Trump, page 28
Donald and Ivana personally earned the credit for some of the structure’s successful flourishes—architect Der Scutt attributes “the use of the European mirrors and brass” to them and says it was Ivana who insisted on the waterfall, even when Scutt advocated Art Deco panels, sculptures, or tapestries. It was the City Planning Commission, however, that forced Trump and Scutt to double the width of the entrance, avoiding what commission architects feared would be the tunnel effect of the fifteen-foot doorway Donald planned. “Trump went crazy,” recalls Scutt, “because that meant he’d have fifteen feet less for valuable retail space.” But, in the end, Donald complied and, years later, he acknowledged the commission’s better judgment.
It was Scutt who had to convince Donald and Ivana about the Italian marble that became the building’s interior trademark. The Trumps, according to Scutt, wanted to use the same brown paradisio marble they’d selected for the Hyatt, but Scutt argued that it would be too dark. “At one point,” he remembered in an interview, “to get them off the brown marble adventure, I suggested white tile. White tile would’ve been awful. Ivana, for a while, liked the idea of white tile. Finally, I got them to consider this rosy beige marble which I think is fun to be around, the kind of marble that’s conducive to shopping.” Ivana became such a champion of the rare Breccia Perniche marble that she went to Italy and trekked from one end of the quarry from which it was being taken to the other, picking the finest stones.
Scutt had to apply the same powers of persuasion on the applauded exterior: “For a long time, Trump in the early designs had us make a simple box . . . a plain base so that a tower was sitting on a box. . . . It was a feeble attempt to relate to the Tiffany structure. And I kept pointing out that this was really very boring. What we needed was a building that had a lot of action visually. For about five or six months I began to sketch alternative forms that were eventually englassed and fragmented with the cascading terraces . . . that give the base of the tower a rather interesting geometry.” Ivana joined Scutt in this campaign until finally Donald, who Scutt says was “always doodling” with his own hand-drawn amateur sketches, agreed.
Scutt was less successful with the size of the Trump Tower lettering on the front entrance: “I argued that the height of the Trump Tower letters would be far more elegant if they were only eighteen inches high.” “If you’ve ever noticed the lettering on the front of Tiffany’s, it’s very discrete and very small, and very elegant and very distinguished. Trump intercepted the shop drawings for the height of these letters and changed the design from eighteen-inch-high letters to thirty-six-inch. I guess he just wanted the name to be that much more prominent. Obviously, an eighteen-inch-high letter is still very visible from way down Fifth Avenue.”
The architect said that the altering of the entrance lettering—and Donald’s simultaneous heightening of the brass portal above the nameplate—was the only time Donald “simply bypassed me and got ahold of the shop drawings and made the change himself.” He didn’t even discuss the matter with Scutt, though on a typical day during the peak of their Trump Tower planning, Donald would start phoning him at 7:00 A.M. and call fifteen or twenty times before 9:00 P.M. “The height of the Trump Tower letters is very typical, I believe, of Trump’s desire to be known, to be superior. It’s a typical act by Trump to get his own way and to announce his presence. Bigness is not always greatness.”
The building cost $201 million to build, including $44 million in interest payments on the construction loan, but it was an instant moneymaker. A 1986 Times story reported that the sale of 251 of the tower’s 268 apartments had brought in $277 million, according to a financial statement from an outside accountant. The sale or lease of the remaining apartments was expected to add millions to that total, and Equitable and Trump shared the $17 million a year in earnings on the commercial and retail space. Trump also collected $11 million in commissions on apartment sales and was regularly paid an undisclosed fee for managing the building (listed as well over a million dollars a year on property tax expense reports).
Donald was, from the beginning, concerned about competition from a building going up just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue on 53rd Street, Museum Tower. Built on the air rights above the Museum of Modern Art and designed by internationally famed Cesar Pelli, Museum Tower hit the superluxury market at the same time as Trump Tower. Donald had tried to launch a covert campaign to block the project, contacting Dan Levitt, the lawyer for the Strawberry chain who had successfully blocked the condemnation of its Commodore store.
“He wanted me to challenge the air rights sale in court. He wanted to stop Museum Tower from going forward,” said Levitt. “But he didn’t want his name associated with the lawsuit I filed. He wanted me to represent a neighbor or someone to oppose it. I told him there was no way I could do it without using his name.” Trump later successfully used this sort of substitute plaintiff gambit to force drastic alteration of the planned construction of a forty-four-story tower at 712 Fifth Avenue, directly across the street from Trump Tower—a project he feared would threaten the Atrium’s chic European retailers.
No one ever did file the third-party lawsuit Donald wanted, but his subterranean efforts to kill Museum Tower proved wholly unnecessary. He outmarketed its owners in every way; his $2 million promotional campaign made Trump Tower the place to buy. A key to that campaign was a masterstroke of media deception. Trump called New York magazine’s “Intelligencer,” one of the city’s hottest gossip pages, and on a confidential basis told a reporter that the Crown Estates, a holding company for the British royal family, had expressed interest in acquiring several apartments—totaling twenty-one rooms—for the use of Prince Charles and other members of the family. Somehow, according to a source at the magazine familiar with the episode, he even managed to produce a letter on Crown Estates letterhead. When the British family would not confirm or deny this supposed interest, the magazine attracted worldwide attention with a short and splashy item. In fact, as Donald would write in The Art of the Deal, the Prince never had the slightest interest in a tower apartment.
The advertising brochure expanded on the hype of the media campaign. It described the tower’s ambience in terms that Donald, and many of his buyers, would have found irresistible:
It’s been fifty years at least since people could actually live at this address. They were the Astors. And the Whitneys lived just around the corner. And the Vanderbilts across the street.
You approach the residential entrance—an entrance totally inaccessible to the public—and your staff awaits your arrival. Your concierge gives you your messages. Quickly, quietly, the elevator takes you to your floor and your elevator man sees you home. You turn the key and wait a moment before turning on the light. A quiet moment to take in the view—wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling—New York at dusk. Your diamond in the sky. It seems a fantasy. And you are home.
Maid service, valet, laundering and dry cleaning, stenographers, interpreters, multilingual secretaries, Telex and other communications equipment, hairdressers, masseuses, limousines, helicopters, conference rooms—all at your service with a phone call to your concierge.
There was, however, another side to the grandeur of the tower, for not only did its opulence quickly outpace that of the Hyatt, Donald’s only other project at the time, but so did the dubiousness of its origins.
The scandals associated with the project started with the demolition of the old Bonwit building, which began in early 1980. While Donald’s Commodore demolition contractor had its mob ties, it was at least a well-known and capable company. Though Trump Tower was to be Donald’s most lavish project, he decided at the very outset to try to cut costs in clearing the site, selecting a demolition contractor with no heavy demolition experience simply because it had agreed to do the job at Trump’s suggested $775,000 price.
The contractor, William Kaszycki, was able to submit so low a bid because most of his workers were illegal Polish aliens working at rates one-half to one-third those of union scale. Kaszycki’s wife recruited the workers in Poland, promising housing as well as four-to-six-dollar-an-hour wages. On Trump’s job 200 of them worked twelve-to-eighteen-hour shifts with no days off or overtime and slept in groups of eight in a slum apartment or motel room. When Kaszycki began using his payments from Trump to cover costs on other jobs, as well as to pay the few union workers on the site, he underpaid many of the Polish workers, who were hauling asbestos-covered piping and other materials out of the building virtually unprotected.
Though Donald’s office throughout the demolition was in the Crown Building, directly across the street from the site, he claimed in subsequent sworn testimony that he did not “think” he knew anything about the Polish brigade “until probably sometime after the demolition.” So fainthearted a claim of ignorance was transparently disingenuous, since it was Trump himself who discovered Kaszycki and invited him to bid on the job.
Kaszycki had been hired in late 1979 by the company that owned Bonwit to do light, interior demolition on a 57th Street store adjacent to the Trump Tower site that Donald had leased to it. While Donald insisted on the witness stand later that he had “nothing to do with the work” on this side street store, he not only owned it, but he had agreed to give Bonwit $1.2 million to pay for the renovation of it as part of his lease agreement with the company. It was separated by a wall from the other Bonwit building on Fifth Avenue that Donald would subsequently hire Kaszycki to demolish totally.
Zbigniew Goryn, a Kaszycki foreman on both jobs, said that Donald came to the 57th Street job once and said he “liked the way the men were working.” Goryn recalled that Trump remarked that the “Polish guys” were “good, hard workers.” In fact, Trump hired away from Bonwit a construction supervisor who’d overseen its 57th Street work, Tom Macari, and put him in charge of supervising the Fifth Avenue demolition. Macari, whose office was in Donald’s suite, went to the Fifth Avenue site “twenty to thirty times” from March until the job was finally finished in late August. One of only a half dozen or so Trump Organization officers at the time, Macari knew, according to the eventual findings of a federal judge, “that the Polish workers were working ‘off the books,’ that they were non-union, that they were paid substandard wages, and that they were paid irregularly if at all.”
Trump’s ignorance was even more improbable in light of Kaszycki’s testimony that “hundreds, thousands of workers from Poland and other countries” came to the Trump Tower site and “stood in lines down the street, waiting, begging” for jobs. “You could see that all the time,” Kaszycki said, “five, six, ten, twenty times—all the time—come begging for jobs.”
Despite his savings by underpaying the Polish workers, Kaszycki’s financial problems on the job became so severe—because the costs far exceeded his bid price—that he began shortchanging the Housewrecker Union’s welfare and pension fund. While the union was willing to overlook all the nonunion labor being used, it threatened to shut the job down if the welfare payments on the union workers weren’t made. Though this was Kaszycki’s obligation, Trump himself began to make the union payments in June, rolling up over $40,000 in contributions. Macari “carefully scrutinized” the fund payments, according to the later judicial opinion, and “knew that contributions were being sought and made on only union members’ wages.”
In addition to its labor problems, the Kaszycki crew destroyed two fifteen-foot-high bas-relief Art Deco sculptures, reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, unleashing a howl of editorial and cultural criticism. Trump, who apparently authorized the destruction of the pieces (in part because Kaszycki couldn’t remove them except at great cost), had promised to donate the sculptures to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The union and sculpture crises, plus wildcat strikes by the unpaid Poles and the grindingly slow pace of demolition due to Kaszycki’s inability to bring down the heavy concrete structure, finally forced Trump to focus on the disaster just a few yards away. He authorized Macari to take control over the Kaszycki bank account for the job and, according to Kaszycki, Macari began approving payments not only to the union but “sometimes [to] the Polish” workers as well. Macari also started getting calls from a lawyer, John Szabo, representing several of the unpaid Poles, who threatened a lien or a suit. By the summer, Szabo did file $100,000 in liens. Macari and a Trump attorney toyed with and then threatened Szabo, at one point suggesting they’d go to immigration and seek the deportation of the unpaid workers. In July, after months of abuse, the workers were apparently so disgruntled that a large group of them threatened to hang Macari, and Trump had to personally summon a labor mediator friend of his to try to settle the situation.
The scandal didn’t end with the completion of the demolition. By late 1980, Szabo was taking his case through the federal bureaucracy, going from the Labor Department to the U.S. Attorney’s office in New Jersey. The reason he went to New Jersey was that agents from that office had raided two motels near Atlantic City where a Kaszycki crew of illegal workers had been holed up doing a demolition job. Kaszycki was convicted of importing and exploiting Polish aliens and was sentenced to several months in jail and a $10,000 fine. The Labor Department also won a $575,000 judgment against him for the Trump Tower abuses. Szabo later testified that he believed the Labor Department suit should have been brought against Kaszycki and the Trump Organization as joint employers but that Labor officials asked him to remove Trump’s name from the draft complaint he’d prepared. When Szabo went to federal prosecutors in Newark, where Donald’s sister was the first assistant to the U.S. Attorney, he testified that he was told “not to mention Trump’s name” unless he “walked outside into the hallway.” While there was no evidence that Maryanne Trump had anything to do with her office’s handling of the case, the government’s refusal from the outset to consider any possibility that the Trump Organization might have knowingly participated in this off-the-books scheme was certainly strange.*
The Newark office’s explanation was that it viewed Trump as a Kaszycki victim—a dubious proposition, since the litigious Trump expressly refused to join any Szabo suit against Kaszycki and decided not to pursue Kaszycki for the hundreds of thousands in demolition costs beyond the contract that Trump had to cover, starting with the welfare fund payments. Kaszycki and Trump were jointly sued, however, by labor lawyers seeking the welfare fund payments for the Polish workers that were never paid. A decade after this litany of abuse, U.S. District Court Judge Charles Stewart finally found that the Trump Organization and the president of the union, who actually worked on the tower site, had “a tacit agreement to employ the Polish workers and deprive them” of union benefits, concluding that “the Trump defendants knowingly participated in the fiduciary breach.” Stewart determined that $325,000 in welfare payments had been improperly withheld—and fined the Trump Tower corporate entity over a million dollars. Of course by then the workers who were supposed to get those benefits, as well as the hundreds of thousands in wages they had missed, had long scattered to the wind.
The demolition controversy—which also involved convincing evidence that the Polish workers had been exposed to massive doses of asbestos—was hardly the only Trump Tower matter to invite the attention of investigators. Even before the Kaszycki probe was underway in New Jersey, and before construction began on the tower in the fall of 1980, Donald was subpoenaed by prosecutors in another jurisdiction about the most fundamental judgment he’d made in designing and planning the building. Donald had decided to build the nation’s tallest reinforced concrete job at a point when the concrete industry in New York, at both the union and contractor levels, was wholly dominated by organized crime. In the end, the tower would become one of the most expensive private concrete jobs in history—running up a $22 million concrete bill, compared with only $300,000 worth of touch-up steelwork. Each of the fifty-eight stories rested entirely on reinforced concrete beams, not steel. The 45,000 cubic yards of concrete weighed 90,000 tons, one and a half times the weight of all the steel used in the Empire State Building. The only real steel used in the building was the 3,800 tons of reinforcing steel rods inside the concrete blocks.
The choice of concrete for Trump Tower was hardly automatic, even though it was frequently used in residential construction. The mixed uses planned for Donald’s building—with the bottom third of the floors relegated to retail and office space—left Donald with options, since office buildings are rarely just concrete. While concrete gave Trump a more rigid and solid building, it was also more appropriate because the tower was being built on a fast track—meaning it was being designed a floor at a time and going up as fast as it could be designed. “When you change concrete,” architect Scutt explained, “all you have to do is change the form a little bit. When you change steel, you have to send it back to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and it comes back five weeks later. To do it in steel would have been prohibitively expensive.”
Using concrete, however, put Donald at the mercy of a legion of concrete racketeers, none more powerful than union boss John Cody. The balding, bulky, sixty-year-old Cody had weathered eight arrests, including one for attempted rape, and three convictions. Before Trump Tower was finished, he would be indicted in an eight-count federal racketeering case, charged with taking $160,000 in kickbacks. His mob associations were so strong that the FBI claimed that Carlo Gambino, the most powerful mobster in America, came to his son’s $51,000 wedding in Long Island in 1973. His bodyguard, indicted on a murder rap and bailed out by Cody’s investment banker son, was later shot to death.
