17 minute read
CONFIDENCE MAN
Donald Trump pausing in his apartment just after getting a 40-year tax break approved for the Commodore Hotel.
CONFIDENCE
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Maggie Haberman’s new book examines the world that made Donald Trump.
FOR NEW YORK TIMES reporter and Donald Trump chronicler Maggie Haberman, the environment and the era that molded the former president explains a lot about how he governed. She wrote in “Confidence Man,” which was released Oct. 4 by Penguin Press and is already a No. 1 New York Times bestseller, that Trump seemed “frozen in time” in 1980s New York City, a time in which he honed his deal-making, politicking and larger-than-life persona in the press. In this excerpt, Trump learns how to bully, cajole and charm his way through the city’s bureaucracy in the mid-1970s to gain control of the Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal. With the help of his father and then-Mayor Abe Beame, Trump lied his way into a deal for the property – and no one challenged him along the way. CONFIDENCEMAN
Far left, the Commodore Hotel sits across the street from Grand Central Terminal in the foreground, and the hotel, which opened in 1919, has been the scene of several historic events, like a visit by Richard Nixon, far right, in 1960.
WHILE THE federal housing-discrimination suit demonstrated to Donald Trump that the government could be a potential threat to his business, he appreciated, as his father had, that it could also be a gatekeeper to new wealth. This was underscored by the 1970 bankruptcy of the Penn Central Transportation Company, which forced a sell-off of the railway’s vast property holdings nationwide. New York developers had their eyes on one asset in particular: the company’s West Side rail yards, among the largest undeveloped parcels remaining in Manhattan.
It was an especially appealing piece of land to Trump. After he had found a footing in the real estate business, a key goal became differentiating himself from his father, a “mere” developer of middle- class housing in Brooklyn. Empty swaths of land abutting Midtown skyscrapers, Broadway theaters, and luxurious Riverside Drive apartment buildings would be the perfect canvas for the twenty-seven-year-old to show what he was capable of accomplishing on his own.
Trump courted executives representing Penn Central, but waited for power to change in City Hall to make his move, as (Abe) Beame succeeded (John) Lindsay in office in January 1974. Fred (Trump) was written into contracts as Donald’s notquite-silent partner, as reassurance to city officials that the project could not go belly-up. Donald then arranged for a meeting with the mayor and the manager of the railroad’s non-rail real estate holdings in New York, at which Beame proclaimed, “Whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing,” wrapping his short arms around both Trumps for show.
As part of his efforts to get the necessary approvals, Trump encountered a lawyer named David Berger, who represented Penn Central shareholders and had been vocally skeptical of a sale to Trump. Berger informed Trump of a suit he planned to file on behalf of New York residential land-
lords accusing energy companies of fixing prices on the heating oil that warmed their buildings. Berger would get one third of any settlement, the size of which would be determined by how many apartments were collectively represented in the suit; Trump would later join, swelling Berger’s potential gain. A few days before a key November 1974 court hearing on the Penn Central land, Trump went to see the lawyer at his Philadelphia town house. By the time Trump returned to New York, Berger had dropped his opposition to a sale. Trump came away from the bankruptcy with two separate parcels from Penn Central’s West Side rail yards. One stretched from West Thirtieth to West Thirty-Ninth streets in Midtown, where Trump proposed a new convention center, and another to the north, from West Fifty-Ninth to West Seventy- Second streets, where he envisioned massive new apartment blocks.
As Trump learned how difficult zoning rules would make it to actually build there, his attention turned to another item in the Penn Central portfolio: the grand Commodore Hotel attached to Grand Central Terminal. For much of the twentieth century, the station had served as the primary gateway in and out of New York, but it struggled with the decline of intercity travel by passenger rail. When he approached government officials with a vision of a new hotel breathing life into the decrepit East Side of Midtown, Trump claimed he had tentative interest from the Hyatt company to partner on the project. But no bank or investor was willing to finance a massive redesign of the Commodore without being promised that the mortgage payments could be made, and Trump maintained that the city’s high taxes made the math impossible. He tried first to secure a multidecade break on the building’s property taxes through the state legislature, relying on his father’s Brooklyn machine ties to the assembly speaker. When those efforts to work the system in Albany stalled, he made his appeal for a tax abatement to city officials, often misrepresenting not just his support from a possible long-term financial backer, but his legal claim to the property overall. He was quoted in May 1975 saying he had a “purchase
The Hyatt Grand Central New York sits on the site of the Commodore Hotel, as it was rebuilt by Trump.
contract” with Penn Central for the hotel, then a year later told The New York Times he had “an option – with no particular time limit – to buy the Commodore for $10 million from the railroad trustees.”
When city officials asked Trump to show them the option he claimed to possess, he sent along a piece of paper bearing only his signature. A signed option from the hotel did not arrive for another year. Penn Central representatives, interested in preserving the relationship with Trump, indicated to city officials that they intended to sell him the Commodore, making the paperwork matter easier to overlook. No one saw it in their interest to challenge Trump’s claim.
Over the course of the negotiations, Trump developed something akin to friendship with the development-agency official on the other end of the talks, Michael Bailkin. They would get drinks at a Third Avenue bar, where Trump would occasionally offer Bailkin a glimpse into his inner life, such as it was, by talking about his brother Freddie’s struggles with alcoholism. During one conversation Bailkin told Trump, “You’re a very shallow person.” Trump replied, “Of course. That’s one of my strengths. I never pretend to be anything else.”
This was less an admission from Trump about his emotional or intellectual depth than a concession that his focus was solely on business matters, and he would use any means necessary to get what wanted. When it came to charming Bailkin, Trump succeeded. Impressed by his hustle, the bureaucrat worked to steer the tax-abatement proposal through the government approval process. Bailkin devised a scheme for Trump to donate the Commodore property to the city after he obtained it from Penn Central, then have the city lease it back to him for a ninety-nine-year term. Then Bailkin came up with the idea securing the forty-year tax abatement through the Urban Development Corporation, which fell under the purview of Governor Hugh Carey, the Brooklyn Democrat to whom Fred Trump was a major donor, not the city government. Fred committed to officials that he would “provide financial credibility” to his son’s undertaking.
By the time he visited the corporation’s offices to meet its chairman, in December 1975, Trump seemed to believe he had
– Donald Trump, after being told that he’s shallow by a New York City bureaucrat
everything wired in his favor. But unlike other public officials, Richard Ravitch refused to let himself be dazzled or bullied by Trump. Ravitch was offended by Trump’s sense of entitlement, and found it unseemly that he arrived with a political fundraiser who worked for the governor. Ravitch set about trying to defeat the abatement, warning City Hall that a tax break on such a hotel project amounted to an unreasonably big giveaway to a private business and enlisting City Council members to challenge it.
Bailkin, who would soon leave city government to start a law practice, proposed a different arrangement: in exchange for the tax break, Trump would give the city a cut of his hotel profits. Trump balked at first, but ultimately used the compromise as the basis for fresh overtures to resistant City Council members. The concept loosened the political resistance to the Commodore project. In the spring of 1976, Trump finally won preliminary approvals from the city Board of Estimate and an initial vote by Ravitch’s agency. In securing the tax break, Trump mixed charm and threat in a way that would become a lifelong hallmark of his interactions with legislators.
Even when the major political work was done, Trump still had to win final approvals before his construction crews could break ground. With Bailkin gone, Roy Cohn brought Stanley Friedman, a deputy mayor to Beame, into Trump’s fold. Friedman had found his way into City Hall after years rising through the ranks of the Bronx Democratic Party, a weaker counterpart to the Brooklyn machine. Friedman remained a machine politician, amassing chits and, according to prosecutors years later, using the levers of bureaucracy to enrich his friends and associates. The final package he secured on the Commodore project, in September 1976, delivered Trump forty-two years of property tax relief, worth about $168 million, with the condition that he had to give a portion of profit back to the city.
Trump’s quest for the Penn Central properties presented an opening to reinvent himself in the press. He aligned himself with the public relations executive Howard Rubenstein, who helped orchestrate press conferences promoting Trump’s plans for the convention center and the Commodore. Before the first one, Trump was nervous as he stepped in front of the cameras. But if Trump had begun with a visible ambivalence about starring in such a performance, he left it hooked. “That was great,” he told Rubenstein. “Let’s do that again.”
With Rubenstein guiding his image, Trump was the focus of a November 1976 story in The New York Times that portrayed him as a well-liked wunderkind whose hustle was appreciated by his rivals. The story did not describe him as a developer so much as a “real estate promoter.” The Times reporter who followed Trump around for a day in a chauffeured limousine, Judy Klemesrud, relayed, without overtly acknowledging the laughability of it, Trump’s claim that he was “publicity shy.” The only place the chatty developer went quiet was at the Trump Organization’s Brooklyn offices, where Donald met with his father. “Face to face, the son seemed affectionately intimidated by the older man,” wrote Klemesrud.
She watched Trump at the “21” Club, a favorite Cohn spot, where Trump talked to two men whose Jewish hospital was about to honor Trump as its Man of the Year. “I’m not even Jewish, I’m Swedish,” Trump explained to the reporter. “Most people think my family is Jewish because we own so many buildings in Brooklyn. But I guess you don’t have to be Jewish to win this award, because they told me a gentile won it one other year.”
Trump was neither Jewish nor Swedish; Fred Trump, a first-generation American born to German parents, had developed the habit of telling people the family was Swedish because they had so many Jewish tenants and, after World War II, he did not want to repel them. Donald perpetuated the fiction for many years. ■
The underdog fights again
Max Rose is trying to pull off another upset over a Staten Island Republican.
By Sahalie Donaldson
FORMER REP. MAX ROSE has come full circle. Four years ago, the U.S. Army veteran beat the odds by becoming only the second Democrat to win the Staten Island congressional seat in nearly four decades. Today, he’s an underdog again, vying for a political comeback against Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.
The 11th Congressional District, which encompases all of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, has been represented by five different members since 2009. It’s also the only New York City district to have voted for former President Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020. In short, Rose faces an uphill battle against Malliotakis, who defeated him by 6 points in 2020. Although a Spectrum News/Siena College poll released Oct. 6 showed that the margin between him and his opponent wasn’t necessarily insurmountable – 6 percentage points with a margin of error of 5.2 percentage points – nearly every outlet or election rating organization has predicted Malliotakis as the likely victor. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hasn’t been investing much into the race, or running any TV ads, suggesting that party insiders don’t think Rose has much of a chance.
But Rose, a centrist Democrat who describes himself as someone able to forge bipartisan solutions, has pulled off the upset before and he has more or less kept up with Malliotakis in fundraising, even without any outside spending. Throughout his campaign, he has often gone on offense, describing his opponent’s voting record as extremist, pointing to her continued support of former President Donald Trump and slamming her positon on abortion rights, and the fact that she was one of 147 Republicans to vote against certifying the 2020 election results. And it’s not just the big stuff. On Oct. 21, the Daily News reported that Rose accused Malliotakis of violating ethics rules by using her official government podium at a campaign event. One of his supporters reportedly planned to file a formal complaint.
Like many competitive contests playing out across the country, crime and the economy are likely to be keystone issues in the upcoming election. The Spectrum News/Siena College poll found that 41% of voters in the district cited the economy as their top issue, 21% said crime, 16% said threats to democracy and 8% pointed to abortion. While Rose acknowledged that these top two issues were among the most important to voters, he has also poured a lot of energy and resources into contrasting his stance on reproductive rights with his opponent’s.
“Affordability, safety and choice are all critical issues, but they really boil down to the central issue of freedom. I believe in this country, I’d give my life for this country – I nearly did,” Rose said in an interview with City & State, referring to his military service. “I believe that in this nation people deserve the freedom from skyrocketing prices, they deserve freedom from crime, and they certainly deserve the freedom to make their own reproductive health decisions.”
Rose has repeatedly challenged Malliotakis’ stance on abortion, even running several television advertisements on the issue – one of which suggested the representative was in favor of banning abortions without exceptions, even when the mother’s life was in danger. While Malliotakis has said it didn’t accurately characterize her personal views, since she supports exemptions in cases of rape, incest or where pregnancy threatens the life of the mother, she argued that people in the district were far more concerned about public safety and their ability to put food on the table than they were about abortion. In an interview with City & State, Malliotakis criticized Rose for being on “the wrong side of public safety issues” and for honing in on abortion. (That public safety focus might
– Richard Flanagan, a College of Staten Island political science professor, on the role of crime in this race
have been key to her success in 2020. Malliotakis hammered Rose for joining a peaceful Black Lives Matter march – which some conservatives considered to be insulting to the police.)
“He doesn’t want to address inflation. He doesn’t want to address our open border. He doesn’t want to address crime, which are the top three issues that people care about in the district,” Malliotakis said. “He wants to talk about an issue that doesn’t affect one woman in New York, because we already have the most extreme law in the country.”
Malliotakis has received endorsements from a slew of law enforcement, fire and building trades unions, including the Police Benevolent Association, the Uniformed Firefighters Association, the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association and the Mason Tenders’ District Council – endorsements that will likely to go a long way with her Staten Island constituents. Rose has been backed by a host of Democratic elected officials, including Rep. Ritchie Torres, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, the United Federation of Teachers and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.
In recent years, sweeping national issues like abortion, public safety, immigration and the economy have largely overshadowed local topics in congressional races, according to Richard Flanagan, a political science professor at the College of Staten Island. While he acknowledged that abortion resonated with New York voters, he cautioned that New York was already such a pro-choice state that it might not turn out to be as galvanizing of an issue as Democrats had hoped. Crime, however, is likely to be a big factor and that’s an issue that’s been cornered by Republicans.
“I don’t think Democrats have been handling it very well. I think that there’s a certain glib response – not from Rose – but from other Democrats,” Flanagan said. “I think Rose is pulled down by other Democrats, who are rather glib and say, ‘It’s not the 1970s.’ I think that’s dismissive of people’s fears.”
With Democrats currently holding a slim, eight-vote majority in the House, New York has become perhaps the most important con-
Max Rose, gressional battleground in the country. The according to 11th District leans red now, but earlier this a forecast by FiveThirtyEight, is projected to lose year, it seemed like an easy pickup opportunity for Democrats, after the redistricting committee drew the lines in a way that inby 13 points. cluded the deep-blue bastions of Sunset Park, Park Slope and Gowanus in Brooklyn. Hopes were thwarted after the state Court of Appeals ruled the maps unconstitutional, and the district was redrawn in a way that favored Republicans. Malliotakis made some polarizing decisions during her first term. Shortly after taking office, she voted against certifying presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, subscribing to the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate due to irregularities in election results. Days later, she also voted against impeaching Trump. Malliotakis’ close ties to Trump have continued to be a point of controversy. While she hasn’t talked about the former president much recently – perhaps due to his unpopularity with many centrist Republicans and independents – her campaign website does tout that she has his “complete and total endorsement.” But Malliotakis has not always aligned with her most conservative House colleagues. She was a rare Republican who voted for the infrastructure package in 2021. She has also voiced some support for new gun regulations and voted to codify same-sex marriage rights. When asked whether she feels a need to win over Democrats in the district heading into the election, Malliotakis said these constituents were important to her victory two years ago and remain so now. “The pendulum has just swung too far to the left, and people across the political spectrum see the need to restore a sense of balance, to have bipartisan representation because that’s where you’re going to develop the best policy in the middle ground,” she said. “The people in this district understand that and appreciate that I’ve provided an alternative perspective in Washington.” Rose himself needs to think about currying favor with voters. “He’s won one and lost one, and he won the first one as an underdog. He’s back in that underdog spot again,” Flanagan said. “I wouldn’t count him out by any stretch.” ■
