Free The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston Page B

DJT asked Weichselbaum to permit his friend Marla Maples to reside in the Weichselbaum condominium. DJT has emphatically denied this allegation.”
    The report offered no indication that the DGE had interviewed Weichselbaum, his brother, Maples, the probation officer,or anyone else who might have contradicted Trump’s denial. Again, not asking questions was key to how the DGE protected its own reputation while simultaneously protecting casino owners from themselves.
    As a casino owner, Trump could have lost his license for associating with Weichselbaum. But the DGE never asked whether he had any financial entanglement, obviously undisclosed, with Weichselbaum or anyone connected to him, including whether he had staked any of the drug deals, based on its publicly released reports. Without the DGE putting into the public record the very obvious questions, together with the answers, about what motivated Trump to make such risky moves—including denying the letter he wrote seeking soft treatment for Weichselbaum—we can only speculate about what may have influenced Trump’s conduct regarding the drug trafficker.
    Trump called my home in spring 2016, when I was working on a long piece for
Politico
magazine about his ties to various criminals. After a few questions about what I was up to, Trump asked what I wanted to know, even though he already had my twenty-one questions in writing. I asked what motivated him to write the letter for Weichselbaum. Trump said he “hardly knew” the man and didn’t remember anything about him. When I reminded Trump that he said on national television just a few months earlier that he has “the world’s greatest memory,” Trump just said that “that was long ago.”
    As Trump often does in calls to journalists, he told me he liked some of my work and that I had been fair at times. Then, with a pause, he added that if he didn’t like what I was about to publish he would sue me. That last comment surprised me a bit. Trump knows that I am not intimidatable. I reminded him that he is a public figure. Under the law, that means a libelsuit would require him to show that I wrote something with reckless disregard for the truth—something no one has ever accused me of in nearly fifty years of investigative reporting.
    “I know I’m a public figure but I’ll sue you anyway,” he said before ringing off.
    Weichselbaum was not the last unsavory character Trump got close to. Much more recently, Trump chose to work with a convicted art thief who goes by the name “Joey No Socks,” as well as with the son of a Russian mob boss, a man with a violent history … and there’s video to prove it.

9
POLISH BRIGADE
    B efore Donald Trump could erect Trump Tower—his signature building—on Fifth Avenue, he had to knock down the Bonwit Teller department store, which had catered to fashionable women since 1929.
    Bonwit’s twelve-story façade was adorned with a pair of giant bas-relief panels considered priceless examples of the Art Deco era: two naked women with flowing scarves, dancers perhaps, cut in limestone. The building’s entry featured an immense grillwork made from Benedict nickel, hammered aluminum, and other materials, which gave it the impression of a lusciously large piece of jewelry when backlit at night.
American Architect
magazine’s 1929 appraisal of the building described it as “a sparkling jewel in keeping with the character of the store.”
    Trump assured those worried about the architectural treasures that he would give them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art if removal was not prohibitively expensive, a promise he would not keep.
    Instead of hiring an experienced demolition contractor, Trump chose Kaszycki & Sons Contractors, a window washing business owned by a Polish émigré. Upward of two hundred men began demolishing the building in midwinter 1980. The men worked without hard hats.They lacked facemasks, even though asbestos—known to cause incurable cancers—swirled