When it comes to telling his family origin story, Donald Trump is, uncharacteristically, a man of few words. Perhaps that’s because, while Donald Trump’s family story is a uniquely American one, it is not the kind of family story that typically underpins one’s case to be elected president of the United States. It’s the tale of a hustling entrepreneur immigrant grandfather who made money satisfying the appetites of Western lumberjacks and miners for food, liquor, and prostitutes; of a builder father whose career included several run-ins with government investigators, and decades of hiding a massive fortune from the IRS. It is memorable but not uplifting, a story of men and their money, a gleaming shadow edifice, rooted in fraud.
At the turn of the last century, Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, found himself in the Yukon, in Canada, chasing the last major North American gold rush, the Klondike. On July 17, 1897, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer greeted with three extra editions the arrival of a steamer called Portland carrying $700,000 worth of gold from the Yukon. Sixty-eight “ordinary” people were the proprietors of this gold, suggesting to everyone struggling with Seattle’s wet, rainy weather and manure-covered streets that they too, could strike it rich.1
Much of the West Coast was raw, virtually lawless country in those days, smelly, rough-hewn. Its energy was fueled by the verve of immigrant laborers, massive streams of European capital, and land giveaways—of territory taken from Native Americans—that underwrote the transcontinental railroad. Each new discovery of precious metals produced a torrent of interest: even a Canadian government requirement that prospectors needed to carry a year’s worth of food, weighing more than 1,100 pounds, did not deter more than a hundred thousand gold-seekers from slogging over mountain passes, consuming meat from the horses who died along the way, swatting away swarms of fierce Northwest mosquitos.
Tall and lean, with a sharp nose undergirded by a bushy mustache, Friedrich did not follow the gold rush to mine, but to profit from the masses of prospectors heading north. To do so, he ran three incarnations of a venture called the Arctic Restaurant. The Arctic served a startling array of meats, from salmon to duck to sheep, as well as raspberries and red currants. One version of the Arctic was “a small oasis of luxury” on the town’s main street. “The bulk of the cash flow,” wrote Trump family biographer Gwenda Blair, “came from the sale of liquor and sex.” Indeed, the “Arctic was open twenty-four hours a day and had private boxes for ladies—facilities that here included not only a bed but a scale for weighing the gold dust used to pay for services.” This was the origin of the Trump family fortune: selling food, liquor, and sex.2
Friedrich Trump had arrived in America in 1885, pushing away from a militarizing Europe where inheritance laws gave him few financial prospects. For about twenty dollars, he purchased a space in steerage on the SS Eider, soon pervaded by the stink of “ship,” as Blair wrote.3 In New York, Friedrich lived with his older sister, Katherine, and her husband, and worked seven days a week as a barber. But cutting hair was a slow way to make money. So Friedrich Trump took a long train ride to Seattle, a place where a young man could make money fast.
His first venture was a restaurant, the Dairy, in Seattle’s red-light district. As Blair described it, the establishment was “thick with the smells of wet cloth, hot meat, sour beer and unwashed human flesh.” By noon, “the sawdust he sprinkled on the floor every morning lay in muddy, manure-dotted clumps.”4 Blair, whose book was written with the cooperation of the Trump family and who provided a detailed account of Friedrich’s story, suggested that the Dairy was also a whorehouse. She wrote, “for Friedrich Trump to offer anything else . . . would put him at a punishing competitive disadvantage.”5
Friedrich soon moved on from Seattle to Monte Cristo, a forbidding Cascade Mountains mining camp, where feet of snow and sucking mud made passage almost impossible. But the possibility of finding a rich lode of silver ore was fueled by the endorsement of John D. Rockefeller, whose investment convinced Trump and others of the soundness of the bet. Friedrich Trump identified a prime piece of land next to the future train depot, exactly the place where miners would arrive and congregate, hungry to satisfy their appetites. He couldn’t afford this land, so he claimed that he intended to mine it, which would give him access, effectively for free. In April 1893, Friedrich recorded his claim, swearing he was making a “placer” claim—that is, that he would mine it—because he had found “color”—that is, ore. “Not one of these statements, it seems, was true,” Blair wrote.6
Indeed, Friedrich Trump’s actions suggest he had other plans for the property. Even before filing his claim—despite the fact he was not allowed to build on the site—he had purchased five thousand board feet of lumber from the Monte Cristo Mining Company. He constructed a two-story boarding house that enabled him to profit from the risks the miners were taking, without taking that risk himself. He took his earnings and moved up to the Yukon. “Once again,” Blair wrote, “in a situation that created many losers, he managed to emerge a winner,” leaving the Yukon with “a substantial nest egg.”7
Friedrich moved back to New York with this nest egg, and on a trip back to Germany, met his future wife: Elizabeth Christ, a blond and blue-eyed neighbor from a poor family with whose classic beauty he became instantly smitten. Friedrich and Elizabeth took another ship across the Atlantic Ocean, and moved to an apartment in the South Bronx, but Elizabeth was desperately homesick. Friedrich, now wealthy, tried to move back to his native country. But because he had not done his military service, Germany wouldn’t have him. In 1905, Friedrich Trump returned to New York City, with Elizabeth five months pregnant with their son, Frederick Christ Trump.
In New York, Friedrich Trump entered the real estate business, settling in Queens, a small borough by population and the largest borough by land. Queens was then known as the “cornfields” borough; farmers still brought their wares to Manhattan by horse and cart. Unlike Brooklyn, which had been connected to Manhattan by bridge, Queens was accessible only by ferry or a circuitous route through Brooklyn.
That was about to change—the city was building the Queensboro Bridge, and the Pennsylvania Railroad was digging a tunnel under the East River from Manhattan to Queens, infrastructure improvements that would create massive value for Queens real estate at just the time Friedrich Trump was buying in. In September 1908, Friedrich used some of his Yukon nest egg to buy a two-story frame house on Jamaica Avenue in Woodhaven. Soon, the city began constructing the elevated train there, leaving great mounds of excavated dirt along the side of the former wagon path. The Trumps moved to a quieter street nearby in what was fast becoming a German immigrant enclave, and Friedrich continued his real estate business, conducting much of it in German with other German immigrants, dealing with a German mortgage broker, dining at the Triangle Hofbrau, a restaurant whose wooden barrel heads came from a village just a few miles from Friedrich’s hometown of Kallstadt. Friedrich Trump spoke German at home to his children, too.8
The senior F. Trump prospered in early-twentieth-century Queens for almost a decade. But the upward trajectory was abruptly halted: in 1918, at the age of forty-nine, Friedrich went for a late spring walk with his older son along Jamaica Avenue, stopping to chat with brokers along the way. During the walk, according to Fred, Friedrich turned to his son and said he felt sick. He climbed into bed and died the next day, felled by the influenza epidemic of 1918 that claimed as many as a hundred million victims. By the time of his death, he had accrued a substantial fortune: after taxes, it came to over $31,000 in mortgages, properties, lots, bank accounts, and insurance, equivalent to more than half a million dollars today.9 Friedrich’s occupation, noted on his death certificate, was “the real estate business.”10
Freidrich’s untimely death came amid a wrenching turn in global history: two world wars, sandwiching a global depression. Even with their comfortable lives built on Friedrich’s proceeds from the gold rush years, the value of Friedrich’s land holdings shrunk, battered by postwar recession. Elizabeth took over the attenuated family business: hiring a contractor to build homes on the lots she’d inherited, selling the houses, providing mortgages, and living off the mortgage income, plus what she could make by sewing. After his 1923 graduation from high school, Fred Trump found work as a “horse’s helper,” pulling construction materials in wagons along icy roads that mules couldn’t navigate. He also worked as a carpenter, eventually building homes. As described in Nina Burleigh’s Golden Handcuffs: The Secret History of Trump’s Women, Elizabeth’s “business model was an embryonic form of the debt-leveraging, borrow-build-borrow style that remains a hallmark of the Trump Organization today.” In April 1927, a local newspaper announced the incorporation of E. Trump & Son, the prototype of Fred Trump’s real estate business.11
That same year—on Memorial Day, 1927, as reported by the New York Times—“1,000 Klansmen and 100 police staged a free-for-all battle in Jamaica.” Seven men were arrested, among them “Fred Trump of 175–24 Devonshire Rd. in Jamaica.” Fred Trump’s exact role at the rally is unclear, but a contemporaneous report in the Daily Star said that the arrest was for “refusing to disperse from a parade when ordered to do so.”12
Elizabeth’s industrious use of Friedrich’s nest egg didn’t insulate the Trump family from the Great Depression. But it kept the family from sliding into the oncoming abyss. Nevertheless, E. Trump & Son could not support Fred; by 1934, he was running a supermarket in Queens.
Still a young man, tall, with a broad forehead and a trim-reddish brown mustache topping a dazzling smile, Fred received two breaks at the height of the Depression that launched his career as a New York developer. He got his first big break from the collapse of the House of Lehrenkrauss. The family-owned company had issued $26 million in mortgages over fifty years,13 but as Julius Lehrenkrauss testified in court, he had sold shares in the same mortgages over and over to different buyers and used other methods to pressure buyers to make investments in nonexistent assets.14 The company went into involuntary bankruptcy, but there were still extant parts of the business to run: namely gathering fees for collecting the payments on the outstanding mortgages. Moreover, Fred Trump saw another angle: getting the lists of mortgage payers. “The real value in the business . . . was in the information they gleaned from the Lehrenkrauss operations,” Michael D’Antonio noted in his biography, The Truth About Trump.15 If Fred was able to get the appointment to service the mortgages, he would find out who was behind in their payments and who faced foreclosures, enabling him to get a jump on offering to buy the distressed properties. This was valuable intelligence.
In order to be able to get the assignment to take over this part of the Lehrenkrauss business, however, Fred needed to get his bid in contention, which meant submitting it to a Brooklyn court. Fred Trump had little experience servicing mortgages, only the one-offs he’d put together in his early business with his mother. In letters to the court, he bragged that he had ten years in the building business, even though he’d only had five.16
Fred showed up alone the first day in court as six inches of snow blanketed the city. He was “solicitous and self-assured. He had an erect, almost military bearing, musclebound and purposeful,” as Trump biographer Wayne Barrett described it. “He made a brief oral statement to the court in a thick German accent.”17 The other bidders had counsel. Fred represented himself. He fought for his bid. When it looked like he might lose, he teamed up with another Queens businessman. A third bidder complained, calling them “two individuals who there is no doubt in my mind, do not run a servicing company at all; and are trying to make a bid to buy something for nothing.”18
Fred had reason to be confident; he had learned something important about the way the system worked. To be seriously considered in the Brooklyn bankruptcy court, he had to be seen as having the endorsement of the party bosses. Around the time of the Lehrenkrauss bid, Fred opened up communications with a Brooklyn boss: Frank V. Kelly. The two were seen lunching at Park Slope’s Montauk Club, the ornate private social club near Prospect Park, said to be modeled on a palace on Venice’s Grand Canal. Exactly what Fred did to get the court’s approval isn’t entirely clear. But as Barrett noted, “the vigorous support he received from the Democratic Party players suggests that he was their designated winner, making Lehrenkrauss the introductory venture for an alliance between Trump and the Brooklyn organization that would last a lifetime.”19 Fred Trump would at times be among the very largest donor to Brooklyn Democrats, in some years raising tens of thousands of dollars for the party. Fred hired the party’s lawyer to be his own. He became a regular customer of an insurance broker favored by the party. And year in, year out, he showed up at the annual gala of Brooklyn’s Madison Democratic Club, eating rubber-chicken dinners, glad-handing the political bosses who held the power behind the scenes. The public might not have known their names; Fred Trump did.
He used those connections to secure a second, crucial break: an enormous infusion of federally backed funds. Fred Trump was one of the earliest and largest beneficiaries of the National Housing Act of 1934, the law that regularized mortgage lending and later contributed so much to the 1950s growth of suburbia.
To build a sturdy edifice of debt, the Federal Housing Administration created a series of strictures for home lending: for example, homes had to have readily accessible bathrooms in order to hold their value, that is, in order to be a good lending bet. But it wasn’t just sound principles of construction and markets that guided the FHA, as documented in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law.20 In its earliest iterations, the FHA institutionalized racial discrimination and segregation by requiring, in so many words, that lending should only go to properties “occupied by the same social and racial classes.”
In the FHA, Fred Trump saw opportunity. And once again, his club connections paid off. The first director of the New York State FHA Office was Tommy Grace, who Wayne Barrett described as “a bouncy little Irish politician.”21 While working at the FHA, Grace later acknowledged, he was also a partner in his brothers’ law firm, which made most of its money from clients who wanted help getting approval from the FHA.22 In 1936, with Grace’s backing, Fred Trump was able to get one of the first major FHA commitments for a New York project: $750,000 in mortgage insurance for the development of 450 homes in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.23
In 1938, Fred Trump got federal backing for another Brooklyn development, this one valued at $1 million. The loans allowed a transformation in construction practices. No longer building house by house, Fred Trump could now build hundreds of homes at a time, sometimes setting up scaffolding that spanned a city block.24 The Brooklyn Eagle wrote that “among the real-estate fraternity he is known as the ‘Henry Ford of the home-building industry.’ ”25 By 1943, Fred Trump—who a decade earlier had to abandon the real estate industry to run a supermarket—was a millionaire, in 1943 dollars. He was becoming one of the largest recipients of FHA loans in the country.26
Fred Trump’s mother was an immigrant, and so was his wife, Mary Anne MacLeod. MacLeod was born in the village of Tong on the Scottish island of Lewis, in a two-bedroom home with her parents and nine siblings, warmed by a smoky peat fire. When she was six, two hundred of the island’s young men, returning from war, were drowned in a shipwreck on New Year’s night, 1919. Eleven years later, listing her occupation as “domestic,” MacLeod arrived in New York City, declaring on her immigration papers she intended to seek US citizenship, and did not intend to return to Scotland.27 Indeed, Mary MacLeod found work as a maid at the East Ninety-First Street mansion of the widow of the richest Scotsman in the world, Andrew Carnegie, a baron of the Gilded Age, who had made his fortune from steel. According to Nina Burleigh’s Golden Handcuffs, “her live-in maid’s position meant she spent her days—and presumably nights (she is listed in the census as a household member)—in an American palace, rubbing shoulders with the closest thing Americans had to royalty, during the depths of the Great Depression.”28
A half decade after she arrived in America, Mary Anne MacLeod attended a dance in Queens and met a builder who, like her, spoke with an accent, but who was tall and neat and fast becoming rich. “The most eligible bachelor in New York,” she later called him. The two were wed at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, with a reception at The Carlyle, a hotel on the Upper East Side, a newly built symbol of elegance just a block from Central Park.
A decade later, in an exclusive Queens enclave, Fred built his new wife and family a twenty-three-room, nine-bath, red-brick colonial fronted by six white columns, a Queens version of Manhattan wealth, exuding a whiff of royal aspirations. Mary Anne MacLeod Trump had given birth to Maryanne, then Fred Jr., then Elizabeth. Fred Sr. dressed impeccably, even at home. His rules for the house were strict: curfews, no cursing; for the girls, no lipstick.
During the war, Fred stopped speaking German, and went silent on his German roots. He began telling people he had Swedish ancestry. And with a growing prominence of Jews in real estate, politics, and finance in New York, Fred also started to generously donate to Jewish philanthropies. In 1941, he was on the dinner committee of a fundraiser for the New York and Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities.29 Some people assumed he was Jewish. He let them.
In 1946, at the very outset of the baby-boom era, Mary Anne Trump gave birth to her fourth child, Donald John Trump. Donald’s three older siblings were children of the Depression and the war; Donald was what biographer Blair calls a “faux firstborn,” part of a post-war generation that became the repository of post-war parental dreams, hopes, and optimism.30
In 1946 New York—lifting its wartime blackout curtains, adjusting to newly plentiful foods like eggs and meats—the subway still cost a nickel. And out at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn, in Coney Island and Brighton Beach, land was still cheap. Backed with $26 million in federal loans, Fred Trump erected unlovely brick complexes with nice names like “Shore Haven” and “Beach Haven.”31 The buildings were drab but practical. After the war, families wanted to nest and to grow, and Fred Trump built affordable homes that served both needs. His complexes were some of the largest in the country. Woody Guthrie lived in an apartment in Beach Haven and wrote a song about it. “Beach Haven is a heaven where no black folks come to roam” was one of the lines. “No, no, no! Old Man Trump! Old Beach Haven ain’t my home,” was another.32
As Fred built, with tens of millions of dollars in federal help, he began to shield his fortune. In a series of moves that the New York Times called “dubious tax schemes” and “outright fraud,” Fred Trump would move wealth eqivalent to a billion dollars to his children without paying the proper taxes, including $413 million to his son Donald.33
One of the earliest such schemes was at Beach Haven. Fred Trump transferred the title of the land under his buildings to a trust benefiting his children, then leased the land from the trust, in effect making his children his landlords. This meant Fred Trump could take money that he, Fred Trump, was collecting from rents on units he built with federal help—and transfer those profits to his children, without returning money to the government as taxes.
In this way, almost immediately upon his birth, Donald Trump started making money. As documented by the New York Times’s David Barstow, Susanne Craig, and Ross Buettner, as a toddler, Donald Trump was making, in today’s dollars, $200,000 a year from the wealth transferred from his father. By the time he was eight, he was a millionaire. At seventeen, he was part owner of a fifty-two-unit apartment building, and as a young college graduate, Donald Trump was making the equivalent of $1 million a year.
Among the methods the Times documented: Fred Trump would undervalue his properties when transferring them to his children, thereby minimizing or eliminating gift taxes. (The Trumps would later inflate the value of those properties when seeking bank loans.) Sometimes, Fred Trump would simply transfer properties through a web of companies, “without public trace,” as the Times put it, and pay no taxes at all. Once, he sold Donald a $15.5-million property stake for $10,000; in effect, a $15.49-million untaxed gift.
There were other routes: Fred Trump set up a sham corporation, All County Building Supply & Maintenance, which he placed in his children’s names. All County wasn’t a real company; it didn’t do anything; it simply bought supplies, like appliances, at prices negotiated by Fred Trump’s employees, then marked them up and billed Fred Trump’s properties for them. Fred’s children collected the difference, again evading taxes.
A young Donald Trump was also paid to manage his father’s buildings, even though there were Trump employees to handle day-to-day management. At one point, Fred Trump helped his children buy mortgages on his own properties, making them, in effect, his bankers, again paying them money while avoiding taxes.34
There were 295 such revenue streams, in all. “I think they took delight in the tax games that they played,” Susanne Craig, one of the journalists who spent eighteen months on the investigation, said in an interview for the Trump, Inc. podcast. “Any dollar that they could keep away from the tax man was a victory for them. They delighted in these transgressions that they played, both of them.”35
Fred Trump was doing something that all Americans, all parents, like to do: pass on what they’ve earned to their children. This tendency, as Thomas Piketty wrote in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, fuels the intergenerational transfer of wealth, allowing younger generations of wealthy families to accumulate money faster than their counterparts who earn their livings through wages. Postwar America tried to correct for that, by imposing relatively high taxes on the top brackets of income, as well as a hefty real estate tax. This meant rich Americans could pass along their wealth, but had to give some of it back to create a more egalitarian society. Fred Trump simply evaded those laws, insuring that greater and greater portions of his wealth (which had been generated with huge assists from the US government) were kept away from tax authorities.
In 1954, Fred Trump was subpoenaed before the US Senate banking committee in a widespread probe of corruption and abuse in federally backed housing loans. Investigators had found that local Federal Housing Administration officials, who had sometimes been given gifts like television sets by area developers, would then give FHA approval for bigger FHA mortgages than their properties warranted, thereby restricting the pool for other possible developments.36 This is what the committee wanted to ask Fred Trump about. So, after being subpoenaed late on a Friday afternoon in July, Fred boarded a 9:30 a.m. plane Monday from New York to Washington to take their questions.
During the hearing, Fred Trump conceded he’d paid just $180,000 for the land underlying Beach Haven, but had, a few years later, got the FHA to appraise it at $1.5 million. When he transferred the land to his children, Fred Trump acknowledged, he’d valued it at the lower amount, $180,000, thus paying taxes at the lower rate. He further acknowledged that the higher appraisal allowed him to take a higher mortgage, and that he’d used the difference to finance other projects, paying no taxes. This was, he said, what he was entitled to do under the regulations.37
The senators extracted more admissions: that Fred Trump had inflated his building costs by working into the budget a “building fee,” that he paid to himself. “You don’t want to be misunderstood, testifying under oath, that you paid that money out, do you, Mr. Trump?” the general counsel on the FHA investigation, William Simon, asked him. “No, I will explain this to you, Mr. Simon,” Fred Trump said, maintaining that “whether we supervised the work ourselves or paid someone to do it,” he still considered himself entitled to the fee. There were other ways Fred shaved money from the FHA, including inflating architectural fees in his FHA application. Fred Trump defended himself, saying he’d built thousands of high-quality homes.38
But a federal report found the inflated cost estimates that had enriched Fred Trump and other developers were “outright misrepresentation,” and they had “saddled tenants with the burden of meeting not only legitimate costs” but also the portion of the loans the developers were keeping for themselves. And it condemned another Fred Trump tactic: “fictional division of single projects into two or more projects” to sidestep federal loan insurance limits.39
This was not Fred Trump’s last appearance before a government investigative committee. In 1966, the New York State Investigations Commission called Fred Trump and his Madison Club friend Bunny Lindenbaum before a televised hearing on the construction of Trump Village, a seven-building project in Coney Island. Fred Trump, it emerged, had again engaged in a pattern of double valuation: he secretly set up an equipment-rental company and paid his own company padded fees—$21,000, for example, to lease a truck worth $3,600, and $8,280 for two tile-scrappers each worth $500.”40
At the hearing, Fred Trump erupted. “This is peanuts what you are talking about compared to $60 million!” But the state commission wasn’t finished: there was $1.2 million he’d pocketed by overestimating land costs, and returned only when the hearings loomed. He’d overstated construction costs by $6.6 million, and used that figure to claim a higher fee from the state. Even his lawyers charged $650,000, compared to a $70,000 fee for legal work on a similar, non-Trump project.
After the hearings, the case was formally referred to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, “a cemetery for public corruption probes,” as biographer Wayne Barrett put it. As the commission’s attorney later acknowledged to Barrett: “These people were untouchable.”41
Two decades later, the government was once again investigating Trump business practices. In 1973, the US Justice Department brought a race discrimination suit against the Trump Organization, alleging the Trumps had systematically refused to lend to blacks. According to the suit, several people working for Trump confirmed that rental applications were coded by race. Doormen were told to tell black applicants there were no vacancies. Some employees said instructions came straight from Fred.42
In a deposition in the case, Donald Trump, by then in his twenties and working for his father, claimed ignorance of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which required nondiscrimination in rentals. He claimed both that he had no idea of the rental composition of his complexes and that some were all white and some were all black. When asked if he, personally, had “anything to do with rental decisions,” he said, “No, I really don’t.” Yet, while applying for his brokerage license application he had said the opposite: that he “supervises and controls the renting of all apartments owned by the Trump organization.”43
To defend himself in this lawsuit, Donald Trump made a fateful alliance at Le Club, where he’d talked himself into a membership. Le Club “was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive,” Trump wrote in his first memoir, The Art of the Deal, “and its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy seventy-five-year-old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.”44
Once inside, Donald met a short man with a high forehead and a nose that looked like it had been smashed in a fight. A man who had become known to the nation as the young prosecutor who in the 1950s sent alleged Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, and then became chief counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
The lawyer’s name was Roy Cohn.
By this time, McCarthy, with Cohn’s eager assistance, had led a relentless series of probes into suspected Communists in government, leaving a trail of ruined careers, damaged reputations, and suicides. Cohn had organized the hearings in 1954 where McCarthy met his match. The senator tore into Joseph Welch, the lawyer for the US Army, insinuating that a young Harvard grad who had briefly been a member of the National Lawyers Guild was a Communist, an accusation that could have ruined the young man’s career. McCarthy would not let it go. Welch interrupted. “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”45
After those hearings, Roy Cohn quit government and formed a private practice that he ran out of his Upper East Side town house. Cohn would display his power by doing business in his bathrobe. At events, his suits changed from black and grey and the occasional tan to yellow and lavender. A closeted gay man, his client list came to include Mafia figures including Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti.
Around the time he met Trump, Cohn had been under investigation or indictment in both New York and Illinois for, among other things, jury tampering and perjury. (He was never found guilty.)46
“I don’t like lawyers,” Trump told Cohn when they met at Le Club, telling Cohn the government “has just filed suit against our company . . . saying that we discriminated against blacks.” Or so Trump described the encounter in The Art of the Deal.
“My view is tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove that you discriminated, which seems to me very difficult to do,” Cohn replied. “I don’t think you have any obligation to rent to tenants who would be undesirable, white or black, and the government doesn’t have a right to run your business.”47
Donald Trump hired Roy Cohn.
He would never love any lawyer as much, again.