What has happened to The Donald?
Just because I have titled this story “dinners with the mob” does not imply that Trump left the GOP race because of any sleazy casino associations. But after all, Trump – or to be more accurate Trump’s father – made his fortune as a real estate developer in Queens. Real estate development is a precarious and rather brave way to make money in New York City. This is especially true in Queens, where so many in the New York Mob including Queens Godfather John Gotti have listed their DBA as “construction.”
It is not that the New York Mob will shake down money from New York outer-borough business people through sheer terror and intimidation. But they will sell things to businesses and union halls that nobody needs. You might wonder, for example, why there is a juke box in a Queens real estate office. Or why there is a collection of completely meaningless coffee-table union yearbooks in a union hall. And the price of these things will be way over the money that any sensible person would spend. But in enough cases, the businesses and union halls can afford these extra touches, and so why not make a neighborhood Godfather happy?
Trump has grown up in this rough-and-tumble world of New York real estate all of his life except for his education in military school and at the Wharton School of Business. It is indeed his expensive education that has created a bridge between Trump’s roughneck fast-track money and mainstream America. Like the Great Gatsby, Trump has used his Ivy League education to become much more than another New York roughneck with endless money. For one thing, in the spirit of Gatsby, Trump has picked up the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA beauty contests in his name and with unlimited beautiful young women on his arm.
But let’s look at a pattern that takes place with any New Yorker these days who runs for President. In the last presidential election in 2008, it was former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani who dominated the Republican’s 2007 warm-up year. Giuliani was not just dominated the GOP polls in 2007 but he eventually made the cover of two national magazines.
With all that hoopla, Giuliani finished the Republican race to the White House dead last, with only one delegate vote from Florida to his name in 2008. His was a vanishing act that was as astonishing as Trump’s.
And what happened to Giuliani? For one thing, he is talking about running for president again in 2012. Another thing, I think the clue to his presidential chances is the “heh-heh-heh” I heard in the voice of one Umberto “Robert” Iannicello when I was writing a background story on Giuliani for the Signal in the winter of 2008. I had chosen to talk with Iannicello because I often ate at his restaurant, “Umberto’s Clam House” on Mulberry Street in Little Italy for many Friday night dinners. This was a common habit in New York for a working journalist like myself. But that was before U.S. Attorney Giuliani had come down on the restaurant down for being a suspected mob hangout.
Umberto’s had drawn the attention of the U.S. Attorney’s office shortly after it opened in lower Manhattan, when a remnant of the Colombo gang broke into the restaurant and gunned down Crazy Joey Gallo at his own birthday party. Colombo himself was supposed to have been gunned down earlier by a Gallo assassin.
Umberto’s became a kind of tourist attraction, with idiots from all over the world wanting to sit where Crazy Joey was shot. Actually mob restaurants have often been popular with the non-mob public, especially Umberto’s which offered excellent Old World Italian food at very accessible prices (the U.S. attorney’s theory was that it is easier to launder money in a place where the prices are low and the traffic is heavy). For my part, I could find no where else in New York where I could order something that tasted as good as Umberto’s linguini with anchovy sauce.
Rudy Giuliani himself could not escape the culture and the pressure of the mob. Growing up in Brooklyn, the young Rudy had to bear the turmoil around his father Harold, who was an enforcer for his brother-in-law’s loan-sharking operation. When he became an adult, Rudy took his payback in the form of his job as U.S, Attorney in New York City, when he sent more mobsters to prison than any local predecessor in New York history.
Heh-heh-heh
Giuliani in the meantime did not make friends with the people operating Umberto’s Clam House. Robert Iannicello told me he did not believe Giuliani’s personal supervision of his restaurant had anything to do with legal cause. I asked him, “Why did Giuiliani grind your place to the ground?” Iannicello gave me another “heh-heh-heh.”
But Iannicello has survived. After closing his Mulberry Street restaurant down, Iannicello opened another Umberto’s Clam House down the street. The U.S. Attorney’s has relented and allowed him to run the restaurant as long as he is good and did not allow his brother Harry the Horse into the money flow. Meanwhile the new place is packed with tourists who hope each night to have “dinner with the Mob.”
Shortly after my interview with Robert Iannicello, before the first 2008 GOP primary, Giuliani was presidentially destroyed by a single photo that appeared in a national magazine. The photo was of Giuliani giving James Kerin a Cosa Nostra kiss in the mayor’s office. Kerin had originally worked for Giuliani as Rudy’s chauffer, and then step by step Giuliana moved Kerin up to New York City’s police chief. It was only when Giuliani had proposed Kerin to George W. Bush as homeland security chief that a national vetting brought to light a history of corrupt leveraging in the New York City police chief’s office.
So why was Giuliani photographed kissing Kerin? It was finally explained that the kiss was in the Mafia tradition of making a colleague a “made man,” qualified to carry out assignments for a mob family. All of this unraveling hardly made mainstream America comfortable with the idea of Giuliani as president of the United States.
Actually, since Franklin D. Roosevelt, being associated with New York has never helped a person become president of the United States. None of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s many millions could help him win the Republican nomination against a middle-class Barry Goldwater. I also remember living in Oregon in 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy – then a senator representing New York – spent many millions from the Kennedy family fortune only to lose the Oregon Primary ignominiously against Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, who was practically penniless. Four years later, in 1972, New York City’s very popular Mayor John V. Lindsay ran for president, and his crushing defeat effectively ruined him.
This is why I wasn’t surprised when Hillary Clinton lost her heavily favored race for the Democrat presidential nomination. She basically made the same mistake as Robert Kennedy, choosing the job of New York Senator to represent her political springboard, even though Clinton like Kennedy had never really lived in New York. The largeness of New York never helps carpet-bagging candidates. But the ghosts of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall continue to make mainstream America suspicious of them. I believe this is why – immersed in Queens real estate baggage and casino deals in Las Vegas and Atlantic City – Trump has become a vanishing act.
Chris Sharp- Commentary
Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. He has recently published a new book titled “Dangerous Learning: The New Schooling in California..” His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.