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The Making Of Trump Tower – Thread
Trump Tower is a mixed-use Manhattan skyscraper opened in 1983 and finished the following year. Designed by Der Scutt of Poor, Swanke, Hayden & Connell, the structure has a distinctive 28-sided dark glass curtain wall including a partially...
Trump Tower is a mixed-use Manhattan skyscraper opened in 1983 and finished the following year. Designed by Der Scutt of Poor, Swanke, Hayden & Connell, the structure has a distinctive 28-sided dark glass curtain wall including a partially...
...stepped façade to maximize the number of corner rooms. Skin of glass and gold and crime in its bone matter, the building was one of the first high-rises to be built with a concrete frame. That concrete was of the ready-mix type, and supplied by S & A Concrete, a firm...
...controlled by Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul Castellano, respective heads of the Genovese and Gambino crime families. Ready-mix concrete supply is especially conducive to mob extortion and delay because the material has to be poured quickly and still wet or else it...
...loses its strength when dried. Anyway, Trump used S & A repeatedly during his career as a developer, a continuation of ties going back to his father Fred, who fostered connections with the same groups. In the 1970s and 1980s New York’s construction sector was heavily...
...controlled by a cartel of Mob actors engaged in labour supply, bid-rigging and obstruction, intimidation, featherbedding and labour relations management: ‘the Concrete Club’. The Five Families – mainly the Gambinos, Genoveses, Colombos and Luccheses - put the squeeze on...
...the entire industry, controlling materials supply, unions, teamsters and construction companies. A simple nod from one of the dons might stop work for days, which is why contractors such as Stanley Sternchos wound up paying hundreds of thousands to the Mob to keep their...
...projects on schedule. Only six firms, pre-selected by the mafia, could bid on contracts valued over $2 million and would have to kick up two points to the Concrete Club. Trump was tightly tied into this world. Irving Fischer, president of HRH Construction Corp., general...
...contractor for the Trump Tower construction project and later sued by Trump-Equitable, was one of the few who spoke out against the strong-arm interference by organised crime in the building trade when he described labour goons storming his office and holding his...
...switchboard operator at knifepoint to demand no-show jobs. (It was, however, according to Mario Cuomo, not so much actual violence as fear of expensive impediment to building that motivated co-operation with the Club.) John Cody (below), corrupt president of the Teamsters...
...union Local 282 between 1976 and 1984, who worked with Trump through Roy Cohn (left), made sure concrete deliveries to Trump Tower continued despite the city-wide strike he ordered in 1982. Cohn, Trump’s lawyer and mentor, represented Fat Tony (right) in 1978 when he was up...
...on gambling and tax charges, in addition to providing counsel to Paul Castellano (below). Although most of Trump’s association with the Genoveses and Gambinos occurred at one remove, according to the 1992 book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, Donald was also introduced in...
