His thoughts as to life and control had given him a fixed policy. He could, should, and would rule alone. No man must ever again have the least claim on him save that of a supplicant. By right of financial intellect and courage he was first, and would so prove it. Men must swing around him as planets around the sun.
—THEODORE DREISER, THE TITAN
Two scandals and two lost dreams on the Coney Island beachfront had finally taken a toll on the sixty-one-year-old Fred Trump. He retreated again from public view after the state hearings, just as he had after the FHA investigation a decade earlier. Though he would remain quietly active in his business for twenty-five more years, Trump would never return to the public stage.
Stymied by the Steeplechase stonewall during the first Lindsay term, he concentrated instead on privately financed, 150-unit luxury apartment buildings, which he built without any form of government assistance, both adjacent to his major Brooklyn projects and spotted all over the hills around Jamaica Estates. He became a recluse king in Coney Island, the most powerful man in a dying stretch of town, lunching at Gergiulio’s or Lundy’s, driving around in his dark blue stretch limo with the license plate FT-1. His grandest exile project became his own Queens house, which he kept expanding, taking it from its original nine rooms to twenty-three.
The death of his mother in June of 1966, just a few months after his humiliation at the hearings, seemed to deepen Fred’s need to recede. A woman of extraordinary determination, eighty-six-year-old Elizabeth Trump had pushed Fred into his initial homebuilding forty years earlier. The first Trump construction company was called Elizabeth Trump & Son, and it was no misnomer: She was intimately involved in the business. In addition to Fred, her other son, John, was an MIT professor and celebrated scientist who’d helped develop the first million-volt X-ray generator and chaired the famed Lahey Clinic in Boston. Before her death, John had won His Majesty’s Medal, awarded by George VI in 1947; the President’s Certificate of Merit, presented by President Truman in 1948; and the Lamme Medal, awarded in 1960 by the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Her daughter Elizabeth’s husband, William Walter, worked for Fred and owned a small piece of the Trump Village project. Ill for six years prior to her death, and living most of it just a few blocks down Midland Parkway from Fred, she left an estate of $456,925, most of which was a trust fund share of the Shore Haven project. Elizabeth was buried in a family plot in Lutheran Cemetery in Queens that she had bought when her husband died almost fifty years earlier.
In the aftermath of Elizabeth’s death, Fred seemed to consciously move to do for his eldest son, Fred Jr., what she had done for him: establish the twenty-seven-year-old in the family business. Fred had been bringing the handsome, six-foot Fred Jr. to everything from property closings to newspaper interviews for years, but merely as an observer. Now the senior Trump was dispatching him as his representative at critical meetings, especially with community leaders in Coney Island. As grueling as the pressure from his father was, Fred Jr., a Lehigh University graduate with little drive or business ability, could barely feign interest in the family company’s affairs. Those who met him at the Avenue Ζ office said he clearly preferred boating to managing a Trump building and, as engaging as he was, made no take-charge impression.
Other members of the family had long been involved in the business. Mary Trump, Fred’s tough and practical wife, ran the laundry rooms in Fred’s Brooklyn projects, collecting quarters out of the washing and drying machines. Always dressed very simply, Mary traveled her laundry room route in a Rolls-Royce with the license plate MMT. Brother-in-law William Walter actually owned a tiny share of Trump Village and was widely liked in Coney Island for his gentle and open way, getting himself in trouble with Fred once when he told a local Lutheran minister about the family’s Lutheran roots. Fred became annoyed when the minister—whose church had been torn down and shortchanged in condemnation court by Trump to make way for Trump Village—then tried repeatedly (and without success) to get Fred to make a donation to a church-run summer youth program. And finally, as the sixties wound down, the number two son appeared.
In the summer of 1968, Sam Horwitz, a friendly theater operator who rented a Trump Village site from Fred and had a zest for politics, visited Fred’s office at Avenue Ζ and met his son Donald, already ensconced in a cubicle amid the cheap fifties furniture and plastic plants. Donald had just graduated from the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the premier undergraduate business programs in the country, and he wore the Ivy League degree like a badge. There was something about his resolute ambition that reminded Horwitz instantly of the old man. The theater he and Fred had operated for years had been a smash success, and though Fred’s temporary office during the construction of Trump Village was literally next door to the movie house, Fred had never so much as stopped in for a peek at the frontline movies Sam showcased. He was just too driven, and Sam saw the same hunger in Donald.
Though he’d just started as a full-time Trump executive, Donald already seemed to have passed Fred Jr. by and moved into a commanding position, right beside his father in the tightly drawn organizational structure. He had been coming out to Fred’s jobs for years, sometimes, according to the locals, putting on a chauffeur’s cap and uniform and driving his father on his rounds, stopping for coffee and Danish at the local luncheonette, where Donald would try to hustle the young waitresses, making out with an English girl in the back kitchen. In his younger days, he’d been a carefree, friendly kid, awkwardly attached to his unsmiling lather. But now, with a degree and a real job, he took on the older man’s seriousness. Still, Horwitz found in him a congeniality and an open, searching mind, which he had never encountered in the reserved Fred. Donald loved to talk politics, for example, no matter how local, and Sam, a district leader in a county party dominated by Stanley Steingut and new boss Meade Esposito, could discuss Brooklyn politics forever.
There was no grand scheme afoot at Trump headquarters, with Steeplechase formally dying just before Donald arrived. The organization was just managing projects, mowing lawns, collecting rents. With Fred Jr. soon disappearing for a brief career as an airplane pilot, the most Donald and the senior Fred could do was engineer the purchase or sale of another defaulting FHA project or two. It was a peculiar hiatus—from the late sixties into the early seventies—with Donald an apprentice and Fred a tired caretaker. But Sam Horwitz could sense it, as could many others who watched the two adjust to the transition that was quietly occurring. A new Trump era had begun.
Donald had grown up apart. His neighbors knew him by his papier-mâché Halloween mask and elaborate costume; otherwise they just watched him come and go by limo from his mansion on the long green hill. The family was very out of touch with the neighbors and grew more so as the years went on.
One of the few families in the neighborhood with a live-in maid (always white) and a chauffeur (usually black), the Trumps were “never really a part of the block,” said one neighbor. While Fred Jr. had gone to public school, Maryanne, Donald, Elizabeth, and Robert went to Kew Forest, a small private Queens institution with a WASPy air about it, located just a few miles from the Trump home. The school’s old black Chrysler with fold-down seats picked up a handful of kids from the neighborhood each day at 8:00 A.M. for the twenty-minute trip and returned them by four in the afternoon. Young Donald and the rest of the Trump children were also Sunday regulars at First Presbyterian Church in Jamaica, though Fred and Mary attended only sporadically. Six days a week, at school and at church, Donald was in coat and tie from a very early age, riding in his mother’s rose-colored Rolls or his father’s stretch Caddy when he wasn’t in the school limo. Donald’s earliest teachers described him as “a jolly little boy,” in sharp contrast with the more introverted Robert. But as the years went by, his prankish, easygoing behavior got in the way of good grades at Kew Forest. He was the only Trump not to finish there, pulled out by Fred at the end of seventh grade and sent to far-off New York Military Academy for a little discipline. The school, stretched across 325 country acres overlooking the Hudson, was an attempt at a rich boys’ haven.
If the Kew Forest experience had set him apart from the neighbors he grew up with in Queens, five years in uniform fifty-five miles upstate in Cornwall on the Hudson was as isolating as it was formative. Nicknamed “DT” by his friends at military school, Donald became an achiever, ultimately selected commander of the Honor Guard in his junior and senior years by the school’s administration and designated to lead the school’s brigade up Fifth Avenue in the Columbus Day Parade in 1963. He hit cleanup on the school’s winning baseball team, batting .350 and playing a sweet first base in his senior year, with Fred standing up and screaming at every home game. A tall, slender, beaming, and talkative kid, he lettered in soccer, acted in the school play, and earned a Β average. He lived alone his senior year by choice and kept a meticulously clean room, getting up every morning for 6:00 A.M. formation and drills. When he graduated, he had been on his own since he was thirteen years old, and he was ready to go home for a while.
He went to college at Fordham, a forty-minute trip to the North Bronx in his red Austin-Healey 3000. It was an unusual choice—a small Jesuit men’s school whose Business Administration program was not highly regarded. But it was, in a sense, a continuation of the formula that Fred had discovered in the military academy: a structured and disciplined educational program that, combined with a steadying life at home, protected him from the sort of freewheeling campus life he might have found elsewhere.
Donald’s two years at Fordham (1964 to 1966) were an uneventful mix of a light and undistinguished course load, combined with a sporting menu that ranged from squash to football. Recruited as the punter for the school’s Division III football club because he had a fifty-yard kicking range, he hurt his ankle after three or four weeks and dropped off the team. Fred came to his squash matches, but he was a mediocre player on a less-than-mediocre team. Though his teammates thought he had the talent to be a ranked player, he “wouldn’t practice hard,” dogging it on the coach’s mandatory five-mile runs.
His doubles partner on the Fordham tennis team said, “He had a big serve, but no ground game”—a lust for the spectacular but little steady court work. Another teammate recalled that his ground game consisted of “defensive lobs,” waiting for the opponent to make a mistake. Beyond an aggressive serve, Donald played “a conservative game,” with a “fierce” desire to win but “no killer instinct.” When the team went on a trip, the players traveled in two or three cars, and once a group went to Maryland in Donald’s sports car. Though the coach gave each driver cash to cover tolls and gas, Donald insisted on each passenger’s chipping in, leaving one teammate resentful decades later.
Though he “got along pretty well” with everyone, he was “not one of the guys,” said one of his closer friends. “You could see he was a cut different. He was a nondrinker, which was kind of rare. He never smoked. There was an air about him, not obnoxious or offensive, but distant. I recall going to parties with him, and he had a good line with the girls, but never had a girlfriend.” It was back to a mandatory coat and tie, like in his grade school days, and Donald was always perfectly tailored—“not ostentatious, but everything matched, everything fitted.” That, too, set him apart from the campus’s convention of deliberate tie-askew dress.
After his sophomore year, he suddenly transferred to Wharton, without telling his friends or coach at Fordham. Everyone was surprised that he had been admitted since he was hardly a star student at Fordham and Wharton was a highly selective school. There he continued to coast in class and stayed far away from the antiwar tumult that hit Penn’s campus in the late sixties. He graduated in 1968, though the campus newspaper did not contain a single reference to him, and not even a senior photo of him appeared in his graduating yearbook. He was not listed as a member of any sports team, club, or fraternity throughout his two years at Wharton, in sharp contrast to his NYMA and Fordham days. When Donald became a builder who preferred marble to his conservative father’s familiar brick, Fred told friends like architect Philip Birnbaum that he “sent Donald to Wharton, and all they taught him to do was spend.” Within days of finishing at Penn, he headed out to Avenue Ζ to start the career Fred had long been preparing for him.
Somehow, with five years of military training and a string of cadet honors at NYMA, the baseball-tennis-squash star qualified for a medical deferment, classified 1Y after a physical exam at the Armed Forces Center in New York on September 17, 1968. Neither the national anguish over Vietnam, nor the riots and racial conflict tearing apart Brooklyn at the time, distracted him. In fact, when he talked Brooklyn politics with Sam Horwitz, the borough’s burgeoning reform movement was of no interest to him. Donald was already fixed on the world as it was, and all he wanted to know was who had power and which was the right button to push. Even as a young man out of college, in an era when his generation was marching for change, Donald saw politics as business, just another arena where connections could be converted to profits. In 1969, the same year Richard Nixon became President, Donald registered as a Republican.
His father’s Trump Village scandal had hit the newspapers and television in the middle of his sophomore year at Fordham, but Donald was unfazed by the myriad allegations against Fred and Bunny Lindenbaum. He spent summers working out of his father’s office and scoffed at the charges. When he started doing his own first Manhattan deals in the middle seventies, he chose Bunny as his lawyer.
Donald’s Avenue Ζ years were anything but glamorous. He took on the title of president of an assortment of Trump entities. With Fred as chairman of the board, Donald lay claim to the management of forty-eight privately held corporations and fifteen family partnerships. Between his arrival in 1968 and 1974, when he first floated a Manhattan deal that looked as if it might go somewhere, his principal job was managing 10,000 to 22,000 apartments, depending on whose estimate of Fred’s holdings one accepted. The dollar value of this empire—whose varying size reflected in part periodic sales and purchases—was said to be as little as $40 million and, in a 1975 BusinessWeek article, as much as $100 million. Running it, at least to Donald, was a grind.
The job was basically a matter of collecting rent and making repairs, hardly the sort of deal-making magic Donald had in mind. Years later, in The Art of the Deal, he would devote a chapter to a coup he claimed he engineered in these early years—namely, the company’s acquisition of a troubled Cincinnati FHA project at a risk-free, bargain-basement price. But Fred had actually closed on the project in 1964, when Donald was far off in military school. The turnaround that Donald boasted about—transforming the half-vacant, 1,200-unit project into a fully tenanted and successful one—had also long been achieved by the time he came full-time to the company. Other than any work he may have done during his summer breaks, Donald’s real role was limited to the 1972 sale of the project at a handsome profit.
A more typical deal he oversaw in this era was the two-year effort to lease storefront space in a Trump-owned Coney Island shopping center to the city’s Off-Track Betting Corporation. The newly created OTB was busily setting up betting parlors all over the city, and the leases became a hotly pursued, clubhouse commodity. The Trumps were such a certainty for a lease that when community opposition killed a location in one of his shopping malls, the agency insisted on moving on to another Trump mall, as if the lease were the property of a particular landlord. “We made a commitment to Trump,” one local leader remembers an OTB official saying.
Even with this all-but-guaranteed business, Donald had the audacity to demand that OTB pay him a $50,000 commission for renting the agency space at prime prices in one of his buildings. In a 1971 letter to OTB, twenty-five-year-old Donald wrote of his “tremendous respect for the off track betting concept” and justified his demand for the commission by promising to surreptitiously ease the current tenant, a men’s store, out of the space. “It is imperative,” Donald insisted, “that Atlantic Men’s Store not find out that another tenant wants access to the store.”
The initially planned site for the parlor at the Trump Village Shopping Center was so close to a school that outraged parents from the middle-class project ultimately killed it. Donald then got the agency to switch the lease to the Trumps’ other shopping center—the Luna Park mall, which was also just a few steps from an elementary school, but one attended by poor and minority children who lived in the nearby public housing project. In a June 1972 letter to the agency, Donald said he’d been “recently informed that the Community Planning Board [would] not exert excessive pressure” against this second location, and, as promised, the local board—dominated by the neighborhood Democratic club housed virtually rent-free in a Trump storefront—quickly approved the site.
Trump constructed a tiny new brick store stall at the end of the mall, twenty-eight by ninety feet, and obtained a ten-year lease at $26,000 a year, with an annual escalation clause but no obligation to cover heat, electricity, or any other costs. The rent was $6,000 more than Donald had asked for in his June letter. The building did not even include a bathroom, and the daily crowd of bettors relieved themselves on the side of the building. Since Fred had acquired the land for the mall from the city at no expense years earlier, the parlor was virtually pure profit, Donald’s first political booty.
There were other father-son Coney Island maneuvers. Donald and Fred plied their local and citywide political connections, including comptroller Abe Beame, to override neighborhood opposition and open a McDonald’s franchise on the extra land the city had sold Fred for Trump Village. The theory had been, when Fred was awarded the extra site, that he would build a secondary parking lot for residents of the housing complex, but the Trumps came out on the winning side of a city ruling in the early seventies that said the additional parking was unnecessary. With Donald doing his first behind-the-scenes city lobbying, the Trumps were able to sign a lucrative lease with the fast-food chain, which was anxious to break into the massive middle-class market in the nearby Warbasse, Trump Village, and other apartment complexes.
Opposition was so strong that the planning commission, which feared that McDonald’s would continue to pull customers away from the established Coney Island retail district, approved it by only a four to three vote, and City Council President Paul O’Dwyer denounced it as “a windfall” for the Trumps, atop everything else they had already taken out of the Trump Village project.
The Trumps also continued real estate acquisitions out on the old Brooklyn turf, but most were disappointing dead ends. They announced with great fanfare the purchase of a ten-year option on a hundred acres of Brooklyn waterfront land near Shore Haven, but federal housing subsidies were drying up, and they had no plans to build the anticipated 10,000 units without them. Fred went back to Marie Tilyou for one more purchase—the majestic Tilyou Theatre across the street from the old Steeplechase site. He tore it down, speculating on a new grand plan for Coney Island, but the city’s and state’s midseventies’ fiscal problems stymied development, and he wound up renting the property for a parking lot.
A deal that did work out was the Trumps’ purchase of a 25 percent stake in the state-subsidized, almost 6,000-unit Starrett City housing complex in Brooklyn. While the Trumps played no role in building the borough’s biggest development, Donald did join his Starrett Construction Company partners in discussions with state officials about the record $362 million mortgage that financed the project. He cited his role in the acquisition of the project in a successful 1975 application for a real estate broker’s license, trying to use it to catapult himself past the ordinary one-year trial period as a licensed salesman. (In a January 1975 interview for the license, he told a state examiner that he received $50,000 in yearly income “from the properties owned and operated by him.”)
The Trump companies were also still wheeling and dealing in FHA projects across the country. Sometimes, though, the Trump tactic wasn’t a turnaround, like the Cincinnati job, which they bought cheap, rejuvenated, and sold at a profit. In Maryland, for example, Fred wound up handcuffed and arrested by Prince George County officials when he appeared at one FHA project that local officials said he was “bleeding” dry. The arrest came in 1976, but it was after at least four years of battling Trump to make repairs on the beleaguered 504-unit Gregory Estates, which county officials flatly called “a slum property.”
With over a hundred vacancies, a series of disregarded code violations, a history of heat and hot water problems, defaulting payments to FHA, hundreds of thousands overdue to the gas and electric companies, and a minuscule local staff that “couldn’t buy light bulbs without authorization for New York,” the project was denied a license to operate. When repeated phone conversations with Fred proved fruitless, county officials surprised him on a visit to the project and charged him with noncompliance with a notice of violation. The housing inspection supervisor indicated that “as long as an effort was being made, we’d work with an owner,” but said that no improvements were being made at the project.
The flabbergasted Fred was first taken to a local precinct and required to post $100 to secure a thousand-dollar bond, which he didn’t have. The housing supervisor offered to loan it to him, and he sternly rebuffed the offer. He called an angry Donald in New York, an arrangement was made to get the bond, and Fred was released. When he reappeared in the district court, the judge levied a heavy fine on Fred’s corporate entity. The repairs were rapidly made, but the Trumps soon sold the property—the only one they had in the Maryland suburbs outside Washington, D.C.
Things got almost as nasty in Norfolk, Virginia, where some of the FHA projects Fred had invested in years earlier turned sour in the seventies. Residents at two of his projects, the Hague and Pembroke Towers, staged what was called the city’s first rent strike against Trump and filed a lawsuit charging “a lack of hot running water, sporadic or nonexistent air conditioning and elevator service, improper swimming facilities, and insect and rodent infestation.” When Fred went to meet with the tenants they almost threw him in the top-floor pool.
Then young Donald appeared on the scene, called a press conference, and told reporters: “We want to make these the finest buildings in Virginia.” The same day, a waterline burst in Hague Towers—at the time, the tallest residential building in downtown Norfolk—showering the lobby, a laundry room, a beauty shop, a maintenance room, and storage areas, causing one resident to declare: “We’re going to have two swimming pools.”
Donald arranged a meeting with tenant attorney O. L. “Buzz” Gilbert at the office of the Trumps’ Norfolk attorney, Zeke Waters, a politically connected lawyer eventually appointed to the bench. “It was the strangest meeting,” recalled Gilbert. “Zeke stood up and introduced himself and Donald, and Donald turned to him and said you sit down and shut up. He put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Buzz and I are going to settle this thing.’ I thought it was typical of a New York know-it-all. I said, first of all, ‘My name is Mr. Gilbert, and I’m going to speak to your lawyer.’”
The suit was settled only when Trump attended to a long list of building violations, after which Donald tried what would become a trademark tactic: hiring the other side. “He called me up,” Gilbert said, “and told me he liked the way I handled the tenant suit and asked if I’d be willing to represent them in Norfolk. I asked for a $500-a-month retainer and an hourly rate, and Donald at first said they weren’t going to pay that much. He finally agreed. I represented them for a year and did nothing. I never got any calls. They paid promptly.” The tenant war quieted down, with the newly retained Gilbert quoted in Norfolk newspapers praising the Trumps’ compliance with the settlement. He and the Trumps parted ways after a year, and later the Trumps sold the properties.
But Norfolk and Prince George County were hardly where Donald planned to spend a career, and an OTB lease was apprentice work, no matter how lucrative the payoff. His first few years at Avenue Ζ he commuted with Fred from Queens, but in 1971, he moved to Manhattan, where he intended eventually to bring the family company. His first Manhattan apartment, a studio off Third Avenue at 196 East 75th Street, was on the seventeenth floor of an undistinguished, twenty-one-story, white brick building, with two windows that overlooked a water tank on the courtyard of the adjacent building. Though Donald would spend years railing against New York’s rent regulation system, his first apartment was rent stabilized, meaning it was covered by a maze of state and city guidelines limiting rent increases and protecting tenant rights.
He tried partitioning the place to give it a larger feel, but then he jammed it with so much furniture that it shrunk visually. He met a young architectural associate named Der Scutt at an East Side bar and brought him home to get advice on how he should redesign the tiny space. He hired an Irish maid and quickly developed a reputation among the building’s workers as a cheap tipper. Some of them remember one girlfriend who lasted a while and was frequently in the apartment—a very pretty stewardess. Apart from her, and the white Cadillac convertible he parked in the next-door garage, he was hardly a memorable presence.
He stayed on 75th Street for almost four years, through his late twenties, and when he moved out in late 1974, he turned the apartment over to his younger brother, Robert. One of the subterfuges that owners of rent-regulated buildings bemoaned was that tenants covertly transferred their apartments to friends and relatives—preventing the owners from getting large rent increases permitted when a new tenant signed a lease, or from decontrolling the apartments altogether, which was allowed under new statutes designed to return vacant units to the free market. Donald boasted to friends that he had done just that.
Yet, in January of 1975, he was pictured and extensively quoted in a full-page New York Daily News story assailing the “ridiculous” rent stabilization system and celebrating his recent court victory in a lawsuit against the meager rent increases authorized by the regulators. “Everybody in New York gets their increases but the landlords, and we are going to put an end to that practice,” Donald promised the News.
He moved south, which was the right direction to go for an ambitious young man, though his new Third Avenue apartment was only on the fringes of the Upper East Side gold coast. The Phoenix, at 160 East 65th, was nonetheless a gigantic step up. Donald now had a one-bedroom penthouse with one and a half bathrooms on the northeast corner of the thirty-second floor, which he decorated in beiges and brown and lots of chrome, a style he would continue to favor through much of his life. A bank of living room windows that continued into the dining area offered views of the George Washington Bridge and New Jersey to the north and Great Neck, Long Island, and Brooklyn to the east. He brought along the Irish maid, but dropped the convertible for a new gray limo. On the verge of thirty, he was ready to shed the boyish lifestyle of his 75th Street studio.
He never wore casual clothes, even on weekends, and was always going in and out of the building in a suit or blazer, his initials sewn into his shirts and engraved on his gold cuff links. The garage bill for his company-owned car was sent out to Avenue Z, where he went most mornings as well, usually coming down from his apartment before 8:00 A.M. and getting home before eight at night. He drove the car himself until late 1976, when a newspaper profile published his address and a smiling photo of him in his apartment. Around the time of the profile interview, he hired an ex-cop chauffeur who doubled as an armed bodyguard, and became a bit more reclusive.
Living in Manhattan was, in Donald’s view, an occupational necessity: He was studying the real estate around him. As early as 1972, shortly after Donald had first moved to Manhattan, a Trump entity made its first submission on a Manhattan project, bidding to get a piece of a huge Lindsay administration plan called East River Landing, a waterfront development planned below Wall Street that never came to fruition. He and Fred were also quoted in an early seventies’ story as planning to build an East Side rental apartment building that never got off the drawing boards. Despite these aborted efforts, Donald remained on the lookout. Steve Weissman, who lived a floor below him at the Phoenix, remembers bumping into Donald on the street one day and Trump blurting out: “Steve, you’re friendly with the owner of the building. Approach him with an offer of $10 or $12 million. There’s a million in it for you.”
At some point during his initial forays in Manhattan, he also met the man who, after Fred, would become the most important influence on his early career, Roy Cohn. Infamous for his 1950s role as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, Cohn was by the 1970s a peculiarly New York institution, a lawyer who could simultaneously represent the Archdiocese and the bosses of several organized crime families. It is difficult to determine precisely when he and Donald first met. Trump testified years later that it was in 1970 at a Manhattan restaurant. Cindy Adams, one of the many New York gossip columnists once close to Cohn, said Cohn introduced her to Trump at a dinner party the same year. Yet Donald’s account of their first encounter in The Art of the Deal dates it as 1973, when he claims they discussed a case that was filed against the Trump companies that fall.
Whenever Donald met him, Cohn was by the early seventies a walking advertisement for every form of graft, the best-known fixer in New York. In 1970, he was under indictment in both New York and Illinois. Already acquitted in two criminal trials in the sixties, he would survive these two as well. The Illinois banking indictment was dropped without a trial, while the New York bribery and conspiracy case ended with his third acquittal. Cohn was also in his second decade of annual IRS audits, occasioned by his refusal to pay any taxes at all. He lived like a millionaire, yet openly boasted that he had literally no income, drawing lavishly from his law firm’s expense account and all the cash bribes he could collect. In his early forties, a balding, rail-thin five-foot eight-inch wraith whose bloodshot eyes, scarred nose, and surgically taut face gave him a demonic look, Cohn was senior partner in Saxe, Bacon, Bolan, a tiny firm headquartered in the East Side town house where he lived. His monied and mob clients gave him a Rolls, a three-and-a-half-acre Greenwich, Connecticut, summer house, a yacht, a Bentley, and a Cadillac convertible just like Donald’s, all owned by the law firm.
The son of a Bronx judge, Cohn was reared in the clubhouse culture of the city, attending dinner parties as a teenager with Carmine DeSapio, Ed Flynn, and the other Democratic bosses who ruled New York. He had also met Abe Beame in his father’s house, and over the years became an adviser to both Beame and new Brooklyn Democratic Chairman Meade Esposito. In fact, he played a pivotal role in 1973, when bridesmaid Beame, who was again city comptroller, finally won the mayoral election.
It was Cohn who privately convinced the New York Times that Beame’s leading opponent, Bronx Congressman Mario Biaggi, had taken the Fifth Amendment before a federal grand jury the year before. Cohn happened to know this because Biaggi had come to him for legal advice and told him that he’d refused to testify. When the Times published the charge against Biaggi, with the source cited as anonymous, Biaggi denied it, the testimony was eventually released, and Biaggi’s candidacy was destroyed. The gambit made Roy Cohn a fixture in Abe Beame’s government and Beame a trophy at Cohn’s frequent parties.
In the spring of 1974, soon after Beame’s inaugural, both Cohn and the Trumps had tables at the Brooklyn Democratic Party’s annual dinner at the Waldorf—a ballroom filled with a dozen indicted, soon-to-be-indicted, or convicted public and party officials. They listened as the new mayor told the crowd, including the two law secretaries to Supreme Court judges who would eventually plead guilty to stealing $100,000 in ticket receipts from this and three previous Brooklyn dinners, that “critics might call” the Brooklyn organization “a machine,” but that he’d been proud of his membership in it for forty years and that “no one need apologize for being part of it.” Brooklyn had proven, Abe Beame announced, that “effective party organization need not be synonymous with smoke-filled rooms.” For Fred, a lifetime of binding friendships had culminated in Abe Beame’s election. But for Donald and Cohn, it was just a new season of opportunity.
It was only a few months after Beame won the mayoral runoff that Donald first retained Cohn. The case in question had nothing to do with the city administration, but the timing of Cohn’s retention had everything to do with the formal merger of these two disparate wings—one from Brooklyn, one from Manhattan—of the loose amalgam that had helped make Beame king. To Donald, the case he put in Roy’s hands was a mere nuisance. No money was at stake. The Justice Department had brought a major racial discrimination suit against the company, contending that the Trumps had systematically refused to rent to blacks. Four superintendents or rental agents working for Trump confirmed to federal authorities that applications for apartments were coded by race. Doormen were told to discourage applications from blacks by telling them that there were no vacancies or by jacking up the rents. One staffer said that his instructions came straight from Fred and the company went so far as to try to figure out how “to decrease the number of black tenants” already in one development “by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.”
The government was willing from the start to sign a consent decree with the Trumps, compelling them to take certain affirmative steps to integrate their estimated 14,000 units in the New York area, but Donald and Cohn agreed that they’d much rather fight. Donald’s public diatribe was that the Justice Department was trying to force them to take “welfare recipients.” Cohn echoed him, declaring in a shrill affidavit that the government sought “the capitulation of the defendants and the substitution of the Welfare Department for the management corporation.” Roy countersued the government for $100 million, but the judge called it a “waste of time and paper” and threw the suit out a month later.
Donald’s deposition in the case in March of 1974 caught the essence of his social conscience. He didn’t know what the Fair Housing Act of 1969 was and freely admitted that the company had done nothing to implement it. Asked when the first black had moved into one of his predominantly white projects, Donald replied: “I don’t care and I don’t know.” In a color-blind pose, he repeatedly said he had no idea what the racial composition of his tenants or employees was even though he casually mentioned complexes the company owned that were 100 percent white and ones that were all black. He claimed that the company’s only eligibility standard for tenants was the income of the man in the family, noting that “we don’t generally include the wife’s income; we like to see it for the male in the family.”
Donald also debuted his talent for manipulating of the truth, sworn or otherwise. In an attempt to put distance between himself and the discriminatory practices of the Trump companies, he repeatedly claimed he did not handle the rental of apartments. Asked if he “ever had anything to do with rental decisions in individual cases,” he answered: “No, I really don’t.” Yet he told the state examiner for his brokerage license, according to written reports filed shortly after his deposition in the race case, that “he supervises and controls the renting of all apartments owned by the Trump organization.” Indeed, he showed the examiner hundreds of files “containing leases and rental records for commercial and residential tenants, all of which contained applicant’s signature and handwriting.” Matthew Tosti, the longtime Trump attorney, also wrote state officials supporting Donald’s license application and contended that Donald had “negotiated numerous leases for apartments.”
Another example of this penchant for misstatement drew the attention of his federal interrogators. He had complained to reporters when the lawsuit was announced by the Justice Department that he’d first learned about it on his car radio riding to work, when in fact, according to the government attorneys, he and the organization had been notified both during the probe and at the time of the filing of the suit.
The litigation dragged on for a year and a half, with the federal investigation intensifying and Cohn deriding it as “a spit in the ocean.” Finally, Donald signed the consent decree. The government called the decree—which required advertisements in minority papers, minority employment promotions, and a preferential vacancy listing with the Urban League—“one of the most far reaching ever negotiated.” Donald sneered in news stories that the Trumps had won, since they still weren’t required to take welfare recipients.
In any event, four years later, in the summer of 1978, the Justice Department found the Trumps in contempt of the decree and called them back into court. Cohn picked up his argument where he’d left off, branding the new case a “rehash” without “the slightest merit,” attributable to “planted malcontents.” It all remained irrelevant to Donald. The bottom line was that two government discrimination lawsuits had had no effect on the company’s ability to make development deals, usually with the government’s help. The charges were just not a part of the world in which he operated.
The decision to seek a settlement of the initial race suit in late 1974 came just as Donald was getting ready to put together the pieces of his first tangible Manhattan deals, just as he moved into the Phoenix, just as he put on the full-court press with state officials to qualify for a broker’s license. He was positioning himself for the breakthrough deals that at last seemed right around the corner.