When Macari told his boss what had happened, Trump placed a panicked telephone call to Daniel Sullivan—a labor fixer, FBI informant, suspect in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and Trump’s personal negotiator for the Grand Hyatt contract with the hotel workers’ union.
“
Donald told me he was having some difficulties,” Sullivan later testified, “and he admitted to me that—seeking my advice—he had some illegal Polish employees on the job. I reacted by saying to Donald that ‘I think you are nuts.’ I told him to fire them promptly if he had any brains.”
As Sullivan later told me, along with reporter Wayne Barrett and others, hiring Polish workers who were in the country illegally and then having them work without standard safety equipment was not just foolish, it was reckless. For all his dealings with Trump, Sullivan was repeatedly astonished by the businessman’s lack of prudence. He said that whenever Trump saw an opportunity to collect more money or to cut his costs by not paying people what they had earned, he did. “Common sense just never took hold” when Trump had money on his mind, Sullivan told me several times.
To Sullivan, only greed and an utter lack of regard for human life could allow Trump to let the Polish Brigade work without hard hats or the facemasks they needed to keep asbestos from entering their lungs.
“Men were stripping electric wires with their bare hands,” Sullivan later testified.
There is no record of any federal, state, or city safety inspector filing a report during the demolition. In a 1990 Trenton
restaurant interview, I asked Sullivan how a project of this size could have been erected in the heart of Manhattan without attracting government job safety inspectors. Sullivan just looked at me. When I widened my eyes to make clear that I wanted an explicit answer, he said, “You know why.” When I persisted, anticipating that Sullivan might specify bribes to inspectors, he said that unions and concrete suppliers were not the only areas where Trump’s lawyer, Roy Cohn, had influence.
Shortly after Trump called Sullivan, a new demolition crew arrived on the site. They were officially members of Housewreckers Local 95, but there were only fifteen or so unionists among them. Normally, employing non-union workers (in this case, Kaszycki & Sons) at a union work site would prompt an immediate shutdown. But, as federal court documents would later show, the Housewreckers Union was firmly under the control of the mobsters whose consigliere was Roy Cohn, Trump’s mentor and lawyer. So the union went along with a scheme to employ non-union workers, cheat them out of their pay, and shortchange the union health and pension funds.
Several simple but clever techniques in filling out records ensured that the union received no written notice of the non-union workers. Not incidentally, those workers were nonetheless required to pay union initiation fees and had union dues deducted from their meager pay, even though (as a federal judge later concluded) they were never actually in the union. Macari, Trump’s overseer, testified that he reviewed and approved these documents before paying Kaszycki.
Six Polish workers went to a lawyer named John Szabo for help getting paid. In early April, Macari saw to it that the window washing company Trump hired for the demolition
job gave the six men a total of almost $5,000 in back pay. More workers then sought out Szabo. By July, as summer temperatures soared, the unpaid wages came to almost $104,000, even though the rate of pay was under five dollars an hour with no overtime, despite a grueling eighty-four-hour workweek of heavy manual labor.
One day, to keep the workers swinging their sledgehammers, Macari showed up with a wad of cash. Instead of paying the men directly, court papers show, Macari gave the money to the foreman. Anyone who wanted their money had to kick back fifty bucks to the foreman, testimony showed. After that, Macari testified later, he handed cash directly to the Polish Brigade members at least twice.
After the building was taken down, a dissident member of the Housewreckers Union, Harry Diduck, took the brave step of suing the corrupt union, Trump, and an arm of Metropolitan Life Insurance (Trump’s financial partner in Trump Tower) for the wages and benefits the Polish Brigade members should have received. Trump insisted he owed nothing and filed motion after motion that delayed the proceedings, which his lawyers characterized as baseless and unfair.
When the trial finally made it to federal court, Trump testified that he had no knowledge that any workers were underpaid, or that the Polish workers lacked hard hats and other safety equipment.
Judge Stewart, in a lengthy opinion, found that Trump’s testimony lacked credibility. The judge said it would have been easy to identify the Polish workers—they were the only ones on the demolition site without hard hats.
Judge Stewart ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to cheat the workers of their pay. At the heart of this conspiracy was Trump’s violation of his duty of loyalty—also
known as fiduciary duty—to the workers and to the union. This “breach involved fraud and the Trump defendants knowingly participated in this breach,” Judge Stewart held.
The judge awarded damages of $325,000 plus interest. Trump, who has consistently maintained he acted lawfully, appealed. He later settled. The agreement was sealed, so the amount Trump paid remains unknown. Diduck’s dedication to his fellow workers showed amazing persistence—the sealed settlement took effect more than eighteen years after the demolition began.
There was no litigation over the destruction of the bas-relief façades and the valuable entry way grillwork, which Trump had promised to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A spokesman for Trump who identified himself as John Baron told
The New York Times
that Trump had ordered their destruction. Baron said three appraisers told Trump that the Art Deco sculpture was “without artistic merit.” Museum curators, the building’s architect, and a host of architectural experts all said that was nonsense.
Baron said removing the art would have cost Trump more than a half million dollars in demolition delays, other unspecified expenses, and (without explanation) additional taxes. That last item may have struck those following the dispute as curious; by donating the art, Trump would have qualified for an income tax deduction. Of course, that deduction would have no value if Trump did not owe any income taxes in 1980, as public records show was the case in 1978 and 1979, and would be again in 1984, 1992, 1994, and likely every other year since 1978.
The entry grillwork that
American Architect
magazine had so highly praised a half-century earlier just vanished. Baron said the grillwork and the limestone panels, if preserved, could not have been sold for more than $9,000. Art experts dismissed
that as nonsense as well. The Metropolitan Museum said its twentieth-century art curators never would have requested the donation of objects that lacked artistic merit or had no value in the market. The museum said one appraiser had estimated the value of the art in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Others called the destroyed artifacts priceless, comparing them to the renowned artwork on the Rockefeller Center buildings.
Otto J. Teegan, who designed the grillwork in 1929, was still alive in 1980. Baron had said the grillwork just disappeared. Teegan wasn’t buying that. Teegan and others told the newspaper they were appalled. Teegan said the grille “would have required cranes and trucks to be removed and could not merely be mislaid or easily stolen. It’s not a thing you could slip in your coat and walk away with” since the heavy metal grillwork measured fifteen by twenty-five feet.
Trump spoke up days later, saying safety concerns were his real worry, namely the fear of heavy limestone falling onto the sidewalk and street. “My biggest concern was the safety of the people on the street below,” he said. “If one of those stones had slipped, people could have been killed. To me, it would not have been worth that kind of risk.”
Noted art dealer Robert Miller, who watched the destruction of the limestone sculptures from his gallery across the street, described how huge pieces of stone did in fact crash to the Fifth Avenue sidewalk. “They were just jackhammered in half and pulled down in such a way that they just shattered … [I]t was just tragic. They were very much in the Art Deco style—very beautiful and very gracious.”
Trump insisted that he was being cheap in destroying the art, rather than preserving it, to save what may have been about $32,000. “I contribute that much every month to painters
and artists—that’s nothing,” Trump said. Years later, as a presidential candidate, Trump would have little evidence to support his claim to being an “ardent philanthropist,” as we shall see.
The destruction of the Bonwit Teller artwork, together with the Polish Brigade case, highlighted some of Trump’s unscrupulous business practices, but it also brought to light another intriguing aspect of Trump’s conduct, one that raises serious questions about the lack of judgment that troubled Daniel Sullivan. For years, Trump used fake identities to mislead journalists—and at least once to menace someone who was just doing their duty. This will be examined after we take a look at some other aspects of Trump, including how emotions influence how much Trump says he is worth.
O
ver more than four decades of promoting himself in public, Donald Trump has declared widely varying figures for his net worth. The numbers sometimes differ by billions of dollars in just a matter of days.
In 1990, when his business empire was on the verge of collapse, Trump told me and many other journalists that he was worth $3 billion. He told others $5 billion. I got my hands on a copy of his personal net worth statement that spring, which revealed a much smaller figure. Two months later, a report commissioned by his bankers and introduced in casino regulatory hearings put Trump in the red by almost $300 million.
In spring 2015, as he prepared to run for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump declared his net worth, on different days, to be $8.7 billion, $10 billion, and in one case $11 billion.
Just how does Trump arrive at these fluctuating figures? They do not appear to take into account factors as basic as stock prices, changes in real estate values, and interest rates.
Trump’s net worth is central to his public persona as a kind of modern Midas. It is so important to him that he sued veteran journalist Tim O’Brien over a net worth estimate in his 2005 book,
TrumpNation
. O’Brien—who has edited my work in
The New York Times
—estimated Trump’s worth at $150 million to $250 million, based on documents Trump had shown him and statements from three unnamed sources. Trump’s lawsuit said the correct figure was between $5 billion and $6 billion. The lawsuit accused O’Brien of deliberately undervaluing Trump’s net worth so he could sell more books, causing irreparable damage to Trump’s reputation as a billionaire.
In pursuing the lawsuit, Trump testified under oath about his actual net worth. But his answers were not the dry recitations of asset values minus debts usually found in financial investigations. The testimony was quintessentially Trumpian.
“Mr. Trump, have you always been completely truthful in your public statements about your net worth of properties?” O’Brien’s lawyer asked.
“I try,” Trump answered.
“Have you ever not been truthful?”
“My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings, but I try.”
In that statement, attorney Andrew C. Ceresney of Debevoise & Plimpton—who represented both O’Brien and his publisher—found exactly the opening he was looking for.
“Let me just understand that a little bit,” Ceresney said. “Let’s talk about net worth for a second. You said that the net worth goes up and down based upon your own feelings?”
“Yes,” Trump answered. “Even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day. Then you have a September
11th, and you don’t feel so good about yourself and you don’t feel so good about the world and you don’t feel so good about New York City. Then you have a year later, and the city is as hot as a pistol. Even months after that it was a different feeling. So yeah, even my own feelings affect my value to myself.”
“When you publicly state what you’re worth,” the lawyer asked, “what do you base that number on?”
“
I would say it’s my general attitude at the time that the question may be asked. And as I say, it varies,” Trump replied.
Trump’s answers were a remarkably candid explanation of his behavior, which he modulates in public to polish the careful image of his ability to make money through deal artistry. Whether being under oath prompted his candor or he simply felt relaxed after decades of lawsuits is unknowable. A New Jersey state appeals court, in its 2011 decision dismissing Trump’s lawsuit, concluded that Trump’s testimony “failed to provide a reliable measure” of his net worth that could be used to impeach O’Brien’s reporting. In short, the core issue in Trump’s lawsuit was not hard facts and figures, but Trump’s feelings. The lawsuit had no basis in reality.
The decision cited a document that O’Brien said Trump showed him three times, the “Statement of Financial Condition prepared by Weiser L.L.P., Certified Public Accountants,” as a measure of Trump’s fortune. The judge wrote of that problematic document:
A preface to that statement demonstrates its limited value as an accurate representation of Trump’s net worth. The accountants cautioned that they had “not audited or reviewed the accompanying statement of financial condition and, accordingly, do not express an opinion or any other form of assurance on it.”
Further, the accountants noted significant departures from generally accepted accounting principles, and stated “[t]he effects of the departures from generally accepted accounting principles as described above have not been determined.”
Explaining the lack of audit or review, the judge quoted Gerald Rosenblum, one of the accountants who helped prepare the statement. Rosenblum testified that he did not try to independently assess Trump’s financial condition: “
I asked the client to provide me with a list of liabilities as they existed at June 30, 2005,” said Rosenblum. “The client presented me with a list, in essence. I’m not certain to this day that I was aware of all of Mr. Trump’s liabilities at that point in time, and I sought no corroboration.”