Alan Zendell, June 1, 2024

For more than fifty years, Donald Trump has run a business that flouted every law and regulation he found inconvenient, fraudulently kept its books, and falsified records to avoid paying taxes. He hobnobbed with mobsters, most notably, John Gotti, who was the leader of the Gambino mafia family, and was mentored by Gotti’s consigliere, Roy Cohn, both of whom were convicted of numerous felonies and died in federal prisons.

Trump was closely aligned with Gotti during the time period in which the latter was guilty of corruption throughout New York’s commercial real estate world, and using large construction projects to launder millions of ill-begotten dollars. When I first researched the Trump-Gotti-Cohn connection, I was shocked at the pictures and accounts of Trump partying with organized crime figures in New York nightclubs in the 1980s. The sources were not the sleazy tabloids Trump used to cover up his own misdeeds, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

On September 1, 2016, nine weeks before the Trump-Clinton election, WSJ published, Donald Trump and the Mob, a history of Trump’s involvement with New York mafia families. The article noted, in particular, that Trump contracted with known mobsters in the construction of Trump Plaza in New York City and the four casinos he built in Atlantic City, NJ. With respect to the latter, in the midst of the lengthy WSJ compendium was Robet LeButti, who the Journal described as “a major profit source at one Trump casino. … His gambling losses earned Trump Plaza $11 million between 1986 and 1989, state documents show.” LeButti told investigators his boss was John Gotti.

Since this isn’t a court of law, we can speculate. Gotti was sent to federal prison for money laundering, among other things; LeButti, who claimed to work for Gotti, lost $11 million gambling in Trump’s casino over four years. What would you conclude? I’d go a step further, though I can’t prove it until the records around Gotti’s conviction are unsealed. Add to the WSJ article the fact that celebrity photos and videos of Trump, Cohn, and Gotti hugging each other stopped abruptly before Gotti was indicted. Was Trump given immunity by the FBI to testify against Gotti and avoid being indicted himself?

This idea is supported by a February 3, 2023 NYT article, Trump Likened to Mob Boss John Gotti, which reported on a new book by respected former Manhattan prosecutor Mark Pomerantz. Pomerantz worked for several Manhattan District Attorneys, including Cyrus Vance, who held the office before Alvin Bragg, who just won 34 felony convictions against Trump. Pomerantz claims Manhattan prosecutors had been investigating Trump’s mob connections for years, but Vance believed they didn’t have enough proof to convince a jury, and dropped the case. Pomerantz resigned in protest, determined to inform the public about Trump’s past.

The Times reported that Trump grew his business, fortune and fame “through a pattern of criminal activity,” according to Pomerantz, who wrote that his office had been considering charging Trump with racketeering under the RICO statute, until Vance dropped the investigation. This is important context for Trump allies claiming that the Biden administration weaponized the courts against Trump. If you’re a New Yorker, you know no one in Washington dictates to either New York State or New York City. New York is where Trump built his criminal enterprise over fifty years, and he and his company have been at odds with law enforcement during most of that time.

He lost fraud suits concerning Trump University and financial losses suffered by Atlantic City. His company was found guilty of fraud and his CFO, Allen Weisselberg is in prison because of it. He was fined $350 million in a civil suit by E. Jean Carroll, who convinced a court that she had been sexually assaulted and defamed by Trump. In the past year, he has been fined more than a billion dollars for his criminal actions.

The convictions by a jury of his peers, last Thursday, were simply the most recent event in a forty-year long attempt to bring Trump to justice. He is a life-long criminal and sociopath who is promising to tear up our Constitution if he wins re-election, and to promote violent insurrection if he loses. Even the Libertarian Party wants nothing to do with him.

Things are going to get a lot worse between now and November. The divisiveness in our country that Trump exacerbated and capitalized on goes very deep. As a scientist/engineer, I have spent my professional life avoiding corrupting objective facts with emotion and bias, yet the current state of our nation defies explanation.

It makes no sense that any rationally thinking woman, person of color, or immigrant would ever vote for Trump, much less the hard-working, largely blue collar base that supports him, whom he screws over regularly with his tax and trade policies. There’s something the rest of us are missing, and we’d better figure out what is before the madness of the MAGA movement destroys us.