In Atlantic City, a place marketed as an escape from reality, the sudden tragedy seemed especially out of place. Trump was bereft, seeking support and sympathy, variously suggesting that he had almost boarded the helicopter or might have boarded it or could have. There were conflicting reports at the time about whether Trump was supposed to have been on the flight. Months later, on CNN, he said, “I was going to go. From the standpoint that they said, ‘Do you want to come with us?’ And I said, ‘I think so, but maybe I’m just too busy.’ I mean, it was that close. It would have been, like, a fifty-fifty deal.” Trump’s comment angered O’Donnell, who believed Trump was trying to shift attention to himself.
Trump served as a pallbearer for Etess, whose funeral was attended by a thousand people and was held in Northfield, New Jersey. The next day, Trump attended Benanav’s funeral in Mount Vernon, New York. There, of all places, the messiness of Trump’s love life played out before the mourners. Ivana accompanied her husband to the service. As Ivana emerged from the chapel, she saw Marla Maples. It was the first time some people had seen her. For months, Maples had stayed at Trump properties, often in Atlantic City. Ivana had learned about her husband’s infidelity, but the women dueling for his affection had usually been kept apart. Now O’Donnell saw Ivana glare at Marla. “I was sure she was going to throw a punch at any moment,” he later wrote. “Marla stood there petrified.” Trump pulled Ivana away.
Last of all, Trump attended Hyde’s funeral—which, like Etess’s, was held in Northfield, New Jersey—before Hyde was buried in his hometown in Utah. Hundreds of mourners snaked outside the funeral home. Trump stared at Hyde’s photograph and shed a tear, a lonely, shell-shocked look on his face. “For the first time, I saw sadness in it, profound sadness,” O’Donnell recalled. Then, composure. The funerals were complete, the page turned. Trump’s focus quickly returned to business. O’Donnell wrote later that he wondered whether Trump “cared about anyone other than himself, or if he harbored a sincere emotion.” The Taj was supposed to open in a couple of months, although that would be delayed. The magnificent memorial would come one day. O’Donnell was, as Trump later put it, the only one “still standing.” Trump turned to O’Donnell’s wife and told her he had a lot riding on her husband. “Now,” Trump said, “it’s his turn.”
• • •
O’DONNELL WAS AN ASTUTE observer of the way people take risks. He knew what loss was like: his parents had died when he was young; he was then adopted by his uncle, who had headed Bally Manufacturing, the gaming company. O’Donnell grew up inside the company, enthralled by the manufacture of slot machines. He worked in Las Vegas in his early twenties, then moved to Atlantic City, to a casino owned by Steve Wynn. Hyde hired him away to the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino, where he was now president. O’Donnell had spent most of his adult life observing people gamble with their money, from senior citizens on buses to Trump’s wager on Atlantic City. As a casino executive, his job was, in effect, to entice people to part with their hard-earned cash, on the chance that they might profit even if the odds were against them. His job, in part, was to sell the casino experience as theater.
Few casinos profit by attracting only the super-rich. As much as Trump focused on the high rollers, he needed the masses, the storekeepers, hourly workers, and retirees who took charter buses to the Jersey shore and fed coin after coin into slot machines, emboldened by the thrill and sparkle of it all. The attraction wasn’t necessarily the long-shot bet that they could get rich; it was that they could, in this version of a reality show, feel rich, however briefly. Inevitably, a number of gamblers likely were compulsive, no more able to control the urge to bet than an addict seeking the next high. Trump himself cared little about the psychology of gambling, which had surprised O’Donnell. He learned over time that Trump had a simple mind-set, winners versus losers, and that his chief motivation was winning, even when he didn’t need the money.
O’Donnell was frustrated that Trump put his name on buildings to attract customers but sometimes disdained interacting with most of them. “This is bullshit,” Trump told O’Donnell one day as they walked to a meet and greet with gamblers. At the event, Trump complained about a gambler who had won big—meaning Trump lost. The boss left the reception after a short stay, saying, “That’s it, I’m going.” O’Donnell believed Trump needed more patience. It was simple math: the longer gamblers remained at the table, the more likely they were to lose. Trump just didn’t like to see what happened in the interim. He couldn’t stand being beat.
• • •
ON MARCH 20, 1990, two weeks before the Taj was slated to open, analyst Marvin Roffman’s concerns about the casino market became big news. He was quoted in a Wall Street Journal story about the Taj, and the impact was immediate. The story said the casino-hotel had to gross up to $1.3 million or more every day to pay its bills and loans—more than any casino had ever taken in. “When this property opens, he will have had so much free publicity he will break every record in the books in April, June, and July,” Roffman predicted. “But once the cold winds blow from October to February, it won’t make it. The market just isn’t there. . . . Atlantic City is an ugly and dreary kind of place. Even its hard-core customers aren’t coming down as much.”
On the morning that the Journal story was published, Roffman was scheduled to meet with Robert Trump, who was overseeing final preparations for the Taj’s opening day. With the loss of the three executives, and the decision to send Ivana away from Atlantic City, Robert’s role had deepened, and he faced added pressure as one of the few insiders Donald trusted. Robert—soft-spoken, cerebral, and empathetic—was a graduate of Boston University, a financial whiz. He lacked Donald’s charismatic showmanship, and he was happy to leave the bravado to his brother, but he could show flashes of Trump temper. As Roffman arrived for his meeting with Robert, the gaming analyst didn’t yet know that the Journal story had been published. He drove up to the Taj, looked over its extravagant features, and thought, “So this is what a billion dollars can buy.”
Roffman found Robert Trump and extended his hand for a shake. Robert exploded. He said Roffman had stabbed the bondholders in the back. “Get the fuck off the property,” Robert screamed. “Good-bye.”
Roffman hustled away, rattled by the accusation that he had hurt bondholders. “I mean, every word out of his mouth was a four-letter word,” Roffman recalled. He called his office and was told to return as soon as possible. Donald Trump had already faxed over a letter: “You will be hearing shortly from my lawyers unless Mr. Roffman is immediately dismissed or apologizes.” Trump also phoned Roffman and urged him to “write me a letter stating that the Taj is going to be one of the greatest successes ever, and I’m going to have it published.”
Roffman had risen to vice president of research. He loved his job. Yes, he had spoken bluntly, but he believed he had a fiduciary duty to do so. He was a gaming industry analyst, and at a time when some derided his profession for too much cheerleading, he took pride in making tough calls that proved accurate. Confronted by his company’s chairman, Roffman declared that he believed the junk bonds that Trump relied upon “would fail.” The chairman, according to Roffman, responded that he wasn’t concerned about that judgment, but was very concerned about the analyst’s comment that “Atlantic City is an ugly and dreary kind of place.”
The chairman called Trump, who demanded that the Journal be told that Roffman had been misquoted, and that Roffman actually believed “the Taj Mahal is going to be the greatest success story ever.” Roffman’s boss drafted a letter of retraction, and Roffman felt he had no choice but to sign it. Yet Roffman could not sleep that night. The next morning, he told his bosses that he wanted to issue a recommendation that Taj bonds be “sold immediately” because he feared they would fall in value. But Roffman’s firm wouldn’t let him go public with that opinion, so the analyst wrote a letter in which he said he “basically canceled” the retraction he had signed. Roffman’s bosses had had enough. Facing the threa
t of a Trump lawsuit, the company fired Roffman.
The story might have ended there, with Trump triumphant. But Roffman decided he had been right all along and fought back, saying his dismissal was unjustified. He entered an arbitration proceeding in which he got a $750,000 settlement from his firm. He also sued Trump, eventually agreeing to an undisclosed settlement. Years later, Trump said he could not recall reading any of Roffman’s reports. He described Roffman’s remarks in the Journal as a “vicious attack” and “not a nice thing on a human basis,” but he said in a deposition that he had never intended to get Roffman fired. Trump said he only wanted Roffman to withdraw remarks that “were totally inappropriate.”
• • •
EVERYTHING WAS NOW SET for the grand opening of the Trump Taj Mahal. Aside from some modest architectural echoes, it could not have been more different from its namesake, the ornate seventeenth-century marble mausoleum in India that the United Nations had declared “the jewel of Muslim art” in that country. Trump’s Taj was grandiose, fanciful, outlandish, like nothing Atlantic City had ever before seen. Some called it cartoonish. The 120,000-square-foot casino, a low-slung building stretched along the boardwalk, sat across from the whirling amusement rides of the famous Steel Pier. Topped by dozens of minarets and onion domes in bubble-gum shades of pink, blue, and green, the Taj featured a forty-two-story hotel tower, though Trump numbered the top floor as the fifty-first. On each of the tower’s four façades, at the highest point, Trump’s name stood tall in red capital block letters.
The Taj’s doormen, wearing purple robes and feathered turbans, guided guests through a lobby featuring Carrara marble imported from Italy. Deeper inside, the theme continued with restaurants such as the Bombay Café and New Delhi Deli and walls adorned with Indian murals. Above the baccarat tables, massive crystal chandeliers dangled from vaulted, mirrored ceilings. In the luxury suites, guests enjoyed marble and bronze statues and a sunken Jacuzzi tub surrounded by gold Greek columns.
For the moment, the dire warnings, the extraordinary debt, and the marital crisis were all overshadowed by a weeklong parade of opening events. These first nights were crucial: tens of thousands of gamblers were waiting to pour their dollars into Trump’s hands, and he needed to make a perfect impression so they would return. The chrome had been polished, the employees were in place. But on the second morning, April 3, Trump learned that state regulators had ordered that the slot machines remain closed. The reason: a mysterious accounting discrepancy. Trump went ballistic. He phoned O’Donnell, Trump Plaza’s president, and pleaded with him to handle the emergency at the Taj. “Jack, I’m at the Taj,” Trump said, by O’Donnell’s account. “I got big fucking problems over here. . . . I’ve been in meetings with the state all morning. They’re not going to let me open. I’ve got a bunch of fucking idiots down here. . . . You have to come down here and straighten this out. . . . I’m going to fire all these assholes.”
O’Donnell rushed to the Taj, where Trump was waiting. O’Donnell said he needed time to figure out the problems. Every minute was costing Trump thousands of dollars in profits. “What the fuck is going on?” he asked. One thing that was going on was that Trump had, six months earlier, received a warning from Deno Marino, the deputy director of New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission. Marino had told Trump and his top managers that, with the Taj planning twenty-nine hundred slot machines—the most on any Atlantic City gambling floor—the casino needed a bigger “hard count room,” the secured back area where, at the end of each day, coins and tokens are sorted, tallied, and readied for the next day’s gamblers. “The place is already built,” Trump had replied, by Marino’s account. He was not about to move walls made of cinder block over quarter-inch steel.
Now, after the first night of the Taj’s soft opening, the ripple effect of his failure to heed that advice was plain. The count-room workers were in a frenzy, unable to keep up. The room was unbearably hot. Marino, on the premises that night, made an exception to the rules, allowing a heavy steel door to an inner hallway to be opened to let cooler air flow in. When the count was finished, the tally was $220,000 less than an initial count from the slots themselves. Under state law, unless the amounts were in balance, regulators couldn’t let the slot machines open the next day. In the eleven casinos he had opened before the Taj, Marino had never seen this kind of mess.
Marino broke the news to Trump, and the slots stayed closed all that day and most of the next. Finally, late on the third day of opening week, a worker on his way into the count room stubbed his toe. When he looked down, he saw that the steel door was propped open with a large, heavy canvas bag—the $220,000 in missing tokens. Trump couldn’t believe it. Within days, the outer wall was knocked out so the room could be enlarged. O’Donnell recalled that during the same period “we found an entire room full of coin that no one knew about.”
To the press, Trump was all smiles, insisting that the only problem the Taj had was that he was making so much money “we couldn’t count it fast enough.” (A headline in the New York Times echoed that view: “Taj Mahal’s Slot Machines Halt, Overcome by Success.”) Privately, Trump’s tone was starkly different. He told O’Donnell he should “fucking fire people” to solve problems. “Don’t leave here, Jack,” Trump said, as O’Donnell recalled it. “Don’t leave me.”
Trump headed back to New York as O’Donnell scrambled to fix the problems. After some agonizing hours, the state agreed to let customers into the casino. In O’Donnell’s mind, the opening was already a “colossal failure.” But the public continued to know little of this. Most of the publicity was about the spectacular setting, the casino floors that went on seemingly forever, the length of three football fields. The halls echoed with the sound of coins clinking and dice falling and music playing and customers laughing, joyful melodies that meant money was being made, although not nearly enough in Trump’s estimation.
Late that night, while O’Donnell was still working through problems at the Taj, Trump called him, wondering if the casino would have suffered such problems if Steve Hyde and Mark Etess had not been killed in the helicopter crash. O’Donnell responded that the two would have foreseen the problems and prevented a crisis. “I think these are Hyde’s people in here, and I think that Hyde’s people are responsible for this problem,” Trump told O’Donnell. O’Donnell had long since concluded that Trump knew little about running casinos. A crop of stellar executives led by Hyde had been crucial to Trump’s success. Now O’Donnell was upset that Trump seemed to be blaming their deceased colleagues for problems that O’Donnell believed were Trump’s fault. O’Donnell concluded that Trump’s style was to lash out when things weren’t going well.
O’Donnell had seen the same kind of reaction when Trump once launched into a tirade against an accountant who was black. “I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza—black guys counting my money!” Trump said, according to O’Donnell’s memoir, Trumped! “I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else. . . . Besides that, I’ve got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is; I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” O’Donnell admonished Trump not to talk that way, but he said Trump ignored him. (Years later, O’Donnell hired the accountant at his own business, testament to his belief that Trump had been wrong. Trump, asked about O’Donnell’s memoir, said in 1997 that it was “probably true,” but years later Trump said it was “fiction,” even as he acknowledged, “I didn’t read his book.” Separately, Trump said, “I’m the least racist person that you’ve ever interviewed.”)
Two days after the casino reopened, Trump flew in his helicopter from New York to Atlantic City, landed on the roof of Trump Castle, and made his way to the Taj for the grand conclusion of opening week. To the public, the imagery was spectacular: Trump had arranged f
or one of the biggest stars on the planet, Michael Jackson, to tour the Taj, and the two strode through the hotel and casino, an odd couple connected by wealth and celebrity, trailed by the media and mobbed by guests. Publicists made sure the media knew that Jackson was impressed with the $10,000-a-night Alexander the Great suite. More than one hundred thousand people toured the hotel, gawking at the glorious excess and the 167 gaming tables. This was to be one of the proudest moments of Trump’s career. Hordes crowded him wherever he went.
As opening week came to a close, however, Trump met with his remaining management team. O’Donnell listened intently as Trump again said he wanted to fire anyone who had caused the problems: “I want the assholes out of here. I want people who are going to kick some ass. I want pricks. What I need are more nasty pricks in this company. Warriors.” At yet another meeting, O’Donnell was with a group of executives, including Robert Trump, when Donald walked in. Donald shouted about a series of mishaps, saying, “We’re going to lose a fortune!”
Robert spoke up: “Donald, you know there’s just no way to predict these things.”
“Robert, just never mind!” Trump replied, as O’Donnell recounted it. “I’m sure as hell not going to listen to you in this situation. I listened to you and you got me into this.” Soon after that exchange, O’Donnell learned that Robert was gone. “He told his secretary to get some boxes,” an executive told O’Donnell. “He said, ‘I’m getting out of here. I don’t need this.’ And he got on a helicopter and went home.” (In an interview for this book, Donald Trump disputed O’Donnell’s account, saying his brother “never quit” and did a “really good job” at the casinos.)
In public, Trump spoke with pride to the crowds that had gathered to celebrate the grand opening. At once brash and eloquent, he praised the executives who had died in the helicopter crash, and he said opening week at the Taj had exceeded “my wildest expectations.” He rubbed the giant Aladdin’s lamp, and the image of a genie appeared. Laser lights and fireworks filled the sky, and customers rushed in. Publicists called the Taj the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” Trump’s former rival Merv Griffin predicted that the Taj would lift up Atlantic City. Television personality Robin Leach, speaking on his show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, said just what Trump wanted to hear: “Donald’s biggest gamble is turning up aces!”
Trump Revealed Page 18
