyes and ears. Robert had an easygoing style and a taste for simple things like the Thursday meat-loaf special at a greasy spoon called Gilcrest's Cafe, but gaming was not in his blood the way it was in Hyde's. Haybert was named president of the Taj and he continued the stream of warnings that money could run out before the Taj opened.

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As the new year began the wild spending on the Taj began to draw the bank account dangerously low. Vendors, used to the Trump slowpay method, waited longer and longer for their money. Irwin Tobman, who sold the Taj its seventy multicolored fiberglass minarets, demanded payment with such urgency that he was invited down from New York. Tobman walked into a Taj construction office and was shown a check for the full amount due. "Just as soon as the money's transferred to the checking account we'll give it to you," Tobman reports being told.

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Trump's construction chief, Tom Pippett, Robert Trump, Haybert and even Donald pleaded with contractors to make the promised April 2 opening, saying the checks would be forthcoming. Making the opening was critical because the first two Taj bond interest payments, totaling $94.5 million, had come from the proceeds of the Taj bonds that Merrill Lynch had sold at a stiff 14 percent interest. Making the third payment, due May 15, depended on starting up the cash flow that Griffin had joked about the day he took over Resorts.

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Trump fortune. He purchased the Eastern Airlines Shuttle for $365 million in borrowed dollars and only later realized that he was stuck with a fleet of jets more than twenty years old that guzzled kerosene. He paid way too much for the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. And like all developers he was leveraged, making him vulnerable the moment the economy stopped growing, as it did just as he went on his spending spree. He owed $1.3 billion to the junk bond buyers for his three casinos and an astounding $1.9 billion to six dozen banks, with Citibank's syndicate due more than $1 billion. And he knew that without some new deals he could not pay his bills as they came due.

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A key sign of Trump's troubles came on March 20, 1990, when Neil Barsky, the savvy Wall Street Journal reporter who was one of the few journalists not taken in by the Trump myth, wrote a routine story about the Taj opening set for thirteen days later. Included in it was the latest version of a quote by Marvin B. Roffman, the sagacious Philadelphia gaming analyst who had said again and again that the Taj was a bad investment and would have a hard time getting through its first winter. "When this property opens, he will have had so much free publicity, he will break every record in the book in April, June and July. But once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won't make it. The market just isn't there," Roffman told the Journal.

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Trump exploded in fury. When Roffman showed up that morning for a tour of the Taj, Robert Trump told him to get off the property and never come back. Back at Janney Montgomery Scott, Roffman was greeted by a letter from Trump that demanded he recant or the brokerage would face "a major lawsuit."

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Janney cochairman Edgar Scott, Jr., a Main Line scion whose mother, Hope, inspired The Philadelphia Story , came to Roffman's cramped office and spoke to Trump by telephone.

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"Janney Montgomery Scott has been in business since 1832 and to the best of my knowledge it has never publicly apologized to anyone," Roffman heard Scott say. "What is it you want, Mr. Trump?"

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The next morning he went to advise Janney's brokers to dump the Taj bonds, but research director James Meyer barred him. "I can't let you," Roffman said he was told, "because if word ever gets back to Donald Trump that you are badmouthing his bonds you'll get fired."

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After fretting for several hours, Roffman faxed Trump a new letter, but instead of including the changes Trump wanted, Roffman withdrew his retraction. Scott fired Roffman. Both Janney Montgomery and Trump would later pay Roffman hefty settlements that enabled him to buy a palatial suburban home and start his own money management firm. But ten weeks would pass before the reason would emerge for Trump's vociferous response to a quote that was not news and that later would be proven stunningly accurate.

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A week after the Roffman incident, and three days before the Taj opening, the Casino Control Commission breezed through licensing Trump in less than an hour of jovial exchange between Trump lawyers and the commissioners. No one asked a question about the unpaid bills from contractors or all the unfinished work, about how a hotel could meet the first-class standard in the Casino Control Act without a swimming pool, a gymnasium or a theater. The commission did ask the enforcement division to look into a complaint from the Atlantic County Board of Chosen Freeholders and the Brigantine City Council that Trump had violated a state permit in paving over an old dump to create a Taj parking lot. Everyone knew nothing would come of it.

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Then the lights died. Amid hoots and shouts the employees twirled phosphorescent light-sticks above their heads that created swirls of red, green ancl blue in the dark. Suddenly a Max Headroom-style genie appeared on the giant television screen, his face and eyes moving abruptly in a visual stutter. Fabu, short for fabulous, implored "members of the fabulous Trump team" working at "The Eighth Wonder of the World" to remember from their training that the "one key ingredient to success is ESP — Excellent Service and Performance."

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When Fabu urged everyone to stand and clap their hands while performers in costume danced on stage, Taj casino manager Bobby Yee and General Counsel Harry Levin ran onto the stage to join in. In the front row Blaine Trump moved gently to the music while her husband, Robert, danced in place by swiveling on his knees. Next to him Taj highroller handler Bucky Howard thrashed about wildly. Harvey Freeman, the detail man who made Trump's deals work, stood still, politely appearing to clap. Next to him was The Donald, stiff as a corpse, his lip curled, clapping his hands out of time with the simple rhythm. When an aide approached, Trump seemed relieved to be led away from the madness. Soon green laser beams projected a Bengal tiger running across a white curtain at the back of the darkened stage. As the loudspeakers blasted out "Eye of the Tiger," the image focused down to the tiger's head, then to its giant eye. The curtain rose to show Trump, emerging as if from a genie's puff of smoke, an array of pencil-thin green laser beams fanning out from behind him as four thousand Taj employees screamed "Donald! Donald! Donald!"

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"Thank you very much, folks," Trump said, his stilted voice contrasting with the party atmosphere he had paid to create. "You really are

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Having dampened the enthusiasm. Trump left the stage. But his words were filled with truth. Trump was barely able to meet that payroll and the shortage of funds was obvious inside the building. The long second-floor hallways leading to the New Delhi Deli and the ballrooms were supposed to have marble columns. Instead they had been hastily covered with pink wallpaper. Many rooms were a mess, with hanging rods laying on closet floors, curtains that would not close and keys that did not match the doors weeks after the grand opening.

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Trump had promised real elegance. No faux marble, no Trump I'oeil views, none of that plastic posing as ivory that Steve Wynn used at his Mirage. But except for the chandeliers the place was mostly fakery and dross. At the main entrance to the Taj stood six white elephants that Trump said had been carved from stone; they were fiberglass, and even before the place opened a tusk on one had cracked, but no one repaired

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Round-the-clock efforts by the contractors allowed the Taj to open April 2 for a test run, but it was a disaster. The Taj covered more than two and a half acres, the size of Trump Plaza and Trump Castle combined, with three thousand slot machines. But instead of many change booths and an army of people making change, it relied on untested machines, most of which quickly jammed. Worse, they frequently shorted fhe customers. The casino cage was too small even for a casino half its size, as one of Castle president Ed Tracy's aides had warned in another ignored memo. To control the flow of money between the cage, which is the casino's bank, and the gaming floor, money must be handled in precise amounts. Thus if $1,001 in quarters is needed on the casino floor, exactly 4,004 coins must be obtained, signed for and delivered, where they are signed for again. The system quickly broke down on the first day, and no one knew how much money was out or who had signed for it. On the second day the casino did not open until late afternoon and then only because the regulators agreed to set aside the mass of money from the first day and count it later. Four days later a sack that propped open a door inside the cage was examined. Inside was four hundred thousand dollars. One Taj executive watched a man walk from the cage, his coat bulging as if he had just put on ten pounds. But the executive decided not to add to the chaos by questioning him. "There's no way of knowing how much cash walked out of the place," said Dino Marino, the Casino Control Commission official overseeing the opening.

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On the second day Trump had stood around the casino floor preening, telling Marino, "Isn't this going great?"

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"That's because they don't want tt) lose their jobs, Donald. They're telling you what you want to hear," Marino said, hoping to make Trump an ally in solving problems and not simply to ignite his fiery

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The grand opening, the night of April 5, was supposed to be a gala, high-tech affair, but it was as much a disaster as the night it rained on the opening of Bugsy Siegel's Flamingo. Trump promised a load of celebs, but produced only the building's one-day owner, Merv Griffin, and model Elle MacPherson. He didn't have the loot to pay for more. Siegel had wanted his Hollywood pals like Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and Joan Crawford, but got only George Raft and Georgie Jessel.

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Trump promised high-tech wonders, but Fabu called Steve Perskie, the governor's chief of staff, "Steve Persico" and the green laser beams that were supposed to cut the giant ribbon wrapping the hotel tower didn't do so. Siegel had built a giant fountain with colored lights that was supposed to be visible a mile away, but then left it off because a cat had six kittens in the sump pump and he feared bad luck. Trump couldn't count the money straight, keeping the regulators on him, and eventually he had to take the Taj to Bankruptcy Court, giving up half his ownership. Siegel couldn't count the money straight, but the only regulators he dealt with enforced their rules with a gun.

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While Trump advertised the Taj on television as his "billion-dollar dream come true," an ad which explained his dreams but not why anyone would want to gamble there, he took a very different position with the taxman. Trump insisted that the Taj was not worth a penny more than $400 million and its property taxes should be based on an assessment even lower than that.

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During the second week, when the Taj still had not qualified for a full license. Trump promoted Ed Tracy from head of the Castle to Hyde's old job. Teams from the Plaza and the Castle, meanwhile, came to help straighten out the money. Marino regarded the Castle team as heroes, especially Barbara Primavera. Other problems grew, however.

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day of the grand opening. Then we were told we could get our checks late on April 6, which was a Friday so we knew that meant Trump wanted to keep the money over the weekend to earn the interest, which was fine. Then we were told we'd be paid on April 13 and then April 20.

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"Next Perini Construction [Trump's general contractor! says they have not received the money from Trump and they don't know when we will get even a partial payment. I feel, and so do some of the others, that Trump has gone through all the money he raised from selling bonds and that we will be paid through cash flows from the casinos and not from monies he has already borrowed," Tobman said.

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Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's Barsky arrived late for his monthly poker game. A banker greeted him with this line: "Donald Trump's headed for a brick wall at a hundred miles per hour with no brakes." Barsky started to shrug off the story, since by then everybody knew Trump was in trouble. The Philadelphia Inquirer , followed a day later by Forbes, had recently obtained Trump's confidential net worth statement, which showed he was no billionaire, and Barsky's own stories had poked holes in Trump's Midas touch claims. But from the snickers in the room, Barsky discerned that his poker pals knew something was up and the next day he started working his banking sources. The result was a June 4 front-page lead story revealing that Trump and his bankers were negotiating from dawn to dusk in what amounted to a private bankruptcy proceeding. Trump the Invincible was suddenly at the mercy of his bankers, unable to make the June 15 interest and principal payments on the Castle or to pay many other bills as they came due. He had boasted in April that he would soon be the king of cash, but just then he looked a lot more like the duke of debt.

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The bankers eventually agreed to loan Trump $65 million, of which the last $17 million was never advanced. It was such a complex deal that John Robbins, the Kenneth Leventhal & Company accountant brought in to value Trump's assets, quipped that "every lawyer in New York has come by for coffee, cookies and two billable hours." The legal fees at that point were $10.75 million and rising.

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The banks agreed to slash interest payments and reschedule loan dates in a package that saved Trump at least $64 million a year for five years. They also put him on an allowance, though a very fine one worth $5.4 million in the first year. Within two years, though, the temporary patch job on his finances would be over, he would give up much of his real estate, his Trump Princess yacht, his Boeing 727 and his Super Puma helicopter.

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The bankers' analysis of Trump's worth can be summed up easily: You are probably worth more than Donald Trump. By Trump's own analysis he was worth $1.4 billion. Leventhal figured he was worth one third to one half that much, while the bankers figured Trump was $295 million under water. The bankers' estimates included some generous calculations. Trump, Leventhal and the bankers all valued his yacht at $70 million, even though it eventually was taken back by Boston Bank & Trust for the $42 million Trump owed on it. They valued his Super Puma helicopter at the $10 million it would cost to replicate it, not the $2 million it was worth on the market. And the banks valued many assets at what Trump had borrowed against them, even if they were worth far less.

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The banks did one more thing. They required Trump to hire a chief financial officer, someone acceptable to them. Trump's choice was Stephen F. Bollenbach, who was the CFO at Promus Companies and who on his first day on the job there, when it was still the Holiday Corporation, had helped put together a plan to ward off a raid by Donald Trump. Bollenbach proved to be a skilled negotiator. He also charged a stiff price. For ten dollars Trump sold Bollenbach a Trump Parc condo overlooking Central Park that was listed in the sales brochure at almost $5 million. Bollenbach also got a seven-figure salary with the banks guaranteeing his pay for two years.

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Division of Gaming Enforcement. Auriemma asked another Trump lawyer, Thomas Cerabino, what would happen if the commission did not act that day. 'The banks will move apart and take whatever steps they think are appropriate to protect their interests," Cerabino said. That threat of imminent and uncontrolled bankruptcy persuaded the commission to set a vote after the weekend. The commission then approved the bailout.

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During this hearing, and during those that followed through the fall of 1990 and throughout 1991, the Casino Control Commission never looked at its own role in allowing Trump to get into trouble and in creating the illusion of his casinos' financial stability, a fiction maintained only by avoiding asking certain questions.

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Anthony J. Parrillo, the enforcement division director, did tell his staff to go look at Trump's tax returns, which he conceded had not been reviewed since Trump was first licensed in 1981. Parrillo said that, like many others, he just believed Trump had bundles of money. Certainly a lot of money passed through his hands. During the thirty months before the bank bailout. Trump had a cash income of $375.2 million, or more than $1.6 million per week, nearly $10,000 an hour around the clock. Where had it all gone? Some had gone into propping up bad deals, covering stock market losses, and maintaining the Trump lifestyle, with its trophy mistress and a private army of security guards, some of whom carried MAC-10 automatic pistols under their suit coats. And a lot of it had gone to pay interest.

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Not once did the Casino Control Commission exercise its broad powers of "strict regulation" to ask about the $90.5 million in capital withdrawals that Trump took from Trump Plaza and Trump Castle, money which would have allowed those casinos to make their mortgage payments without difficulty. Nor did the commissioners question the highroller strategy at the Castle, which had led to huge cost overruns on the Crystal Tower and the purchase of the Trump Princess, both of which drained cash and reflected on business ability.

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What the commissioners did do was approve the promotion of Tony Calandra from a casino salesman in charge of bringing in outer-borough high rollers to president of the Castl&, a promotion Trump made one night on the spur of the moment in the baccarat pit when Calandra asked for the job and four Trump yes-men said he would be great at it.

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Donald Trump was treated differently. His personal cash flow statement showed that, including the $10 million cash he paid Ivana in their divorce, he had $54.7 million in bills coming due in 1991 and an anticipated income of $1.6 million. Owing nearly thirty-five times one's income would not on its face seem to suggest financial stability, but Perskie brushed this matter aside even though Trump's solution to his problems was simply to stop paying his bills as they came due, but without seeking refuge in Bankruptcy Court as the Atlantis and Resorts had done because his bailout agreement would not allow that without dire consequences.

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In April 1991, when the time came to renew Trump's qualifications and those of his three casinos, Perskie approved Trump personally, the Trump Organization and Trump Plaza. Auriemma, with help from Robert Latimer, who had ferreted out numbers for the Atlantis closing, filed a sixty-seven-page report which declared that "the Trump Organization will be insolvent in the near future, if it is not already, and if judged on that basis would not be financially stable" and "more worrisome is the financial health" of Trump personally.

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But having laid the facts out in the record Auriemma opened a new escape from the financial stability requirement by suggesting that if Trump has a deal in the works that would make him stable once completed, that should be considered, too. Perskie immediately seized on Auriemma's initiative to help Trump. "It is obvious," Perskie said, "that neither Trump, the Trump Organization nor the Taj can satisfy the man-

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Commissioner W. David Waters said he could find no reason to deviate from the Casino Control Act's requirements. Waters believed that if Trump was unfit it was of his own making and that government should not intervene to protect him. Some predicted chaos if Trump lost his licenses, but Waters figured that the bondholders would step forward, propose that they take over as the real owners and hire competent managers. Besides, he figured, in the long run giving the commission's backing to owners when they could not pay bondholders would make it harder to raise money in the marketplace.

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Since Trump needed four votes to keep his license that left his fate up to Valerie Armstrong, who longed for an appointment as a Superior Court judge. Armstrong said she wanted to avoid casting a no vote and she literally called out from the dais for help in finding some way to justify renewing Trump's qualification. Once again it was Auriemma of the Division of Gaming Enforcement, not Trump's own lawyers, who took up Trump's cause. Auriemma said the commission had broad powers and was obligated to look at many interests in making decisions. He said Trump could achieve financial stability by filing for Bankruptcy Court protection, but added "we should not necessarily, as regulators, be forcing" Trump to do that when "perhaps, the same result as a bankruptcy proceeding" can be reached through negotiation.

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Martin Greenberg, the former Golden Nugget executive who represented Taj bondholders, supported Auriemma and said that financial stability, when he voted on the bill in the state senate, was intended to insure that casino owners were not tempted to break the law if they were in a squeeze for money. In what turned out to be a prescient observation, Greenberg said: "If financial stability were viewed as a component of integrity," then the fact that Trump may be a million dollars or so short, even after the bankers stop requiring payments, is

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not significant. "You have all the authority you need to monitor the financial condition and Donald Trump on a periodic basis so that you can assure yourself of that stability to avoid the temptation that would give rise to the loss of integrity."

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Before that issue arose, however. Trump would lose both of his biggest customers — for very different reasons.

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had just taken charge of all three Trump casinos when Kashiwagi returned to Trump Plaza. In February, Kashiwagi had beaten Trump Plaza for $6 million, a pittance compared to the $19 million that Kashiwagi won that month at the Diamond Beach Casino in Darwin, Australia, breaking its bank.

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In May, Kashiwagi had been playing at Trump Plaza for five days and was insisting he should get more credit, that he had been promised more credit. Tracy met Kashiwagi in the Plaza Club, a lounge reserved for high rollers, and they sat near a large bronze Buddha that Trump Plaza had won away from another high roller. Bob Libutti. Tracy explained that he was a simple man, not familiar with Japanese social graces, but confident that he and Kashiwagi could talk amicably as businessmen.

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Then Tracy dropped his bombshell: the $6 million credit line extended by Trump Plaza, matched by the $6 million check Kashiwagi left at the cage, would not be increased. After this game to the death ended, however, Mr. Trump would be honored to have his very best customer come up the Boardwalk to the new Taj Mahal, and if that was of interest, there could be discussions about how much cash and how much credit would make for a worthwhile game there. At the Taj, though, Tracy hinted, the maximum bet might be just one hundred thousand dollars, half what Trump Plaza allowed, depending on what kind of checks or other instruments the gambler had with him.

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Trump had paid Marcum five thousand dollars plus expenses to tell him if Kashiwagi somehow had rigged the February game. Marcum and Glasgow watched videotapes made by cameras hidden in the smoky gray domes dotting the casino ceiling. Marcum quickly determined that Kashiwagi was no cheat. What fascinated Marcum were the subtle changes Tn Kashi wagi's face when he lost and how he kept coming at the house. "Turn off the machine. I know how to beat him," Marcum said. "This guy loves a challenge. He's a natural for the freeze-out proposition."

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Glasgow sauntered to a telephone on the casino wall and called Trump with the news about Kashiwagi's bad luck. "Isn't he great," Trump exulted. "He is really the greatest."

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Glasgow grabbed the phone and called the Trump Plaza cage. "Anyone been cashing in five-thousand-dollar cheques?" he asked, using the casino term for such high denomination chips that they bore serial numbers.

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Daryl Yong had, yes, the clerk replied. Yong had cashed in $474,000 worth of them during the week. Yong was Kashiwagi's translator and aide. At the table he wagered some of Kashiwagi's chips. Glasgow was astounded because the cash-ins meant that Kashiwagi had converted nearly 10 percent of the credit chips into cash, money Trump Plaza would have a hard time getting back if Kashiwagi played until he went bust.

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When Kashiwagi awoke that morning he proposed that Trump extend him another $4 million credit. He needed more bullets to fire at his adversary. No, said Tracy, who knew from Marcum's pages of handmade calculations that the odds were 87 to 1 against Kashiwagi coming back from his current state to double his original bankroll. Tracy said no because while the world still thought Donald Trump was the modern

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Kashiwagi was furious. Trump lacked honor, Yong told casino reporter Dan Heneghan. Kashiwagi had come all the way from Japan after Trump presented him with a signed copy of The Art of the Deal and now Trump was not honoring his word that he would be delighted to extend Kashiwagi credit. But the aide said Kashiwagi would get his revenge. Trump's published life story would have a new use, Yong said. "We plan to burn it soon."

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Kashiwagi called Caesars, which provided him a limousine to depart. While Trump would later propose that Kashiwagi return, that he come to the Taj on Pearl Harbor Day, that was just hot air. Kashiwagi had no intention of paying his marker. The word was spreading among casino executives that Kashiwagi was in hock deeply to the yakuza.

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Kashiwagi died owing Trump $6 million. With the money he won in February and the chips Yong cashed in, plus the expenses of bringing the player and his entourage from Japan twice, the experience was a loser for Trump, who was out about $1 million in cash. The Hilton held a $5 million marker from the Christmas 1990 visit. Casinos in Macao and elsewhere also held final markers.

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Among all the 33 million people who played in Atlantic City each year he held one major distinction. Bob Libutti was the biggest loser of them all. He had made a name for himself as a big loser at Steve Wynn's old Golden Nugget, and when Steve Hyde left there to run Trump Plaza he persuaded his best player to come along. Casino records showed that Libutti had lost $12 million in less than three years. No one knew how

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These subtle touches, and every other action Caesars took that day, came on the recommendation of Lynden Stockton, a man who regarded himself as Libutti's friend, his very good friend. Stockton was a "senior marketing executive" with Caesars and he knew to the minute when Libutti would walk out of Trump Plaza and stroll the thirty or so paces along the Boardwalk to Caesars, where Stockton would be waiting, along with a security guard so that everyone would know this was a special player. For two years Libutti had gambled every other day at Trump Plaza, where he wagered as much as twenty thousand dollars on a roll of the dice and his average bet was nearly twelve thousand dollars. Stockton knew these closely guarded Trump Plaza secrets because, until the day before, Stockton had worked at Trump Plaza as a casino host.

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The knowledge that Libutti was above the rules was no secret. Everyone who worked in the Trump casino knew it and so did plenty of others. At Duke Mack's, Graybel's and other watering holes where the dealers eased the strain of their jobs over whiskey and beer, the best way to top the tales of player foolishness and outrages was to recount the latest story about Bob the Monster.

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With Stockton's help Caesars had everything in perfect order to satisfy Libutti's whims and to show him how people who really knew how to run a casino, as opposed to what Caesars regarded as the amateur act at Trump Plaza, could treat a man of Mr. Libutti's stature. Yet this visit was about to turn into the worst day of Bob Libutti's gambling life, one that eventually would end the perks like the ten thousand dollars in cash that Trump Plaza funneled to him each month and the round-theclock limo and driver. Before it was all over government agents wearing flak jackets would raid Libutti's home, poking through his wife's underwear drawer. Trump Plaza and Caesars would not escape this mael-

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"As soon as I started gambling I forgot about my son, completely forgot about it," he said. It was the first relief he had felt. It cost him the $10,000, but the next day Libutti was back with $50,000 of his own money. When Hyde left for Trump Plaza, Libutti followed, which fit perfectly with Trump's desire to have only the biggest, only the best, in his joint.

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When the maze of tall columns in Trump Plaza, which were needed to support its thirty-eight stories, were stripped of their mirrors and fabric and covered with marble, along with the walls and the floor, some took to calling the lobby Libutti Forest because it was his losings that paid for it all.

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Sometimes, though, other players came and bought chips on credit and then passed them to Libutti at the table, players like a horse trainer who had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar credit line at Trump Plaza. While Trump Plaza kept such detailed records of Libutti's play that it could determine that his average 1987 bet was precisely $13,929.52, no one knew how many hundreds of thousands, or even millions, Libutti gambled and lost with chips obtained on other players' credit.

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To keep gambling Libutti said he had certain needs. They were all satisfied, including his need for a predictable ten thousand dollars each month so he could cover his nut, pay his electric bill and the like. Each montlThe would get show tickets from Trump Plaza and trade them to a broker for ten thousand dollars cash.

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The creative minds at Trump Plaza also gave Libutti cars. Ferraris. Rolls-Royces. Whatever he wanted. The rules required that the casinos buy the cars, but Libutti could instantly sell the cars back to the dealership, which would deduct a commission and then give him cash. Trump Plaza did not bother to arrange title to the cars — the casino and the car dealer simply exchanged checks, giving Libutti the cash, $1.6 million, with which to gamble. And when Libutti lost the money his temper would explode and Hyde would have to calm him down.

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To keep this lucrative business Hyde extended Libutti every privilege he could imagine. Libutti flew with Donald Trump in his black Super Puma helicopter and he sat between Donald and Ivana at Wrestlemania IV until one of the wrestlers threw a snake toward them. Libutti jumped up as if to block the creature while Ivana left in a huff. He even arranged a horse for Trump, to be called DJTrump, but then Trump ordered the horse run on a day when a sickness was sweeping

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the track where it was kept, ruining the animal. Trump refused to pay, so Hyde stepped in to pick up part of the loss.

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When Edie turned thirty-five. Trump Plaza threw a lavish party and made a professional videotape of it. Donald Trump gave Edie a creamcolored Mercedes-Benz convertible.

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"They had me so entranced that they got me to the point where I started taking artifacts, antiques from the house, down there to gamble," said Libutti. "The jade Buddha that's in the chairman's suite at Trump Plaza cost me one hundred eighty-five thousand dollars. There's another Buddha, the bronze one that cost me forty-five thousand dollars," Libutti recalled, Joan watching his every word, her eyes afire. Trump Plaza arranged for a liquor vendor to buy the Buddhas and then sell them to the casino, Libutti said. "I got fifty some thousand for them. I went to the table, made two bets and lost it."

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Joan said a limo soon showed up at her door with two women from Trump Plaza, who said they had come to take her on a shopping spree in Manhattan. Anything her heart desired at Tiffany's or wherever, Donald would be glad to pay.

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forcement lawyer who had pursued the case against the cocktail waitress who found a chip on the floor and who had brushed aside Bob Signore's complaints that Trump Castle played by a different set of rules than it gave players. Gushin cared passionately about civil rights issues and the moment he saw Respes' complaint he knew he had a case. While the enforcement division sometimes delayed for years and years deciding whether to issue a permanent license, Gushin filed this complaint in just six weeks. Respes was not the only employee the complaint named as having had his civil rights trashed in a manner "repugnant" to state policy. On orders from casino manager Nick Niglio and shift manager Rachel Bogatin, the enforcement division showed, Respes and two women dealers had been replaced with white men.

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The recommendation to remove blacks, women and, had any been around, Asians came from Lynden Stockton, the casino host hired away from Trump Plaza by Caesars marketing operation. An internal Caesars memo said Stockton told Caesars that Libutti "did not want Blacks or Orientals dealing on his game; he had no problem with females, but preferred males."

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The pair told Walker that they knew Libutti and his brother-in-law, singer Jimmy Roselli. Later Cortellino and his pal Louis Lubrano told Walker that Libutti "was in Donald Trump's pockets," explaining that Libutti had obtained a lucrative contract for Roselli at Trump Plaza for "big money." They also said Libutti was known to have run a number of scams with horses.

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Libutti, meanwhile, went to see Ed Tracy, who was then head of all three Trump casinos, about getting $375,000 he felt Trump owed him. In the course of the discussion Libutti gratuitously dropped John Gotti's name. Tracy, a man of scrupulous honesty, smelled a shakedown and called the state police, who wired his office. At the time Trump was deep in negotiating his bailout with the banks.

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During the conversation Libutti explained how John Gotti offered to deal with Frank Sinatra because of how the Chairman of the Board had treated Roselli, who grew up on the same block in Hoboken as Sinatra. The two singers had been feuding for two decades and the latest development was when both were to sing in Atlantic City, Old Blue Eyes at the Sands and Roselli at Trump Plaza, where both were sought after because' of the crowds of free-spending wise guys they drew to the tables. Sinatra hired away several of Roselli's musicians.

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Later in the conversation Libutti brought up Gotti again, saying "Gotti wants me to find out if he can come" gamble in the Trump casinos. "He said he never got a letter [banning him from the casinos], that means he's not barred."

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Later Trump would tell the Philadelphia Inquirer that he had heard the name Libutti, but could not even remember what the guy looked like because they met, maybe, once. Libutti went ballistic at this distancing by Trump. "He's a liar," Libutti said, taking off into another angry tirade filled with four and seven and thirteen-letter denunciations of Trump and his integrity.

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Libutti also said he was aware of all sorts of serious rules violations at Trump Plaza that would be of interest to the casino regulators. He said he and Trump had a deal for an "elaborate marketing scheme" designed to inflate the table drop) — the amount of chips reported sold — because Trump wanted to report a higher figure than Caesars. He told one story of Donald Trump coming to him on the casino floor and personally handing him a check.

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Sweeney was advised of Libutti's claim that Trump personally handed him a check.

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"Well, that'll be thoroughly investigated," Sweeney said. It marked the first time that Donald Trump had ever personally been the subject of an enforcement division investigation. It did not last long. Several of the witnesses Libutti identified said they were never contacted, never questioned. But Sweeney's office did call in one witness and ask him under oath about the accusations. Donald Trump denied them. He said the check in question had been turned over, but in a perfectly legitimate way. Sweeney took his word for it.

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Libutti, whom the commission banned from the casinos because of his Gotti remarks, soon had new problems. At noon one day Edie kissed her mother good-bye in the kitchen and climbed into the Mercedes-Benz convertible Trump had given her. Moments later Joan Libutti noticed people in dark clothing with guns rushing her house. They were IRS agents and local police, wearing riot suits and flack jackets, come to serve a search warrant, wanting to know where her husband got all the money for gambling.

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The regulators, the high-up ones who did not want to see either Libutti's conduct or the casinos' until Joel Respes stepped forward, ultimately fined Trump Plaza for discriminating against its own workers and for deceiving the commission with fake-gift cars that were meant to help Libutti get cash.

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Trump Plaza was fined $200,000 for discriminating against its female and minority employees. For the sham car deals the fine was $450,000.

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In addition to the $540 million from the Chengs, Snell wanted to sell $400 million of new junk bonds. The debt would help entrench management by making Aztar unattractive in a takeover, as would a plan that eventually would put about 10 percent of Aztar stock in management hands. In many ways this resembled what the rival Holiday Corporation had done earlier when it paid a sixty-five-dollar-per-share dividend financed with $2.6 billion of bank and junk debt that gave the firm a negative net worth, at least on paper. But this was Ramada, not Holiday. This was 1989, after Drexel Burnham Lambert had been indicted and after the junk bond market had started collapsing and the real estate market had become depressed. The last big casino junk deal, Merv Griffin's takeover of Resorts International from Donald Trump, was already in trouble and within weeks Griffin would declare an end to interest payments on Resorts' debt.

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posed provisions that permanently entrenched existing management. Beyond that it was willing to take a casino company's word about how swell a deal was almost at face value, as shown by its approval of the looniest deal of them all, Merv Griffin's debt-laden takeover of Resorts. The commission made it easy for casino owners to prove by clear and convincing evidence that they would possess financial stability through these deals by allowing owners from Ramada to Donald Trump to produce paid experts who expressed the opinions managements wanted, opinions that a few pointed questions, in many cases, could have shown to be outrageously optimistic fantasies. Rarely did the regulators produce their own experts and when they did their testimony was often discredited during intense cross-examination by lawyers for the casino owners?

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Free to proceed, Connelly refurbished the President, a 1926 tour boat he had used for excursions in St. Louis. But the land-based development he promised Davenport kept being delayed. After Donald Trump's troubles became household knowledge Connelly said Trump was partly to blame for his difficulty raising financing and there was nothing he could do. Meanwhile, the scheduled start of riverboat gambling in 1991 approached.

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Jim Gwathney had just come on duty as a Casino Control Commission inspector at Trump Castle on December 17 when one of the gambling hall's security guards furtively offered a bit of news. "Someone just bought three million dollars worth of chips, but left without playing," the guard whispered.

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could stomach and he fumed until his shift ended after midnight. Gwathney rose early and telephoned Chris Best, the commission's principal inspector at Trump Castle, and started talking about the $3 million deal. Best had no idea what Gwathney was talking about. "Look on the shift summary," Gwathney said, assuming the chip purchase had been routinely logged. It wasn't.

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What Gwathney had stumbled onto, and what his bosses wanted to make sure he did not investigate, was an illegal loan to Trump Castle, a loan made in the form of chips purchased but not played because it provided the lender with absolute security and would not violate the terms of Trump's bailout deal with his bankers.

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The chip buyer was Fred Trump, who was giving his son an advance on his inheritance so he could make the December 1990 mortgage payment on the Castle.

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Donald Trump and the man who as an assemblyman had sponsored the law, Perskie, was doing his best to help Trump get around it.

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The ruse prompted an extraordinary response by a law enforcement agency: even though the law-breaking was deliberate and planned, enforcement division director Jack Sweeney's office worked closely with Trump lawyers to help Donald Trump escape the penalties mandated by law for illegally loaning money to a casino. The penalty was forced return of the loaned money, something Trump Castle could not do because the very day the chips were bought the proceeds went out to help make the $18.4 million mortgage interest payment to bondholders. The Castle was so pressed for funds that it ended the year with just $770,000 in cash, a tiny sum for a business with annual revenues of $260 million.

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Sweeney did indeed know about the illegal loan in advance, but he did not share his knowledge with Tom Auriemma, the deputy attorney general assigned to the Trump casinos. When Auriemma learned of it — because Trump Castle suddenly had enough cash to make the mortgage payment instead of falling a few million short — he went to Sweeney for permission to file a complaint. What for? Sweeney asked, saying he saw nothing wrong and, besides. Trump casino lawyer Nick Ribis had told him in advance about the chip purchase.

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Auriemma felt strongly that a complaint had to be filed, but the best he could wheedle from Sweeney was permission to negotiate with Trump's lawyers and to ask their advice on what to do since the law plainly made the loan illegal and mandated return of the money as well as barring Fred Trump from the casino industry. By spring Trump Castle had admitted the loan was illegal and agreed to pay a thirty-thousanddollar fine, less than half what a bank would have charged in fees to arrange a proper loan, assuming any bank would have loaned Trump a penny more at that point.

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to help prop up Trump and help him maintain an advantage with the bondholders he would eventually have to face in Bankruptcy Court. Perskie, who had championed the 1976 casino initiative and had sponsored the Casino Control Act with the reassuring words in its preamble, knew how to take care of this problem. He broke the matter into two issues. He ordered that Fred Trump's fitness to lend money to a casino be heard first. While the illegal loan made Trump unqualified — some casino lawyers felt it barred him forever from the industry — that issue was not yet before the commission. Thus, lacking any reason on the record to deny Fred Trump, he was licensed. Fred Trump, however, did not loan any more money to the Castle and in June 1991, the mortgage went unpaid.

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When the commission met one week later Perskie brought up the illegal loan and the negotiated thirty-thousand-dollar fine, a pittance compared to the significance of the loan to Trump and compared to penalties imposed in the past for far less serious offenses such as false and misleading advertising. Two of the commissioners, W. David Waters and Valerie Armstrong, would not go along quietly. They challenged the official version of events and accused the enforcement division of showing favoritism to Trump. They even began to say publicly what little people and their lawyers, people like cocktail waitress Diane Pussehl and lawyer Gregory Imperiale, had said for years: that casino regulation relied on two standards of justice, separate and unequal.

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Armstrong said she was "mystified by this settlement." Armstrong noted that during earlier hearings on Donald Trump's financial stability, "I was rather concerned about the situation" involving Fred Trump, "but I didn't want to prejudge at that time since all of the facts were not before me. I guess to put it quite simply, I still don't feel that all the facts are before me. This, to me, is a really serious situation."

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Armstrong noted that in the Trump hearings she was repeatedly told "that integrity questions are not an issue, everything is on the up and up, and it seems to me a financially distressed casino should not be deliberately violating the Casino Control Act."

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Waters was more explicit than Armstrong. "You have two standards for determining what the penalty is going to be," he said, one for run-ofthe-mill employees who get named and punished and another for Trump casino executives who go unnamed and unpunished.

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Chairman Perskie, anxious to shut down this line of official comment, proposed raising the fine to sixty-five thousand dollars and delaying a vote until after the commissioners could talk in private. At the next commission meeting Auriemma and Trump attorney Joseph Fusco presented the commissioners with a written statement naming three Trump executives as the responsible parties. Neither Harvey Freeman, who concocted the ruse, nor Nick Ribis, who had tipped Sweeney, was named. Castle president Tony Calandra was named, but everyone knew he was a figurehead without real power. What the commissioners did not know was that the other two executives named as the responsible parties — Ed Tracy, who headed all three Trump casinos, and Pat McCoy, the Trump Castle chief financial officer — had fought to stop the illegal loan. Tracy had been forced out of his job soon after that. McCoy resigned under pressure. It was the rankest kind of lie, but because both

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There it was, on the record, in a public meeting, two of the commissioners saying that when it came to owners, or at least to Donald Trump, there was a double standard.

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The commission did not enforce the law mandating return of the money because despite these words, Perskie was assured of at least three of the four votes he needed to get the sixty-five-thousand-dollar fine approved, ending the matter. Waters dissented. The key vote was Armstrong, who gave Trump what he needed, saying she did so reluctantly and only because there was no hint of mob involvement. Nick Ribis knew she would clear it back when he called Sweeney to boldly announce the illegal loan plan. "Valerie always goes along in the end," he had said four months earlier when asked to predict if the commission might force return of the illegally loaned money.

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DeVesa never asked the central question in the affair, though. He never asked why Sweeney did not simply enforce Section 95 of the Casino Control Act and direct Trump Castle to return the illegally loaned money. That was the issue that prompted Ribis to call Sweeney in advance, because if the money were loaned, and then had to be given back. Trump Castle would have had to close its doors. The only way to repay Fred would have been to do what Dennis Gomes pondered the night Akio Kashiwagi almost got away: raiding the casino cage and emptying the slot machines. Why wasn't the central issue explored?

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Beyond letting economic considerations shape their judgments about the fitness of casino owners and executives, the commissioners allowed themselves to hear what they wanted and to screen out undesired facts, another natural tendency. Nowhere was this theme more clear than when the Casino Control Commission certified as financially stable junk bond deals that any careful reader of the prospectuses could tell were doomed to failure. The Atlantis mortgage bonds turned to junk less than six months after Drexel Burnham Lambert sold them. Merv Griffin's deal to buy Resorts was in trouble just three weeks after Drexel wrote him a check for $325 million and the bondholders got just one interest payment before watching their investment axed to pieces in Bankruptcy Court. Trump made only three interest payments on his Taj Mahal Casino-Hotel, and two of those were made with the bondholders' own money before filing Chapter 11. The commission found Bally Manufacturing financially stable in 1990, but six weeks later Bally began missing payments to banks and bondholders it owed more than a billion dollars.

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Kaye Handley, a sharp-eyed securities analyst whose specialty is the stocks and bonds of companies on the edge of collapse, followed how the Casino Control Commission and the financial markets dealt with the Trump and Griffin borrowing binges and their aftermath. Those who focused on whether that particular deal involved fraudulent conveyance — cheating investors by wrongly transferring their property to someone else — missed the larger point, she said. The Atlantis, Resorts, Trump and Bally cases all fit a pattern.

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W. David Waters, the Casino Control commissioner most hated by the casino owners and their executives because he resisted the sirens of economic interest, believes it is also critical to enforce the integrity requirement and to define that term clearly. As the Trump casinos drifted into bankruptcy and he heard more and more complaints of rules violations, culminating in the illegal Trump loan, he realized that integrity was whatever the commission said it was. "Having integrity has come to mean that you haven't been convicted of a felony, and that's just plain offensive to me," Waters said.

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Art of the Deal, The (Trump), 2, 91, 241 Aruba Concorde, 2, 144, 145, 147, 148-49, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164-65, 241 Atlantic City disinvesting in, 54 ghetto areas, 3, 52, 53, 129 organized crime in, 9 poverty, 135

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gambling by minors, 180 sale to Trump, 199

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Del E. Webb Corporation, 11, 34, 39, 65, 211 Del Tufo, Robert, 294 Dematteis, Fred, 121 Desert Inn, 36, 44, 146 DeVesa, Frederick, 294 Discounting, 151, 210, 237 Discrimination, 33, 55, 175, 253 employment, 55 investigation of Trump, 83 Dixon, Mead, 41, 50 Dodd, Frank (Pat), 196, 233 Dog racing, 17, 21, 283 Dopp, Paul A., 197 Douglas, Buster, 2, 213 Doumani, Ed, 272, 273, 276 Dratch, Stephen, 216

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Trop World, 52, 260, 261, 265, 268 Trump, Blaine, 225

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Trump, Donald, 1-8, 11, 13, 35, 59, 73, 81-92 bankruptcy bailout, 137 borrowing practices, 21, 91, 92, 97, 99, 104,

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and junk bonds, 14 licensing issues, 82, 83 management practices, 93-105, 221 official favoritism to, 81-82, 88, 91, 110, 230, 232, 291, 293 personal style, 94, 104 purchase of Atlantis, 199 regulation problems, 96 use of deception, 84-92, 202 Trump, Fred, 81, 289, 290, 291, 292, 294 Trump, Ivana, 91-92, 94, 95, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 135, 136, 137, 138, 232, 251 Trump, Maryanne, 83 Trump, Robert, 83, 102, 221, 222, 225 Trump Castle Hotel & Casino, 7, 55, 56, 57, 92, 95, 136, 166, 167, 227, 229, 288 cash flow, 103, 104, 141

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gambling by minors, 182, 183 illegal loan to, 289-95, 299 overruns, 231 profit margins, 101, 141 Trump Parc, 230

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Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 78, 86, 87, 92, 93, 96, 101, 197, 200, 227, 238, 243, 244, 251, 252 competition, 4

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gambling by minors, 180, 184, 185 profit margin, 101 Trump Princess, 134-41, 230, 231 Trump Regency, 220 Trump Tower, 82, 83, 84, 117 Turner, Wallace, 36, 40 21. See Blackjack Tyson, Mike, 2, 103, 193, 254

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once worth $44 million, lost everything she had when Ramada bought out her casino and then refused to pay her for it. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission stood by as bondholders were financially raped by the junk-bond borrowing sprees of Trump, Griffin and Bally Manufacturing. Government regulators even gave one casino written permission to cheat novice roulette players. The mentality of greed that is driving corporate investors to sponsor casinos on Mississippi riverboats, Indian reservations and Main Street U.S.A. has also led casino managers to encourage sixteen-year-olds to drink and gamble indiscriminately.

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Part 5 of __

The Black Hand Mafia
by Queensland State Archives
4 July, 2023
https://blogs.archives.qld.gov.au/2023/ ... and-mafia/

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BLACK HAND! Special Writer Interviews People Who Live in Fear. VENDETTA NOT AT ... MOVE TO REPORT UNDESIRABLES. Only Way to Stamp Out Vicious Society of Killers

*Please note: the content of this blog post relates to historic crimes and accounts of violence which some readers may find distressing.

The Godfather playing out among the cane fields of tropical North Queensland? Sounds far-fetched.

But the unlikely location saw a string of unsolved murders throughout the 1920s and 1930s that baffled police and terrified the public. And at its heart, an Italian-Australian community haunted by a sinister guild which had followed them from their old country.

In 1932, nineteen-year-old Jean Morris’s body was found in an Ayr rooming house, with over 30 stab wounds. In 1935, Domenico Scarcella was shot in the head as he fed his horses and, the following year, Francesco Guglielmo ‘Frank’ Femio was killed in cold blood, riddled with shotgun pellets as he slept. Then Vincenzo D’Agostino was fatally wounded in an explosion at an Ingham bakery in 1938. All were linked to the notorious Black Hand: La Mano Nera, a secret society that originated in 18th century Naples.

When hard-working Italian canecutters and farmers began to prosper in North Queensland, the Black Hand infiltrated, demanding their countrymen pay exorbitant sums of money or risk extreme misfortune. Australians were warned to beware the ‘olive peril’.

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Photos of Jean Morris included in her Murder File, 1932. ITM814574.

Jean Morris, a street girl known locally as ‘Stiletto Jean’ because of the small knife she carried, had been involved with several members of the Black Hand up until her an untimely death. Inspector O’Driscoll stated:

“In all my long experience as a policeman I had never witnessed such evidence of lethal ferocity or unbridled rage. Hardened as I imagined myself to be, I admit I felt sickened by the dreadful scene in Jean Morris’s bedroom.”

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Deposition interview with Francesca Scarcella from the inquest into her late husband’s murder, 1936. ITM349599.

At the inquest into the murder of Domenico Scarcella, his widow Francesca swore that her husband’s death was a vendetta killing. It transpired that Domenico’s brother, Severio, killed Vincenzo Speranzo in Italy. Speranzo happened to be the brother-in-law of D’Agostino, the Calabrian man widely rumoured to have led the infamous Black Hand, and Francesca had received letters from relatives in Italy to support that theory.

A letter was also found among Domenico Scarcella’s personal items: an extortion letter from the Black Hand demanding £250 (approximately $24,500 today). Francesca said her husband had vowed to find its author.

In a post-mortem examination of his body, Dr Morrissey noted 71 pellet wounds to the torso: all had been fired prior to the fatal gunshots to the skull, which were made at close range from behind.

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Francesco Guglielmo ‘Frank’ Femio’s passport, included in his Murder File, 1937. ITM666429.

For Francesco Femio, potential retribution had long dogged his footsteps. Dr Morrissey, in his Post-mortem examination, confirmed it found him in the form of “Gunshot wounds of the chest, left hip and right knee. Homicidal.” His Queensland police murder file reveals the cane-cutter’s murky past and tangled associations with the Black Hand gang.

Femio had close links to prostitution in the area and was believed to control more than 100 working girls across Cairns, Townsville and Innisfail. One of whom was also his lover, Jean Morris. The two had quarrels so bitter and violent they were reported in newspapers of the time. Months before Morris’ brutal murder, one passer-by allegedly heard Femio threaten “You come, you come with me. If you don’t, I’ll kill you” as she screamed at him to leave her home.

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Newspaper clipping depicting an artist’s interpretation of Jean Morris, included in Femio’s Murder File, 1937. ITM666429.

Police also suspected Femio was an accomplice in the murder of Domenico Scarcella, the inquest disclosing that a handwriting expert had attested his writing was identical to that on the extortion letter Scarcella had promised to discover. Though Femio vehemently denied the allegations when questioned.

While it was never proven, his familiarity with other “men of doubtful character” and implicated involvement in various criminal offences shored public opinion of his having been, at least at some point, second-in-command to reputed Black Hand leader Vincenzo D’Agostino.

A baker by trade, D’Agostino remains a constant thread through the stories and files on the Black Hand. Suspected by police and reported by newspapers to be its chief – to both he claimed innocence, denying any knowledge or connection. Any truth, which may have aided in his arrest if he was indeed the leader, evaded police at every vicious twist.

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Police background on Vincenzo D’Agostino, included in Femio’s Murder File, 1937. ITM666429.

The whispers of the frightened community terrorised by the Black Hand remained just that, with those interrogated by authorities refusing to share anything they may have known of the society and its actions. And not without reason, in 1933, D’Agostino was charged with corruption of a police witness using threats and intimidation. Though later acquitted of the charge, the warning to those in the community who might speak out about the Black Hand endured.

In 1938, as police sat by his deathbed, D’Agostino steadfastly refused to name his attackers, taking his secrets to the grave.

Perhaps the series of murders stemmed from 1928, when elderly canegrower Nicky Patane refused to pay any more protection money to D’Agostino and was shot in the head, dying in the arms of his wife.

Patane’s callous murder allegedly inspired another secret society in North Queensland. On the banks of a creek at Stone River, 16 defiant farmers allegedly signed an oath written in their own blood, vowing to eliminate the Black Hand permanently.

These cases, and more, remain unsolved to this day.

North Queensland’s Black Hand and its mysteries continue to intrigue and perplex. Presented by Anthony LaPaglia, ABC TV’s The Black Hand is set to unpack just some of these stories and histories from the cane fields. Watch the trailer below.


BLACK HAND Full Movie