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-- 2016 --
May 22: Just What Were Donald Trump's Ties to the Mob?
In his signature book, The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump boasted that when he wanted to build a casino in Atlantic City, he persuaded the state attorney general to limit the investigation of his background to six months. Most potential owners were scrutinized for more than a year. Trump argued that he was “clean as a whistle”—young enough that he hadn’t had time to get into any sort of trouble. He got the sped-up background check, and eventually got the casino license.
But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano. That story eventually came out in a federal investigation, which also concluded that in a construction industry saturated with mob influence, the Trump Plaza apartment building most likely benefited from connections to racketeering.
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No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910
-- 2017 --
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August 16:
Australia's New South Wales (NSW) police board recommended against approving an offer from the former New York businessman and a local developer, according to a report from The Australian, because it would have been "dangerous".
The now U.S. president, in partnership with the Queensland-based Kern Corporation, was one of four groups bidding for the lucrative Darling Harbour project in Sydney. However, the NSW government rejected the pair's proposal on 5 May 1987, along with two other bidders.
At the time Trump owned two casinos in Atlantic City – Trump Plaza and Trump's Castle – and was poised to open a third with the Trump Taj Mahal.
The NSW government's concerns regarding Trump's joint venture were not made public at the at the time. However, under rules which declassify NSW cabinet papers, summaries of several reports on the Kern/Trump joint bid were reported in The Australian on Wednesday.
The Trump organization was not available to comment when contacted by CNBC on Wednesday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/16/trump-mafia-connections-blocked-bid-to-open-sydney-casino-30-years-ago.html
November 17: Trump building in Panama tied to Russian mafia, international crime
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/360852-trump-building-in-panama-tied-to-russian-mafia-international-crime
-- 2018 --
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August 1: Trump’s Team Keeps Using Mafia-Inspired Language — to Defend Itself
Former FBI Director James Comey once compared a meeting with President Donald Trump to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony” and said Trump’s demeanor gave him flashbacks to his “earlier career as a prosecutor against the Mob.”
But it’s not just Trump’s critics who compare his Administration to the mafia. Indeed, Trump and his allies have also made repeated mob references — when defending themselves.
In a tweet Wednesday morning, Trump compared his former campaign manager Paul Manafort’s trial on tax and fraud charges to legendary gangster Al Capone, the second time in recent days he explicitly compared Manafort to Capone, who was brought down on tax charges.
http://time.com/5355482/donald-trump-rudy-giuliani-mafia/
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September 12: Trump’s ties to the Russian mafia go back 3 decades
On November 9, 2016, just a few minutes after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, a man named Vyacheslav Nikonov approached a microphone in the Russian State Duma (their equivalent of the US House of Representatives) and made a very unusual statement.
“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago, Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections, and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America, and I congratulate you on this.”
https://www.vox.com/world/2018/9/12/17764132/trump-fbi-russia-new-york-times-craig-unger
December 8: Mob mentality: how Mueller is working to turn Trump's troops
As the special counsel ‘flips’ presidential allies one by one, prosecutors see parallels to efforts against organized crime
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/08/robert-mueller-donald-trump-loyalty-organized-crime
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December 17:
Trump's attack on Cohen was just the latest example of his using 'mob' talk.
A rat, commonly known as an FBI informant, often refers someone from an organized crime family who has gotten arrested and cooperated with the federal government to provide information about a larger crime or crime family aka an informant, according to Merriam-Webster.
When asked by ABC News if Cohen being branded as a "rat" would be dangerous, Michael J. Stern, a former federal prosecutor said it could be.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-calls-cohen-rat/story?id=59862349
-- 2019 --
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January 10: Donald Trump's Mafia Connections: Decades Later, Is He Still Linked to the Mob?
On a rainy day in the spring of 1976, FBI Special Agent Myron Fuller took the New York subway to Brooklyn to interview Donald Trump. The future tycoon, about 30, was just getting his real estate career off the ground, aided by secret payments from his father. Fuller found Trump working out of a temporary office in a double-wide trailer on a muddy construction site. “There were boards covering wet dirt, in lieu of cement walkways,” Fuller recalls to Newsweek. He knocked on the door and went in. “His secretary sat there by the entrance, and Trump was a door away from there.” Ushered in, he found Trump sitting behind his desk. The businessman did not get up to welcome the agent. “He never came around, and I do not recall him shaking my hand,” Fuller says.
The FBI agent was carrying out an errand for the bureau’s Miami office, to follow up on a tip that mobsters had asked Trump to front for them in a purchase of the Fontainebleau hotel. Once a beachside favorite of movie stars and the rich, the hotel was also a notorious hangout for Mafia kingpins like Sam Giancana, who famously met with CIA agents in the hotel’s Boom Boom Room to plot the assassination of Fidel Castro. But in 1976, the Fontainebleau was teetering on bankruptcy, and the mobsters needed a straw man to buy it.
https://www.newsweek.com/2019/01/18/donald-trump-mafia-connections-decades-later-linked-mob-1285771.html
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January 30: Venezuela's Maduro claims Trump tried to have him killed by the Colombian government and mafia
This is not the first time Maduro has made such a claim, but it comes as he faces increasing international pressure to step down amid a popular uprising against his disastrous rule.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from INSIDER.
https://www.businessinsider.com/venezuela-maduro-claims-trump-tried-killed-colombian-government-mafia-2019-1
February 26: We Asked Actual Mafia Experts If Trump Is Really Acting Like a 'Mob Boss'
Comparing the president to a Mafia leader is almost a cliché at this point. Is it just a joke, or something more?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8xymjz/we-asked-actual-mafia-experts-if-trump-is-really-acting-like-a-mob-boss
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February 28: Michael Cohen's quest for redemption drew Americans into the mob-like world of Donald Trump. The President's former personal lawyer has painted a cruel and unseemly picture, shocking even with the nation's senses dulled by years of Trump-induced controversy.
In a theatrical day of congressional testimony Wednesday that will become an iconic moment of Trump's presidency, Cohen -- who is about to go to prison -- turned on his ex-client with the world watching.
He made a case that after spending a decade inside Trump's world, he knew the President better than anyone -- seeking to provide context for the flurry of investigations and claims of crimes and wrongdoing surrounding the President.
He sketched a stunning portrait of Trump's organization and conduct in what turned into an extraordinary and unprecedented daylong indictment of the character of a sitting President.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/28/politics/donald-trump-michael-cohen-world/index.html
-- 2020 --
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