Forgeddaboutit?

First of all, let me note that I’m not accusing Trump of being in the mob.

I just found this interesting, and I unfortunately find it a sad and interesting look at how things were (hopefully not still are) in business, on the East Coast.

Back in December 2019, not all that long ago really, and running up to the election that following year, Rolling Stone published an article written by Seth Hettena entitled:

The Real-Life Mob Families of ‘The Irishman’? Donald Trump Knew Them

The president and his associates have long histories with the Mafia figures who populate Scorsese's film

The article was written because The Irishman had just been released on television.¹

Rolling Stone noted how the central characters in the film were now all dead, quite of a few of them because of mob hits, which also wasn't what the film was about.  It was about two very elderly men who are still living.  One of them was Donald Trump. As the article states:

Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.

And it goes on:

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trump’s buildings and his casinos attracted underworld figures like “Fat Tony” Salerno, the Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno, who’s portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasn’t affected was Trump Tower.

The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting Sheeran did that left his victims’ brains on the wall.) The book is full of characters who didn’t make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trump’s world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the “chicken man” whose 1981 murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song “Atlantic City.” Testa’s son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another figure in the book is Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, whose associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City — until New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.

And it goes on:

In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasn’t true, but he also swore that he didn’t know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohn’s obituary a few years earlier.

And it’s not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trump’s world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohn’s Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagan’s political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohn’s advice would change the course of Stone’s life: “What you need is Donald Trump.” Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stone’s conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Ooo. . . ick.

And there's more:

In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattan’s East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohn’s townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.

The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his “rabbi” Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorsese’s film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobster’s scratchy voice. “When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you can’t help but sound like them,” Giuliani once said.

Well that explains a lot.

But it wasn't limited to Trump, another was. . . Joe Biden.

Trump wasn’t the only one who knew the people in the world of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him. There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day in the last week before election, and the lawyer didn’t want them to run. So Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters union drivers who delivered the paper wouldn’t cross it. So the ads were never delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Biden’s door was always open. “You could reach out for him, and he would listen,” he wrote.

The Biden story isn’t in the movie. There wasn’t room enough for everyone to make it into Scorsese’s epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does — and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New York’s five Mafia families. “I’m the fucking boss, that’s who I am,” Salerno once boasted in a secretly recorded conversation. “Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine.” Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the till.

I think that last line is correct.  The Mafia was thick into unions, and it controlled a lot.  Unfortunately, that means that it dealt with conventional businessmen and politicians a lot as well.  This is foreign to a lot of the country, however, and it really never develops in the news, beyond the rumor stage, and it isn't likely to now.

Footnotes:

1.  To my surprise, I haven't done a review of the excellent film yet.  I'll have to do one.  It is well worth watching.

2. According to an article in Politico by David Cay Johnston:

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

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

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

But with Cohn as his lawyer, Trump apparently had no reason to personally fear Salerno or Castellano—at least, not once he agreed to pay inflated concrete prices. What Trump appeared to receive in return was union peace. That meant the project would never face costly construction or delivery delays.