Andrew Cuomo Has Found His Voice, and It’s His Father’s.

Andrew Cuomo has found his voice, and it’s his father’s.

 

Less than one month before the New York State Democratic Gubernatorial primary, Cuomo, seeking his third term as New York’s Governor, is being politically pelted from the Right and the Left, at the same time as Upstate New York is being battered by torrential storms.  Yet Cuomo, strong and resolute, is weathering the withering attacks, like his battered fellow upstaters, just as his father did, decades before.

 

Cuomo has gotten into court battles with the lawless, amoral Trump Administration, almost daily, just the way Mario Cuomo relentlessly resisted Ronald Reagan’s attempts to eliminate State and local tax deductions for middle-class homeowners, and to illegally force an unsafe Nuclear Power plant down the throats of Long Islanders. Andrew Cuomo has taken dead aim at the financial stability of the NRA, echoing his father’s fearless fights with the greedy gun-lobby that couldn’t tell the difference between a constitutional right, and their own institutional recklessness, or, today, their sellout to rich Russians out to undermine democracy.

 

But nowhere has Andrew Cuomo been more articulate in channeling his father, than on the defining issue of our time, immigration and human dignity.

 

In an impassioned Op-Ed in the New York Times less than a week after what would have been Mario M. Cuomo’s 86th birthday(“A Moral Outrage We Must Not Tolerate”, June 21, 2018), Andrew Cuomo, excoriated the Trump Administration for its “inhumane treatment of immigrant children.”

 

Cuomo punctuated his well-reasoned legal case against the “complete disregard for parental rights,” with a paragraph that could have been written by his father, Mario Cuomo, who’s three-terms as Governor were devoted to serving the “Family of New York:”

          “New York State will not remain silent. Our state has always served as a beacon and opportunity for the world, and the Lady of the Harbor holds her torch high not only to light the way for immigrants, but to light the way forward when our country is lost.”

 

I re-read the paragraph and closed my eyes.   The words were familiar to me.   I had heard the same sentiments with that same sense of optimism, strength and compassion many times before, having worked for Andrew Cuomo’s father when he was Governor of New York, and was the ringing voice for people around the country without the power, money or connections to speak for themselves.

 

I was with Mario Cuomo in June, 1992, when he spoke at New York University’s Urban Research Center on Immigration, explaining how his father and mother—immigrants from Southern Italy—battled discrimination each day:

I thank God the country didn’t say to them, ‘We can’t afford you, you might take someone else’s job, or cost us too much.’  I’m glad they didn’t ask my father if he could speak English, because he couldn’t; I’m glad they didn’t ask my mother if she could count, because she couldn’t…I’m glad they didn’t ask my father what special skills he brought to this great and dynamic nation, because there was no special expertise to the way he handled a shovel when he dug trenches for sewer pipe.  I’m glad they let him in anyway.”

 

On the day after Andrew Cuomo’s Times’Op Ed echoed his father’s eloquence, he traveled to a facility in New York State that housed 15 immigrant children separated from their parents.  Later that week he asked Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services for information about 345 children kept in NY by the Federal government without the knowledge of anyNew York State officials.

 

“They are in my state,” Andrew Cuomo said.  “ They are my legal charge.”

 

More importantly, Cuomo’s deepest values –the “fundamental right to family integrity”—as taught to him and scrupulously practiced by his father, and mother, Matilda, who devoted herself to the “Decade of the Child” while First Lady of New York State—had been violated.  These immigrant children, forcibly taken away from their parents in violation of every religion’s teaching, were Andrew Cuomo’s children,and he was morally offended by what was being done to them.

 

I read Andrew’s words and was transported back to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, to an electrifying speech his father gave in May, 1990, when racial tensions were near the boiling point in New York, less than a year after the murder of Yusef Hawkins—a 16-year old Black child—in heavily Italian Bensonhurst:

“There is hostility, and I don’t like it.  It makes me cringe.  I’ve seen a lot of it in my time…but we need to refocus our hostility away from one another and onto the government policies that neglect people in need…Think of it: with a 21% drop-out rate in NYC among my Italian-American young people—myItalian-Americans—we are second only to Hispanics and African-Americas.  For Italian-American youth, the enemy is not Hispanics or African-Americans, or any of the bright new immigrants sweating to make a place alongside us. The enemies are hopelessness, and illiteracy, ignorance and fear…”

 

Mario Cuomo’s words quaked with emotion, shaking the rafters of the huge Cathedral:

 “Tell me, for God’s sake, why are we fighting among ourselves?  We must save our strength for the real battles; for fighting the closed-minded people, the skin-heads, the anti-Semites, the racists, the gay-haters…We must save our strength for all the small-minded, shrunken-souled, big-mouthed demagogues who seek to tear us apart.”

 

Cuomo’s words resonated with New Yorkers so deeply that the great Pete Hamill, writing in the New York Post, on May 24, 1990, expressed it perfectly:

Cuomo spoke with the personal authority of a man who had triumphed over stereotypes, over bigotry, over ignorance.”

 

Now 28 years later, when the “shrunken-souled, big mouth demagogues” are tearing apart this nation, Mario Cuomo’s words, personal decency and actions are more urgent than they have ever been.  And, if you listen closely, you can hear him speaking through his son:

“There’s a line and it’s called basic decency and basic humanity,”Andrew Cuomo told NY 1, referring to the Trump Administration’s policy of rippling immigrant families apart. “And they have stepped over that line.”

###

Memorial Day & Murdering the Bond Between Mothers & Children

 

 

My father curses you from his grave,

You avaricious garbage-pail, depraved

Beyond redemption, not to mention how

Deprived you are of any shards of soul.

 

My father didn’t want to leave three kids

But yet he did, to fight the Fascists and keep

Us safe from crazy, kleptocratic autocrats, intent

On killing mothers & babies, and tearing them apart.

 

My wife’s uncle, at 20, had reasons plenty to stay home

And not run off to Rome, to spend his youth fighting Nazis

So uncouth they pissed on Jewish graves, including his own,

Dug deep into Europe’s hills, before The War was won.

 

And now, you come, you avaricious garbage pail,

Face so callow and puffy, skin so pale, voice a callous peale,

To tear down the democratic fortress their blood sealed,

Defeating & containing dictators for 70 years–your lifetime–

You chin-thrusting shill for Russian mobsters, you pig squeal.

 

My father and his fellow GI’s curse you from their graves,

You avaricious garbage-pail, depraved more than the jackals

Who feasted on the entrails of dead soldiers and civilians,

Growing fat, insatiably feasting on the flesh of humans,

In the crassness and crapulence of your full inhumanity.

 

The soldiers of democracy’s fortune, from here and abroad,

Curse you from their graves, you fraud, knowing the courage of their brave

Allies who, from different lands, came together for a cause,

Not simply for applause, nor profit, but to save the world,

From avaricious, kleptocratic, autocratic, garbage pails like you.

 

 

 

 

 

What “Paternity Information” Could Stormy Have That’s So Powerful It Forced Trump Into Kim Jung Un’s Arms?

Is the “Paternity Information” that Stormy Daniels may have on Donald Trump driving him into Kim Jung Un’s arms? Did Trump get Stormy pregnant? Pay for her to have an abortion?

 

On the eve of the Special Election in Pennsylvania’s 18th CD, where virulent anti-abortion GOP Rep. Tim Murphy resigned in 2017 over reports that he asked his mistress to get an abortion, is Trump facing the same “choice?” If not, just what “Paternity Information” is he afraid of in the non-disclosure agreement that his attorney Michael Cohen paid Stormy $130,000 to keep quite about?

 

Is Trump’s “audacious diplomatic overture” to North Korea as the New York Times described it, just another huge, Reality TV driven distraction from the tightening noose of bad news swirling around him? Is he running to Kim because the North Korean dictator is less scary than Stormy’s “paternity information?”

 

In typical Trump fashion — while he is cornered on every legal and political front; when the criminal investigations against him and his associates are getting closer and closer to Trump and his family; when his own lawyer has admitted Trump had an affair with Stormy Daniels which they tried to coverup with $130,000 of hush money; when his terrible Tariff decision is already backfiring even causing Grover Norquist to label it “tax,”; and when his “best people” are jumping ship faster than rats, Trump pulls down his pants to get people’s attention. It’s a tried and true Reality TV trick: when all else fails, do something ridiculously outrageous. Eat bugs, or stuff worms down your throat. Anything for attention.

 

So what is he trying to distract us from? Is the “Paternity Information” in the StormyDaniels’ illegitimate non-disclosure agreement disguising information of an illegitimate child? Does the phrase mean that he fathered a child by her? That he, perhaps, made her pregnant, and then paid for her to have an abortion, while he was married to Melania?

 

Up until the “PATERNITY INFORMATION” phrase emerged in Stormy’s Non-Disclosure Agreement, and the Pennsylvania Special election in the 18thCD drew closer — an election made possible by an abortion demand made upon his mistress by an anti-abortion GOP Congressman — I hadn’t given much thought to information about rumors of a surreptitious sexual encounter Trump had that I came across in writing my book.

 

In the course of researching Chapter 8 on Trump and the Mafia, in my book Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother, several sources told me that Trump made a Queens, N.Y. woman pregnant and, for years, paid hush money — cash in suitcases — to keep her quiet.

 

I pressed those sources to go on the record with the information, but they would not, so I turned away from what they said was an “open secret” throughout Queens, NY. If I couldn’t get the information confirmed on the record by at least two sources I wouldn’t use it. So, I didn’t. But then, the perfect Stormy hit.

 

I hadn’t thought about the rampant rumors of Trump fathering an illegitimate child in Queens — and paying hush money to his mistress — until this week’s revelation that “PATERNITY INFORMATION” was part of what was covered in the NDA with Stormy, and what Trump and/or his personal attorney Michael Cohen were among the things they were paying her to keep quiet about.

 

So, what better way to distract the world from the growing storm over Stormy and what he doesn’t want her to reveal, than to rush into a rash, dangerous meeting with Kim Jung Un? For at least 24 hours, Trump’s latest trick has taken the mainstream media’s attention off of the “Paternity Information” which Stormy has on Trump, and overshadowed the 18 criminal counts lodged against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort in a Federal District Court in Virginia by the Special Prosecutor.

 

Could Stormy have ever imagined that her fling with Donald, might result in Trump fathering a child (or at least a fetus) with her, AND a possible peace agreement (or photo op) with Kim Jung Un? Was THAT the “Paterntity Information” the Non-Disclosure Agreement referenced?

 

I’m reminded of the secret code words whispered to Harry Truman when his staff learned that the tests were successful for the atomic bombs which would be dropped on Hiroshima & Nagasaki to end World War II. “Babies Satisfactorily Born,” his aides told him. Is Trump afraid that Stormy might spill that same secret code in public, or worse, tell Christian fundamentalists that in fact, the baby wasn’t born, but aborted? And that their beloved leader, Donald Trump, paid for the abortion?

Stay tuned.

The World’s White Supremacists Are Emboldened Out of Their Shitholes

 

On the eight Anniversary of the catastrophic Earthquake in Haiti which killed more than 230,000 Haitians and prompted many Americans–and our houses of worship–toward humanitarian responses to those who survived, Donald Trump decided to breathe new life into White Supremacy and the hatred of Haitians and people from impoverished lands, seeking a better life, and the “American Dream.”

 

Trump’s ignorant, hateful, racist comments were consistent with his own family’s history of White Supremacy, and the United States history of racial discrimination dating back to the founding of a nation half free and half enslaved, and an immigration system designed to keep out “undesirable” non-whites dating back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Italian immigrants–considered to be a subhuman race from the “shithole” nation of that time, and numbering nearly four million by the early 1920’s–became the explicit target of America’s White Supremacist’s Anti-Immigration Law of 1924.

 

And, as Princeton Law Professor James Q. Whitman documents in his recent book Hitler’s American Model: The United States & the Making of Nazi Race Law, Adolf Hitler and Nazi jurists expressed admiration for that specific Anti-Immigration law, and used it–along with the Jim Crow laws of 30 American States–as the basis for the Nuremberg Laws, which discriminated against Jews, and were used as legal justification for mass murder.

 

Haiti, as a French colony, supported the American Revolutionary War effort against England, sending supplies to the colonists and troops to fight alongside Americans. In 1804, while slavery was still thriving in the United States, and propping up the economy of the South, Haiti became the first Republic in the Western Hemisphere to overthrow slavery, and become a nation free of it. That would not happen for another 60 years in the United States, after 750,000 people died fighting a war over the White Supremacists inhumane practice of Black enslavement.

 

As the New York Times pointed out in its editorial of January 13, 2018, entitled “So Much for the Beacon of Hope:”

“No one is denying that Haiti and some of these countries have profound problems today. Of course, these problems are often a direct result of policies and actions of the United States and European nations: to name a few, kidnapping & enslaving their citizens; plundering their natural resources; propping up their dictators and corrupt regimes; and holding them financially hostage for generation.”

Dr. Paul Farmer, in his brilliant book AIDS & Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame clearly demonstrates that Haiti was victimized by Westerners (Americans and Europeans) spreading HIV and other diseases in its major urban areas and not the other way around, as Trump falsely claimed when he said several months ago that “Haitians all have AIDS.” It was the same pernicious lie spread by White Supremacists about Haiti for decades. Dr. Farmer’s study points out:

 

“As a US-trained physician, it is clear to me that, even today, many health professionals have distorted views about AIDS & Haiti. These distortions are even more grotesque among the lay public, as many North Americans still believe that AIDS came to the U.S from Haiti, and not vice versa.”

Having worked at the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical Center in the heart of Brooklyn the the late 1990’s, one of the epicenters of the Haitian population in the United States, I witnessed–and worked with– a large number of highly-trained medical professionals from Haiti and other Caribbean nations who devoted their lives to serving the healthcare needs of 2.6 million Brooklynites. They were colorblind in their care for patients, and extraordinary in their degree of professionalism. The house in which I was born on Hawthorne Street in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from the Medical Center, was now meticulously cared for and lived in by a Haitian family.

 

But the Trump family, whose real estate empire began in Brooklyn, wanted the color of its’ tenants skin to be anything but Black. The Trump Organization, which built working class housing in Brooklyn with federal tax dollars, actively sought to keep African & Caribbean Americans out. Fred & Donald Trump’s company was found guilty by the Federal Government in 1973 for discriminating against Black’s, and the Trump’s–despite being represented by mobbed-up lawyer Roy Cohn– were forced to integrate their housing.

 

It wasn’t the first time the Trumps were caught practicing their own brand of White Supremacy. In May, 1927, as reported in the New York Times, Fred Trump was arrested at a KKK Rally in Queens. The Klan was at the peak of its power in the North at that time, was virulently anti-immigrant, as well as anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. White Supremacists were instrumental in denying New York State’s Catholic Governor Al Smith the nomination for President at the 1924 Democratic National Convention, and in beating back an anti-Klan resolution.

 

The Klan amassed 50,000 protestors to march through Washington, DC that same year–1924–the year when Congress passed the sweeping anti-Immigration Act, which took special aim at Italian immigrants, and immigrants from non-“Nordic” nations, and became a model for the Nazis Nuremberg Laws. Fred Trump knew exactly what the White Supremacist organization was advocating when he attended their rally in 1927. Three months later, the Italian political activists Sacco & Vanzetti were executed in Massachusetts in a climate of virulent anti-Italian immigrant hatred, and a national hysteria over “radical” elements.

 

The Times points out (January 13, 2018) that throughout his lifetime, we have seen Donald Trump’s White Supremacist prejudices rear their ugliness again and again:

“We knew it in 1989, when he took out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five black & Latino teenagers…(later exonerated by DNA and other evidence)…We knew it again when he built a presidential campaign by demonizing Mexicans and Muslims, while promoting the lie that America’s first Black President wasn’t born here…And, again, last summer when he defended marchers in a neo-Nazi parade as ‘very fine people.’”

Now, on the Anniversary of the National Holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King–a holiday which many of the very same White Nationalists supporting Donald Trump fiercely campaigned against creating–it’s instructive to recall a powerful sermon given by Dr. King, two months before his assassination, 50 years ago this April. The sermon, which he entitled, “The Drum Major Instinct,” was delivered from the pulpit of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia on February 4, 1968:

 

“Do you know that a lot of the race problem grows out of the drum major instinct? A need that some people have to feel superior. A need that some people have to feel that they are first, and to feel that their white skin ordained them to be first. And they have said it over and over again in ways that we see with our own eyes…And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct. It has led to the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man.”

That Screeching You Hear from Trump & Friends About Mueller & the FBI: Just Another Tactic He Learned from his Mobbed-Up Pals.

Donald Trump & the Mob: A Patsy Among Punks:
By Steve Villano

(Mobsters in the Gambino & Genovese Crime Families Screeched at the FBI & Robert Mueller (Just like Trump & Friends are Doing Now) Right Before Being Indicted & Convicted of Running a Criminal Enterprise. The FBI & Mueller ALWAYS Get Their Man…)

(reprinted from The National Memo, December 17, 2017)

Author Steve Villano’s remarkable new book is Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo And My Brother (Heliotrope Books 2017), the true story of his life as an aide to the late New York Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the sibling of a longtime Gambino crime family associate sent to prison for tax evasion.

The following is drawn from the pages of “Tightrope.”

Before all the signs and rumors that special counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments are about to start tumbling down upon Donald Trump and his associates like a ton of bricks, many of us were baffled as to how long the huge target of the criminal investigation involving the Russians could get away with his lunatic, erratic, fanatical behavior, false claims about “fake” news, and histrionic attacks on the FBI and every federal law enforcement and intelligence agency.

 

That masquerade worked until members of Robert Mueller’s FBI investigative team induced Sammy “The Bull” Gravano—a man who murdered 19 people—to “flip” and provide evidence to convict John Gotti. After the Boss of the Gambino crime family was put away for life, Mueller’s men enticed the same Gravano to come out of the safety of witness protection and testify again; this time, he said that “The Chin” was totally lucid, and his insane behavior had all been an act.

 

Gigante, like Gotti, was convicted on Gravano’s testimony, and sentenced to life in prison, where he died. Mueller and his crack law enforcement professionals — expert in busting up criminal enterprises— were thus responsible for ending the reign of two of the most feared mobsters in the United States. Neither the Gambino nor the Genovese crime organizations (members from both of which married into my family) were ever the same again.

 

In Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother, I write about the Trump family’s “ incestuous relationship with organized crime,” as the investigative reporter Wayne Barrett described it in his seminal work on the depth of Donald Trump’s lying and corruption, Trump: The Deals & the Downfall, (December, 1991, Harper Collins, NY, NY.)

 

Trump’s ties to the Genovese, Gambino, and Scarfo mob families were of great significance to me, since my brother Michael was convicted of being a bag man for John Gotti, while I worked for Governor Mario M. Cuomo of New York.

“My brother knew many of the mob guys Trump did business with, and how they joked that they could make the hair of the heir of Fred Trump’s construction business stand on end, getting whatever they wanted from him. It’s a lesson that was not lost on Russian mobsters, like Felix Sater, Trump’s partner in his SoHo hotel, and a number of his wealthy, well-connected oligarch friends. Nor was it a lesson ever ignored by Mueller and his top team of law enforcement officials. It’s also a lesson that came straight out of New York’s construction industry, where the Trumps made their money.’

 

“I’ve never dealt with an industry that has more pervasive corruption than the construction industry,” James F. McNamara, director of former New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch’s Office of Construction Industry Relations told the New York Times in April 1982.

“When I say corruption I’m using a very broad term. Some of it is labor racketeering. Some of it is political influence. Some of it is bid-rigging; some, extortion,” said McNamara.

In an extensive story detailing the mob’s influence over New York’s construction industry, the Times reported:

“Organized crime figures have infiltrated many important construction unions, from truck drivers to carpenters to blasters. Sixteen of thirty-one union locals in the city that represent laborers, the backbone of any construction job, are described by law enforcement authorities as being under influence of organized crime.”

Many builders and developers throughout the New York metropolitan area, including the Trump Organization, considered it part of the cost of operating in the construction business, and paid whatever extra charges were exacted through organized crime’s control of the cement and drywall industries, or other aspects of the trades.

In Trump: The Deals and the Downfall, Barrett wrote that Donald Trump met with Genovese crime family boss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno in the apartment of attorney Roy Cohn in 1983. Cohn, hired by Trump ten years earlier, when the Trump Organization was sued by the federal government for racially discriminatory practices in housing, represented Trump as well as Salerno.

 

The meeting between Trump and the Genovese boss occurred only a year after the New York Times had detailed organized crime’s stranglehold on New York’s construction industry, denying Trump any alibi that he did not know with whom he was meeting. Salerno, along with then-Gambino crime family boss Paul Castellano, tightly controlled the city’s concrete industry through their company, S & A Concrete. Cohn’s client list— built since he moved to New York from Washington, DC in the mid-1950s, following his work as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) —included celebrities, the Studio 54 club, Salerno, Donald Trump and, later, John Gotti.

 

Barrett, who died the day before Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States, documented that Cohn also represented Trump in meetings with another key New York construction industry player during the 1980’s, convicted labor racketeer John Cody, who was another former associate of my brother Michael.

Cody, at the peak of his power in the mid-1970s through 1982, when he was dealing with Cohn on Trump’s behalf, was no small operator. As President of Teamster Local 282, Cody controlled 4,000 drivers of delivery trucks in New York City and Long Island. He had the power to bring to a grinding halt the $2.5 billion construction industry, which employed 70,000 people. He could shut down any construction project in New York, including Trump Tower, by pulling out his drivers. Cody told Barrett: “Donald liked to deal with me through Roy Cohn.”

 

Barrett reported that Trump did, however, have to deal directly with John Cody’s girlfriend, Vernia Hixon, to whom Trump gave a sweetheart deal for several apartments, one floor beneath his own penthouse in Trump Tower.

“Despite his posturing as a New York power player, Trump cowered in front of John Cody, behaving more like a bagman, than a big man. As recently as last October, Cody’s son Michael told Christopher Dickey and Michael Daly of The Daily Beast how Donald gave Cody whatever he wanted: “Trump was a guy who would talk tough, but as soon as you confronted him, he would cry like a little girl. He was all talk, no action.”

 

That’s exactly the opposite of what Trump was telling Billy Bush about how he mistreated women on the now infamous Access Hollywood tape, released the week before Michael Cody’s interview in The Daily Beast and distracting most of the media from Trump’s crime family connections — which went all the way back to his father’s business partnership with Genovese crime family capo Willie Tomasello in the 1950’s. Both Fred Trump and Tomasello were hauled before a Senate committee and questioned about misuse of federal housing funds.

 

John Cody made sure Trump took good care of his special friend Verina Hixon, who now lived directly under Trump’s penthouse. The mobster funneled some $500,000 to Hixon for renovations of her apartments, while he was in jail for racketeering and income tax evasion. When Trump balked at fulfilling some of his promises to Cody’s girlfriend, Barrett reported that “Cody and Hixon cornered him in a nearby bar and got his agreement.”
“Anything for you, John,” was Hixon’s recollection of Trump’s comments to John Cody. “Anything for you.”

 

Trump was so terrified of crossing Cody that at one point, when Cody called Trump from prison to complain about construction problems on Hixon’s apartments, Barrett reported that “Trump greeted him nervously on the phone. “Where are you?” Trump asked. “Downstairs?”

 

“My father walked all over Trump.” Michael Cody told The Daily Beast. “Anytime Trump didn’t do what he was told, my father would shut down his job for the day. No deliveries. 400 guys sittin’ around.”  To John Cody and his colleagues, Donald Trump was just another puffed-up pasty patsy, who did whatever the mob guys asked.

 

Indicted by a Brooklyn grand jury on charges of racketeering, extortion, and tax evasion, John Cody was sentenced to five years in prison at the end of 1982. His sentencing judge, Jacob Mishler, was the same federal judge who would sentence my brother Michael to federal prison six years after Cody’s conviction.

 

With Cody’s ability to wield such vast economic power and choke off Trump’s flow of cash, there was little wonder that Donald Trump asked Roy Cohn to meet with Cody to keep him happy. They were in business with these guys. They had buildings to complete, and fortunes to make. Cooperating with the FBI or federal and state law enforcement officials to clean up the construction trades industry was not in Donald Trump’s self-interest. Making money was.

 

“There are no heroes in this industry in terms of helping law enforcement officers,” Jim McNamara told the Times. Many observers believe that Trump, although he holds the nation’s highest elected office, behaves the same way today toward the Russian mob and its international criminal empire. See no evil, speak no evil—especially if your business is dependent upon the mobsters under investigation.

“There is something eerily familiar about the attacks on the FBI by Trump and his lackeys at Fox News and in Congress. They sound exactly like my brother did, when he was sentenced to prison as a bagman for John Gotti who had never paid income taxes on the illicit money he collected for the crime boss. They sound like my brother’s former Gambino family associates with their bitter attacks on the “Feds” and the “fuckin’ gov’ment.” They all cursed the government and the FBI more intensely as the charges against them became more real, and their prison sentences became a certainty. My brother continued to curse the FBI and the “fuckin’ gov’ment” after he got out of prison–sent there because of solid FBI evidence against him.”

Trump was, and still is, a punk-wannabe among punks: an amoral actor doing business with amoral peers. As John Cody’s son observed, and my brother’s friends demonstrated, they had zero respect for Trump. They knew they could squeeze him for as much as they wanted, since all that mattered to Trump was money. That’s a language understood very well by organized crime—whatever dialect is spoken by the Gambino, Genovese, Scarfo or Russian criminal enterprises. It’s also a way of life that Robert Mueller has developed great expertise—and extraordinary results—in holding accountable to the law.

 

Steve Villano is a journalist, film producer, educator, and consultant who worked as a speechwriter for New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo and headed his New York City press office. He now lives in northern California.
Copyright 2017 The National Memo

Donald Trump And The Mob: A Patsy Among Punks

Salvator Mundi

Circa 1490-1519, oil on panel, 45.4 cm × 65.6 cm (25.8 in × 17.9 in), private collection. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)

 

 

Salvator Mundi

Born on Sunday,

Forgotten Tuesday

On a very slow newsday.

 

 

Moore’s young girls

Made him weep on Wednesday,

Ryan’s bloodsuckers sold him out on Thursday.

 

 

Salvator Mundi,

Crucified Friday,

Lies & hypocrisy hammered him away.

 

 

Salvator Mundi,

Saturday’s dump,

Rose from the dead,

Saving us from Trump.