My mother was a beautiful Italian woman of great dignity, faith and courage. She was born during the Polio Epidemic of 1915–16, and paralyzed on one side of her body. She considered herself fortunate that it wasn’t worse. When she saw other “Polio children” in the Crippled Children’s Home where she spent several months–living their lives in Iron Lungs because they could not breathe–my mother was grateful that she only lost the use of one arm.

 
From her earliest days, my mother faced hateful discrimination because of her disability. Her father, an ignorant, arrogant, bull-headed Italian macho-man, told her she’d never get a job or get married because of her “limp” arm. As a “polio” child born in the Italian neighborhood of Greenwich Village, NYC public health restrictions kept her out of public swimming pools. When she was sent upstate New York to a New York Times “Fresh Air Fund” camp for disabled children, she noticed signs in front of private camps throughout the Catskills which read: “NO POLIO CHILDREN ALLOWED.”

 
My mother taught herself to swim in the waters off Coney Island, using her “one good arm”, and raised and diapered four children in the days when diapers were made of cloth, and all washing was done by hand. She never complained, nor cursed her disability, even when my father went off to World War II to fight Fascism and she was left alone, to care for three children, with her youngest still in diapers.

 
My mother never lived in a mansion, never was driven to school in a rose-colored Rolls Royce, and never received millions from her father, as Donald Trump did, nor did she ever delight in calling people names or insulting them. She was a devout Catholic until the moment of her death in 2007, and believed in the kind of all loving God that Pope Francis has preached about over the last few years. Money never mattered much to my mother; human dignity, kindness, caring and love were the sources of her wealth. Her life-long disability made her even more sensitive to all kinds of human frailties.

 
I thought of my mother a great deal when the shrivel-souled beast who mocked disabled reporter Serge Kovaleski was elected President. My mother, loving and forgiving as she was, would have been outraged.

 
“You miserable son-of-a-bitch,” I imagined her yelling at the television each time she watched the video replay of Donald Trump mocking Kovaleski. “You should be forced to spend time in a Crippled Children’s Home to see people struggling to live each day with a disability.”

 
My mother’s political hero was FDR because he showed the world how a person with a disability — Polio, specifically — could accomplish great things for others. When FDR helped launch the “March of Dimes” to raise vast sums of money for Polio research, my mother sent off her annual contribution of dimes with a religious fervor for decades. With FDR fighting for a cure, surely one would be found, she told us. She was proven right in 1954, when Dr. Jonas Salk discovered the Polio Vaccine.

My mother isn’t alive today to call Donald Trump a miserable son-of-bitch, for making fun of the disabled, dehumanizing women and for his blatant bigotry. So, I will. This son of a courageous Polio survivor thinks you’re a miserable son-of-a-bitch, Trump, and a shrivel-souled creature of the lowest order.

First you picked on Mexican immigrants and called them criminals and rapists — some of the same slurs that were thrown at the Chinese 135 years ago, Italians 100 years ago, and Cuban immigrants, 35 years ago. Next you attacked political refugees, escaping certain death and oppression, and advocated the anti-American and unconstitutional action of registering people on the basis of their faith–an action taken by Fascist regimes against the Jews during World War II. Then you cheer on your White Nationalist supporters to beat up a black man for having the courage to stand up to your pernicious political views, and you hire the Mercer Family’s Merchant of Hate as your chief advisor. And, finally, you mocked a man— a national treasure of a journalist — simply because he told the truth about one of your unending stream of lies.

My father fought Facists like you in World War II, Trump. My wife’s Uncle, a Jew, died fighting them in Italy. My mother fought bigots and brutes everyday of her life. It’s in the spirit of these battlers against bullies like you, that I’ll continue their fight, Donald, you miserable son-of-a-bitch. You couldn’t polish the chrome on my mother’s wheelchair.

You want respect? You give respect, as my mother used to say.

(Orginally published in The National Memo, May 30, 2016)
As an Italian-American and a former staff member for Mario Cuomo, I have been wrestling with how best to express my outrage over the fact that if Donald Trump’s name contained six vowels — like say, Mario Cuomo’s — his Presidential candidacy would be swimming with the fishes because Trump has been in bed with mobsters for his entire professional life.
The list of the Trump family’s — both Fred Trump, who left his son $200 million dollars and a legacy of lying about his wealth and businesses, and Donald’s — ties to organized crime, or “Mob-Nobbing” as Wayne Barrett aptly named it in his book Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, reads like a Who’s Who of Mafioso in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Areas over the past five decades.

Just a few of the law-breaking luminaries or their mob-fronted companies, which can be found in Barrett’s book, who either did business with the Trumps, served as their partners (secret or otherwise), or made labor or building problems go away in exchange for cash, included:
· Manny Ciminello; construction contractor, racketeer, tied to S & A Concrete;
· Paul Castellano; head of Gambino Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
· Fat Tony Salerno; head of Genovese Mob; secret owner of S & A Concrete;
· S & A Concrete; Mob-front concrete company, run by Nick Auletta; built Trump Tower and Trump Plaza;
· Willie Tomasello; Fred Trump’s partner on Beach Haven; Genovese associate;
· Nicky Scarfo; Atlantic City/Philadelphia Crime Boss; Cleveland Wrecking Co;
· Cleveland Wrecking Company; mob-front demolition co., hired by Trump;
· Wachtel Plumbing; mob-front co.; hired by Trump in Atlantic City & NYC;
· Teddy Maritas; mobbed-up head of Carpenters Union; NYC Trump contract;
· Circle Industries; Maritas’ mobbed up Drywall Co; Trump hired, NYC;
· John Cody; mobbed-up head of Teamsters Local 282; jailed for racketeering; bragged that “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.”
· Nick Auletta: President of S & A Concrete, mob-controlled cement company;
· Joe DePaolo; President of Dic Underhill Co; company with alleged mob connections; helped build Trump Village with Fred Trump;
· Danny Sullivan; partner in SSG, Inc; deal-making arm of Scarfo Mob, negotiated with Trump on land in Atlantic City;
· Kenny Shapiro; scrap-metal dealer, partner SSG; principle financier for Scarfo’s Philadelphia Crime Organization.
Writing in Politico just last year (May 22, 2016) David Cay Johnston, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter whose book Temples of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business carefully details Trump’s ties with organized crime, stated:

“No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks. Professor Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, said the closest historical example would be President Warren G. Harding and Teapot Dome, a bribery and bid-rigging scandal in which the interior secretary went to prison. But even that has a key difference: Harding’s associates were corrupt but otherwise legitimate businessmen, not mobsters and drug dealers.”

The torrent of thugs, terrible people and mob-front businesses Trump and his father were involved with going back more than 50 years permeates every present-day action Donald Trump takes.

If Mario Cuomo was in the same room for five minutes with just one of the mobsters that Donald Trump or his father did business with daily, his political career would have been finished.

Instead, Trump shrugs it all off; an amoral actor playing among amoral peers. And the press, which apparently only looks for mob connections among Italian-American politicians, allows him to do it.

 
Imagine, for a moment, if Cuomo — anytime between 1985–1991, when the presidential boomlets for him reached their peaks — had gone to a private meeting in a posh New York townhouse with the boss of one of New York’s biggest crime families under investigation by the FBI. Wayne Barrett’s book — backed by an eyewitnesses’ account — documents such a meeting between Trump and Genovese Crime Boss “Fat Tony” Salerno, who controlled the cement industry in New York, and attorney Roy Cohn — later disbarred — who represented many gangsters, and Trump. Would the media be silent about such a meeting if it occurred between the head of a Mafia crime family and an Italian-American candidate for President?

 
Even a Mob/Trump meeting broker as unsavory as Roy Cohn, whose long list of Organized Crime clients were clearly of financial value to Trump, would have been cited as proof that there were Mafia “skeletons” in Cuomo’s closet.

The vowel at the end of his name would have been Cuomo’s indictment, plain and simple. Yet, Trump and his shills get away with the absurd and inaccurate defense that “everybody was doing business that way,” when other major NYC real estate developers such as Sam LeFrak and the Resnick family clearly refused to, and were, instead, pleading with the FBI, and filing civil actions, to free them of mob control of the concrete business.

Trump, no friend of law enforcement authorities, just kept quiet and paid his tithe. Such silence would have sentenced Mario Cuomo to political death by insinuation.

Far more dangerous than the double-standard at work here, evidenced by the way the media has failed to pursue Trump’s history of “Mob-Nobbing,” is the practical matter of putting Donald Trump in charge of Federal law enforcement agencies. Does any American who believes in the rule of law and justice really want someone so cozy with Mobsters to have power over the U.S. Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, the NSA and Homeland Security? Does anyone seriously believe a President Trump would not try to bend those agencies to his will, steering investigations away from his friends and associates, quietly killing administrative inquiries or condemning federal judges conducting criminal fraud cases as “biased?”

Stick a vowel at the end of Trump’s name, and see if his family’s decades-long “incestuous intertwining with organized crime,” as Barrett described the many Trump/Mafia marriages of convenience, would still be ignored.