Weichselbaum worked for a helicopter company that shuttled clients to and from Trump’s 
TSG says Weichselbaum had previously been convicted of grand theft auto and embezzlement. A spy says Weichselbaum was the general manager of the Trump-connected helicopter company from 1983 until 1986 and that his brother Frank Weichselbaum was one of the men who owned it.
- In October 1985, Weichselbaum was charged with trafficking cocaine and marijuana through Florida to Ohio, Kentucky, and North Carolina. He was indicted in Ohio and ultimately pleaded guilty to two felonies in the case. Spy and TSG say he cooperated with authorities in the case.
- After Weichselbaum was indicted but before he went to prison, per Spy andTSG, he began renting an apartment in the Trump Plaza building in Manhattan. The Smoking Gun says that Trump owned the individual unit and rented it directly to Weichselbaum as a landlord. while Weichselbaum’s trafficking case was pending the Trump Plaza unit was partly paid for in “barter”—i.e. in-kind services provided by Weichselbaum’s helicopter company.
- During this time, Weichselbaum applied for a change of venue in his cocaine case. The case was transferred from Ohio to Newark, New Jersey, where the new judge in his case was …
- Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump’s sister! She then handed the case off to a different judge, to whom Trump wrote a letter asking for leniency for Weichselbaum before his November 1987 sentencing. (Spy, TSG, and Barrett’s book all report on the letter.)
- Weichselbaum was convicted of two felony charges and ultimately received a three-year sentence. He spent about 18 months in prison beginning in January 1988. After he was released, he moved into a different Trump property—Trump Tower—in an apartment that TSG and Spy say his girlfriend had purchased. A spy says Weichselbaum told his parole board he planned to work for Trump after his release.
- Spy, Barrett, and TSG say Trump continued to pay Weichselbaum’s erstwhile company—which per Spy went bankrupt and reformed itself under a new name twice during the time Trump was paying it—for helicopter services after his indictment. Spy specifically says the payments continued until 1990.
- Trump launched his own New York–Atlantic City helicopter service in 1988.
Weichselbaum is now 74 and living in Los Angeles and does not appear to have had further troubles with the law. (His son, however, at one point spent 46 months in prison and now, runs an X-rated webcam business.)
In summary, multiple outlets have reported that Donald Trump vouched for and rented an apartment to Joseph Weichselbaum—a known felon and soon-to-be-convicted drug trafficker. For some still-unknown reason, Weichselbaum’s drug prosecution passed briefly through Trump’s sister’s courtroom in a state that had no apparent connection to the case. And Trump continued to pay Weichselbaum’s helicopter company after Weichselbaum was convicted and (according to Spy) after Trump had founded his own helicopter business.
A Trump campaign spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment about Trump’s relationship with Weichselbaum.“Donald is a master of manipulating the conventions of journalism,” explained the veteran reporter. He proceeded to shatter many of those conventions in a book talk that was frequently punctuated with the declaration “because Donald just makes it up.” Trump “a modern-day P.T. Barnum.
It chronicles the rise of Trump’s fortunes, beginning with the Republican presidential nominee’s grandfather, a German immigrant who, ran a “whorehouse,” and continuing through Trump’s father, is an industrious businessman with some unfortunate views.
Trump’s association with Cohn “taught Donald how to hurt people”as part of a disturbing pattern. “We have never had a major party candidate for president with the kind of relationships Donald Trump has, While some past presidents have had unsavory friends and business associations, “They were not the mob. They were not drug traffickers.”
Russian-born stock fraudster and admitted fellow traveler with the mob. Sater is now a defendant in tax fraud case papers unsealed earlier this month named Trump and two of his children as “material witnesses.”
He invited his audience to contrast the treatment Trump gave a convicted drug dealer who ran a company that operated Trump’s helicopter fleet with what he did to his infant great-nephew, gravely ill with an ailment that caused seizures.
For his troubled helicopter provider, Joey Weichselbaum, the real estate mogul provided a luxury apartment, continued employment and a testimonial to the court after the Weichselbaum’s indictment for drug trafficking, But Trump was much less accommodating to the grandson of his late older brother after the baby’s parents challenged the will of his father, Fred Trump (which cut them out), in court. Trump removed the ailing child from the family’s medical insurance policy. “I can’t help that, Trump telling a New York Daily News reporter who asked why he cut off the infant’s health care coverage (a court later restored it).
THE REAL DONALD TRUMP
Vindictiveness is a point of pride for Trump,“His personal motto is ‘get revenge
“She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad… I can’t stomach disloyalty…and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable.”
In another outside-the-box move for a journalist, reach out to some of the evangelical ministers who back Trump, offering to provide evidence of how much the candidate’s personal views deviate from the philosophy that Jesus Christ outlined in his Sermon on the Mount. “I’ve called them. So far none has taken me up on the offer what are you getting out of him?
Trump was trying to break into the casino business in the New Jersey beach town, Trump document collection in the world Donald has paid no federal income taxes for years.” That’s based on some documents that have leaked out from various court cases, Trump’s lack of charitable giving to his own family foundation (which suggested no need for deductions), and a gaping tax loophole available to real estate developers.
It’s also possible that Trump’s decision to break with long-standing campaign tradition and not release his tax forms could be based on his reluctance to reveal his true net worth. While Trump is “very rich,” he, like many others, questions whether he’s quite as rich as he makes himself out to be. Trump’s chief talent lies in “making deals to bring in money that supports a lifestyle” fit for a billionaire “How many billionaires, who you really know are billionaires, do you see out hawking ties, steaks, bottled water and board games?”
For all Dems & Reps denunciations of #Trump2016 Journalist have made Americans uniquely qualified to understand the Republican presidential nominee’s appeal. “I started documenting the growing inequality in America “Government rules take from the many and give to the already rich few.” The people who are being inexorably pushed out of the middle class are on the edge of despair, not least because their plight is so invisible, he argued. “They get almost nothing
DEMOCRACY & GOVERNMENT
Late last month, in an interview with Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, CNN host Jake Tapper asked the candidate whether he would disavow an endorsement from longtime Ku Klux Klan leader and white nationalist celebrity David Duke. Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about David Duke,” he said. Moments later, he added, “I know nothing about white supremacists.”
Trump has since walked back his comments, blaming his hesitance to condemn the Klan on a “bad earpiece.” The matter has now been filed away into the ever-growing archives of volatile statements Trump has made about race and ethnicity during the current election cycle—a list that includes kicking off his presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists, calling for the “‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and commenting that perhaps a Black Lives Matter protester at one of his rallies “should have been roughed up.”
But the particulars of the David Duke incident call to mind yet another news story, one that suggests that Trump’s father, the late New York real estate titan Fred Trump, once wore the robe and hood of a Klansman.
Versions of this story emerged last September when Boing Boing dug up an old New York Times article from May of 1927 that listed a Fred Trump among those arrested at a Klan rally in Jamaica, Queens, when “1,000 Klansmen and 100 policemen staged a free-for-all,” in the streets. Donald Trump’s father would have been 21 in 1927 and had spent most of his life in Queens.
As Boing Boing pointed out, the Times account simply names Fred Trump as one of the seven individuals arrested at the rally, and it states that he was released without charges, leaving room for the possibility that he “may have been an innocent bystander, falsely named, or otherwise the victim of mistaken identity during or following a chaotic event.”
A few weeks after Boing Boing unearthed that 88-year-old scoop, the New York Times asked Donald Trump about the possibility that his father had been arrested at a Klan event. The younger Trump denied it all, telling interviewer Jason Horowitz that “it never happened” four times. When Horowitz asked if his father had lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road—the address listed for the Fred Trump arrested at the 1927 Klan rally—Donald dismissed the claim as “totally false.”
“We lived on Wareham,” he told Horowitz. “The Devonshire—I know there is a road ‘Devonshire,’ but I don’t think my father ever lived on Devonshire.” Trump went on to deny everything else in the Times’ account of the 1927 rally: “It shouldn’t be written because it never happened, number one. And number two, there was nobody charged.”
Clipping from the Long Island Daily Press, January 22, 1936
Biographical records confirm that the Trump family did live on Wareham Place in Queens in the 1940s when Donald was a kid. But according to at least one archived newspaper clip, Fred Trump also lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road: A wedding announcement in January 22, 1936, issue of the Long Island Daily Press,places Fred Trump at that address, and refers to his wife as “Mary MacLeod,” which is Donald Trump’s mother’s maiden name.
Moreover, three additional newspaper clips unearthed by VICE contain separate accounts of Fred Trump’s arrest at the May 1927 KKK rally in Queens, each of which seems to confirm the Times account of the events that day. While the clips don’t confirm whether Fred Trump was actually a member of the Klan, they do suggest that the rally—and the subsequent arrests—did happen, and did involve Donald Trump’s father, contrary to the candidate’s denials. A fifth article mentions the seven arrestees without giving names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested—presumably including Trump—were wearing Klan attire.
Clipping from the Daily Star June 1, 1927
The June 1, 1927, account of the May 31 Klan rally printed in a defunct Brooklyn paper called the Daily Star specifies that a Fred Trump “was dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse.” That article lists seven total arrests and states that four of those arrested were expected to go to court, and two were paroled. Fred Trump was the only one not held on charges.
Clipping from the Queens County Evening News, June 2, 1927
The Klan’s reaction to the alleged police brutality at the rally was the subject of another article, published in the Queens County Evening News on June 2, 1927, and titled “Klan Placards Assail Police, As War Vets Seek Parade Control.” The piece is mainly about the Klan distributing leaflets about being “assaulted” by the “Roman Catholic police of New York City” at that same rally. The article mentions Fred Trump as having been “discharged” and gives the Devonshire Road address, along with the names and addresses of the other six men who faced charges.
Clipping from the Richmond Hill record, June 3, 1927
Yet another account in another defunct local newspaper, the Richmond Hill Record,published on June 3, 1927, lists Fred Trump as one of the “Klan Arrests,” and also lists the Devonshire Road address.
Clipping from the Long Island Daily Press, June 2, 1927
Another article about the rally, published by the Long Island Daily Press on June 2, 1927, mentions that there were seven arrestees without listing names, and claims that all of the individuals arrested were wearing Klan attire. The story, titled “Meeting on Parade Is Called Off,” focuses on the police actions at the rally, noting criticism of the cops for brutally lashing out at the Klan supporters, who had assembled during a Memorial Day parade.
While the Long Island Daily Press doesn’t mention Fred Trump specifically, the number of arrestees cited in the report is consistent with the other accounts of the rally. Significantly, the article refers to all of the arrestees as “berobed marchers.” If Fred Trump, or another one of the attendees, wasn’t dressed in a robe at the time, that may have been a reporting error worth correcting.
According to Rory McVeigh, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Notre Dame, the version of the Klan that would have been active in Queens during the 1920s may not have necessarily participated in stereotypical KKK activities like fiery crosses and lynch mobs.
“The Klan that became very popular in the early 1920s did advocate white supremacy like the original Klan,” McVeigh told VICE in an email. “But in that respect, [its views were] not too much different from a lot of other white Americans of that time period.” In New York, McVeigh added, “the organization’s opposition to immigration and Catholics probably held the biggest appeal for most of the people who joined.”
None of the articles prove that Fred Trump was a member of the Klan, and it’s possible that he was, as Boing Boing suggested, just a bystander at the rally. But while Donald Trump is absolutely right to say that his father was not charged in the 1927 incident, the candidate’s other claims—that Fred Trump never lived at 175-24 Devonshire Road, and more importantly, that his involvement in a Klan rally “never happened”—appear to be untrue.
The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Photo by Time & Life Pictures via Getty
In the decades following the 1927 rally, after Fred Trump had gone on to become a wealthy real estate developer and landlord to thousands of New Yorkers, he faced accusations of racism, some of which were relatively quiet and informal. In the 1950s, one of his tenants, folk icon Woody Guthrie, wrote in the lyrics of an unpublished song that Fred Trump had drawn a “color line” in his Brooklyn neighborhood. “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up,” the lyrics go.According to Trump biographer Gwenda Blair, Fred Trump, who had close ties to the Federal Housing Administration in the 1950s, likely profited from racist practices that the government tacitly endorsed at the time.
Formal accusations of racial bias in Fred Trump’s residential real estate business eventually materialized in 1973, around the time that his son Donald was taking over management of the company. In a lawsuit filed that year, the US Department of Justice alleged that Trump Management Corporation had violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by systematically denying people rentals “because of race and color.” Fred Trump, testifying as company president, said he was “unfamiliar” with the Fair Housing Act, and that he hadn’t changed his business practices after the federal law went into effect.
In 1975, the Trumps made a deal with the government to resolve the suit without an admission of guilt. According to a New York Times story from June 11, 1975, the Trump Management Corporation “promised not to discriminate against blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other minorities.” But in 1978, the Justice Department filed another discrimination suit against the company, alleging that the Trumps weren’t complying with the original terms of the 1975 settlement.
A 1979 story in the Village Voice chronicled the rise of Trump’s real estate empire, including allegations of racial discrimination at properties managed by Trump. According to the Voice, when there were vacancies in a Trump housing block, rental applications were secretly marked with the applicant’s race, and doormen were coached to discourage black people from renting. At times, Trump rental agents were allegedly told simply not to rent to black people. In 1983, the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal looked at two “Trump Village” residential properties, and found that they were 95 percent white.
In subsequent years, as Donald Trump morphed into a grandstanding tabloid celebrity, he developed a reputation for agitating the public about racially-charged issues. In 1989, he faced national criticism over full-page ads he took out in New York newspapers, warning of “roving bands of wild criminals” and calling for the return of the death penalty in a veiled reference to the Central Park Five. More recently, in the lead-up to the last presidential race, he reignited right-wing conspiracies over Barack Obama’s birthplace, sending a team of investigators to Hawaii to uncover the president’s true origins.
So the fact that race has become a central part of Trump’s 2016 campaign should come as no surprise. Despite Trump’s own insistence that he’s the “least racist person that you have ever met,” devoted racists like Duke are thrilled that The Donald has “sparked an insurgency.” Trump may reject their endorsements, but that doesn’t mean they’ve rejected him in return. MORE PROBLEMS
Donald Trump and Kids Named in $250M Tax Scam
The lawsuit, unsealed Thursday, describes the scheme as simple, telling the judge ‘there need be no fear of complexity, for there is none
Four Donald Trump-licensed real-estate developments are at the center of a huge income tax evasion scheme, according to allegations in a lawsuit unsealed Thursday afternoon by a judge in Manhattan.
The presumptive Republican nominee is not personally accused. He is described as a “material witness” in the evasion of taxes on as much as $250 million in income. According to the court papers, that includes $100 million in profits and $65 million in real-estate transfer taxes from a Manhattan high-rise project bearing his familiar name.
However, his status may change, according to the lawyers who filed the lawsuit, Richard Lerner, and Frederick M. Oberlander, citing Trump’s testimony about Felix Sater, a convicted stock swindler at the center of the alleged scheme.
Trump received tens of millions of dollars in fees and partnership interests in one of the four projects, the Trump Soho New York, a luxury high rise in lower Manhattan. His son Donald Junior and his daughter Ivanka also were paid in fees and partnership interests, the lawyers said and are also material witnesses in the case.
Trump and Sater traveled extensively together and were photographed and interviewed in Denver and Loveland, Colorado, Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, and New York. The two Trump children were also with Sater in Moscow, Alan Garten, the Trump Organization general counsel, has said.
Trump has testified about Sater in a Florida lawsuit accusing the two of them of fraud in a failed high-rise project. Trump testified that he had a glancing knowledge of Sater and would not recognize him if he were sitting in the room.
play iconThe Last Time Donald Trump’s Tax Returns Went Public, He Paid $0The Last Time Donald Trump’s Tax Returns Went Public, He Paid $0play iconTrump Says ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Do Something About ClintonTrump Says ‘Second Amendment People’ Could Do Something About Clintonplay iconNY Daily News Front Page Calls For Donald Trump To End His CampaignNY Daily News Front Page Calls For Donald Trump To End His Campaign
Sater controlled an investment firm named Bayrock, with offices in Trump Tower, and sought to develop branded Trump Tower luxury buildings in Moscow and other cities. Court papers show his salary in 2006 was $7 million, but it alleges that was a pittance compared to his real income.
Sater then moved into the Trump Organization offices. He carried a business card, issued by the Trump Organization, identifying him as a “senior adviser” to Trump.
ADVERTISING The tax fraud lawsuit included 212 pages of documents, among them a flow chart that the plaintiff claims showed how the scheme worked. The lawsuit alleges the tax fraud scheme as simple, telling the judge “there need be no fear of complexity, for there is none.”
real estate, tax fraud Trump
HANDOUT
The four developments were all handled as partnerships. Partnerships are not taxed and are rarely audited because the profits are supposed to be reported as going to the partners personally. The lawsuit says the profits simply were not reported when Sater and others took their partnership profits and other income from the deals.
The state tax fraud lawsuit is known as a qui tam case in which citizens file as private attorneys general on behalf of the government. In effect, Lerner and Oberlander are acting as prosecutors in the alleged tax fraud.
Eric Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, learned of the case soon after it was filed in state court last August and declined to intervene. His office confirmed that stance Thursday after the lawsuit was unsealed.
The suit says Sater and other defendants owe at least $7 million in New York state income taxes, a sum that would be tripled if they prevail.
If the federal government were to intervene the federal taxes would come to about $35 million.New York state tax law closely aligns with federal tax law in defining income, deductions, and taxes due.
The case was unsealed after Sater filed an action in Israel against a rabbi who says he was cheated in a $40 million stock swindle. That was enough to persuade a federal judge to unseal another lawsuit against Sater, Bayrock, and others earlier in July. And in turn that disclosure prompted the state Supreme Court (trial court) judge in Manhattan to unseal the tax evasion lawsuit.
Sater secretly pleaded guilty to the stock swindle in 1998. The $40 million fleeced from investors went to him, the Genovese and Gambino crime families and others.
In 1998 Sater pleaded guilty in federal court, but the plea was kept secret. Sater was sentenced in secret in 2009 to probation and a $25,000 fine with no jail time and no requirement to make restitution.
That was an extraordinarily light sentence, especially given Sater’s violent past. In 1991 he admitted to shoving the broken stem of a margarita glass into a man’s face and was sentenced to two years.
Court papers, testimony by Trump and a book by one of Sater’s confederates—The Scorpion and the Frog, “The True Story of One Man’s Fraudulent Rise and Fall on the Wall Street of the Nineties”—all tell how after his arrest Sater became an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency, supposedly buying missiles on their way to terrorists, which may explain the light sentence.
As to Trump, every president starting with Richard Nixon and major party candidate since has made public some or all of their tax returns. He has not, even as Hillary Clinton has released her complete tax returns going back more than three decades.
Trump has explained his refusal to make his income tax returns public by claiming that the ones he has filed for 2012 and since are under routine audit. Mark Everson, a former commissioner of Internal Revenue has said there is no reason to hold the returns back, even assuming they are being audited.
He has offered no explanation for not releasing his returns for 2011 and earlier, years on which he has said the audits are closed.
Documents made public by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission show that despite living a lavish lifestyle, Trump did not pay income taxes in 1978, 1979, 1992, and 1994. He also paid no income taxes in 1984, by far his most lucrative year in his career to that point, according to state and city tax tribunal proceedings I reported on previously.
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