Donald Trump's ties to the Gambino crime family
The
daughter of a reputed New Jersey mob figure says her late father had a
longtime relationship with Donald Trump that included gambling millions
of dollars at one of his casinos, flying on his helicopter and partying
aboard his private yacht.
In
1991, Trump first faced questions about his dealings with Robert
LiButti, a plump, balding and nationally famous horse breeder with an
explosive temper who would later be banned from New Jersey casinos for
his ties to Mafia boss John Gotti. At the time, New Jersey state
regulators had launched an investigation into allegations by nine
employees of one of Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, the Trump Plaza, that
the hotel had repeatedly removed African-Americans and women from craps
tables after LiButti, one of the highest-rolling gamblers in the city’s
history, loudly complained about their presence when he was playing.
Robert
LiButti, top left, and Donald Trump.
The
probe resulted in a $200,000 fine against the Trump Plaza by the New
Jersey Casino Control Commission for violating state anti-discrimination
laws. Investigators found that LiButti had, on multiple occasions,
berated blacks and women using what one state official described as the
“vilest” language — including racist slurs and references to women in
obscene terms — and that the Trump Plaza, in order not to lose his
substantial business, sought to accommodate him by keeping the employees
away from his betting tables, according to commission documents
recently obtained by Yahoo News under the New Jersey Open Public Records
Act.
“It
was a substantial fine at the time,” said Mitchell A. Schwefel, then a
New Jersey assistant attorney general who brought the state’s case
against the Trump Plaza on behalf of the state Division of Gaming
Enforcement. “That was a red-flag issue for us because that was conduct
[by the hotel] that was not going to be tolerated.”
Trump
was not held personally liable for the violations of his hotel, and
there is no indication that he was ever questioned by state officials as
part of their investigation. When asked about LiButti by a reporter,
the casino mogul suggested he barely knew the foul-mouthed gambler. “I
have heard he is a high roller, but if he was standing here in front of
me, I wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump told the Philadelphia
Inquirer in February 1991.
But
Edith Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, told Yahoo News in two recent
telephone interviews that Trump’s account was false and that Trump and
her father knew each other quite well. “He’s a liar,” said Creamer. “Of
course he knew him. I flew in the [Trump] helicopter with [Trump’s then
wife] Ivana and the kids. My dad flew it up and down [to Atlantic City].
My 35th birthday party was at the Plaza and Donald was there. After the
party, we went on his boat, his big yacht. I like Trump, but it pisses
me off that he denies knowing my father. That hurts me.”
Asked
for comment for this story, Trump, through his spokeswoman, sent this
email to Yahoo News: “During the years I very successfully ran the
casino business, I knew many high rollers. I assume Mr. LiButti was one
of them, but I don’t recognize the name.”
Trump’s
response to questions about LiButti underscores what critics say is a
recurring theme in his career — a tendency to minimize or deny
associations with unsavory characters with whom he has done business.
Indeed, throughout his career as a real estate mogul there have been
frequent allegations of interactions with reputed mob figures —
something that may have been inevitable given the mob’s influence in the
New York construction industry during that era. (Trump has consistently
denied ever knowingly doing business with organized crime.)
However,
in the case of LiButti, Creamer’s account of direct dealings between
her father and Trump would appear to be corroborated by a 1991 book
written by John R. O’Donnell, the former president of the Trump Plaza
casino. In the book, “Trumped!: The Inside Story of the Real Donald
Trump — His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall,” O’Donnell recounts a
meeting between Trump and LiButti aboard Trump’s private helicopter, a
Super Puma, in the spring of 1988. Trump, according to O’Donnell, agreed
to pay $500,000 for a racehorse named Alibi after LiButti showed him
color photos of the “luxurious brown colt” and assured him he was going
to be “another Secretariat.”
O’Donnell
doesn’t use LiButti’s name in his book but describes him in
unmistakable terms, calling the seller of Alibi a world-famous “horse
broker” who was “our most lucrative player” at Trump casinos. O’Donnell,
in a phone interview, confirmed to Yahoo News for the first time that
the broker in question was LiButti. “Bob [LiButti] was selling him the
horse, for sure,” O’Donnell said. “Everything in the book is true.”
John
Gotti on trial and documents pertaining to Robert LiButti from the
attorney general in New Jersey.
Trump,
according to O’Donnell’s account, then “insisted” that the horse be
renamed D.J. Trump. But the deal blew up after the stallion grew lame
from illness and Trump sought to renegotiate the purchase price,
enraging LiButti and causing him to temporarily boycott Trump’s casinos,
according to O’Donnell. Trump “reneged on the deal when the horse came
up lame,” said O’Donnell in the phone interview. (“Mr. Trump never owned
a racehorse,” said Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks in an email. “He
vaguely remembers someone naming a racehorse after him.”)
Yahoo
News has also obtained the full transcript of a Sept. 4, 1990,
undercover New Jersey State Police tape of a conversation between
LiButti and Trump’s top Atlantic City executive, Edward M. Tracy, that
appears to lend further credence to Creamer’s account.
The
New Jersey police had secretly wired Tracy after two reputed bookmakers
for the Gambino crime family told an undercover officer that LiButti
was “in Trump’s pockets.” That, police investigators concluded, was a
reference to a highly lucrative contract at the Trump Plaza that LiButti
had secured for his brother-in-law, Jimmy Roselli, a popular crooner once considered a rival to his childhood Hoboken neighbor, Frank Sinatra.
According
to the transcript of the September 1990 meeting, LiButti makes multiple
references to conversations he claimed to have had with Trump, telling
Tracy, “I’m very close with him” and recounting how he had been advising
Trump to unload one of his Atlantic City casinos to resolve his then
highly public business problems. “I told him this right in the
helicopter with, ah, Ivana and my daughter one night,” LiButti said to
Tracy, according to the transcript. (Although portions of this
conversation were reported on at the time, the full transcript — which
was recently provided to Yahoo News by a confidential source — includes
these and other references to Trump that have not been previously
reported.)
In
the conversation, LiButti also offered personal advice, telling Tracy
that Trump needed to “get rid of the broad” — a reference to his then
publicized affair with Marla Maples. And he lamented the toll that both
the business and personal issues were taking on Trump at the time.
“He’s
lost that aggressiveness. … Walks around like a f***ing banana. I can’t
believe it’s Donald Trump. I don’t understand it,” LiButti says.
“Yeah, I know you were shocked when you saw him,” Tracy replies.
“Yeah,” says LiButti. “I can’t believe it. My hero. Broke my f***ing heart. My f***ing idol. I wanted to grow up like him.”
LiButti
recounts how on one occasion, when he had blown $350,000 at the Plaza
craps tables, Trump personally handed him a check — apparently as a
so-called comp to keep him coming back. “As I’m checking out … they call
Donald. He goes in his pocket and takes out the f***ing check and goes,
‘I want to present this to you myself.’” (When questioned about that
claim at the time by reporter David Cay Johnston, then with the
Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump denied it, saying, “I never gave him a
check at all.”)
The
secret tape recording proved to be LiButti’s undoing — but because of
other comments he made that day. The gambler was then trying to pressure
Tracy to pay an additional $250,000 for Roselli’s services by
repeatedly invoking the name of Gotti, the head of the Gambino crime
family. LiButti referred to Gotti as “my boss.” He talked about meetings
he had had with Gotti and suggested that he bring him down to Trump’s
Atlantic City casinos. Calling LiButti’s statements “sinister and
chilling,” Assistant Attorney General Schwefel filed a motion before the
Casino Control Commission to bar LiButti from all New Jersey casinos on
the grounds that he was a Gotti “associate” — a request that was
approved by the commission on Aug. 21, 1991.
At
the time, the Casino Control Commission was also moving to fine Trump
Plaza for its past efforts to placate LiButti by keeping blacks and
women away from his craps tables. According to the commission’s
documents on the case, LiButti flew into fits of rage whenever he lost
money at the craps tables, flinging dice and gaming chips around the
casino and grabbing the stick from a stickperson’s hand and breaking it
in half.
He
also made it clear that “he did not want women, blacks or other
minorities dealing or supervising his games,” according to one filing by
the state Division of Gaming Enforcement. He referred to one Trump
Plaza floor person as a “dumb c***” and “dumb bitch,” another as a “Jew
broad” and an African-American dealer as a “black bastard.” Finding
himself playing with an African-American at his craps table, LiButti
shouted, “Shoot the f***ing dice. Shoot the f***ing dice like you’re
f***ing some n*****,” according to testimony in the case.
State
officials argued that, rather than removing some of its employees from
LiButti’s craps tables, the hotel should have removed LiButti from the
casino. But it didn’t, the officials contended, because Trump’s casino
had put profits above following the state’s laws against racial
discrimination.
“Certainly,
it would have been so much better if the casino itself had thrown
LiButti out at the time that he committed these acts, but they didn’t
because he was a very high roller, obviously,” Schwefel argued at a
March 13, 1991, hearing on the case. “If LiButti had been a five- or
10-dollar customer, they would have thrown him right out, literally
without asking any questions. The problem again is that the casino did
not want to get rid of a high roller of his dimension.”
Trump’s
lawyers aggressively challenged the charges of discrimination, seeking
to discredit the testimony of its employees who filed complaints and
arguing it had had “no formal policy” of removing African-Americans and
women from LiButti’s craps tables.
“Trump
Plaza is being found in violation based only on an aura of
discrimination,” said Brian Spector, the lawyer for the Trump hotel.
“Something may look like discrimination, feel like discrimination and
even smell like discrimination, but you need discriminatory intent. It
simply hasn’t been proven.”
But
Casino Control Commission officials didn’t buy it, and on June 5, 1991,
they doubled the gaming division’s recommended $100,000 fine to
$200,000 to reflect what one commissioner contended was the “gravely
serious” nature of the offense. Three months later, the commission
leveled another $450,000 fine against the Trump Plaza — this time for
buying LiButti nine luxury autos, including Ferraris, Bentleys and
Rolls-Royces worth $1.6 million, that he then exchanged for cash, a
violation of state laws at the time that barred cash comps for high
rollers. Documents from the case show that the Trump Plaza also provided
LiButti with other “comps” that included paying $104,338 for five
European vacations and one to California; $279,978 for tickets to the
Super Bowl, boxing matches and other sporting and theater events;
$121,712 for jewelry; and $40,020 for Champagne that included 178
bottles of Cristal Rosé, valued at $225 a bottle.
It
was only the start of LiButti’s legal problems. He was tried and
convicted in 1994 for tax fraud in what federal prosecutors described as
the largest case of federal income tax evasion in New Jersey history. A
federal judge sentenced him to five years in prison. He died in 2014.
Creamer,
LiButti’s daughter, said her father blamed Trump in part for some of
his problems, apparently because Tracy agreed to be wired for the
conversation in which he had invoked Gotti’s name. She declined to talk
about her father’s alleged Mafia associations. “That is something I
don’t want to talk about,” she said. But she strongly insisted that her
father was not a racist. “He was a character,” she said. “He had a heart
of gold.” While acknowledging that her father “did have a foul mouth,”
she added that derogatory comments were made to everybody. “He loved
black people,” she said. “He used to throw them money all the time” when
he won at the craps table.
And
while keenly disappointed that Trump denied knowing her father, Creamer
said she is still backing him for president. “I’m voting for Trump,”
she said. “He’ll change the world — I think we need that.” In fact,
Creamer added, before her father died — and Trump was talking about
running for president in 2011 — he expressed similar sentiments. “I’m
going to vote for the SOB,” she recalled him saying.
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/trump-challenged-over-ties-to-mob-linked-gambler-100050602.html
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