Sex, money and recordings: Trump’s ‘bonfire inferno’

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The guy was flush with cash. Born rich, the son of a home builder in the humble neighborhoods of New York, he had made the leap to Manhattan in the seventies, and soon thereafter skyscrapers bearing his name began to sprout with golden letters. Excessive, languid and addicted to fame, he had also launched himself into the world of television to present a reality show: The Apprentice.

One June day in 2006, during a party at the Playboy Mansion in Los Angeles, he ran into model Karen McDougal. The woman tells the story that a few days later they chatted on the phone; that they stayed in a hotel in Beverly Hills for dinner and that, at a certain moment, they undressed. Thus began an alleged idyll that would last until 2007, when, she says, guilt overcame her: the millionaire had been married for only a year with his third wife, who had just given birth to a son. At that time, the entrepreneur also met Stormy Daniels, the artist name used by a pornographic film actress, when they ran into each other during a golf tournament. Years later, she also revealed the affair.

Everything would have been just a vulgar side-track to hide in his marriage if not for the fact that the tycoon was no longer satisfied solely with his business and fame. He dreamt of something else —  being president of the United States.

In 2016, he embarked on the electoral race. Then, a few months before the election the two women threatened to tell their stories — which he denies — and his lawyer took out the checkbook. The porn star was paid $130,000 for her silence. But for the Playboy model, he used an old friend from the Manhattan sewers: David Pecker, owner of several gossip tabloids. Pecker bought the exclusive story of the romance that McDougal wanted to tell for $150,000. And he did not publish it.

Both payments ended being disclosed in the middle of a federal investigation shortly after the millionaire had already become president. The transactions became alleged and illicit financial crimes during the electoral campaign, since the objective for silencing these women was to protect the image of the candidate during the last weeks before the election.

The lawyer who promised he’d give his life for his boss — said he’d “take a bullet” to protect him — ended up telling the authorities everything and fingered his client as the instigator. His rich client tried to deny it, but wasn’t aware of one small detail: the lawyer had secretly recorded the conversation in which they talked about the payment to the model.

If the millionaire were not named Donald Trump, or the lawyer Michael Cohen, everything would seem like a discarded chapter of The Bonfire of Vanities, that mythical Tom Wolfe novel that so well portrays the sewers of New York. But it is a real incident that has put the president of the United States in serious legal trouble in the framework of the investigation of the Russia investigation.

Special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller came across the issue as he explored the possible connections between Trump’s inner circle and the Kremlin interfering in the 2016 elections with the aim of helping to assure a Republican victory against Democrat Hillary Clinton. After more than a year and a half of inquiries, with public information available, the most dangerous legal issue the tycoon faces today does not deal with the meetings in embassies or red phones with questionable purposes, but from the Manhattan of sex, money and conversations recorded.

“Remember, Michael Cohen only became a snitch after the FBI did something that was unthinkable until the Witch Hunt began. THEY BROKE INTO THE OFFICE OF A LAWYER,” Trump wrote in his Twitter account on December 15, when Cohen had pleaded guilty before the judge. He accepted a sentence of three years in prison and pointed to his illustrious ex-client as instigator of the crimes. Trump called him a “rat”, the expression used by gangsters like Al Capone to refer to informers.

On another occasion he also used the words flipper and flipping, which in the jargon of crime identifies the way in which authorities can force a witness to accuse or betray an ex-partner through deals or threats. “I’ve seen flippers for 30 and 40 years. Everything is wonderful until they’re given 10 years in jail, and then they accuse someone higher up,” complained Trump this summer on the Fox television network.

To understand how gangster slang made its way to the White House, we have to look back at the 25-year-old Trump who had just arrived in Manhattan, a crazy kid who thrived in high places on the elitist island. If those places had a postal address in the seventies, it was that of the select Le Club, where he managed to enter after three unsuccessful attempts. There he met the lawyer Roy Cohn, a sinister character who was part of the city’s history, a consigliere to mafiosi like Tony Salerno, chief of the Genovese family, or Carmine Galante, of the Bonnano family, in addition to having been adviser to Senator Joseph McCarthy of the anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s.

Cohen, a score of years older than Trump, became his lawyer and trusted confidant. He was the one who “taught him how to fight back,” according to Marc Fischer, coauthor of Trump Revealed. In those years, buildings with his name began rising, some of them, like the Trump Plaza, with concrete sold by a company controlled by the mafia. It was S & A Concrete, from the aforementioned Tony Salerno, who had infiltrated much of this business in the city.

The New York Times reported last January, citing sources present in the room, that one day in March 2017, frustrated by the investigation of the Russian plot — when trying to keep the investigation under the control of the Department of Justice so that it did not fall into the hands of an independent special prosecutor — Trump asked: “Where is my Roy Cohn?”

That old friend had not been reincarnated in his new defender (today his ex-lawyer) Michael Cohen, who was no saint either. Cohen started working for the Trump Foundation in 2006 and, little by little, he became the magnate’s trusted man. He pressured journalists who wanted to publish information — such as his famous threat to a Daily Beast reporter in 2015: “I’m going to make sure we meet one day in court and I’m going to take every penny you have, even those you do not have yet.” 

He [Cohen] was in charge of contacting Russian officials to try to land the construction contract of a skyscraper in Moscow, talks that, he [Cohen] has confessed, continued well into the election campaign, which turned these efforts into scrutinized material by the investigation of special prosecutor Mueller.

Today, one of Trump’s lawyers for the Russian affair is also a 100 percent New Yorker: Rudy Giuliani, mayor of the city during 9/11 and, long before that, when he was a prosecutor in Manhattan, the man who prosecuted the gangster Salerno for, among other crimes, his business in concrete. Washington’s daily drama is played by old acquaintances.

(From Spain’s El País)

• Translation by Progreso Weekly.