{"id":285227,"date":"2025-01-20T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-01-20T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=285227"},"modified":"2025-01-15T07:13:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-15T07:13:24","slug":"mafia-don-trump-and-other-presidents-who-flirted-with-the-mob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/mafia-don-trump-and-other-presidents-who-flirted-with-the-mob\/","title":{"rendered":"Mafia Don? Trump and Other Presidents Who Flirted with the Mob"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The book art for Wiseguys and the White House. Photograph: Harper Collins<\/p><\/div>\n

A new book looks into the complicated relationship between the mob and the White House from Roosevelt to Biden.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

13 Jan 2025 <\/em>– As a veteran of the crisis management business<\/a>, Eric Dezenhall knows a thing or two about the murkier parts of politics. As the author of Wiseguys and the White House<\/a>: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made, he knows a lot about the shady places where power and organized crime collide. A survey of presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Joe Biden and their brushes with the bosses, Dezenhall\u2019s new book will be published a week shy of Donald Trump\u2019s second inauguration.<\/p>\n

According to Dezenhall, \u201cthe thing that makes Trump different from all of the other presidents is he\u2019s the only one who has been shockingly open about talking about\u201d his experiences with the mob.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo him, it\u2019s a branding thing. Everybody else is running from the mob context. Trump, he\u2019s on Letterman, telling you he knows them. And not only does the public not punish him for it, they elected him twice. They\u2019re fine with it. And yet the idea that somebody would run for office using mafia connections as part of their branding is really something to behold.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2013, Trump appeared on the Late Show. The host, David Letterman, asked<\/a>: \u201cHave you ever knowingly done business with organized crime?\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump said he had \u201creally tried to stay away from them as much as possible\u201d, though \u201cgrowing up in New York and doing business in New York, I would say there might have been one of those characters along the way\u201d.<\/p>\n

Then he said: \u201cI have met on occasion a few of those people. They happen to be very nice people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even then, years before Trump entered politics, it seemed an odd thing to say about men who trade in extortion and violence. But as pictorial evidence of Trump\u2019s mob adjacency abounds \u2013 in two days in 2023, shots surfaced of him with Joseph \u201cSkinny Joey\u201d Merlino<\/a>, a Philadelphian twice imprisoned, and John Alite<\/a>, a former hitman for the New York Gambino family, jailed for robbery and murder \u2013 so Trump\u2019s remarks to Letterman pointed to the facts of his business career.<\/p>\n

Dezenhall says: \u201cOne of the things Trump says that drives people crazy is whenever he\u2019s accused of something untoward, he says, \u2018That just makes me smart.\u2019 I reluctantly concede that in this case he may be right.<\/p>\n

\u201cPicture a tower being constructed in Manhattan. You probably picture a steel skeleton and a crane. You don\u2019t picture concrete, but that\u2019s what Trump used. Steel is not centrally controlled. It\u2019s an international industry. Concrete is controlled locally. And in New York at the time he built Trump Tower, only two companies did it, and they were owned by the Genovese, Gambino and Colombo families. And so what did Trump do? He got a good contract.<\/p>\n

\u201cA prosecutor friend of mine said, \u2018If you could prove that he got something in return \u2026\u2019 I said, \u2018Stop saying that. It was almost a half-century ago. No one\u2019s proven anything.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"a<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Donald Trump in 1987.<\/span> Photograph: Bruce Gilbert\/Newsday LLC\/Newsday RM\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dezenhall grew up across the river in New Jersey, home to real and fictional bosses from Nucky Johnson<\/a> to Tony Soprano, the state where Trump built (and lost) a casino. The first book Dezenhall remembers buying, aged 10, was about the American presidents. After a career in and around politics that began with a spell in Ronald Reagan\u2019s White House, two abiding interests have come together.<\/p>\n

He once \u201casked an uncle, this must have been 30 to 40 years ago, \u2018What\u2019s with Trump and the mob in Atlantic City? You hear that. But what does it mean?\u2019 And my uncle said, \u2018This is very simple. He overpays for real estate, and that\u2019s how he gets labor support.\u2019 So it\u2019s in the book.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know the Bruce Springsteen song, Atlantic City? \u2018They blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night.\u2019 Well, the Chicken Man was Phil Testa\u201d \u2013 a Philadelphia mob boss killed by a nail bomb<\/a> in 1981 \u2013 \u201cand in Atlantic City, Testa\u2019s son, Salvie Testa, sold Trump a crummy piece of property that was worth $195,000 and Trump paid $1.1m, and he did it through a secretary, and he got this piece of property, which I think they used as a parking lot or something for his casino. And Trump\u2019s detractors would say that\u2019s how he compensated for labor peace. All Trump has said is something to the extent of, \u2018Hey, you know, sometimes I get the right price, sometimes I don\u2019t get the right price. Where\u2019s the crime?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd here we are, 45 years later, and no one\u2019s proven anything. And so when he says, \u2018That makes me smart,\u2019 let\u2019s bite our lip and say he might be right.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dezenhall\u2019s chapter on Trump also considers his fondness for dressing and acting like a New York don and even a rumored offer to be an FBI informant, a common gambit among capos and killers. Unsurprisingly, Trump is among the presidents Dezenhall considers to have brushed closest to the mob, though the only commander-in-chief to score top marks on Dezenhall\u2019s one-to-five scale for such ties is Harry Truman.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019ll surprise people,\u201d Dezenhall says. \u201cI\u2019m a Truman fan, I\u2019ve read a lot of the biographies, and what fascinated me is the Mafia<\/a> is hardly mentioned at all. The machine stuff\u201d \u2013 Truman\u2019s origins in Democratic politics in Kansas City \u2013 \u201cis mentioned, but not the fact that this was a mafia-slash-Cosa-Nostra-controlled machine, to the point where people would call the police and a mobster would answer the phone and decide whether to dispatch a squad car, if they didn\u2019t want the cops busting up a gambling joint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wiseguys and the White House reprints an extraordinary picture, the gangster Charles Gargotta lying dead in a pool of blood in a Democratic Club in Kansas City, under a portrait of Truman. It happened in 1950, when Truman was president.<\/p>\n

To Dezenhall, \u201cTruman is interesting in the sense that he he didn\u2019t openly talk about it very much, but he kind of had this grudging attitude: \u2018Look, I\u2019m not happy, but in order to do what I need to do, I can\u2019t avoid these people.\u2019 And what does it say that the mob chose a person to be president who was the same president who dropped the [atomic] bomb? That\u2019s some heady stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\"black<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n
Charles Gargotta killed in 1950.<\/span> Photograph: AP\/Kansas City Star<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So are more familiar tales, of John F Kennedy having the same girlfriend as Sam Giancana from Chicago, or of mob involvement in attempts to kill Fidel Castro, under JFK. Dezenhall dismisses the old line that the mob killed Kennedy \u2013 \u201cMy running joke is with Kennedy stuff, no conspiracy theory, no book contract\u201d \u2013 but gives more credence to the equally startling story of how the Roosevelt administration deployed mobsters to watch the docks for Nazi saboteurs, then to help prepare the invasion of Sicily.<\/p>\n

Very often, Dezenhall concludes, presidential proximity to organized crime is simply unavoidable, because of the intertwined nature of politics, the mob, labor unions, city and state party machines and other powerful interests. Most often, presidents are unaware of the precise nature of such ties. Many, Kennedy and Richard Nixon prominent among them, oversee crackdowns on organized crime at the same time as flirting with it.<\/p>\n

Dezenhall\u2019s book contains a profusion of fascinating stories. Lyndon Johnson, for example, most likely didn\u2019t know that his order to the FBI director J Edgar Hoover to do anything necessary to find three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 resulted in the FBI deploying Greg Scarpa, a psychopathic mob killer, to extract information from the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n

Reagan, meanwhile, had links to Sidney Korshak, a lawyer with mob clients, and owed a lot to Lew Wasserman, a Hollywood agent who also had mob ties.<\/p>\n

\u201cOld friends aren\u2019t thrilled with me,\u201d about the Reagan chapter, Dezenhall says with a laugh. \u201cBut one of the things I have prosecutors tell me, which is in the book, is that while Reagan went after the Mafia hard as president, he did not go after Lou Wasserman and Sidney Korshak. Those investigations were killed<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dezenhall\u2019s final chapter concerns Joe Biden, who only scores one out of five on the mob adjacency scale. Nonetheless, Dezenhall tells a remarkable story from 50 years ago. It involves the Democratic machine in Delaware, where Biden ran for US Senate at 29, and its use of a union official with mob ties: none other than Frank Sheeran, the Teamsters enforcer played by Robert De Niro in The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese.<\/p>\n

Biden \u201cwas a kid, running for Senate against a powerful incumbent\u201d, Dezenhall says. \u201cAnd the incumbent prepared these really strong newspaper ads against Biden.\u201d Without Biden knowing, Sheeran made a simple but effective intervention. \u201cHe made sure the newspapers weren\u2019t distributed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s an example of a conspiracy that really works. What doesn\u2019t work is 300 people get together to kill Kennedy. No, didn\u2019t happen. The papers not getting picked up? Certainly did happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Wiseguys and the White House is out on 14 January.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Martin Pengelly is a freelance journalist.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

13 Jan 2025 – A new book looks into the complicated relationship between the mob and the White House from Roosevelt to Biden.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":285230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,2197,467,1624,2059,249,70,71],"class_list":["post-285227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-biden","tag-government","tag-mafia","tag-organized-crime","tag-trump","tag-usa","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285227"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285233,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285227\/revisions\/285233"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/285230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}