In the early 1980s, when Donald Trump began to put together the deal for the building that would become Trump Tower, New York City was still limping its way out of the fiscal crisis. But the long construction drought into which Donald Trump had pitched his plans to renovate the Commodore Hotel was over. Developers, who view the city’s timeline in decades, not individual years, were starting to build again. AT&T, IBM, Citibank—all were putting up large, new midtown towers.
Encouraged by his success with the Commodore, Trump wanted to build the tallest residential tower in the city, at the chicest address he could find. In real estate terms, the “Tiffany location” is used to mean a city’s best, most lucrative site, in whatever city it’s in. In Manhattan, Trump coveted the actual location of Tiffany & Co., on Fifth Avenue, right below Central Park.
The land belonged to the Equitable Life Insurance Company. Bonwit Teller, the luxury department store specializing in high-end women’s clothing, held the lease. Like many urban department stores in the 1970s, Bonwit’s faced stiff competition from suburban malls. Trump convinced Bonwit Teller to sell their lease for $25 million. But the building wasn’t nearly tall enough for Donald Trump.
In New York, floor space is value. Because Manhattan is an island, developers need to push upward to increase their properties’ worth. Value is based on floor area ratio, which naturally increases as a building stacks more floors above the same piece of land. Typically, there are zoning limits, but they can be surpassed by buying up the so-called “air rights” of nearby buildings that aren’t as tall as the law allows. This is what Trump wanted to do, and to do it, he needed the approval of the New York City Board of Estimate, a body that included the mayor, the comptroller, and the five borough presidents.
Trump had already contributed tens of thousands of dollars to these people, and his lawyer, Roy Cohn, had given more.1 The Board of Estimate approved the plans. Once again, Trump had used his ties to convince the city’s political leaders to put their thumbs on the scale. By the onset of the Reagan era, Trump had amassed the rights to build the tallest residential tower in the city at one of the most valuable intersections in the world. The apartments—“apahtments,” he said in those days, his Queens accent more pronounced—were to be among the most expensive in the city.2
To begin work, Trump hired a demolition team to tear down the old building. The contractor, who had little demolition experience, bid a bargain-basement price. To make his bid profitable, the contractor hired undocumented Polish workers, off the books, for $4 an hour. Sometimes they weren’t paid at all. They worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, with neither overtime pay nor asbestos protection.3 Trump himself, the workers later testified, visited the job site, and knew about the illegal workers.4 The contractor eventually faced repercussions, and Trump paid a $1.375-million settlement.
Cheap labor wasn’t enough. Trump wanted a tax abatement, too. In 1971, New York State had passed a law designed to encourage developers to build affordable housing in places where they wouldn’t otherwise build, like the South Bronx. The law offered developers tax breaks to help make such properties profitable, even in low-rent neighborhoods. Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street wasn’t a marginal neighborhood, but Donald Trump wanted the tax abatement anyway. He argued the future Trump Tower should receive a $25-million subsidy from the taxpayers.
In March 1981, Trump and Louise Sunshine, the former Democratic Party fundraiser and Trump lobbyist who was by then a senior Trump Organization executive, attended a breakfast with Manhattan borough president Andrew Stein, another well-coiffed son of a wealthy New Yorker and a friend of Roy Cohn. Stein’s family connections, like Trump’s, had launched his career: for him, Democratic politics. Stein had asked the city housing commissioner, Tony Gliedman, an appointee of Mayor Ed Koch, to attend the breakfast. Gleidman was in his thirties, a graduate of Amherst College, a loyal Democrat. Unlike most city commissioners, Gliedman lived in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, then an unfancy neighborhood of freestanding Victorian homes. Gliedman kept a listed telephone number. His children played Little League in Prospect Park.
By contrast, Trump and Stein were members of what Mayor Ed Koch called in his book Mayor, “The Old School Tie Network.”5 They didn’t do business in cramped, overheated, fluorescent-lighted city offices. They did it over drinks, or breakfast, in Park Avenue apartments, like Andy Stein’s.
Sunshine and Trump and Stein and Gliedman met to discuss the use of 421a tax abatements, so named for the portion of the 1971 state law that created the breaks. Like most laws of this nature, 421a required developers to show that the existing building was “functionally obsolete” or “underutilized,” terms that developers could massage to their favor. “I’d probably succeed with Trump Tower even if I didn’t get a tax exemption,” Trump acknowledged in The Art of the Deal.6 Nevertheless, he asked Gliedman to approve 421a status for Trump Tower. Gliedman listened, but made no promises. Back in his office in Lower Manhattan, Gliedman asked two associates, both women, if they thought the Bonwit Teller site was underutilized. There was laughter all around.
Mayor Ed Koch, who had been generous with developers in general, drew the line at affordable housing tax abatements for Trump Tower. Gliedman denied Trump’s application. At which point, Trump phoned Gliedman, called him “dishonest” and said “Tony, I don’t know whether it’s still possible for you to change your decision or not, but I want you to know that I am a very rich and powerful person in this town, and there is a reason I got that way. I will never forget what you did.” Gliedman memorialized the call in a memo to Koch.7
A year later, Gliedman got another phone call. It came to his home in Ditmas Park from a man named “Vinnie,” at seven in the morning. Though Gliedman’s phone was listed, not many people thought a city commissioner would have his name in the phone book, or would live in Brooklyn. His wife handed him the phone. “Uh-huh,” Gliedman said. “OK.” Then he left for work.
The contents of that call weren’t publicly reported until more than thirty-six years later, in 2017. According to FBI records first obtained by Jason Leopold of BuzzFeed News, Gliedman “received a telephone call at home at approximately 7:00 am on 4/20/82 threatening his life over a tax abatement issue concerning DONALD TRUMP. The caller . . . became very abusive and profane regarding GLIEDMAN’s inability to approve Mr. TRUMP’s request for a tax abatement.”8
Gliedman did not immediately tell his wife. But that afternoon he called her at work, and told her he was coming to pick her up, and that they would be under twenty-four-hour police protection. A team of police officers, a couple, shadowed them days and nights, in their living room for family meals and at the park for Little League. A police cruiser parked on their blocks for months.
The day after Gliedman got his call, someone else called the FBI: “DONALD TRUMP of the Trump Organization.” He delivered his own message, conveying that he had “received a telephone call from a [redacted] (LNU) who indicated that he [redacted] was going to ‘kill’ Commissioner GLIEDMAN.” The caller “advised TRUMP that [redacted] had been ‘shafted’ by GLIEDMAN and, for that reason, was going to retaliate.” Trump reported he heard again the next day from the caller “who indicated that he was going to ‘kill’ TRUMP if Mr. TRUMP told the authorities anything concerning their prior conversation.” Trump added that his dealings with Gliedman “are strictly business and that he harbors no ill feelings towards Gliedman.”9
The NYPD investigated, but closed the case with no action.
Trump did attack Gliedman—through the courts. Trump sued the city, claiming he had been unfairly denied the tax abatement. He also sued Gliedman, personally. Trump called the city’s decision “a purely political act,” suggesting Mayor Koch had denied the tax abatements in an election year to prove he wasn’t soft on developers. It was “the most discriminatory thing I’ve seen in my life.”10
Trump won in the lower court. The city appealed, and an appellate court overturned that decision, ratifying Gliedman’s “rational basis” in denying the tax break. “Trump Tower’s enormous bulk (760,000 square feet) was achieved by means of multiple zoning variances,” the appeals court wrote, “including the transfer of air rights and the use of a special Fifth Avenue District (C5–3) zoning bonus given solely for the continued high-quality retail use of Fifth Avenue. This has nothing to do with encouraging residential housing by means of a tax exemption.”11 Indeed, the court ruled, if Trump got the tax give-back, the argument could be made that every lot in Manhattan would be eligible for one, since it could always be argued that a larger or taller building would better utilize the site, even at what the court, quoting Trump, called “the best [site] in the world.”
Trump appealed, again.
“My lawyer, Roy Cohn, did a brilliant job,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal, “arguing before seven justices without so much as a note.”12 At one point in the litigation, Cohn showed up for a meeting with a city lawyer in a white T-shirt, purple suit, and loafers with no socks.13
Ultimately, the state’s highest court ruled for Trump.14 The law might have been intended to create an incentive to build housing in high-poverty neighborhoods. But the court said the law had been inartfully written, that legislators had drawn it so broadly that even construction at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth Street was eligible. The decision was unanimous.
“By this time,” Trump said, “Trump Tower was an unqualified success.”15
The Trump Organization was so confident of its new building that it had already asked President Ronald Reagan to send a presidential telegram for the Trump Tower opening ceremony, in a letter claiming, “The Trump family have been long time supporters of the President.”16 The White House Counsel’s Office declined, and an official noted on Trump’s request that the White House couldn’t endorse a commercial project.
Two years later, his personal lawsuit against Gliedman still going, Trump invited Gliedman to breakfast at the 21 Club. Gliedman, still a commissioner, refused, and the two had lunch at a modest restaurant in Little Italy, in Lower Manhattan. Gliedman paid. In those days, Trump kept appearing on television and on the covers of magazines, all of them touting how rich and appealing he was. Trump said he had exciting projects for Gliedman to work on, including renovating the city-owned skating rink in Central Park. He promised to drop his lawsuit. Gleidman, struggling with his weight, his high forehead betraying the combover that was to come, was making $82,000 as a city commissioner in a downtown office. “At this point in my career, the offer of a very exciting position as Executive Vice President of the Trump Organization is a challenge and one which will allow me the opportunity to continue in my chosen profession, housing and real estate,” Gliedman told Mayor Koch in his resignation letter.17
Gliedman worked for Trump for about five years, managing the speedy renovation of Wollman rink in Central Park, which Trump used for years as an example of the superiority of the private sector. In public, the Trump-Gliedman relationship seemed mutually beneficial. “Tony has a tremendous sense and a feel for the politics of what’s going on,” Trump told the Washington Post.18 In private, Trump heaped abuse on Gliedman, who lost 120 pounds while he worked there. After Gliedman left the company, Trump, incensed at what he saw as Gliedman’s disloyalty, refused to speak to him, or his family. Gliedman suffered a debilitating stroke a few years later. He died in 2002, at age fifty-nine, of heart failure.
From the moment Trump Tower opened in 1983, it symbolized the excess that defined the decade. Inside the building, the pinkish marble surfaces, the golden escalators, the sixty-foot waterfall—all were indicia of aspirational wealth. Trump’s own penthouse triplex—inspired by the apartment of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, who lived nearby—had fifty-three rooms, an eighty-foot living room, and massive columns meant to look like classical relics, but newly carved because actual antiquities looked too old.19
Trump had promised to donate the beaux-art friezes on the old Bonwit Teller building to the Metropolitan Museum, but instead pulverized them so he could apply for his tax abatements without delay. The new tower’s exterior black and gold surfaces, its terraced balconies, its three-foot tall lettering proclaiming the building’s provenance; all projected wealth and gaudy newness.
The business structure was new, too. Trump Tower was a condominium building in a city of cooperative apartments, which had been organized around the turn of the last century to apportion ownership of New York’s newly rising apartment buildings. In a co-op building, units are sold as shares in a corporation, and are thus subject to a great deal of oversight. By contrast, condos, which were only allowed as a form of home ownership in the United States beginning in the 1960s, require far less scrutiny. In Trump Tower, three-quarters of the initial condo buyers were wealthy nonresidents and out-of-town corporations.20
Trump Tower was a pioneer of a new form of structural wealth in New York. Limited liability companies, also known as LLCs, were only invented in the late 1970s, and were then just emerging as a favored form of real estate ownership for the wealthy.21 An LLC, often a shell company with no business purpose, could easily hide its true owner or owners, and the business partnerships they represented. The use of LLCs made it easier for foreign and questionable money to find its way into New York real estate. For Trump—whose business relied on favors and secrets—this was the perfect business model.
Some of the earliest owners of Trump Tower apartments were associates of criminals or soon-to-be criminals. There was Verina Hixon, the friend of John Cody, the Teamsters boss and Roy Cohn friend who, when work began on Trump Tower, had already been arrested eight times and convicted thrice. (Hixon was not accused of wrongdoing.) Before Trump Tower was completed, Cody was convicted of racketeering charges for which he was sentenced to five years in prison.22 But Cody made sure Donald Trump had a continuous supply of concrete even during the citywide concrete worker walkout in the summer of 1982. Hixon, an Austrian divorcée with no obvious source of income, was allowed to design her own apartment right below Trump’s, complete with a (rare) swimming pool. At one point, Trump arranged for her to obtain a mortgage to cover a $3-million financing shortfall.23
Then there was David Bogatin, flush with money from a gas-tax scam run by the Brighton Beach Russian mob, where they siphoned off cash that was supposed to go to gasoline taxes and pocketed it themselves. Bogatin stored some of his money in the form of five apartments in Trump Tower. Donald Trump himself attended the closing.24 Bogatin later received a sentence of up to eight years for his role in the scam, but not before turning over his mortgages to a Genovese crime family associate and fleeing to Poland, as detailed in Robert Friedman’s book Red Mafiya.25
There was Joey Weichselbaum, who paid rent to Donald Trump for an apartment partially in cash, partially in in-kind helicopter services. Weischelbaum was charged and pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges in Ohio. Donald wrote a rare letter asking for leniency. “Mr. Weichselbaum has been conscientious, forthright and diligent in his business dealings with us,” Trump wrote in a letter to Weischelbaum’s lawyer to be filed with the court.26 Weichselbaum received three years in prison, of which he served about half. Upon release, he moved to apartments 49A and B in Trump Tower, purchased by his girlfriend for $2.35 million in cash.27
By 1983, Roy Cohn had played an essential role for Trump in his two signature deals, the Commodore and Trump Tower. That year, the State of Israel Bonds organization feted Cohn at the Commodore—now the Grand Hyatt—for his “deeply-rooted commitment of purpose on behalf of his fellow man,” according to the dinner program. Senator Alfonse D’Amato was there, and Rupert Murdoch, and Alan Greenberg, the chairman of Bear Stearns, and Donald Trump. Within a year, Cohn was dying of AIDS, which he told everyone was liver cancer. As Cohn got sicker, Trump began to withdraw his business. When Cohn wanted a room for a former boyfriend, also dying, at Trump’s Barbizon Plaza Hotel, Trump assented, but then Trump started to send him bills. “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn said. At Cohn’s memorial service, Trump stood in the back, not asked to speak.28