The Donald Trump Story You’re Not Hearing About
there has been remarkably little interest shown in some of Trump’s less-than-savory connections.
One of the exceptions is Johnston, who, over the course of 27 years, has had ample occasion to pay attention to Trump’s finances and mob ties. He was not the first investigative reporter to do so. In 1992, Johnston favorably reviewed the longtime Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett’s highly unauthorized biography, Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, which, in Johnston’s words, “asserts that throughout his adult life, Donald Trump has done business with major organized-crime figures and performed favors for their associates.”
As Barrett said not long after Trump declared for the presidency last year, Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld.” Barrett updates his treatment of Trump in a new digital edition called Trump, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, the Downfall, the Reinvention.
Barrett’s quote appeared in a July 31, 2015, CNN online piece by investigative reporter Chris Frates, who added:
The allegations are getting new scrutiny as Trump runs for president, largely on his record as a successful and extraordinarily wealthy businessman. As Trump cements his leads atop the polls, questions about how he made his billions, and who helped him make them, are starting to take center stage.
While the story ran on CNN’s website, it never got any air time on the cable network. I tried to ask Frates why his investigation didn’t get onto TV, but didn’t hear back from him. In any event, nearly 11 months later, those questions about Trump’s financial life have still not reached that elusive center stage. The question is why.
Unlike its TV compe ors, ABC News has raised some questions about Trump’s mob relations. Last December, a Good Morning America piece by the network’s investigative master Brian Ross touched on one tendril: Trump’s relationship with a twice-convicted felon, the Russian émigré Felix Sater, who (along with several other felons) occupied office space in Trump Tower. On air, Ross reported that Donald Trump had testified under oath in a civil lawsuit that Sater “helped develop the Trump SoHo hotel and condominium in New York City.”
Online, in a simultaneous piece co-written with Matthew Mosk, Ross noted that in 1991, Sater got into an argument with a commodities broker at the bar of a New York restaurant, smashed a margarita glass and with the broken-off stem, slashed the man in the cheek and neck, breaking his cheek and jaw, severing nerves and lacerating his face and jaw. The victim required 110 s ches. Sater was convicted of first-degree assault and sent to prison in 1993.
Then, in 2000, he pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges for running a $40 million “pump and dump” stock scam and for, as Mosk and Ross wrote, “collaborating with members of four New York mob families.” Sater served no time, however, because the FBI testified at his sentencing hearing that he was “an important witness on both mob-related and national security matters.”
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