The Klansmen and Mobsters in Donald Trump’s Closet

[Octafish]

The Klansmen and Mobsters in Donald Trump’s Closet

Trump’s campaign is haunted by his reported dealings with a mafia boss, a drug smuggler, and a Russian gangster, as well as his dad’s alleged Klan arrest.

by Michael Daly
The Daily Beast, Feb. 29, 2016

Ghosts of the Ku Klux Klan and the Mafia swirled up from Donald Trump’s past as he blustered on toward a future few could have foreseen.

SNIP...

On Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz sought to rouse the mob ghosts of Donald Trump’s earlier days, saying on NBC that “ABC, CNN, multiple news reports have reported about his dealings with, for example, S&A Construction, which was owned by ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno, who is a mobster who is in jail.”
Trump did deal with S&A Construction in the early 1980s, though not necessarily out of choice.

S&A was indeed owned by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese crime family, but he was sentenced to 100 years in prison back in 1986 and died behind bars in 1992.

So an apologist might just shrug and say it was what everybody had to do back in the day in order to build anything at all.
A Trump supporter might even suggest that he and indeed all his fellow builders were victims of the mob in that era.

But few of the builders who accepted S&A concrete as an offer they could not refuse actually met with Salerno, as Trump is said to have done in the office of Roy Cohn the lawyer and fixer, who represented The Donald as well as the Don.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/29/the-kkk-and-mob-allegations-haunting-donald-trump.html

[2naSalit]

1. K&R!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Octafish]

2. That Roy Cohn bastard was Sen. Joe McCarthy's Action Toad.

THE SNARLING DEATH OF ROY M. COHN

Elevated by Joe McCarthy, felled by AIDS, he went with no regrets

By Nicholas von Hoffman
LIFE, March 1988

EXCERPT...

Today the United States, alone among the major democracies, has no Communists, no socialists, no anarchists, no left-wing political groups except in microscopic numbers. Few Americans under 50 have seen or heard a Communist who didn't speak with a foreign accent. The purging of American society in which Roy Cohn took such a conspicuous part in the early 1950s may seem like a gratuitously malevolent lunacy. In actuality, domestic Communism posed a problem like that posed by the Catholic Church to Protestant England in Elizabeth I's time. Both were sometimes public, sometimes clandestine organizations ideologically connected to a foreign power. Some of the members of the CPUSA were connected to the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin.

The fact that these smart, tough men and women often did not identify themselves as Communists gave non-Communists a permanent case of the jitters. Citizens were taken before commissions, subcommittees, grand juries, courts and other instruments of inquiry. They were asked, by Roy Cohn and others, that terrible question: "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist party?

For younger people, however, Roy Cohn was simply another name for a très smart lawyer, for Disco Dan, for the international, I-go-by-private-plane man. He hosted parties in Washington; he was a lawyer with famous friends and rich, rich clients. He was a figure very tough and in on things, a champion of the underdog, though definitely running with the overdog pack. He nested on the nighttime radio call-in shows; he spread his wings over Koppel on Nightline. He appeared to be able to avoid all taxes and all penalties, maybe because he was connected, or on the A list, or known to the headwaiters and hostesses of New York.

But just as his Communist foes hid their secret beliefs, Roy Cohn hid his private life as a homosexual. When AIDS killed him in the bloom of the Reagan years, the public discourse had turned to family values and Americanism. The triumph of patriotic kitsch must have pleased Cohn, for he himself reveled in little flag-waving displays. At his parties he'd haul people to their feet to sing "God Bless America," evidently his favorite song, and though he was a lifelong operagoer, Roy's idea of a good time was to sing patriotic ditties at a piano bar in Provincetown, on Cape Cod. A friend recalled going home early one summer evening, and, on inquiring the next morning about the rest of the night, being told, "We all stood around the piano. Roy sang three choruses of 'God Bless America,' got a hard-on and went home to bed."

SNIP...

In the early 1950s my wife and I lived in a small one-room apartment on West 70th Street, and we had Roy to dinner. I had known Roy since we went to high school together. I remember Roy came in and said, "Can I use the telephone? "He dialed the operator and said so we could hear it "Get me Walter Winchell at the Boca Raton Hotel in Boca Raton, Florida. "He got Winchell on the phone, and he proceeded to plot out with Winchell how to do something nasty to Jimmy Wechsler. James Wechsler had been a young Communist, but by then he was a columnist on the New York Post, or perhaps even the editor, and had long since given that up. And here was Roy Cohn saying, "Now, Walter, we could play this up, and we could do that, "and listening to this thing, I should have said, if I had had any guts, "Roy, that's outrageous", please leave. "But I didn't." - Anthony Lewis, columnist for The New York Times

Roy wanted to do everything and go everywhere one more time. Half his life he had spent traveling. He could never stay still, he didn't have the attention span for it, so in the summer of 1985 he took off for Monte Carlo. When he got back, he took off in the August heat for Israel with Peter and two Republican senators, Jesse Helms from North Carolina and Chic Hecht, a backbencher from Nevada who was devoted to Roy. The Israeli military took their important guests off on automobile and airplane tours; they kept moving until eight o'clock in the evening.

CONTINUED...

http://www.maryellenmark.com/text/magazines/life/905W-000-035.html

[2naSalit]

3. Somehow the word

cesspool comes to mind. I remember when he passed. It's always uglier the further in time one sees it from.