Slickest con man

The slickest con man out of New York City, and has just been basically made the Republican nominee. One of the few people who has touched on Trump’s amazing history in relationship to organized crime in America, that’s gotten virtually no attention. Roy Cohn is a figure in American history who is well known to people at least of our generation, probably not so much to the one that’s casting a lot of ballots now. But Roy Cohn was the sidekick and chief witch hunter for Senator Joseph McCarthy, after Roy Cohn had left the Senate, he went into private practice.

The set himself up basically as the house counsel to a couple of the crime bosses in New York City—the Genovese crime family and the Gambino crime family. The same time, he adopted a young developer from Queens looking to make his first mark as a developer in Manhattan named Donald J. Trumph. He being a developer in New York City, to be fair, you had to, in those days—this is talking about the late ’70s and 1980s, early ’90s—you had to brush up against the mob. They were a force both on the employer side and particularly on the union side. But despite that problem, Don Trump seemed to keep running into them over and over again. They bought apartments in his Trump Tower, in Trump Plaza. They kept showing up as people that he was carousing with.

Donald Trump met with a couple FBI agents, protesting that he was concerned that in Atlantic City there might be organized crime figures, and what could he do to protect himself from this, which is a little like saying, "Is it true that there was a guy named Al Capone once who didn’t pay his taxes?" He did go to Atlantic City. He probably got in bed with half a dozen mobsters who he bought land from down there.

Ted Rudow III, MA