In this excerpt from his book, Fred C. Trump, nephew of US President-elect Donald Trump, exposes how the latter manipulated a patriarch, leaving two innocent grandchildren cut out of their rightful inheritance
It was amazing what our lawyers were able to discover … and what our relatives ultimately admitted to under oath. The more I learned as the case unfolded, the more I was certain that Mary and I had made the right decision to sue. We had to get to the bottom of what had happened with my grandfather’s estate, and the only way to do that was in the push-and-shove of Queens County Surrogate’s Court.
And there it was, the Trumpiest story ever: how my uncle Donald Trump — at first with (his sister) Maryanne’s resistance and then with her, along with (brother) Robert’s, support — apparently managed to manipulate my aging grandfather into disinheriting two of his grandchildren. As we discovered in shocking detail as the case rolled on, Donald did this with cunning and persistence. He methodically manipulated his vulnerable father by exploiting some ancient prejudices and disappointments deep in the history of our family, most of it involving my late father.
A wild, maddening inside-the-family story
Mary and I hadn’t done anything to deserve this. We’d been loving grandchildren, always engaged in the life of the family. In a way, it wasn’t even personal, Donald’s self-interested decision to target us. He needed money. His creditors were coming after him. He thought they might grab his share of his father’s estate. We were collateral damage of his selfish but typical scheme to skip out on his mounting debts. And after initially raising objections, two of his siblings went along with Donald’s divisive plan ... once it became clear that they too would get more money if Mary and I were squeezed out.
It’s a wild and maddening inside-the-family story that came to light gradually, fact by fact by fact, as the irrefutable evidence piled up. Some of it came from court records. Some came from other parts of the legal discovery process, where the two sides in the case turn over certain documents and other information. And a whole lot came from the depositions of our aunt and two uncles, Donald, Maryanne, and Robert. It can be jaw-dropping what your relatives will reveal when experienced attorneys like our Jack Barnosky frame the questions right.
Jack and his team deserve big credit here. In our legal challenge to my grandfather’s will, the facts dribbled out slowly... but dribble they did. Along the way, we got deep into Grandpa’s cloudy head and into the relentless maneuvering of three of his four living children, Donald especially.
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It was all right there in black-and-white in hundreds of pages of the deposition transcript, the point-by-point Q-and-A, as three of my closest relatives explained in their very own words how they took tens of millions of dollars away from my sister and me and our families and our future. As usual, middle-child Aunt Elizabeth stayed out of the fray.
Donald’s love for glamour, glory, and profits
The best place to start this story is in 1984. That year, my grandfather wrote a will, exactly what responsible people do in looking out for their families. He left the bulk of his large estate to his wife and then equal shares to his five children. If any of his sons or daughters predeceased him, as his oldest son already had, that share would go to that child’s children. Standard stuff for someone who was creating generational wealth, passing the assets down, helping to keep the peace, and investing in the generations to come.
By the time my grandfather put his signature on that 1984 document, my father had been dead for three years. So, there was no confusion about who stood where. At seventy-nine, Grandpa was still hanging around the office as chairman of the Trump Organization, but Donald had been in charge for thirteen years. Donald had already moved the company’s focus away from middle-income apartment houses in Brooklyn and Queens like the ones Mary and I and our cousin David had grown up in. (Donald’s kids had very different upbringings.) The outer-boroughs cash flow was strong, but Donald had no interest in those dowdy developments. He was all about the luxury sector in Midtown Manhattan, along with the glamour, glory, and profits he was certain were right across the East River, just waiting for him. In fact, these were rock-and-rolling years at the high end of the New York market. In that era, it was hard not to make money in luxury Manhattan real estate.
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And the hits kept coming.
In partnership with the Hyatt hotel people, Donald had already turned the old Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central Terminal into the Grand Hyatt, which got things rolling for him in 1980. Donald and The Equitable insurance company then built the iconic Trump Tower, opening the black-and-golden-hued mixed-use condo building on Fifth Avenue in 1983. It was either fifty-eight (regular math) or sixty-eight (Donald math) stories tall, depending on who was doing the counting. Trump Plaza came next. The thirty-six-floor co-op apartment building with retail below topped out on East 61st Street in 1984, by which point Donald had already decided to try his luck in Atlantic City. The Trump Plaza casino hotel started taking bets and renting rooms in 1984. The Trump Castle casino hotel followed in 1985. Both projects were heavily indebted, but the rosy income projections made them sound like a total lock. Donald put his younger brother, Robert, in charge of the company’s casino division, a move he would soon come to regret. But so far, so good. The constantly rising tide was lifting all of Donald’s boats.
It’s true that Wall Street had a bad crash in 1987, but that didn’t kill the housing-and-hotel boom. Not immediately. All those reach-for-the-sky projects had momentum of their own. Some momentum.
TheTrump-sized problems
The first real bump came in 1989, when New York City officials, citing “unusual” and “unheard of” accounting methods approved by Donald, ordered the Grand Hyatt to pay the city nearly $3 million in back rent. It was a little embarrassing when the New York City auditors started wagging their fingers, but no big deal in the scheme of things. The real problems were on the way. Trump-sized problems. And soon.
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The banks were getting itchy. Donald was getting squeezed. The money wasn’t coming in like Donald had promised it would and the bankers had expected it to. The trickle-down from the Wall Street crash was depressing Manhattan apartment prices. Business travel and office rents were also off. And Donald was rolling nothing but snake eyes in Atlantic City.
Despite an avalanche of media hype, the Trump Plaza and Trump Castle properties were groaning beneath high debt and low occupancy. His newest casino hotel, the over-the-top Trump Taj Mahal, was going to be his Atlantic City lifeline. Oops. All the Taj did was cadge customers from its two sister properties and raise the debt collectors’ blood pressure another notch or two.
Things were getting tense in the office too. One day when I went to see my grandfather, I heard a lot of yelling as I walked in. My grandfather was somewhere else in the building, wandering the halls. And Donald was yelling at Robert about some issue at one of the casinos. Or as it sounded to me, Sonny Corleone was berating Fredo again. “You’re an idiot,” Donald thundered at his younger brother.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Robert sputtered back. “It was the contractor and the subs.”
“And why weren’t you watching them?”
It was painful to listen to. I had no idea who was right, whether Rob had been incompetent or Donald was being unreasonable. Either seemed possible. But I did know there was major tension about the way things were going in Atlantic City, and there was no way that Donald was ever going to blame himself.
He might have to deal with it, but it was never going to be his fault. Poor Robert. And it was crisis time.
Donald’s entire gambling empire was in “severe financial distress,” in the ominous words of New Jersey casino regulators, leading to swift bankruptcy filings at all three Trump casinos. (I had to assume that, somehow or another, Robert was already being blamed for that.) At the same time, the Trump Shuttle and its frequent Boston-New York-Washington flights were bleeding cash and also adding to the debt load. And Donald claimed his first wife, Ivana, was bragging that she expected “a billion dollars” in their upcoming divorce settlement.
Forget about that last one for a minute. Ivana was always the queen of hyperbole. The hard numbers were daunting enough. By 1990, the company owed a total of $4 billion to seventy-two different financial institutions. Especially scary for Donald: He had personally guaranteed $800 million of that debt load. These were truly rattling times for the former Boy Wonder of New York Real Estate, who had been so confident that the future was paved with gold ... which turned out to be just a shiny gold-colored veneer.
(Excerpted with permission from Simon & Schuster India)
