Trump, page 48
In 1989, the appeals court reinstated the $11.5 million assessment, forcing Donald to pay $81,500 more a year in taxes. On its Sunday front page, the Palm Beach Post featured a chart contrasting what the town could buy with the tax amount at issue—fully subsidized day care for twenty-three needy children or a new, fully stocked fire rescue truck—to what Trump could buy, namely, forty-five days of upkeep and staff at the mansion or ten cross-country trips in his 727.
In the period between Trump’s lower court victory and the ruling on appeal, Donald refinanced the estate for $12 million, convincing Boston Safe Deposit & Trust to take Chase out of the loan. The new loan was recorded, and even though the amount would have helped the county’s case, the details of the refinancing could not be conveyed to the court, since new facts cannot be added to a case on appeal. Boston Safe granted Trump a standard, adjustable rate mortgage in October 1988, due in five years. In August of 1989, the county hiked Trump’s assessment to $14 million, reflecting the new mortgage.
While Palm Beach had reacted with shock and dismay over Donald’s purchase price—because of the plummeting effect it might have on the real estate market—it celebrated the ultimate decision in the tax case because it would hike local property values. By the time Donald lost the case, however, he’d already been reduced to a subject of ridicule in town on a host of unrelated scores. The Trump Princess, financed with another risky loan from Boston Safe, was too huge to be berthed anywhere near Mar-A-Lago and had to remain upwater, docked at a Best Western. The Trump 727 was so noisy it was banned from the airport from 10:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M., and the black Puma helicopter was barred from landing in Palm Beach at all.
When Donald tried to become the champion of a great public crusade against airport noise, he instead became an embarrassment, insisting that the county spend over $800 million to move the airport so planes didn’t fly directly over his estate. Trump created a “Noise Pollution Action Fund PAC” to elect two members to the Palm Beach County Commission, threw a thousand-dollar-a-head fund-raising party at the estate, and watched his two candidates go down to defeat and attribute their losses to the negative publicity his involvement had generated. As Michael Crook put it in a Miami Herald profile entitled “Hitting a Roar Nerve,” local politicians started avoiding Trump “as if he were a cash bar.”
Doyle Rogers speculated in one news story about the tax case that Donald would not have paid what he did for Mar-A-Lago “had he known the effect of that noise,” an intriguing suggestion from the husband of the broker. But eight months after the Mar-A-Lago closing he made a second local purchase across the waterway in West Palm Beach, home of the disputed airport. He paid $41 million for a thirty-two-story condominium building, half of the mortgage costs assumed by a New York bank that had foreclosed on the defeated developer. Trump set about advertising his new apartments in a dead market, certain that Trump Plaza of the Palm Beaches was a name no one with a few hundred thousand at hand could resist.
The problem was that West Palm Beach is the downscale side of Palm Beach, where its Haitian maids live. The twin towers may have faced the water, but out the backdoor, quipped a real estate agent to the Wall Street Journal, “they are practicing voodoo.” Palm Beach—“a lush sandbar lined with palm trees” and connected to the world by only four bridges—parks its garbage trucks in West Palm Beach.
Donald decorated the lobby with elephant-skin armchairs, brass planters, and leather-paneled walls, but in two years sales only climbed from the paltry six of his predecessor to an unimpressive ninety-three, out of 221 apartments. “Trump the Chump?” was the Palm Beach Review headline in September 1988, and the Herald proclaimed that the sumptuous apartments were selling “at the pace of escargots.” Donald used his brief partnership with Lee Iacocca in the project as a promotional stunt, but Iacocca invested next to nothing, did not solicit Chrysler dealers to buy apartments as Donald had hoped, and pulled out quickly. Donald kept the breakup of the partnership a secret, still trying to use the name to help make sales.
“What Trump has to sell there is a view of a prime location,” said one real estate analyst. “It’s a second-rate location itself. It’s like Trump buying something in New Jersey for the view of Manhattan. He would never have done it.”
Everywhere Donald turned in Palm Beach he seemed to stumble. He was the butt of every Old Guard joke, the walking definition of an arriviste whose wealth was so new “it makes your hands green,” wrote one local wag. The gossip, heatedly denied by Donald, was that he had not been invited to join the Bath and Tennis Club, which is so close to Mar-A-Lago that the Club bought its beachfront from the Foundation. Confronted once by a reporter about his supposed snubbing, Donald countered: “They kiss my ass in Palm Beach.” Yet when he hosted the Palm Beach Preservation Foundation charity ball, just as the Post Foundation had done for years, he provoked stuffy grumbles for having roped off virtually the entire house and staged the event in a tent, with none of the customary dancing in the pavilion.
He was derided for his suggestion in the tax case that the town should grant him a low assessment because it cost him $2.5 million a year to run Mar-A-Lago, as if his seven gardeners and the workman who did nothing but care for the wrought-iron trimmings were performing a public service. He even wound up criticized for canceling $150,000 in Trump Plaza ads after a Miami Herald staff writer wrote: “Whenever I hear Palm Beachers complain about airport noise, I’m overcome with Schadenfreude. That’s a German word that means finding pleasure in the misfortune of others. The rumbling of the jets has the ring of social justice. Right over Don Trump’s house, even!”
Donald, apparently, could not even take a joke.
Ivana, though, loved the house and Palm Beach life. “A girls-only weekend at Mar-A-Lago,” she called her periodic parties there. “We sit in the spa, walk on the beach, and talk.” The invited group of twenty or so women adhered to a tight schedule of supervised exercise, the pool, the beach, massage, dinner, and a night of dancing with one another, entertained by a flown-in orchestra. To Ivana, the Greenwich home was for rest, gardening, and family, a retreat. Mar-A-Lago was for fantasy. When the troubles came in 1990, she went to Mar-A-Lago to forget them, posing for a Vogue cover shoot at the estate and still hosting her April girls’ party.
But to Donald, the mansion was useful only as a setting for business connections and payback weekends for everyone from American Express’s James Robinson to Hugh Carey to Senator Al D’Amato. He mounted his magazine covers behind silver frames and posted them around the house, and he took guests into the kitchen to show off the gold silverware, but neither the house nor Palm Beach ever really became a part of his life. When he was asked during the March 1988 tax deposition about selling the property, his response had an ironically prophetic tone to it.
“People don’t look at me as a seller,” he said. “If I ever offered the property for sale, I believe I would get very little for it, because when Trump is selling something, people think it’s no good. They say, why is he selling it?”
*When Macri finally closed on the sale to Donald more than a year later, he was forced to pay a $250,000 brokerage commission for this Sherry Netherland deal, as well as later negotiations, to none other than Charles Goldstein, the onetime lynchpin of the Commodore deal who was hired by Macri because of his supposed closeness to Trump.
*In The Art of the Deal, Trump would contend that his tearing up the letter was the reason Macri came back to him in the end, “instead of going to any of a dozen other bidders.” Almost everything in his description of this culminating scene was incorrect, however, as he back-dated it by almost a year and placed himself opposite Macri in a page-long, touching, tearing-up scene, when in fact he was with the lesser-known Arria. Macri was actually in Buenos Aires, awaiting the arrival in a day or so of Ivana for a two-day trek—a visit Donald even mentioned in his note to Arria. This inaccurate rendition was a repeat of Trump’s version of how he’d won the yards the first time out, substituting Victor Palmieri for the obscure Ned Eichler in the negotiations precisely a decade earlier.
*Years later, when Gold left government, he joined Schwartz’s firm.
*Apparently not satisfied with this repudiation of Hess’s tough position, Schwartz and other lawyers for major developers subsequently met with the mayor to complain about the anti-development bastions within the administration, singling out Hess and attempting to force him out. In the end, a chagrined Hess, his wings somewhat clipped, remained at the planning helm.
*Koch did not make a public statement about the project for another two years, and the axiomatic character of his ultimate comments made it even more curious that he had taken so long to speak out. “I’ve been accused of advocating bigness—but I know too big when I see it,” the mayor wrote in a November 1987 column. “I will not support a development almost twice as big as what I previously thought reasonable. To do so would be to abrogate my responsibility as the city’s chief executive.” Of course, the mayor had been told about the project’s density even before Trump announced it, yet he’d waited two years to take this rather uncomplicated position. Koch chose not to say the obvious until Schwartz had left Trump and the mayor had gotten embroiled in a series of ugly public disputes with Trump in late 1986 and early 1987 about NBC and other matters.
11
Pigskin Politics
Consider the governor who presided at this time in the executive chamber. He was a strange, dark, osseous man, who owing to the brooding, melancholy character of his own disposition, had a checkered and somewhat sad career behind him. Owing to an energetic and indomitable temperament, he had through years of law practice and public labors built up for himself a following which amounted to adoration. In all these capacities he had manifested a tendency to do the right as he saw it and play fair. He was primarily softhearted, fiery, a brilliant orator, a dynamic presence. . . .
In a vague way the governor sensed the dreams of Cowperwood. He realized that Cowperwood had traveled fast—that he was pressing to the utmost a great advantage in the face of great obstacles. Would he be proving unfaithful to the trust imposed on him by the great electorate if he were to advantage Cowperwood’s cause? Must he not rather in the sight of all men smoke out the animating causes here—greed, overweening ambition, colossal self-interest? . . . Ideals were here at stake—the dreams of one man as opposed, perhaps, to the ultimate dreams of a city or state or nation—the grovelings and wallowings of a democracy slowly, blindly trying to stagger to its feet. In this conflict were opposed, as the governor saw it, the ideals of one man and the ideals of men.
THEODORE DREISER, THE TITAN
Let me put it this way: when it comes to hiring people, Donald Trump, and I think he would agree with this, would not be adverse to hiring a person, in part, because he felt they had knowledge they could use from a previous job they had done. It wouldn’t bother him a bit. I think he would because he’s conscious of the public arena. He would try to do it within the bounds of legality, but he would go right up to the limit of what he was permitted to do in order to get the person with the most information . . .
TONY SCHWARTZ, AUTHOR OF THE ART OF THE DEAL
The venture that made Donald Trump a national figure wasn’t a real estate or casino project. While his own later self-promotion successfully depicted him as a magical master of the deal, it was his three-year dalliance with football—a game he loved to watch and hated to lose—that initially thrust him onto the national stage. With George Steinbrenner only a few miles away in the Bronx, Donald understood that the moneymen behind sports attract more publicity bang for their bucks than any other venture capitalists in America, and part of his genius was to use the exposure that a puny investment in football gave him to catapult into the consciousness of the country. Football became Donald’s way of achieving his ultimate objective—the mass marketing of the Trump name.
His first national newsmagazine profile was in Sports Illustrated, not BusinessWeek or Time. The lead of the first Sunday New York Times Magazine paean to him was his dominance at a 1984 football forum. His first major interview on national television was not with Barbara Walters, but on one of the Sunday pregame shows, The Trump name was regarded by his partner in his first Atlantic City casino, Harrah’s, as too obscure to be part of the casino’s name until all the hoopla about his acquisition of a football team converted him into a celebrity.
Donald began looking for a football team to buy before he could afford one, talking to one National Football League owner as early as 1981. He was simultaneously exploring his prospects with the United States Football League, the new, fragile federation of eighteen underfinanced teams fighting for a foothold in America’s most lucrative sport. From the beginning, he seemed to vacillate between the two, attempting to use the threat of joining the USFL—which was still a year away from its first season and still putting franchises together—as leverage with the behemoth NFL. The difference in price between the two options was astronomical—a USFL franchise might need a few million in start-up funds, while NFL franchises were selling for at least ten times that. Donald’s solution was to figure out how to buy an NFL franchise at a USFL price.
The NFL owner Donald started wining and dining in 1981 was Baltimore Colts owner Robert Irsay. The conversations—including meetings in his Crown Building office—lapsed in 1982, and started again in earnest in early 1983. At one point, Donald had Sandy Lindenbaum, who was friendly with NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle, call Rozelle for help with Irsay. He may even have talked to Rozelle himself. Irsay was willing to sell, according to Donald, but the two were far apart on price.
Irsay and his counsel, Mike Chernoff, would later claim that in the course of their discussions Donald had tried a daring pressure tactic, suggesting that he would buy a USFL franchise and force his way into the NFL if Irsay didn’t sell him the Colts. Chernoff claimed that Donald told him privately he would “see to it that it was worthwhile” for Chernoff if the lawyer would persuade Irsay to agree to the sale.*
After the first unsuccessful run at Irsay went nowhere in 1981, Donald had backed away from the NFL and made a $25,000 down payment to the USFL to obtain the New York franchise, but he did not make the second payment when it came due in 1982. According to Donald, he decided not to follow through on the purchase after talking with Rozelle about the pluses and minuses of going with the USFL—a peculiar selection of an adviser on the issue. Rozelle, he claimed, predicted doom for the league. Donald, on the other hand, was tempted by the notion that combining a daring, new football league with a telegenic and glib young owner might be just the right recipe for the instant media attention that would advance his other business interests, even if the league failed. Despite this hunch, he decided, at least temporarily, to take a pass on it and keep his options open with the NFL. An Oklahoma oil man, J. Walter Duncan, took on the USFL team in New York.
Trump continued to monitor the progress of the league, further intrigued by the four-year, $50 million contract it won with ABC before a single player had been signed and by the respectable TV ratings achieved in its first season. The league’s first player draft and the ownership meetings were held in his hotel, the Hyatt. He spoke regularly with the league’s leadership, peppering them with questions about the local franchise, the New York Generals. Since playing in Shea or Yankee Stadium in the spring—the designated season for the USFL—created a scheduling conflict with baseball, the Generals had followed the NFL Giants to the nearby New Jersey Meadowlands. Aside from snatching Georgia running back Herschel Walker from the college ranks, the local franchise was both a football and financial disaster, winning six games, losing twelve, and racking up a $2 million deficit. Duncan was ready to sell, and any buyer was in an excellent position to dictate the terms.
Donald made one last attempt at Irsay and Rozelle in early 1983, but could not force the Colt price down. One other NFL development also pushed Donald toward the USFL—Leon Hess, the sixty-nine-year-old oilman who owned the New York Jets, made it publicly clear that he was seriously considering a move to New Jersey. That would open the door for Donald’s Generals to become the only New York football team.
Since the Jets’ twenty-year lease at Shea ended on January 1, 1984, Hess had written the mayor a year ahead of time, advising him that the team was entertaining proposals for a stadium lease and would select a future site based on a review of the city’s submission and “others”—an unmistakable reference to the Meadowlands. Hess had been dissatisfied for years with Shea, a stadium built for baseball, with terrible sight lines for football and a scanty 60,000 seating capacity. An old-fashioned businessman who insisted on spotless restrooms in his gas stations, Hess became so furious over the drainage and egress problems at Shea’s bathrooms that everyone understood he would leave unless the city came up with a concrete proposal to rectify all of the stadium’s limitations immediately.
