“Who the f--- do you think you are?” Libutti would rail, sometimes threatening to punch a dealer or use his influence to get the offender fired. No accusation was too absurd when Libutti’s temper took hold—and no one doubted he could summon Trump instantly.
Whatever came out of Libutti’s mouth, the suits expected the employees to stand there smiling, saying, “Yes sir, Mr. Libutti,” so he would stay at the craps table until the cash he brought that day belonged to Trump. Nothing was to interfere with Libutti’s compulsion to gamble. If Libutti insisted that some stupid #@!% dealer had called a cocked die wrong, that it was really leaning to a hard six and not a seven, management would interrogate the entire team working the table and let Libutti throw the dice again.
The highly regulated casino culture of Atlantic City forbade cocktail waitresses from accompanying players to their
rooms, but if Libutti wanted five or six of them to come along and sip the best champagne, no one stopped him.
At Duke Mack’s, Graybel’s, and other watering holes where the dealers unwound over whiskey and beer, the way to outdo any tale of player foolishness was to recount the latest story about Libutti. The dealers called him Bob the Monster.
Bob Libutti said and did whatever he felt like, right down to demanding that Jim Gwathney, a Casino Control Commission inspector, get lost one Friday night. Gwathney’s job was to make sure state regulations were being followed on the casino floor. He knew Libutti’s reputation for abusing dealers and other workers. Libutti felt Gwathney was standing too close to him, but Gwathney stood his ground. Finally, Libutti threw several dozen black chips into the air, shouting “free chips.” Afterward, Gwathney’s bosses told him to stop hawking the game. They told him to stop being aggressive in inspecting. In effect, they told him not to do his job.
When Libutti was ahead and decided to quit and take his winnings (which wasn’t often), he said there was always a problem with leaving. “The helicopter always had some mechanical problem and it would be fixed in a few hours or whatever other lie they could tell to keep me there. But if I ran out of money I’d turn to Rollo, my chauffeur, and I tell him to take the helicopter out to my house and get the attaché case with the seventy thousand dollars so I could keep playing.” A helicopter was always ready.
“I’m a no-good degenerate gambler,” Libutti told me in 1991 while enjoying his fourth twenty-five-dollar cigar of the day. His short frame sunk into his daughter Edie’s feathery sofa, one of only six pieces of furniture in her living room the size of many houses, each wall more than thirty feet long. All
around stood bronze statues of famous horses: Man o’ War, Seattle Slew, Secretariat.
Seated with him were his wife Joan and her brother, the singer Jimmy Roselli, who grew up down the block from Frank Sinatra. Libutti opened another $200 bottle, the red wine as smooth as the cigars. The house belonged to his daughter, he claimed. So, too, he said, did Buck Chance Farm, a great name for a gambler’s racehorse stable, even if it existed only on paper.
Trump and his casino staff, Libutti said, exploited his sickness, his compulsive gambling.
“They had me so entranced that they got me to the point where I started taking artifacts, antiques from the house, down there to gamble,” said Libutti, Joan watching his every word, her eyes afire. “The jade Buddha that’s in the chairman’s suite at Trump Plaza cost me one hundred eighty-five thousand dollars. There’s another Buddha, the bronze one that cost me forty-five thousand dollars.” Trump Plaza arranged for a liquor vendor to buy the Buddhas and then sell them to the casino, Libutti said. “I got fifty some thousand for them. I went to the table, made two bets and lost it.”
Libutti said he harbors no hatred of any group, that the language he used is the language of the streets where he grew up, and that he abhors racial discrimination. “The way I speak is vulgar, in the sense of common,” he said. Besides, he added, if he was a racist, why did Mike Tyson give him the gloves he wore in one of his championship bouts held at Trump Plaza? Libutti said he never asked that a black or female dealer be removed, and the official state record supports that claim. Indeed, Libutti said when he was told that Trump had ordered that only white men work his tables in an effort to curry favor with his biggest customer he flew into one of his rages. Libutti
said he used vile language, but the racist conduct came from Trump.
Libutti said he had realized a few years earlier that if he ever ran out of money to gamble, the state casino authorities would come after him, but that so long as he was losing they would look the other way at just about anything to keep Trump happy and collect 9.2 percent of his losses in casino taxes. After he ran out of money in late 1990, the state did just that, under the guise of banning Libutti because of his sexist and racist language. It was the first time anyone had been banned from a casino in New Jersey or Nevada for anything other than being a mobster.
The new chairman of the Casino Control Commission, Atlantic City politician Steve Perskie, asked the Division of Gaming Enforcement to file a petition banning Libutti. Commissioner Valerie Armstrong alone protested that Perskie’s approach was improper. She said if there was to be any discipline it should be against Trump Plaza and other casinos for not ejecting an unruly customer. But Perskie prevailed in a 4-to-1 vote.
Mitch Schwefel, the enforcement division attorney assigned to make Libutti the one-hundred-and-fifty-second person banned from the Atlantic City casinos, knew he would have a tough time defending an exclusion in court if Libutti fought it on First Amendment grounds. But the state had other, more damning information.
Leonard “Leo” Cortellino and Charles Ricciardi Sr., both associates of the Gambino crime family, had told Robert Walker, a state police detective working undercover, about a bookmaking operation they ran in Atlantic City that benefitted the notorious Mafia don John Gotti. The bookies told Walker that they knew both Libutti and his brother-in-law. They said that Libutti “was in Donald Trump’s pockets,”
explaining that Libutti had obtained a lucrative contract for Roselli at Trump Plaza for “big money.” They also said Libutti was known to have run a number of scams with horses.
Libutti did indeed try to arrange a secret commission for Roselli’s next singing gig at Trump Plaza during a September 1990 meeting with Ed Tracy, who in 1990 ran all three Trump casinos. Libutti felt that Trump owed him and he wanted a commission financed by inflating Roselli’s contract. Libutti also asked about John Gotti coming to gamble at Trump Plaza. Since Gotti was not among the 150 mobsters the state had banned from Atlantic City’s casinos, Libutti inquired about whether the dapper don would be welcome at Trump’s.
Tracy had state police wire the room before he met Libutti again on July 31. I was Tracy’s other appointment that day, but missed seeing Libutti by a few seconds.
“The problem that’s remaining is the, ah … two hundred and fifty number,” Tracy said.
“Right,” Libutti answered.
“No way can I make that happen … My problem is a simple one. It’s that the banks will see everything. Donald doesn’t sneeze without them holding a handkerchief for him … We cannot make a deal that on paper doesn’t make economic sense. They’d just throw it back at us and say, ‘What’s this?’ ” Tracy explained.
Their talk veered off to other subjects until Tracy smoothly steered it back to the payment Libutti wanted.
“So tell me how you want to structure this again?” Tracy asked.
“We’ll take the money off Roselli’s contract,” Libutti said. “We’ll say, listen, he wanted a thirty-thousand-dollar increase per show … so you got him to do the show for the same fifty-six thousand five hundred dollars, with a bonus if he
signed for a year … and I get the bonus of a quarter million dollars.”
Libutti later insisted that he was “only puffing” and had never met Gotti, though he added, “he’s the kind of guy I should like to be around. I admire the guy.”
Trump told me in 1991 that he was only vaguely familiar with Libutti and could not identify him if he were in a group of two. That is a common Trump defense, one he has used again and again. Trump boasts he has “the world’s greatest memory,” but when a connection turns out to be a problem, Trump will assert that he cannot remember someone or that he knew them so tangentially that he could not identify them in a crowd of two. In this case there were photographs, casino records, and that birthday video for Edie showing Trump knew Libutti quite well.
“He’s a liar,” Libutti said, spewing four- and seven- and thirteen-letter insults about Trump when he learned of this distancing.
Libutti added that he was aware of all sorts of serious rules violations at Trump Plaza that would be of interest to the casino regulators. He told one story of Donald Trump coming to him on the casino floor and personally handing him a $250,000 check. “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.’ ”
Such an incident would have been captured on the surveillance cameras in the smoky grey domes that dot casino ceilings.
“Now you tell that one to Sweeney,” Libutti said, referring to Jack Sweeney, whom Chairman Perskie had handpicked to be the Division of Gaming Enforcement director. “And when Sweeney hears it you know what he’ll say. He’ll say, ‘Bob
Libutti doesn’t have any credibility and we’re not going to look into it.’ Well, he doesn’t need Bob Libutti because when Donald gave me that check there was a whole casino full of witnesses.”
In February 1991, I advised Sweeney of Libutti’s claim that Trump had personally handed him a check.
“Well, if that was true it would be very serious,” Sweeney told me, “but Libutti’s got no credibility.”
Sweeney was then told that Libutti had anticipated that response and was told about the other witnesses.
“Well, that’ll be thoroughly investigated,” Sweeney added.
The investigation into the check marked the first time that Donald Trump had ever personally been the subject of an enforcement division investigation. It did not last long. Several of the witnesses Libutti identified said they were never contacted, never questioned. Sweeney’s office did call in one witness and asked him about the accusations under oath. The witness was Donald Trump. He denied the accusations. Trump said the check in question had been turned over, but in a perfectly legitimate way. Sweeney took his word for it. That cleared Trump completely. No action was taken.
The commission soon voted to ban Libutti, not for his vile remarks, but for saying he knew John Gotti.
The Casino Control Commission ultimately fined Trump Plaza for discriminating against its own workers and for deceiving the commission with fake-gift cars that were used to funnel cash to Libutti. The Commission also made clear what it thought about the offense of money laundering versus discriminating against women and minority employees. Trump Plaza was fined $200,000 for racial and gender discrimination and $450,000 for sham car deals.
The state deftly avoided investigating the more extensive wrongdoings that Libutti said he knew about. If proven, those claims would surely have cost Trump his license. Trump’s conduct with Libutti, including his claim that he hardly knew the man, was just one part of a long history of flouting the supposedly strict regulations of New Jersey casinos. But even the strictest rules only matter if they are enforced.
As the many episodes recounted in these pages have shown, Trump is remarkably agile at doing as he chooses and getting away with it.
N
o book can capture the entire life of someone who has done half as much as Donald John Trump has in his seventy years. Through sheer force of will, he has made himself a household name and left a dramatic mark on both the biggest city in America and a much smaller one along the New Jersey shore. He has reveled in every bit of it.
As I noted in the introduction, I would be writing a book about Hillary Clinton but for the simple fact that in 1988, my career took me not to Little Rock, Arkansas, but to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Others have written books on Mrs. Clinton, and I encourage people to read them.
What I have attempted to do here was take my direct knowledge of Trump and the many thousands of pages of Trump documents I’ve collected in my nearly half a century as an investigative reporter, and focus on the aspects of Trump’s conduct that I think are most important for voters to ponder before they cast their ballots in November 2016. In winnowing
down all the things I wanted to convey about Trump, I kept in mind two critical lessons for writers generally, plus a third for investigative reporters specifically:
Brevity, first and always, through the use of revelatory details and events, not every detail and every event.
Second, a lesson from F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of the most perceptive of American observers: action is character. Throughout this book, I have made reference to Trump’s conduct. We can never truly know his character, but we can examine and assess it based on his actions.
This is why I focused on Donald Trump’s obsession with money and the trappings of wealth, as well as his many comments about women not as equals, but objects, their value measured in particular by the size of their busts and the length of their legs.
That is also why so much of this book is about Trump’s many complex and little-known relationships with criminals—a vast assortment of con artists, swindlers, mobsters and mob associates, a major drug trafficker he went to bat for, and other unsavory characters. Merely knowing people who are criminals is not the basis for condemnation. I’ve spent many hours of my life with crooked cops, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, police spies, foreign agents, and other rogues. They have been among my best sources. When it suits their interests, crooks can be among the most trustworthy allies. The man the FBI said was the No. 2 hitman west of Chicago once sat in my kitchen, bouncing my then-infant fourth daughter on his knee while I made coffee. He was no threat to me; I was outside the subculture that employed him as enforcer of its rules.