(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.

In honor of National Poetry Month (April) and National Haiku Poetry Day (April 17) , Amazon.com is still offering our awarding winning digital, interactive Haiku Poetry book, “We, Haiku,” for the special price of $4.49! Not only can you enter your own Haiku into the book, but you can read original Haiku Poetry by Steve Villano, and see the beautiful, original line-drawings of Alysha Lang throughout the 40 page book.

Here are a few samples of the Haiku you’ll find:

Time stops, when with them.

Nothing else matters. Even the

Hummingbirds stop by.

——————–

I am my own strife.

Resistance to me, is me.

I am my own life.

——————–

If everybody

Were my child, my love their shield,

Then, mourning would end.

——————-

The Demon Beggar

Of Drumm Street. Gone. Death by cold.

One story; not told.

———————

I think in Haiku.

Awakened at night, I write.

Hai-jacked, I am.

(The New York Times Magazine, April 9, 2017, ran a cover story about how CNN’s head honcho Jeff Zucker, who headed NBC Entertainment when he greenlighted Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” has served as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, by foisting Trump upon the nation…TWICE. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/magazine/cnn-had-a-problem-donald-trump-solved-it.html?smid=fb-share.)

 
Fifteen months ago, before any of the GOP Presidential Primaries began, my analysis of the Frankenstein Trump monster created by Zucker, NBC’s Mark Burnett, and NBC/Comcast bosses Brian Roberts and Steve Burke was among the first to take Zucker & Company to task for creating that Reality-TV creature, for fun and profit. Now, Zucker is still laughing all the way to the bank, as CNN’s profits soar, and the last laugh is on us. Here’s my piece, updated once before for my “Radical Correspondence” Blog &  Medium:

(Thirteen months ago, almost to the day, I posted this blog criticizing NBC for creating the television career of the Vulgarian Trump, and paying him more than $200 million for aggrandizing his piggish, demeaning, sexist ways on a national TV network. In the immediate aftermath of the revelations of the Trump Sex Abuse Tapes, done in conjunction with another NBC employee, Billy Bush, I reposted my essay. That was two months ago. Now, NBC has decided to reclaim their evil spawn, by re-hiring him as Executive Producer of “The Apprentice.” Mark Burnett is not yet revealing how much they’ll be paying the Kleptocrat-in-Chief. Emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution anyone? Impeachment?)

 
Tom Brokaw’s two and one-half minute noble tsk-tsking of Donald Trump’s full-blown Fascism — coming at the tail end of a little-watched Tuesday night 6 pm newscast over a year ago — was far too little, way too late from the Broadcast network which made Trump an international TV star and helped launch his political career.

 
Now that Trump’s big, ugly Un-American backside has been bared for all to see, those wonderful folks who gave this monster a global platform to pedal his pernicious views, are beginning to have some second thoughts, but very few have anything to do with soul searching. NBC, for example did pay Donald Trump a total of $213, 606, 575 in salary to host 14 seasons of “The Apprentice” — an average of about $15 million per season, according to documents Trump’s campaign filed with the Federal Elections Commission.

Then, after they handed Trump the bully’s pulpit to pick on everyone from the disabled, to Mexicans, to Syrian Refugees, to wounded war veterans, to Muslims, NBC — no longer seeing profit in Trump’s pugnaciousness — fired the Towering Inferno after he insulted all Mexicans in late June, 2015, during his announcement for President. NBC’s Latino market was just too big for the network to fail. But now, that the NBC/Comcast stellar citizens see a chance to make almost as much money off a Trump presidency than the Kleptocrat-in-Chief himself, they’re inviting the pig back to the trough.

 
Financially, as well as cosmetically, NBC’s announcement to Dump Trump last year was good business. Following its’ first five years, “ The Apprentice” began to rapidly lose market share. NBC meanwhile, had become the NBC/Universal/Comcast monolith after 2009, rolling up big new profits in its cable, movie and amusement park businesses. But now, NBC’s high dudgeon over Trump’s filthy mouth, racist and sexist slurs, has disappeared: they’re clamoring to get back into the pocket of the Kleptocrat they created.

 
NBC and Burnett made Donald Trump — long viewed as another wannabe starlet in New York politics–richer, far more famous, and extraordinarily more powerful than he had ever been before. Trump’s little inheritance of his father’s real estate fortune — built with federal funds for constructing middle-income housing, and keeping Blacks out of that housing — and even a New York Daily News front page headline boasting of the “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had” with Marla Maples, weren’t enough to get him the kind of attention he craved. Before his stint at NBC, Trump looked like a silly little post-card painter without serious recognition of his talent.

 
Then along came Mark Burnett and NBC, and the inner Trump was let loose in the living rooms of millions of Americans through the mindlessness of Reality TV. Burnett, Trump’s co-producer on “Apprentice” and “Celebrity Apprentice”, and a prime mover in bringing Reality TV to American television with his “Survivor” in 2000, and other programming such as “The Voice,” “Shark Tank,” “ Sarah Palin’s Alaska (yes, that too) and, the aptly named “Are you smarter than a fifth-grader?” boasts a net worth estimated at somewhere between $385 million to $450 million — a small fortune built on convincing Americans that eating bugs and spitting bile at people was entertainment. Trump spotted a winning formula for his brand of bragadaccio, and a malleable audience to swallow his hollow values and hateful views.

 
Forbes reported earlier this year that Trump’s entertainment-related income since 2004 — the first, and most successful year of “The Apprentice”– was approximately $500 million, from his books, speeches, beauty pageants and Reality-TV employment, the bulk of which, came from NBC, and was made possible by his ten-year run on the NBC aired reality show–including nearly $100 million in product-placement fees Trump and “Apprentice” co-producer Burnett got from shaking down program sponsors like Pepsi and Crest.

 
NBC can roll out all of the Tom Brokaw mea culpa commentaries it wants; pretend to be righteous by having Joe Scarborough cut off Trump after allowing the Quasimodo of Queens to rant on, or even continue to allow MSNBC to operate. The network conglomerate created this monster, and, with the willing leadership of programming ghouls like Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker at the time (who went on to greater shame at CNN), NBC disarmed the audience of any analytical ability to recognize that its collective brain was being snatched, and now, it’s pockets being picked as well.

 
Sleep well,  CNN’s Jeff Zucker, and NBC & Comcast’s Brian Roberts and Steve Burke: you’ve enabled the raping and pillaging of the country, but, at least, you and the Kleptocrat-in-Chief are making money.

I hate even entertaining these thoughts.

The chilling idea that there are such inhuman thugs as leaders of nations who could cause such questions to be raised is the stuff nightmares are made of.  However, the context of this week’s Sarin gas murders of 80 Syrians by Syrian & Russian leadership, and the “proportional” response by Donald Trump–an Assad cheerleader as recently as last week–makes the question necessary to ask:  Were the poison gas killings of innocent Syrians orchestrated by Putin and Assad , and the carefully choreographed response by Trump carried out to benefit Trump and Putin?

Here are a few things to consider:

•  Trump’s virulent oppostion to US intervention in Syria in 2013 when 1400 hundred humans–and many more “children of God suffered such horrors,”  were slaughtered by Assad’s use of Sarin gas. Why did those deaths not matter four years ago, and now, these far fewer deaths do?

• Trump’s hollow piety that “No child of God should ever suffer such horror,” has a very short shelf life, corresponding to his tanking poll numbers.  That standard didn’t apply as recently as last week, when he supported accepting Assad in power, with help from his pal Putin. Putin’s broken promise to rid Syria of its stockpile of poison gas–made to embarrass President Obama and the United States four years ago, and to secure a foothold in the Middle East for Russia–has never mattered to Trump.  Not even now, since he is still silent on it.

•  Trump’s carefully scripted line of “No child of God should suffer such horror,” didn’t apply to thousands of Syrian refugee childen, and their parents, he campaigned to keep out of America, despite their fleeing from terrorist attacks from ISIS, the Russians and their own government.  He never expressed emotion when a dead Syrian child washed up on a beach, or when a bomb-shocked Syrian boy’s photograph became a worldwide symbol of such horrors.

•  Assad’s latest poison gas attack on his own people was  targeted and constrained, compared to the one he carried out 4 years ago.  This limited atrocity raised more questions: Did Putin know about it ahead of time? Did he collaborate with Assad in conducting the limited Sarin gas attack as a way of giving Trump the opportunity to make a limited response and thus appear “tough” vs. Russia. Did Putin see it as a way to further his foothold in Syria and the Middle East?

• With the FBI and US Senate investigations closing in on Trump’s team and possible collaboration with the Russians during the 2016 elections,  did Putin (with assistance from Assad, his client) stage these 80 murders, to give Trump the opportunity to: 1. look tough; 2. “stand up” to Russia; 3. Proclaim the moral high ground during a cynically named “Leadership Week”, and, 4. Prop up Trump’s sinking poll numbers?

• Putin &  Russia clearly gain from this as well. With the US “proportional” attack, Putin can now pressure Assad that Syria needs Russia’s presence even more, to neutralize the involvement of the US. Russia’s largest airbase outside of mainland Russia is located in Syria.

• Trump’s empty “No child of God should ever suffer such horror,” has never applied  to the other 500,000 Syrians slaughtered with conventional weapons during Assad’s reign of terror, especially since Russia’s physical and political presence in Syria began 4 years ago. Trump’s only interest in Syrian children up to this week was to keep them out of the United States as refugees, regardless of how horrible the terror at home.  Now, he sees that crusading on their corpses can bring him political gain.

• Measure the responses of Russia and Syria over the coming days to ascertain whether this action was a pre-choreographed  piece to help BOTH Trump and Russia. Expect rhetorical condemnation from Putin and Assad, but little else. They will tacitly “accept,” the US’ “proportional” response–as if 80 humans exterminated like cockroaches by poison gas  can ever be equated with missile strikes at an empty air force base.  Proportional?

• Everyone gains here, except the dead. Trump looks tougher with Russia, and changes the subject from the Trump/Russia investigations for a while; Putin gains further leverage inside of Syria, and extends his military presence in the Midldle East; and, Assad, has his hands slapped for slaughtering his own people, yet again.

•  Trump’s defenders are already mouthing the disgusting minimization of the death of “God’s Children,” by pointing to the limited missile attacks on an empty air force base (that both Russia  & Syria were pre-warned to empty) as “evidence” that Trump cannot possibly be in bed with Putin.

For thugs like Putin, Assad and Trump, children suffering such horrors are merely the cost of doing business and clinging to power.

Vincent “The Chin” Gigante being arrested by Federal Agents (NY Daily News Photo)

For weeks, some have been asking how long the lunatic, erratic, fanatical and dangerous behavior of Donald Trump can go on.   For answers, we overlooked the most obvious source of all of Trump’s life lessons: Mobsters.

New York Mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the power behind the Genovese Crime Family during the 1980’s and 1990’s, avoided prosecution for decades by pretending to be crazy.   Nicknamed “The Oddfather,” Gigante took rambling street strolls in pajamas, a terrycloth robe and slippers around Greenwich Village, where he lived in a small apartment with his mother, who, in a screeching Sean Spicer-like defense of her son, insisted the only thing he was “boss” of was the bathroom. Paul Manafort? A “limited role.” Michael Flynn? A Volunteer. Roger Stone? A bathroom attendant.

The Chin’s “elaborate deception”—as Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson described Gigante’s behavior in declaring him mentally competent to stand trial in the 1990’s–kept him out of jail for years, and the wealthy & powerful Mob boss manufactured reams of doctors notes to swear to his lunacy. Some of those notes from The Chin’s parade of psychiatrists bore an eerie, albeit, perverse similarity to the claims made by Trump’s own alleged “doctor.” The Chin was the craziest of all crazies, according to his Docs, just as Donnie “Double Chin”—the nearly 300 pound Tweeter from the High Tower—was, physically, if not mentally, the healthiest presidential candidate in world history.

Somehow, “The Chin’s” psychiatrists missed a few salient facts: Gigante’s slipping out at night, dressed in normal clothing, to be with his girlfriend on the Upper East Side; Gigante ordering a hit on John Gotti, head of the rival Gambino Crime Family because he felt Gotti broke the Mob’s rules with the “unsanctioned” murder of Paul Castellano; Gigante ordering his underlings never to mention his name in conversations, but simply point to their “Chins;” and Gigante gingerly extorting payoffs from vendors and pocketing money donated to a neighborhood church during New York’s Annual Feast of San Gennaro. Why bother with the facts when a fake narrative keeps the cash flowing?

Like “The Chin,” Donnie “Double Chin,” profits from advancing his fairy tale: he never settles lawsuits except for the dozens he has; he is “very, very rich”, except for when his debts & liabilities exceed his assets and he pays no income taxes for 20 years; he creates an imaginary universe where Barack Obama is a Muslim, not born in the USA, who wiretapped his phones, with help from British spies; The Central Park Five, along with Ted Cruz’ father, are guilty of murder, even when none of them are; millions of illegal voters gave the popular vote to Hillary; and Trump never dealt with the Russians, except when he did, and as his son admitted, the “family” was doing, in 2008.   Also like “The Chin,”Donnie “Double Chin,” knows that his billowing bouffant layer-cake of lies can be easily deflated by those who have watched how it’s half-baked. That explains why he’s tweeting as fast as his tiny fingers can fly to delete Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn and Roger Stone from his friends list. They know too much.

It’s also why Trump—steeped in the raw sewage of Roy Cohn, Mob sycophant—demands ironclad non-disclosure documents from his underlings.   He watched how testimony from former Mob members exposed “The Chin’s” long-running charade—like a bathrobe coming undone– putting the powerful crime boss away in prison for the rest of his life.

Selwyn Raab, the incomparable New York Times organized crime writer, detailed such testimony in his obituary on Gigante, published on December 19, 2005 (“Vincent Gigante, Mafia Leader Who Feigned Insanity, Dies at 77”):

“Salvatore Gravano, testified that even Mr. Gigante’s archrival, John Gotti, grudgingly acknowledged Mr. Gigante’s craftiness. ‘He’s crazy like a fox,’ Mr. Gravano quoted Mr. Gotti as saying after a summit meeting of NYC Mob leaders in 1988.”

Raab’s masterpice of a New York Times obituary on “The Chin,” is instructive for helping us understand the apparently unhinged behavior of Donnie “Double Chin:”

“ Mr. Gigante, whose nickname was ‘The Chin’, painstakingly maintained the fiction that he was incompetent until April 2003, when he appeared before Judge I. Leo Glasser in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Specifically, he acknowledged running a con on the legal system that delayed his racketeering trial from 1990 to 1997, while his sanity was being examined.”

How long can Donnie “Double Chin” continue to “maintain his fictions “to avoid accountability or prosecution? When will his “elaborate deception” of the US and the world come crashing down? Will some no-nonsense, law and order judge like Justice I. Leo Glasser force Trump to “acknowledge running a con on the legal system,” in exchange for his resignation from office without jail time? When will Trump’s fellow gang members turn on him?

Donnie “Double Chin” may have gone to Wharton for a whiff of time, but he has proven himself incapable of learning the most important lessons “The Chin” taught: fancy pants or silk pajamas attract too much attention, and, the only thing “golden” from yourself and your friends, no matter how it’s achieved, is silenzio.