Trump, page 38
Each of these gambits caused flickers of CCC controversy involving issues of runaway debt, anticompetitive conduct, and market monopoly, as well as more misleading testimony and broken public commitments. Yet the Kean majorities looked the other way until their concurrence became an instinct and effectively turned the future of the town over to the man with the golden touch. In 1987, with the Castle and Plaza doing well, the decision to go with Donald may have temporarily looked sound. But without any regulatory restraint, Trump’s appetite would become a curse—for him and the town.
*Sullivan contends that Shapiro’s interests were held by a family trust, not Shapiro personally, for tax reasons.
*Even before Sullivan took on the Hyatt work, Trump asked him to mediate the dispute between his Trump Tower demolition contractor and the illegal Polish aliens working for him on Fifth Avenue. Sullivan spent the latter part of July and most of August on the site, pushing the demolition project to conclusion and getting rid of the illegals—work he did without charge.
*Fighting the legalization of gambling wherever it reared its head soon became a Trump preoccupation. He underscored its perils over the years in Indiana, New York, and Louisiana, using the criminal vice that gripped Atlantic City as an object lesson. He even opposed a New Jersey Casino Association national advertising campaign that would have documented the constructive contributions of the industry in Atlantic City, fearing that it might stimulate competition elsewhere and suggesting instead that the association get out the word of just how bad crime was in the resort town to persuade other states not to take the risk.
*A state investigations report in the late 1980s revealed that Abrams and Trump had a troubling history of large contributions, embarrassingly intertwined with Abrams’s handling of Trump co-op and condo plans. When Trump pledged a $15,000 donation at a 1985 breakfast with Abrams, he had four plans pending approval before the attorney general’s office, a violation of voluntary campaign rules Abrams had imposed on himself and his donors.
*Milken told Donald that “the Saudis and the Kuwaitis have an unthinkable amount of money, and yet they could not buy the real estate on Wilshire Boulevard,” arguing that valuable property was just too expensive. “There is a great and growing junk bond market,” said Milken, then only in the early stages of the bond boom, “but real estate scares me. There’s not enough junk money to do Manhattan development deals.”
*Brown maintained ties with Trump over the years, representing Castle executive Bucky Howard on kickback charges. Howard was referred to Brown by Trump brass and used much of the $100,000 loaned him by Donald to pay Brown.
*Trump eventually reached a settlement with the state transportation department on the road improvements, but largely on his term. Two years late, he agreed to pay his share of what was reduced to a $16 million improvement, and his $5 million contribution was scheduled to be paid out over time. More than half a decade later, work has yet to begin on the project.
9
Taking On the Tenants
The impediments that can arise to baffle a great and swelling career are strange and various, in some instances all the cross waves of life must be cut by the strong swimmer. With other personalities there is a chance, or force, that happily allies itself with them; or they quite unconsciously ally themselves with it, and find that there is a tide that bears them on. An unconscious drift in the direction of right, virtue, duty? These are banners of mortal manufacture. Nothing is proved; all is permitted.
—THEODORE DREISER, THE TITAN
At quarter past ten on a Thursday morning, John Moore sat sequestered in his three-room apartment overlooking Central Park. He ran a struggling record company, but the forty-six-year-old bachelor and minor-league entrepreneur was in no rush to make it to his nearby office. The phone rang constantly with calls from reporters, and Moore was in his glory—glib, arrogant, pushing his cause into print. After a decade as a loner, the twice-divorced and basically self-employed Moore was used to setting his own daily agenda. Today the only item on his Allentown redbook calendar was the latest skirmish in a war with the man who had suddenly made him newsworthy: Donald J. Trump, owner of the luxury building at 100 Central Park South where Moore lived.
The twelfth-floor Moore apartment—with fourteen-foot ceilings, a fireplace, a huge kitchen formed by combining two rooms, and a wall full of living room windows—was located in a building with twenty-four-hour doormen, prominent tenants like fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, and a prestige address along a four-block runway of park-front affluence. The ambience abetted the Social Register image Moore had spent years inventing for himself, a status far beyond his means or achievement. In reality, Moore’s mere $691 monthly rent, protected under the city’s rent stabilization laws, would not buy him an unregulated studio anywhere else in fashionable Manhattan, where rental occupancy was at an all-time high. Nonetheless, by this January morning in 1985, Moore hadn’t been paying any rent for several years and had run up a $10,000 arrearage. Before he ended his one-man rent strike in 1987, he would live free for four years, all the while fending off improvement requests from the building’s manager, including attempts to paint his entire apartment. His rent holdout was apparently as much an attempt to dodge the expense, and savor the much-needed savings, as it was a sign of protest. The apartment had become a vital prop in his deceptive play, and if he got to use it at no cost, all the better.
Though Moore was half Italian, he worked hard at portraying himself as Manhattan’s last available WASP, with a country-club air and a stylish, barrel-chested brashness. He listed himself in the phone book as John C. Moore III, claimed to be a Tiffany heir from the monied Locust Valley enclave on Long Island, dated flashy models half his age, played daily tennis, weathered New York winters in a full-length, seventy-pound black-bear coat, and enjoyed his own smug brand of put-down humor. No one in the social circles in which Moore floated was aware that one of his partners in the record business was tied to the Gambino crime family, and even John would later insist that he was ignorant of that fact.
Reporters had been calling Moore for an entire week, ever since the enforcement division of the state’s housing agency announced its decision to bring a harassment case against Donald Trump. John Moore, who often said he was chosen president of the building’s Tenants Association because he “mixed the best drinks,” was finally getting the attention he believed he deserved, pitted in every newspaper head-to-head against his famous opponent. Moore relished both media versions of the conflict—his portrayal of the tenants as the beleaguered victims of an avaricious Trump and Trump’s repeated attacks on the tenants as “millionaires” hiding behind the rent stabilization laws.
Moore had never met or spoken to Trump, but he’d helped form a tenants association in 1981, shortly after Donald bought their fifteen-story, sixty-seven-year-old building. Before Trump’s purchase, the six-foot-two-inch, contemptuously superior Moore had hardly spoken to any of his eighty or so neighbors, though he’d lived among them since he bribed a doorman, super, manager, and outgoing tenant in 1973, buying his way at first into a tiny second-floor apartment in the back of the building. Somehow the fear of Trump had instantly catapulted this heterogeneous and unlikely group of rich and poor tenants into a united front, with John Moore as their democratically designated leader. The tenants were galvanized by the transparent purpose behind Trump’s purchase—he clearly intended to vacate the building and replace it with another towering condominium, one that would generate millions in profits.
The building was purchased for next to nothing—the price would never be revealed, but newspaper estimates put it as low as a million—because it came as a minor part of a grand package: Donald had simultaneously bought 106 Central Park South, the aging Barbizon Plaza Hotel, from the same owners. Moore’s building sat at the corner of Sixth Avenue, occupying two thirds of the block, while the Barbizon rose thirty-eight stories high both next door to and behind 100 Central Park South on Sixth Avenue and 58th Street. Trump, who’d just started construction of Trump Tower a few blocks away on Fifth Avenue, envisioned a single huge and elegant condominium development on the combined sites, with floors of commercial space fronting 200 feet along Central Park South and along a full block of Sixth Avenue.
Architects went to work immediately, designing what Trump envisioned as his greatest success, a sumptuous building scheduled for completion at the peak of the eighties boom market. Only John Moore, and his group of feisty tenants, stood in the way of this dream. The canny Moore had, in fact, hired a Tenants Association architect back in 1982 to draw up renovation plans for the building that fulfilled each tenant’s deepest desire. In addition to a plan, the architect produced a formula based on the relative resale value of each apartment, and every tenant was dunned a monthly amount by the Tenants Association, proportionate to the purported value of his or her apartment, with higher floors and corner apartments paying more. The tenants had already been fighting Trump for three and a half years, using the bulk of the $200,000 they had raised to retain the law firm of Fischbein Olivieri Rozenholc Badillo, one of the city’s fiercest tenant advocates. Moore and lead partner David Rozenholc’s courtroom and press tactics had so stymied Trump that by 1985 the war with 100 Central Park South’s tenants had become the most exasperating business experience of his early career, costing him millions and tarnishing his image. And now, the state’s decision to bring the harassment action was putting Trump on the defensive legally, posing the real threat of a damning governmental finding against him. As he sat in his apartment a week after the state order mandating a hearing was issued, Moore sensed a turning point.
The phone rang again, and a friendly voice at the other end asked for John Moore.
“This is John Moore.”
“Hi, John. This is Donald Trump. You know, John, I saw you on television this week, and you look like a really nice guy.”
“Who is this?” interrupted Moore.
“This is Donald Trump,” repeated the voice.
“I’ve experienced this kind of practical joke quite frequently,” said Moore. “Give me your telephone number and I’ll call you back.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said the voice, offering a phone number.
Moore did not know that this was a commonplace Trump tactic: Don’t use a secretary, make a person-to-person initial contact, cut right through to the perceived opponent, and instill an air of intimacy and trust in a relationship that from afar seems naturally combative. Even though he was a bit unnerved, Moore returned the call minutes later, and he got straight through to Trump.
“You look like a reasonable guy,” Donald picked up where he’d left off. “I think if I had gotten involved in this in the beginning, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess today. This is just costing time and money, and I am sorry the whole thing happened.”
Donald was obviously trying to distance himself from the acts of his own managing agents, lawyers, and top staffers. Moore found the ploy absurd, but wanted, for tactical reasons, to leave open the possibility that Trump had been too busy to pay attention to the petty assaults on the people of 100 Central Park South—an opening that would give Donald a way out. Of course Moore knew that it was Donald himself, not any agent, who had written the city’s Human Resources Administration in 1982 offering the vacant apartments in the building as emergency housing for the homeless, alarming every tenant and provoking a cold rebuff from the city. Moore also knew that the foundation for the day-to-day acts of harassment cited in the state complaint had been laid years earlier in public submissions to the city by Donald himself.
For example, in September 1981, shortly after Trump bought the building, he began to take legal steps to clear it, filing a series of applications at the city agencies that administered the rent control and stabilization laws, which covered virtually all of its eighty tenant households. He signed requests for demolition and eviction permits, sought authority to refuse to renew leases, and submitted Buildings Department plans for his new 165-unit tower, with penthouse apartments scheduled to go for millions apiece.
The overwhelming caseload of these agencies, the paralysis prompted by the sweeping legislative changes in rent regulation laws adopted in 1983, and the filing of harassment complaints by several 100 Central Park South tenants had prevented any early adjudication of these key, building-clearing applications. In the only individual case the city agencies fully heard, Trump was ordered by one of the agencies, the Conciliation and Appeals Board, to renew one tenant’s three-year lease. The CAB ignored three letters from Trump lawyers in 1983 asking for a full hearing on the demolition permit, including one offering a list of twenty-one available hearing dates, acquiescing to objections from tenant lawyer Rozenholc.
When a new state law transferred authority over rent-regulated buildings to the state’s Department of Housing and Community Renewal in 1984, Moore and the tenants began filing detailed harassment allegations, one after another, with the department’s new enforcement division. Finally, on January 3, 1985, after eight months of DHCR review of these complaints, the division issued an order requiring full hearings and charging Trump with “an unrelenting, systematic and illegal campaign” whose “singleminded intent” was to “force the tenants from their housing accommodations at the earliest possible time.”
Instead of waiting until his eviction and demolition permits were approved, Trump and his agents had, according to the enforcement division’s hearing notice, tried to force the tenants out by “verbally intimidating” them with claims that the demolition was “certain and imminent,” by instituting “unwarranted litigation” against a variety of individual tenants, by permitting “breaches in the security of the building,” and by “interfering with or decreasing a broad panorama of basic and essential services.”
Moore knew that it would take months of testimony to substantiate the state complaint, but he also recognized the value of its allegations as dramatic leverage over the publicity-conscious Trump. It was clear to Moore, in fact, that the order had instigated Donald’s conciliatory phone call.
“The problem, Donald, is that the whole thing did happen,” Moore began telling Trump. “You hurt a lot of people in this building. Maybe it was your agents, or maybe you were receiving legal advice which didn’t work to your benefit. Maybe you neglected to sit on what you were trying to do, and watch it closely enough. You frightened a lot of people in this building and I think you probably saw the looks on the faces of the ladies that appeared in the TV interviews.”
“Yeah, I did,” Donald responded. “They looked kind of concerned.”
“Well, they are concerned,” retorted Moore, “because they have been suffering under you for a number of years now, and it is pretty rough.”
“I would not have wanted this to happen.” Trump got to his point. “Normally, I do things myself, like I made this phone call to you. So maybe we can try and see, you know, if we can resolve our difficulties. I don’t know whether there would be any purpose to our getting together for a meeting, but I would like to come over to your office or whatever, and let us kick around some ideas.”
“I have to think about that. In principle I have no problem in listening to some ideas, but I would like to think about it and talk to David Rozenholc,” said Moore, introducing the name of the tenant lawyer who Trump had already decided was a hard-nosed and difficult foe.
“What kind of guy is he?” pressed Donald. “Is he reasonable?”
“He is a terrific guy,” answered Moore. “A very bright man, and I want to chat with David, and I will get back to you.”
Moore and his executive committee of four other tenants had picked Rozenholc to represent the association after entertaining offers from several dozen interested parties, and though the firm was only four years old at the time, it seemed to have just the right combination of legal talent and political access for the job.
Born in 1945 in Russia near the Chinese border to a father jailed in Siberia, Rozenholc was raised in Israel, emigrated to the Bronx at age sixteen, and went to City College and Rutgers Law School. A high-strung, disheveled, vulgar bulldog of a trial lawyer, Rozenholc’s method was to pontificate, explode, connive, and berate incessantly, expecting to be paid well for each weapon in the arsenal of personality disorders at his tactical command. “I have a hard time being nice to people who are trying to fuck me, or being pleasant to people I’m trying to fuck” was his philosophy. One Trump lawyer tells the story of how, when he met with Rozenholc in his office, Rozenholc took his shoes and socks off, put his bare feet up on the desk, and announced: “I like to eat a Christian a day, and I haven’t eaten yet today.”
By contrast, his partner, forty-three-year-old Rick Fischbein, was a mediating, thoughtful insider with Rolodexes of powerful connections. Democratic district leader in Chelsea on the West Side of Manhattan during the seventies, he befriended John LoCicero, who was an aide to then Village congressman Ed Koch and remained Koch’s top political attaché throughout the mayor’s years in City Hall. Fischbein’s twenty-year friendship with LoCicero gave him access with city officials, as did his equally long friendship with City Housing Commissioner Tony Gliedman.
A third partner, Herman Badillo, was the city’s preeminent Hispanic politician—a former Bronx borough president and congressman who had run, unsuccessfully, for mayor three times. In January 1985 he was preparing for another ill-fated run, against the seemingly invincible Ed Koch. While Rozenholc denounced politicians as “whores,” Fischbein and Badillo had close ties to everyone from Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein to Governor Mario Cuomo.
When Moore mentioned Rozenholc during this first conversation with Trump, Donald was well aware that the flamboyant attorney had already handed him a number of courtroom defeats. Not only had Rozenholc blocked two Trump attempts to force individual tenants out, he’d convinced two lower court judges that Donald had acted in “bad faith,” winning one finding that Trump had served a dispossess notice on a tenant for nonpayment of rent even though the tenant had a canceled check for the month in question. In a third case, Rozenholc got an injunction barring Trump from evicting six tenants who refused to comply with the bizarre demand—at least in a building with a pending demolition application—that they restore their apartments to their original condition. But Rozenholc’s most important early victory was delaying the CAB hearings so long the case wound up inherited by DHCR, and it was surely not lost on Trump that the CAB’s executive director left government to join the Rozenholc firm soon thereafter. Rozenholc’s track record made it clear, even to Donald, that he was up against an opponent who knew how to play his own game, so he was hesitant when Moore insisted on conferring with Rozenholc about their first head-to-head meeting.
