To me a gambler is someone who plays the slot machines. I prefer to own slot machines. It’s very good business being the house.
—DONALD TRUMP
In a world of winners and losers, suckers and deceivers, casinos represent a diabolical version of paradise. Built on a monumental scale, they exert a magnetic pull, beckoning the curious and the deluded. The deceptions begin with marketing campaigns that show not the retirees who prop themselves on canes before the slot machines, but handsome men at felt-covered tables flanked by beautiful women in low-cut dresses, their mouths agape in ecstasy. Once the pilgrim arrives in this land, he discovers the campy architecture—fake Tuscany, fake Old West, fake Havana—that makes the casino seem like a playhouse for grown-ups. Inside waits a delirium of flashing lights and carnival sounds that establish that this is “fun” and “entertainment.” No one hides that casinos exist to persuade suckers that losing their hard-earned dollars is nevertheless glamorous and exciting. So it was natural that Donald Trump, who looked good in a tuxedo, had long desired to own one.
Big-time gambling came to the East Coast after New Jersey voters approved gaming in crumbling, crime-ridden Atlantic City in a 1976 referendum. The campaign for the proposition was backed by casino operators and developers. Approval set off a land rush as both speculators and would-be operators sought property that would accommodate large casinos and parking lots for the customers’ cars. The first to open was the Resorts Casino Hotel, which had formerly been the Chalfonte-Haddon Hotel. The Las Vegas–based owner immediately began to chalk up profits of $4.2 million per week. Soon other Vegas names arrived, including Caesars, Bally’s, Sands, and Tropicana. By 1984, taxes levied on casinos would supply 7 percent of the state government’s revenues. In the same period, Gamblers Anonymous in New Jersey recorded a tripling of its membership, and a clinic would be opened to offer gambling addicts care twenty-four hours a day.1
Well aware of organized crime’s history in Las Vegas, New Jersey officials screened applicants for casino licenses for any connections to unsavory characters, but their decisions seemed inconsistent at best. Resorts was granted a license despite evidence that one of its consultants passed more than $400,000 to the president of the Bahamas, where the firm operated a casino. After spending $320 million on a hotel/casino complex, the well-regarded Hilton corporation was denied a license when gaming commissioners determined the company had not resolved questions about the alleged destruction of sensitive legal documents and reports of criminal activity at its San Francisco hotel. (Many observers believed the commissioners were bothered more by Hilton’s failure to properly kowtow to them.) The denial infuriated the company’s head William Barron Hilton, who had long cultivated an image of propriety. Hilton had been actively courted by New Jersey’s top officials, who encouraged his firm’s investment. Bally’s and Caesars were put under similar pressure, but received licenses after they changed their management teams.2
The challenge of the license review made casinos more difficult to develop than ordinary projects, and would-be operators relied on local advisers and lawyers to guide them successfully. With this kind of help, Donald Trump found his way to a group of landowners who would lease him prime property close to the Depression-era Atlantic City Convention Hall. The hall, which looked like a giant cement Quonset hut, was best known for hosting the annual Miss America beauty pageant. The land included a parcel controlled by locals who were suspected of mob connections. Although Trump first intended to lease this land, he had to buy the others out to satisfy state officials, who wouldn’t license a casino dependent on a relationship with such questionable characters. He also gained control of several smaller adjacent properties but couldn’t come to terms with a landowner named Vera Coking, whose three-story Sea Shell Guest House sat smack in the middle of the site.
The land beneath the Sea Shell House would have been perfect for parking the limousines that would bring high rollers to the planned Trump Plaza. Her lawyers set the value of her land in the range of $2 million. Coking liked her property and was content to remain in it until she received her price. (Prior to Trump, Coking had turned away Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse magazine, who also dreamed of opening a casino in Atlantic City. Her obstinacy was one of the obstacles that eventually defeated the project, leaving the porno king with the rusting skeleton of a building and a battered bank account.) In Coking’s long negotiations with Trump, the press reported that she had rejected an offer in the millions that also came with a free hotel room, and room service, for the rest of her life. This wasn’t true. Nor was it true that Vera Coking died in the midst of the talks. As of 2015 she was still very much alive. What was true was that Coking seemed almost supernaturally resistant to Donald Trump’s salesmanship. She even called him “a cockroach, a maggot, and a crumb.”3
Atlantic City, which occupied several barrier islands, had been a place of real estate booms and busts ever since its founding in 1853 by speculators who bought up beachfront lots and then sold them at a 900 percent profit when the railroad arrived. Casinos were supposed to revive the local economy after its latest bust, but they had brought more of the same speculation. A few property owners did get rich, but the big winners had anticipated the casino referendum and, in some cases, used political connections to profit. Atlantic City’s mayor would go to prison after he got caught helping organized-crime figures play this game.
In some prime Atlantic City development areas entire blocks of houses were demolished, but casino projects stalled and the land became overgrown and desolate. Other neighborhoods remained downtrodden and dangerous as escalating land prices made them too expensive for anyone who might want to carry out ordinary rehabilitation or construction projects. All, it seemed, were looking to make a killing and were willing to wait until they got their price. As 20 percent of the housing stock was torn down, middle-class residents couldn’t find decent homes, and the local school district was unable to afford land for a new high school. Many of the jobs in the casinos went to people who lived on the mainland and commuted. In sum, after gambling arrived, life in Atlantic City was worse for many of the people who lived there. They tended to remain in the ranks of the poor, bypassed by the rivers of cash that built the casinos, paid executives, and rewarded casino owners.4
In March of 1982 Trump obtained his gaming license. In May he began construction, working around the Sea Shell Guest House. The money for this work came from the same line of credit his father had helped to arrange for the Commodore project. Despite People magazine’s having anointed him a billionaire, the state’s Division of Gaming Enforcement concluded that Trump’s own bank accounts held less than $400,000.5
The DGE report pointed to one of the key elements of Trump’s business strategy. Whatever he gained in profit with successful projects such as the Hyatt or Trump Tower, he used to start new endeavors with vast amounts of additional borrowing. In the 1990s, one former Trump executive told the writer Harry Hurt III that “it was all a shell game” in which Trump shifted small amounts of cash among a number of corporate entities to qualify for loans to develop new enterprises. Lenders, especially those who had done business for years with Donald’s father, felt confident based on Fred Trump’s record. They also understood the Trump methods.
Donald also worked hard to acquire real estate at bargain prices. In 1985, for example, he would buy two Manhattan properties—the St. Moritz Hotel and the New York Foundling Hospital building—for a combined $114 million. Lenders mortgaged them for $134 million, and the extra $20 million was Trump’s to use as he saw fit. Unlike a homeowner who buys his house with a mortgage, Trump was not personally responsible for anything that might go wrong in these deals. Donald’s reputation might take a hit in the event of a big failure, but his personal assets were protected.6
A third Trump strategy involved recruiting deep-pocketed partners who were willing to backstop projects that he had devised and advanced through various stages of permits and development. His salesmanship and his ability to exploit his political connections, which were often cemented as he gave campaign money to candidates and incumbents, brought real value to these partnerships. Relationships were his stock-in-trade, and he knew how to convert them to profit.
In Atlantic City, where Trump lacked the kind of deep relationships that he exploited in New York, he struggled to gain his footing. With its historical connection to organized crime and exploitation of addicts, gambling was still regarded as a shady business. Donald was aware of this darker aspect of the trade and would eventually note that for “four or five percent” of his customers, overspending was a problem. “There’s no question about it.” Trump, who took great risks in his businesses and his personal life, drew the line when it came to wagering in a casino: “I’ve never gambled in my life.”
Despite the profit potential inherent in a business based on legally stacked odds, traditional lenders were generally reluctant to back casino projects. For one thing, few financial experts understood the business. For another, this highly competitive industry was dependent on unpredictable fads and fashions. As Trump looked for financing, he found little support among New York lenders and began scouring the country for construction money. In Los Angeles he visited with Michael Milken. Before being imprisoned for violating securities laws, Milken was the undisputed leader of a new approach to finance that encouraged investors to accept greater risk to obtain higher interest payments on bonds that were openly described as “junk.” Trump went to see Milken after he had recently sold $160 million in bonds to help Las Vegas gambling mogul Steve Wynn build the Golden Nugget in New Jersey.
Milken offered to help Trump, but the two men never came to terms. Some smaller banks came through with loans, but even when pooled together, they failed to meet Trump’s needs. Then, executives with Holiday Inn came to him with a proposal to operate one of their Harrah’s casinos at his Atlantic City development. Harrah’s, the hotel chain’s gambling arm, was already in business in Atlantic City, but at a marina location that was less desirable than Trump’s spot next to the Convention Hall. Negotiations produced a proposal for a $50 million investment by Holiday Inn, which would arrange for construction financing and manage the casino after Trump built it. With no money invested, Donald would share 50 percent of any profits.
The Holiday Inn board convened in Atlantic City to check out the development site and their would-be partner. Donald arranged for extra equipment to be on-site during a tour of the property, and only one of his visitors seemed to notice that the earthmovers that were crabbing around in the sand seemed to be moving the same pile of earth from one spot to another. Trump offered enough of an explanation to avoid real concern, and by the end of the day the board members had approved the partnership.
The showmanship and schmoozing that soothed the Holiday Inn board was a perfect example of the Trump style, which depended on the goodwill that most people, even experienced businesspeople, bring to their encounters with potential partners. As social animals, human beings naturally seek agreement and depend on others to act in good faith. Most of us are so inclined toward this attitude, which includes the tendency to fill in the gaps in our understanding with benign assumptions, that magicians and con artists rely on it as they practice their deceptions. Trump had a way of talking—sharing supposed secrets, offering praise, extending sympathies—that created a synthetic form of friendship. Under these conditions, people had trouble asking hard questions. If Trump said something like “You and I know what we’re talking about,” they would nod and allow a conversation to continue for fear of seeming rude or stupid. In this way, he got the benefit of the doubt.
As the casino neared completion, Donald gave his wife, Ivana, much of the responsibility for the look of the interior spaces, and she devoted as much time as she could to creating an environment that would dazzle the suckers. As of early 1984 Ivana was mother to three children—Donald Jr., a daughter named Ivanka, and a newborn son named Eric—and she was busy at home. Nevertheless she made frequent trips to the casino site and picked out every bit of decoration, which she submitted to her husband for his final approval.7
Harrah’s at Trump Plaza opened in late spring 1984, with a bar called Trumps and a restaurant called Ivana’s. Technical problems plagued the slot machines for several days, depriving the partners of millions of dollars in revenues. Business was further disrupted when the fire alarms mysteriously went off “ten million times,” as one of Harrah’s executives told The Wall Street Journal. After these snafus were corrected, the place still underperformed, earning less than half the profit envisioned for the first full year. This result was especially disappointing compared with the 1984 performance of the other nine casinos in the city, which reported winning 8.4 percent more than the previous year.
The partners disagreed on the source of the problems at the casino. Trump’s side thought that Harrah’s managers had aimed low and alienated the high-roller clientele he wanted to attract. Harrah’s managers believed they knew better than a New York developer who had never run a casino. They also felt let down when Trump failed to build a much-needed parking garage to serve gamblers who drove to Atlantic City from Philadelphia and greater New York City. One outside analyst concluded that gamblers were confused by the cobranding of the place, with the names Trump and Harrah’s appearing together and separately on various signs and in advertisements. For Donald, who was keen to make the name Trump into a brand that added value to everything he might undertake, this confusion was worse than counterproductive. It was a threat to his plan for the future.8
Unhappy with his partners in Atlantic City, Trump approached Barron Hilton to discuss the hugely expensive and unlicensed casino Hilton had built in the marina district, almost next to Harrah’s original Atlantic City location. Hilton was, in Trump’s estimation, a member of “the Lucky Sperm Club. He was born wealthy and bred to be an aristocrat.” Trump offered this assessment in 1987 without a hint that he realized that he himself had been lavished with attention and benefited from the small fortune invested in his private education as the chauffeured child of one of the richest men in America. Few spermatozoa ever had it better.9
In his first conversation with Hilton, Trump made no progress. Then Steve Wynn offered to buy 25 percent of Hilton and made noise about eventually taking control of the company. Like Trump, Wynn was a bold and aggressive businessman. One of his first big deals was to buy a lot next to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for $1 million and quickly sell it to Caesars for $2 million. But unlike Trump, Wynn had not been born to great wealth. His parents ran bingo parlors in Maryland, and their main contribution to his success had been $25,000 in backing for his first foray in business. He also cultivated a friendly public image, which he described as “smooth and easy.” Donald Trump may have been smooth, but he was not easy.10
With Wynn stalking his company, Barron Hilton began raising money to defend against him. Hilton couldn’t know whether Wynn was actually intending to seize control of the firm or practicing a “greenmail” strategy that would lead to some kind of ransom payment that would stop his pursuit. One of the nation’s most prominent lawyers, Edward Bennett Williams, likened this practice to the “protection” rackets developed by gangsters, who threaten their victims with harm if they don’t fork over regular cash payments. “You know, they’ll say, ‘You’re ripe for a takeover.’ That’s the way the gangsters used to do it,” said Williams. Insider trading was also aided by greenmail because once the threat was made, the stock price of a targeted company invariably rose. Friends who were tipped off in advance could buy low, wait for the greenmailer to make his move, and then sell as the target company’s stock reached a peak.11
Greenmail was just one of several tactics that were used in the go-go Reagan years by predatory capitalists. These corporate raiders, among them Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens, raised huge sums of money to buy shares in companies they deemed poorly managed or undervalued. If they succeeded, the debt could be shifted to the acquired company. In some cases this burden led to bankruptcy. In others, a company would be split into pieces and sold. A raider might also squeeze money out of a newly acquired firm by selling additional shares of stock. Although raiders might destroy part or all of a company, depriving workers of employment and communities of bedrock businesses, they almost always made money themselves.12
In the case of Hilton, financial analysts speculated that Wynn could buy the entire company and sell off everything but the gambling houses. Divested one at a time, or even in big chunks, the regular hotels might well have attracted enough money to cover the cost of the entire buyout. Wynn would thus get Hilton’s casinos free of charge. He might even make substantially more than his payment for the Hilton stock. Since virtually all of the dollars involved would be borrowed, his risk would be nil. Of course, if he were successful, Barron Hilton and other stockholders would lose control of the firm, and the properties would probably be loaded with new debt. But the extra operating costs could always be covered by squeezing employees and raising room rates. And if some once-solvent Hilton hotels failed, it would be someone else’s problem.
As the man whose name marked the Hilton empire, Barron Hilton was the one most concerned about defending against Wynn’s overtures. He quickly revised his views on Donald Trump, recasting him as a kind of white knight. Trump abandoned his usual buy-low policy and agreed to pay Hilton the full $320 million asking price for the Atlantic City property. Financing would eventually come through the investment firm Bear Stearns, with bonds issued at a 14 percent annual rate of interest. The property would be christened Trump Castle. To no one’s surprise, Holiday Inn sued Trump for putting his name on a casino that would compete directly with the one that Harrah’s was running at Trump Plaza.
Although another businessman might have been chastened by all the debt, and the Holiday Inn suit, Donald moved decisively. He paid $73 million to acquire Harrah’s half of the Trump Plaza partnership, which ended both their relationship and the pending lawsuit. Trump had reason to believe he might improve things at his original casino site. Harrah’s record at this location, reported quarterly by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, had never been good. In 1985, the Trump casino had lost money while Harrah’s marina location had made more than $10 million in profit. Things improved a little for the Trump facility in the first quarter in 1986, but Harrah’s at the marina still outperformed it, earning almost $6 million compared with a profit of less than $1 million for the Trump operation.
With the consolidation of his position in Atlantic City, Trump entered a new phase in his financial life. Clearly intrigued by the corporate takeover scene, he turned the tables on Holiday Inns by acquiring more than 2.5 percent of the firm’s stock and then announcing the purchase. When he bought the stock, it was selling for about $62 per share, but Wall Street analysts believed that its assets, if broken up and sold, were worth perhaps as much as $100 per share. The difference could mean as much as $500 million to someone who gained control of the firm and disassembled it. Trump issued a public notice of his purchase long before he acquired so many shares that securities regulations would have required it. This, and other factors, made it unlikely that he was interested in actually acquiring the firm. “He isn’t a corporate raider,” explained an official at Bear Stearns.
However, the suggestion idea that a takeover might occur helped push Holiday Inn’s stock past $71. It also led the executives at Holiday Inn to mortgage their firm for more than $2 billion. By burdening the corporation with debt, the Holiday Inn board was following a “poison pill” strategy, which wiped out much of the value that a raider might reap by a sale of the firm’s many assets. Trump sold his shares and bragged that he made $35 million on the price run-up. Later, in a report he was required to make to the State of New Jersey, he noted that his actual profit was less than $13 million, which was, nevertheless, a significant sum.13
Trump, who later said, “The New York Stock Exchange happens to be the biggest casino in the world,” next played the raider game by targeting the casino/manufacturing firm Bally’s with what The Wall Street Journal called a “greenmailing” scheme via the purchase of 9.9 percent of the company’s stock. In Bally’s poison-pill defense, it purchased the Golden Nugget casino in Atlantic City for $440 million. After making Bally’s toxic to Trump’s takeover attempt, the company then paid him $84 million for his shares. The deal netted him $24 million. Bally’s was left with a huge amount of new debt, and Trump moved on to his next target, Resorts International, which owned the existing Resorts casino and a yet-to-be-completed Atlantic City casino called the Taj Mahal.
Resorts International’s founder had died in April 1986. In March 1987 Trump matched a previous offer for the firm and pledged to complete the Atlantic City construction project. Originally estimated to cost $185 million, the projected cost of the Taj, as it was known, had ballooned to more than $500 million. As he made his move on Resorts, Trump focused on the company’s Class B shares, which cost roughly four times the price of the Class A stock, but came with one hundred votes per share. The special status of the shares allowed Trump to grab 88 percent of the possible stockholder votes while paying just 12 percent of the company’s value. No wonder he considered the stock market a casino.14
As Resorts’ Class A shareholders learned of Trump’s maneuvers, a few raised an alarm. His most vocal critics were outraged by his $22-per-share offer. (At this figure Trump would pay a total of $125 million to complete his takeover.) Then, just days before Trump was to complete his purchase of Resorts and make it a privately held company, Merv Griffin announced he would pay $35 for every Class A share outstanding. The two men then sued each other.
Griffin was an unlikely challenger to Trump’s claim on Resorts. He was nineteen years older and known not as a businessman but as an entertainer. After more than a decade of success as a big-band singer, Griffin had hosted game shows and substituted for Jack Paar on the Tonight show. In 1965 his syndicated talk program—The Merv Griffin Show—began a run that would last until 1986. Though soft-spoken, Griffin was unafraid of controversy. When young Donald Trump was still apprenticing at his father’s office, Griffin was giving a platform to outspoken opponents of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In an earnest voice he coaxed the political agitator Abbie Hoffman and the philosopher/pacifist Bertrand Russell to share views that challenged widely held assumptions about American policy. Thanks to Griffin’s afternoon broadcasts, millions of homemakers and their children also got their first glimpse of social provocateurs such as Dick Gregory and George Carlin.
As the mild-mannered Griffin quietly courted controversy, he also proved himself to be an astute businessman. When he developed the concept for the game show Jeopardy, he made certain to retain ownership and formed a production company to control it. He followed its success with other game shows, such as Wheel of Fortune, which was sold as a kind of franchise to broadcasters around the world. In 1986 Griffin sold his production company for $250 million. He brought this money to the battle for Resorts International.15
With Donald Trump claiming to be a billionaire, Griffin’s $250 million made him the little guy in the contest for Resorts. But he was more than rich enough to pay lawyers to work on the various lawsuits and securities filings that arose in the competition with Trump. As he analyzed the situation, Griffin believed that he and his competitor wanted very different things. Trump obviously coveted the Taj, as it would give him both the maximum number of casinos permitted per New Jersey state license (three) and the biggest gambling hall in Atlantic City and, perhaps, the world. Griffin, who was an entertainer by nature and not a developer, preferred the pieces of Resorts that were intact and operating, namely the existing casino on the Atlantic City boardwalk and the four hotels plus a casino in the Bahamas.
With the two men desiring different parts of Resorts, the basis for a compromise seemed quite evident. Nevertheless, Trump chose to wage both a legal battle and a war of words. He started by accusing Griffin of making a “wholly illusory” offer intended to create excitement around Resorts stock and cause a spike in its price. (This is exactly what had happened to Holiday Inn stock when Trump had announced his purchase of its stock.) When Griffin then filed official papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission to formalize his bid, Trump called the move “feeble” and “futile.” Trump’s language, which was obviously intended to belittle his opponent, also betrayed his frustration. Although he controlled 88 percent of the stockholder votes, the final decision on the sale rested with the company’s board of directors, and he could be stalemated there if the three independent members felt obligated to accept Griffin’s bid for the Class A shares. Since it was 50 percent higher than Trump’s offer, they might decide, as fiduciaries, that they had no choice.
For his part, Griffin said nothing about Trump but, after reviewing a new appraisal of Resorts, raised his bid to more than $45 per share, or $295 million. Like a poker player pushing a huge stack of chips toward the center of the table, Griffin made his offer so big that it couldn’t be ignored. Trump didn’t react immediately, but eventually signaled that he might not be willing to match Griffin dollar for dollar. On March 26, 1988, Trump announced that he had purchased the venerable Plaza Hotel, on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street, for a reported $407 million. As was his custom, he added to this figure when he went to his lenders, borrowing a total of $425 million, which gave him some extra millions to play with after he paid the seller, Robert M. Bass.
Having acquired the Plaza along with the rest of the Westin Hotel chain, Bass and his partners had doubts about whether the hotel could generate a profit after servicing its $300 million debt. They recovered almost a third of what was paid for the entire Westin chain by selling one hotel to Donald Trump. His prospects at the Plaza couldn’t have been any better, considering he had piled roughly $125 million in debt on top of its previous burden. However Trump quickly sold other assets to net roughly $100 million, which gave him a bit of breathing room.16
The Plaza gave Donald Trump far more than a hotel with French-château lines. This building was quintessentially New York. Having welcomed guests for more than eighty years, the hotel was as beloved by locals and visitors as Grand Central Terminal and the main public library, which were built in the same period. The first entry in the hotel’s guest book read, “Mr. and Mrs. Alfred G. Vanderbilt and servant.” Home to the fictional Eloise of the famous children’s book series by Kay Thompson, the Plaza was declared to be a National Historic Landmark in 1986. The hotel has appeared as a backdrop in countless films and TV programs. The Plaza’s famous Persian Room had featured performances by a range of divas as diverse as Eartha Kitt, Liza Minnelli, and Peggy Lee, and its ballroom had been the scene of Truman Capote’s famous Black and White Ball of 1966.
Trump seemed cognizant of the building’s significance, but he regarded it in terms that were markedly self-referential. In a paid advertisement he leaned heavily on the word I to trumpet the Plaza deal: “I haven’t purchased a building, I have purchased a masterpiece—the Mona Lisa. For the first time in my life I have knowingly made a deal that was not economic—for I can never justify the price I paid, no matter how successful the Plaza becomes. What I have done, however, is give New York the opportunity to have a hotel that transcends all others! I am committed to making the Plaza New York’s single great hotel, perhaps the greatest hotel in the world.”17
In these four sentences—fewer than one hundred words—Trump framed a deal that was driven by his ambition and commercial desires as an act of civic generosity. He was giving New York “the opportunity” to, well, be the location of a luxury hotel that was already firmly planted in its soil. As carefully constructed as any of his buildings, the ad also set the conditions by which the deal might be evaluated, in a way that made Trump’s defeat impossible. He had “knowingly” paid a price that did not make sense from a business perspective. However, the Plaza was the Mona Lisa of hotels, and therefore he was to be admired for his largesse. And if, by some chance, the Plaza proved profitable, then he had overcome stupendous odds and worked a financial miracle.
Within days of his purchase of the Plaza, Trump agreed to negotiate with his rival in the tussle over Resorts International. Forgoing the usual businessman posturing over location and ground rules, Griffin readily agreed to travel to New York and meet at Trump Tower. He arrived in the middle of a spring afternoon and was whisked by elevator to the twenty-sixth floor. Trump led him to his private office, where the windows offered a commanding view of Central Park. Trump pointed to the Plaza and reminded Griffin that he had just completed his purchase of the eight-hundred-room icon. Griffin quipped, “That’s how many rooms you’re going to need to house all the lawyers it will take to fight me.”
As Nina Easton later recounted in the Los Angeles Times, Griffin asked Trump what he wanted out of Resorts International. Trump answered that he wanted the Taj, and the steel pier that was part of the site. Griffin asked, “Is that all?” Trump answered, “Yes.” In this brief moment the feud was ended and the basic outlines of an arrangement were settled. By the end of the day attorneys for the two men had hammered out the finer details of the deal over a table in the bar at the Helmsley Hotel, where Griffin was staying. According to the agreement, Griffin would take control of Resorts International, break it up, and sell to Trump the parts he wanted at an agreed-upon price. In the arrangement announced on April 15, 1988, Trump received the bonus of several helicopters that were in the Resorts portfolio. Griffin got some seaplanes—Grumman Mallards—that Resorts operated under the name Chalk’s International Airlines to bring tourists to the Bahamas. (Founded in 1917, Chalk’s was the oldest operating air service in the United States.)
Both Griffin and Trump believed that their names carried real weight with the public and, thus, added value to their enterprises. Griffin, known to be genial and fun-loving, had broader fame, but he was less inclined to exploit it. Trump put his last name on just about everything he touched, save the venerable Plaza. By the summer of 1988, the list included the Trump casinos in Atlantic City as well as a roster of substantial buildings in New York, including Trump Tower, Trump Plaza, and Trump Park. However, the name was beginning to signify more than just the wealth, opulence, and excitement he hoped it would evoke. It also stood for an unseemly level of self-regard and exaggeration.
Trump’s reputation had suffered first in 1980, when he destroyed the Bonwit artwork, but the negative publicity was short-lived. The conflict over his plans for the fifteen-story apartment building at 100 Central Park South went on for years, and during much of it Trump seemed to behave like a bully. One judge found that Trump had filed a “spurious and unnecessary lawsuit” in an effort to “harass” one tenant with the goal of forcing him to leave. Trump was ordered to refund part of the man’s rent. In other cases Trump was found to have made attempts at “intimidation” and to have acted “in bad faith.” For three years in a row, his managers had refused to allow a Christmas tree in the building’s lobby. This caused the Times columnist Sidney H. Schanburg to brand him “Donald Humbug.” New York magazine’s Tony Schwartz would describe Trump’s performance in the project as a “fugue of failure.”18
The tenants at 100 Central Park South proved worthy adversaries for Trump. They formed an association, hired a bulldog attorney, and tied him up in legal proceedings until he resembled Gulliver at the mercy of the Lilliputians. Evidence presented at a state proceeding revealed that the managers Trump hired for the building had promised to more or less drive out the tenants within a year. As repairs and cleaning were suspended, the roof began to leak and apartment ceilings collapsed. The common areas became filthy. Lobby staff stopped accepting packages. Doormen ceased opening the door and hailing cabs. One building maintenance man testified that he had been asked to report to managers what he knew about the financial conditions and sexual habits of the people in the building. As reported by writer Wayne Barrett, Trump disputed the maintenance worker’s account. Moreover, Trump’s representative told the press that “the charges of harassment [were] fabrications and a well-organized attempt by the tenants to take advantage of his prominence.”
Hardly powerless, the tenants went to the local media with anecdotes about the fifteen elderly women who lived in the building and the poorest residents who would be hard-pressed to find affordable apartments anywhere in Manhattan. The tenants also enjoyed help from the Koch administration, which went to court charging Trump with “egregious attempts to harass and evict without due process of law.” The suit allowed the mayor, who was seeking reelection, to pose as a defender of the little-guy tenants against a developer whom Koch was happy to paint as callous and greedy. Years of fighting produced a stalemate that thwarted Trump’s effort to convert the building to condominiums. The war ended when he agreed to maintain 100 Central Park South as an apartment building and make substantial renovations, while the tenants dropped all their complaints against him.19
For Trump, who sought to win at every turn, the 100 Central Park South episode was a remarkable setback and a public relations mess. It was even more painful as it came after another big defeat—the collapse of the United States Football League. The USFL had struggled since its inception. Trump had persuaded his fellow owners to switch from a spring/summer season to the fall, when they would compete for attention against the well-entrenched NFL and college teams. He also pushed for the league to file a lawsuit against the NFL, with charges that the older league had violated antitrust laws. The suit alleged $567 million in damages and could have produced, with punitive provisions, a $1.7 billion verdict. In the summer of 1986 a jury found the NFL had sought to operate an illegal monopoly but the USFL owners were not much harmed. The panel awarded the plaintiffs a symbolic $1 in damages. By then the league was defunct.20
In another time, Donald Trump might have been able to fashion better outcomes in these conflicts with the help of Roy Cohn, who was a remarkably inventive legal combatant. However, in 1986 Cohn was too besieged himself to help anyone else. First, he was under attack from the state bar, which had stripped him of his right to practice law. He had not exhausted his appeals, but after many close escapes Cohn appeared to be out of moves. Even worse, he had been quite ill for more than a year, and nothing doctors prescribed helped for long.
Having kept his sexual identity a secret for so long, Cohn had been unable to tell his friends that he had contracted HIV/AIDS, which had reached epidemic proportions in the New York gay community. In this era, when antigay prejudice was extremely common, many men lived such closeted lives. However, the HIV/AIDS crisis had also led many men to come out, as an act of self-determination and solidarity. At age fifty-nine Cohn remained so committed to his ruse that he even maintained his relationships with men such as Senator Jesse Helms, a racist and a homophobe who opposed research into the epidemic.
Roy Cohn fooled many people, including his friend Barbara Walters, with the claim that he had liver cancer. In moments when he felt better, he spoke with his characteristic bombast and venom. As Donald Trump took his business to other law firms, Cohn felt his former protégé had abandoned him in his hour of need. Writer Wayne Barrett reported that Cohn said, “I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. Donald pisses ice water.”21
Some of Cohn’s close friends never forgave Trump, believing he had abandoned the mentor who had schooled him in the ways of success. For their part, the two men reconciled in Cohn’s final year. Cohn took the initiative, telephoning Trump to ask if he could provide a place to live for a former lover, Russell Eldridge, who was also dying of AIDS. According to Barrett and writer Nicholas von Hoffman, Cohn was poised to have the line disconnected if Trump asked what was ailing Cohn’s sick friend. Trump did not. Instead he provided a room at the Barbizon Hotel, which he had acquired. When hotels bills were sent to Cohn, he threw them away. Eventually the hotel staff became distressed to have someone dying in their midst and calls went out to Cohn, asking him to remove Eldridge from the premises. He did not comply with their requests, which didn’t seem to bother Donald. He called Cohn several times to offer him encouragement and invited him to a dinner party in Palm Beach in early March 1986. The event was held at Mar-a-Lago, the former estate of Marjorie Merriweather Post, which Trump had recently purchased. Cohn attended.
Cohn’s commitment to his constructed reality was so steadfast that he maintained it even as he was obviously dying. In the spring of 1986 he spoke to Donald Trump about submitting to an interview with the fierce Mike Wallace of the TV news program 60 Minutes. Trump would recall that he advised against it: “I said, ‘Roy, don’t do it,’ because it was obvious that he was sick. It was obvious at that time that he had AIDS. I said, ‘Don’t do it, Roy. You’re making a big mistake.… Nothing good is happening for you now.’”
Cohn sat for the interview anyway. When the program was aired, he appeared gaunt and near death as he looked at Wallace and told him, and millions of people in the 60 Minutes audience, “I do not have AIDS.” In June, when New York’s highest court upheld Cohn’s disbarment for conduct it found “reprehensible” and “unethical” and “unprofessional,” reporters repeated the liver-cancer deception. Staff at his office said Cohn was unavailable because he was boating, but when TV reporter Gabe Pressman dialed Cohn’s home number, he reached Cohn, who said of his disbarment, “I could care less.”
In July, Cohn was admitted at an inpatient clinic at the National Institutes of Health outside Washington, DC. Beds at NIH were hard to come by, especially those devoted to the care of patients with HIV/AIDS, but Roy was a good friend of President and Nancy Reagan’s, and while he could no longer call in favors at City Hall, he had lots of chits in the nation’s capital. Cohn’s last weeks would eventually be revealed in grueling detail by the writer Nicholas von Hoffman in the book Citizen Cohn and by actor Al Pacino in the television version of playwright Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Cohn died at six o’clock in the morning on August 2, 1986. NIH officials reported the official cause of death was “cardio-pulmonary arrest” linked to “dementia” and “underlying” infections caused by AIDS.
On August 4, 1986, Donald Trump attended a private memorial service for Cohn, where those who knew him well said their good-byes. Once one of Cohn’s close friends and a longtime client, Trump stayed in the back of the room and was not among the many who offered their remembrances. On that same day, Playgirl magazine, which enjoyed an avid readership among gay men, announced that Trump was one of the “ten sexiest men in America.” The honor was noted in newspapers across the country, where editors surely delighted in the opportunity to add a dash of sexiness to the news mix. In the twelve years since Playgirl’s debut, sexy had become one of the words most frequently used by magazine headline writers, who promised readers sexy people doing sexy things in sexy places. Sexy was typically a narrow construct. With some exceptions, women were required to be young, thin, and fair. They were also supposed to present themselves as both available and unattainable. Physical appearance also mattered for men. Over the years, Playgirl’s lists of the sexiest men had been dominated by lean, handsome entertainers and athletes. Among those honored with Trump, not one was short and bald. However, a man who lacked the look of an Adonis could be hailed as sexy if he possessed, in abundance, the qualities most associated with a contemporary definition of success: money, fame, and social status.
In 1980s America, the men most widely regarded as successful were not team players but solo performers who either achieved something notable or gained wide notoriety. Performers of any sort—actors, artists, athletes, entertainers, even newscasters—could be sexy. Sexy too were some politicians who posed as daring iconoclasts, even if they actually played the same games as everyone else. Businessmen could qualify as sexy if they cultivated an image as extreme individualists who resembled the mythic heroes of the West.
Donald Trump circa 1986 was just modestly famous. However, by adding his name to that year’s list of the “sexiest,” alongside actor Bruce Willis, musician Rubén Blades, and pro athlete William Perry, Playgirl added greatly to his status. People had made him nationally known, while Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous had confirmed his wealth. Now he owned the third quality—sexiness—that completed the trifecta of celebrity in the media age. At age forty, this man who craved wealth and attention was also an object to be desired by everyone who was attracted to the American male. (Since a great many Playgirl readers were gay men, this included them too.) The power in this status was substantial. So too was the risk, especially for a man who said he loved his wife and children and craved the approval of his parents, who had each married once and remained together for their entire lives.22