The sensational headlines reached their apex with the Post’s February 16 front-page “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,” a statement supposedly uttered by Maples in reference to Donald. The headline would become a tabloid classic. Bill Hoffmann, a Post reporter known for his stories on celebrities, wrote the article after interviewing two of Maples’s friends from her acting class. The women said they saw Trump pick up Maples after class, and that Marla had gushed to them about their love affair and their sex life. He pressed them for details, but the women knew little more. No matter: Hoffmann had the nugget he needed—a quote from an unidentified friend in which Marla said that Trump provided the “best sex I’ve ever had.”
The Post’s managing editor, Colasuonno, read the quote on his computer and knew he had the next day’s front page. Editors discussed whether the story was actually true: Did Marla really say what the Post was about to trumpet on page one? Colasuonno wasn’t worried. “Guys, this headline is libel-proof,” he said. “Donald will never complain about this one.” A photo editor found the perfect photo: Trump grinning like the Cheshire cat. Under the front-page headline, the Post wrote, “We always knew that Donald Trump was a tiger in the corporate boardroom, but now we know he’s a wildcat in the bedroom, too.” (A couple of years later, when Colasuonno became editor of the Post, he’d get occasional calls from Trump, including an invitation one day to lunch at the Plaza. There, according to Colasuonno, Trump told the editor he would fly him down to Atlantic City for a weekend and “get a couple of chicks,” or Colasuonno could go to a Yankee game and sit in owner George Steinbrenner’s box. Trump wanted Colasuonno to write an article saying that Trump was solvent. “Look, there are a lot of rumors out there that I’m broke—it’s all bullshit,” Trump said. He wanted Colasuonno to write the story, but the editor instead offered to have his best business reporter look into Trump’s finances. Trump never followed up. There was no more talk about going to Atlantic City and Yankee Stadium.) The day after “Best Sex” appeared, the News responded with a Smith report that Donald was “delighted” with the headline, which prompted a follow-up in the Post: “Trump: Fire Liz Smith.”
The frantic coverage continued for months, giving Spy the opportunity to add to its collection of Trump epithets: “wife-dumping Atlantic City strongman” and “debtor-adulterer.” Donald and Ivana did ultimately divorce, and during Trump’s stint as a single man in his forties, one of his stranger media-massaging habits came to light. Since the beginning of his business career, Trump had occasionally called reporters using the name John Miller or, more often, John Barron. (Trump’s fascination with that name persisted for years; when he was seeing Marla while still married to Ivana, he sometimes used the code name “the Baron” when he left messages for her. And when Trump and his third wife, Melania, had a son, they named him Barron.)
In 1991, a young reporter at People magazine named Sue Carswell called Trump’s office to request an interview. Carswell had recently been given the Trump/Marla/Ivana beat and was calling about a recent Post story claiming that Trump had dumped Marla for Italian model Carla Bruni. Five minutes later, Carswell got a call from Trump’s publicist, who introduced himself as John Miller. Miller confirmed the Post story. Yes, Trump had dumped Marla, and he had a bevy of beautiful women to pick from for his next love interest. “Important, beautiful women call him all the time,” Miller said. He listed some names, including Madonna. “He mentioned basically every hot woman in Hollywood,” Carswell said. Something struck the reporter as odd about Trump’s publicist. He sounded a lot like, well, Trump. Conveniently, Carswell had been recording the interview. She played it for some colleagues, who agreed that it sounded like Donald. Then she called Marla and played the tape. Maples burst into tears and confirmed the voice was Trump’s.
Carswell was far from the only reporter Trump called under an assumed name. Daily News columnist Linda Stasi said he once left her a voice mail as an “anonymous tipster” who wanted it known that Trump had been spotted going out with models. Quotations from “John Barron” appeared in New York magazine, the Washington Post, and the Times, where a “John Baron,” described as a “vice-president of the Trump organization,” showed up in a front-page article in 1980. Barron was variously quoted as a “Trump spokesman,” “Trump executive,” or “Trump representative.” Although Trump at times denied making calls as John Barron, he admitted in a 1990 deposition that “I believe on occasion I used that name.” Some reporters found the calls from Miller or Barron merely playful, if a bit weird. Others thought the calls were disturbing or even creepy, as Barron seemed to take pleasure in describing how prominent women were drawn to Trump sexually. “Actresses,” Miller said in the call to Carswell, “just call to see if they can go out with him and things.” Madonna “wanted to go out with him.” And Trump’s alter ego boasted that in addition to living with Maples, Trump had “three other girlfriends.”
As the tabloid battles raged, Trump maintained that all publicity was good for business, but some of his close advisers had severe doubts. Longtime Trump employee Barbara Res worried that tabloid coverage of Donald’s personal life would hurt the organization’s bottom line. The day the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” story ran, Trump held up the Post with pride to show Res. “We all thought, the people in serious positions in the company, thought that was terrible,” she said. “I mean, he’s got a six-year-old at home. He’s got a twelve-year-old that can read the papers. I mean, it was just—we thought that was terrible. He thought it was the greatest thing.” (Donald Jr. later fought for his father’s pride, getting into a tussle at the Hill School, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, after a fellow student confronted him with a racy newspaper picture of Donald’s mistress. Donald Jr. went a year without speaking to his father around that time. “You’re in an environment where every day you’re seeing something on the front page of the paper, you’re getting one side of the story, and it became a feeding frenzy,” he recalled.)
Still, some reporters thought Trump’s decision to fan the flames of coverage rather than trying to stamp out the fire demonstrated a counterintuitive, media-savvy genius. “He understood that if you’re completely shameless and have the knack to turn things to your advantage, there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” said Taylor, the former New York magazine writer. “That situation with Marla and Ivana was a perfect example; he was able to spin it like he was this irresistible macho guy who was being chased by these blond beauties all over town.” The day the “Best Sex” story ran, Taylor interviewed Trump in his office. His marriage was in shambles, yet he had personally called Taylor back within hours. Taylor arrived, walked past the gallery of magazine covers featuring Donald Trump, and found his subject sitting behind his desk, relaxed as ever. Trump didn’t seem particularly troubled. All he could talk about was how much press attention his and Ivana’s impending break was getting: “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. I don’t think there has been anything like this. One day it was eight pages in the tabloids. Even the Times is doing it. . . . One of the papers has twelve reporters on it.”
Taylor noted that the recent divorce of director Steven Spielberg and actress Amy Irving was also generating a lot of press attention, but Trump dismissively waved away the comparison, calling it “a one-day wonder.” Trump called the “Best Sex” story “cheap,” but added that he had just heard the paper was impossible to find on newsstands citywide. Later, Taylor mentioned that he had just gotten back from London. Trump wanted to know how his breakup was playing across the ocean: “Was it big over there, too? I heard it’s a monster over there.”
Taylor’s story, titled “Trump: The Soap,” quoted “one Trump executive” about how the sensational tabloid coverage resulted in booming casinos and a booked-up Plaza Hotel. A few weeks later, a similar quote appeared in a Wall Street Journal story about Trump’s decision to invest in Atlantic City. This time, the words came not from an anonymous source, but from Trump. His Trump Taj Mahal casino was about to open, and since h
is breakup and the crush of coverage, the casino’s staff had seen a spike in media requests to cover the opening. Trump was pleased: “A divorce is never a pleasant thing, but from a business standpoint, it’s had a very positive effect.”
The business was always at the center of life; Trump had absorbed that from his father. Success was defined—and created—in good measure by reputation and image; he learned that from Roy Cohn. Now Trump added his own ingredient: as he pivoted from real estate developer to a far more expansive sense of Trump the brand, he began to use his celebrity not merely to promote his buildings but to erect a network of ventures in gambling, sports, beauty pageants, television—an ever-morphing array of ways to send the message that Trump meant ambition, wealth, and a distinctly personal expression of success. Some of his initiatives would flop and some would make piles of money, but at the core of all of them would be his identity, his carefully honed image as artisan of the deal, his insistence that he—and not a staff or a corporation, but he himself—was the rainmaker. Everything else served that idea—his relations with women, bankers, the media, the broader public. People were always asking him who the real Donald Trump was—was the bombastic, boastful billionaire he played in the media merely a character designed to enhance his business? They didn’t get it, he insisted. He was exactly what he presented to the public: a man of business, in it for himself, in it to win. He would speak in “truthful hyperbole.” He would crush opponents. He would demean “losers.” He would choose to spend time in the office rather than with his wives or children. He would do what it took. And he would gamble, reaching now beyond Manhattan to a sorry seaside city in New Jersey that he believed he could remake in his own image.
7
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All In
In the summer of 1978, thirty-two-year-old Donald Trump boarded a seaplane to Atlantic City, anxious to learn about the millions of dollars in profits reaped by Resorts International, the owner of the first casino on the East Coast. So much cash was coming in so fast that Resorts stored it in bags stashed in hotel rooms before it could be counted. Yet as Trump strolled the boardwalk and viewed the dilapidated buildings, he saw a city in need of a savior.
For generations, Atlantic City had conjured an image of seaside beauty and romance. City dwellers flocked to its shores, at first seeking a health retreat. The cool ocean breezes earned it the nickname “the lungs of Philadelphia.” In 1921, the city played host to the first Miss America contest, one of many events that made Atlantic City an East Coast entertainment magnet. Hotels lined the beachfront boardwalk, and the city’s accessibility by train made day trips a possibility for families—known as shoobies—who packed their picnic lunches in shoeboxes.
The city’s fortunes waned as tastes and fashions changed. During World War II, the army and air force took over the city’s hotels, and in 1944 a hurricane destroyed much of the famous seven-mile-long boardwalk. The number of visitors fell over the next two decades as white flight and urban blight drove up crime and depleted the city of jobs, and interstate highways drew people to new suburban developments. Atlantic City’s population dropped from sixty-six thousand in 1930 to around forty thousand in 1980. The resort remained in the public imagination as a place of wedding-cake hotels, saltwater-taffy stands, and beauty pageants, but the financial reality was harsh. Atlantic City seemed to be dying, and nothing city officials attempted was helping. In desperation, New Jersey legalized gambling in 1977 and enshrined in the law the dream of “the restoration of Atlantic City as the Playground of the World and the major hospitality center of the Eastern United States.” A year later, as Resorts International’s casino-hotel provided evidence the dream was becoming reality, Trump arrived on his scouting mission.
Trump had hoped his home state of New York would legalize gambling. He had suggested putting a casino in his midtown Manhattan property, the Grand Hyatt. This visit to New Jersey sent a not-so-subtle message: if New York wouldn’t let him build a casino in Manhattan, Trump would shift his focus across the Hudson River. Property in Atlantic City was cheaper than in Manhattan, and partners were willing to bear much of the risk on Trump’s behalf. The legalization effort in New York faltered, and Trump decided to invest in New Jersey. On his visit to Atlantic City, Trump stopped at an ice cream shop and met with a real estate broker to discuss acquiring land for a casino. Trump had no experience with gaming or casino management, but local officials didn’t mind; they were interested in his reputed wealth. Anyone was welcome to apply for a casino license, so long as the applicant followed a strict set of regulations and had no ties to organized crime. The first year after legalization, thirty-six corporations filed proposals for gaming halls. As Trump pondered his plans over the next two years, half a dozen casinos began operation. Trump toured one of the new hotels, the Tropicana, insisting that the casino’s gaming chief show him every floor of the building.
As Trump focused on key parcels along the Boardwalk, he portrayed himself to Atlantic City officials as a young mogul. Indeed, he had received millions in commissions on deals in New York, including a fee for brokering the acquisition of land for Trump Tower. He drove a Mercedes-Benz SL two-door coupe and used a Cadillac limousine leased by his real estate company. At thirty-four years old in early 1981, however, he still tapped his father for cash. He had recently borrowed $7.5 million from Fred Trump to help pay off debt he had accumulated partly while advancing plans for Atlantic City.
Trump had to be licensed to run a casino, and that required a financial review and background check. When gaming regulators examined Trump’s finances, they concluded that his organization would carry a lot of debt. Trump told regulators that he would raise $175 million to launch his business in Atlantic City by leveraging his existing real estate holdings. Under his plan, one loan for $100 million was to be secured by his 50 percent stake in the Grand Hyatt. The remaining amount was to be secured by a lien on a casino hotel in Atlantic City—a building that did not even exist. Trump was asking state gaming officials to have faith in him, not necessarily in the money that he had on hand.
Under state law, Trump was obligated to disclose whether he had “ever been cited or charged with or formally accused of any violation of a statute, regulation or code of any state, county, municipal, federal or national government other than a criminal, disorderly persons or motor vehicle violation.” Trump initially neglected to tell the Casino Control Commission about the Justice Department’s civil rights lawsuit that he had faced for racial bias several years earlier. Eventually, as his background check unfolded, Trump disclosed the case in conversations with gaming regulators.
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THE BACKGROUND CHECK ALSO found that Trump had been in contact with people associated with organized crime. This was supposed to be a red flag. When Governor Brendan Byrne signed New Jersey’s gambling law, he declared, “I’ve said it before and I will repeat it again to organized crime: Keep your filthy hands off Atlantic City. Keep the hell out of our state.” There was good reason for concern. A review by the State Commission of Investigation found that as early as 1974, not long after gambling had been proposed, there was an “incipient pattern of organized crime infiltration of certain legitimate enterprises,” including cigarette-vending firms and local Atlantic City taverns. The mob wanted a piece of the action.
In June 1980, as Trump intensified his search for property, he focused on a piece of land along the boardwalk that had been acquired weeks earlier by two men with questionable connections. One was an associate of the Scarfo crime family in Philadelphia, a violent organization that had a tight grip on the twenty-thousand-member union that represented hotel and casino workers in Atlantic City. The Scarfo associate, Kenny Shapiro, was a former scrap-metal dealer in Philadelphia who became a real estate developer on the Jersey Shore. Shapiro served as a financier for Scarfo in South Jersey and Philadelphia. He worked closely with Daniel Sullivan, a former truck driver and Teamster who owned a trash-hauling business and would later be named in a c
ourt case as an FBI informant.
The parcel’s location was perfect, next to the city’s landmark Convention Hall. Trump and his organization came calling almost immediately. In July, Trump agreed to pay tens of millions in leasing fees for the property over the next fifteen years. The windfall for Sullivan, Shapiro, and their small firm was extraordinary. In addition, Trump told investigators that he was so impressed with Sullivan’s negotiating skills that he recommended him for a job at the Grand Hyatt in New York. Trump hired Sullivan as a negotiator to smooth out “labor problems” with the union representing hotel and restaurant employees at the Grand Hyatt. Trump arranged for Sullivan to meet with Trump’s personal banker at Chase Manhattan Bank, an introduction that led to a multimillion-dollar loan for Sullivan. Casino regulators became concerned and began to examine the connections.
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