Trump lied to me about his wealth to get onto the Forbes 400. Here are the tapes
In May 1984, an official from the Trump Organization known to tell me how rich Donald J. Trump was. I had been reporting for the Forbes 400, the magazine's annual ranking of the richest people of America, for the next year. In the previous edition, we had appreciated Trump's holdings at $200 million, of that which he claimed to have in our interviews, just one-fifth. This time, his aide encouraged me I needed to understand how wealthy Trump really was.
The official was John Barron -- a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. "Barron" advised me that Trump had obtained possession of the company he conducted with his dad, Fred. "Most of these assets have been merged to Mr. Trump," he said. "You have down Fred Trump [as half owner]. . . However, I believe that you can really utilize Donald Trump now." Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me how he owned"in excess of 90 per cent" of his family's company. Considering all the house runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he must be called a billionaire.
At the time, I guessed that some of this was untrue. I conducted Trump's assertions into the ground, and for several years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had telephoned him on his distortions and predicated his net worth on which I thought was strong research.
However, it took decades to unwind the farce Trump had enacted to project an image among the wealthiest people in the us. Every assertion supporting that claim was false. Trump was not only poorer than he said he had been. Over time, I've learned he shouldn't have been on the initial three Forbes 400 lists at all.
Audio from May 17, 1984, phone conversation
I was a decided 25-year-old reporter, and that I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I'd done a public service and also exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so large that they had an unexpected effect: Rather than thinking they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and that I watched them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We had been so wrong.
This was a model Trump would use for the remainder of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that folks believed that some kernel of it had to be actual. The strategy landed him a place he hadn't earned on the Forbes list -- and contributed to future accolades, press coverage and bargains. It paved a path contrary to the presidency.
Malcolm Forbes created the notion of the Forbes 400 at 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and individuals who worked together about one another. The sector was personal real estate riches. My grandfather was an accountant into a range of major New York programmers, so that I had the advantage of knowing many of the players . But the reporting was opaque, since few of the relevant financial documents were general; we relied on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced editors and colleagues joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history.
Trump was obsessed. The project could provide a clear, supposedly authoritative statement of his status as a participant, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it.
[I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. ]
When I first contacted him for the first issue, Trump pulled all the stops to convince me he had been the wealthiest real estate developer in New York. In an afternoon-long meeting in his eponymous Fifth Avenue office, he also contended that his household was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with titles like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier home in the gold borough of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was well known for building the majority of the flats the Trump Organization owned before Donald even joined the firm, therefore it amazed me when Donald claimed he, rather than his father, owned 80 percent of the 23,000 apartments he stated they had in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. He added that these were almost debt free and worth $40,000 each.
I contested his evaluation. That would mean his family was worth a $500 million, still atop our listing for New York real estate tycoons.
But that figure seemed high. I anticipated that the flats to be worth about $9,000 each: They could not easily be converted into profitable co-ops, and Trump had falsely described the location of the Queens buildings. He had promised they were in Forest Hills when, in fact, they were in the much less precious Jamaica Estates neighborhood a few miles away. Since Donald's new jobs were still in growth or unproven, the outer-borough flats formed the foundation of a Trump household net worth estimate of $200 million.
Six weeks after my initial interview, I got a telephone at my desk from Trump's secretary and gatekeeper, Norma Foerderer. She said she wanted my work address so Trump would send me an invitation into a business party. Then she abruptly included:"Oh, Donald was only passing by!
Telephone conversation between Jonathan Greenberg and Donald Trump on July 15, 1982. (Jonathan Greenberg)
I changed my music recorder -- my regular practice -- as Trump voiced his concern for what he called"your small article." He invited me for a follow-up interview with him since , he said, he was richer than the remainder. "I really don't think that you have your facts 100 percent correct" about his position vis-a-vis other New York developers. I had been contemplating a too-low appraisal of the net worth, he said:"You had us down in a specific class, and then you mentioned other titles, and there's no competition, you know. I mean, there's no rivalry. So I just wanted to mention ."
Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, therefore he had his attorney, Roy Cohn, telephone me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening suits, schmoozing with mobster customers and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that left his customers look good and their opponents look bad. I took notes . "This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can't quote me! But Donny tells me you are putting together this listing of rich people. He says you have got him for only $200 million! That's way too low, way too low! Listen, I'm Donny's personal lawyer, but he said I could speak with you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he's got over $500 million in liquid resources, just cash. That's just Donald, nothing related to Fred, and it is just cash." He concluded:"He's worth more than some of the other guys in this town!"
I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his workplace. Cohn insisted the document was private. "Just trust me," he said. I advised him without visiting the paperwork, I wouldn't take his word. "It is discreet!" Cohn yelled.
[I research liars. I've never seen one. ]
My Forbes editors and I spent many hours deliberating on where to put Trump. Based on what little we understood -- his claimsa 1976 New York Times profile that stated the Trump Organization owned 22,000 apartments; and Fred's reputation for housing a creation of working-class New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens -- we ranked Donald and Fred in the lowest tier among leading real-estate developers, each with half a $200 million flat empire.
Even though I heard later that this was money than Donald possessed, it did not satisfy him for the following year's edition. Throughout his 1983 interview, Trump claimed there were actually 25,000 apartments and that his net worth had ballooned due to the success of his new endeavors, Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street, as well as a impending casino deal in Atlantic City.
Subsequently Cohn called again, this time was worth more than $700 million. Our chat was recorded by me. He started that Trump had received $250 million in the sale of a 50 percent interest in his project to build a Harrah's casino in Atlantic City. "A certain amount was removed, state, about a hundred thousand," Cohn said. ". . . But he used the balance to liquidate other items, which left his position quite impregnable. The gains on this are much greater than had been anticipated, and trump Tower has been going like a house afire, and the same goes with Grand Hyatt. On top of which he's been in a series of private trades, and he records with banks to get between $700 to $750 million, in addition to with Equitable" -- Equitable Life Assurance, the company that financed Trump Tower --"which backs him in all his deals."
Sound from June 21, 1983, phone conversation
Phone conversation between Donald Trump's and Jonathan Greenberg lawyer, Roy Cohn on June 21, 1983.
In retrospect, Fred Trump was likely worth that sum, and Donald should not have been on the list in any way.
The following year I received two calls from"John Barron," the fictitious Trump executive who advised me that Donald had taken"in excess of 90%" ownership from Fred. He suggested that Trump was on track to earn a $50 million gain each year. And so, in 1984, we raised Donald's net worth estimate to $400 million and left Fred in, to get his this past year on the Forbes 400, at $200 million. (Barron additionally bad-mouthed the contest, saying that developer George Klein had struck a"bad deal" to redevelop Times Square -- a bidding Trump had dropped -- and was"going to move down the tubes")
[Trump is calling Comey a liar because to Trump, all criticism is a lie. ]
I am publishing it here, although Trump asked Forbes to conduct the conversation from the record. I believe an intent to deceive -- equally with all the made-up character along with the content of the telephone -- released me. At a 1990 court case, Trump testified he had used false names in telephone calls. In 2016, when The Washington Post printed a similar record , Trump denied it was him.
Fred Trump turned down my efforts to interview him for the Forbes 400. He enabled Donald to say whatever he wanted about the family's company. In the only major interview he gave after Donald captured the limelight,'' Fred told that the New York Times in 1983 that"Donald has a competitive spirit and that I don't need to contend with him. . . . He disturbs me. He has gone way beyond me, completely."
Nearly every one of the pronouncements regarding his wealth of Trump unraveled.
The number of apartments was the problem. The mentioned figure -- that his family owned 25,000 units -- began together with the reference of 22,000 flats because fawning 1976 New York Times profile. In 1988, once Forbes was left by me, I discovered fewer than 8,000 and relied on the units. (I had been working briefly on a documentary about Trump that was not completed.) John Anderson, another Forbes reporter that year, discovered the exact same thing. He predicted the Trump management firm, he asked that an executive named Harry Green many flats the company owned, and told me then. "Around 10,000," Green told me, meaning that our 1982 family valuation of $200 million should've been only $90 million (under the cutoff at that point for inclusion on the list). A couple of minutes later, Green known as Anderson back and corrected himselfthere were.
Another brazen claim was that the outer-borough flats, which his dad built beginning in the 1930s of the company were, owned by Trump, not his father. According to what Trump said during 1983 interviews and our 1982, I'd presumed that Donald and Fred each possessed halfresisting the son's insistence that he merged the holdings himself or had purchased 80 percent of the units. In 1985, once I left the job, Trump was estimated to be worth $600 million, also this remark went into the Forbes 400 records, and his father was off the list.
[Could a president that disregards the truth maintain his oath of office? ]
It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been scammed: At the early 1980s, Trump had no equity in his father's business. According to Fred's will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retainedlegal ownership of his residential empire before his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be split between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. He did not, although he might have used his own assets as security if he had had some worth that amount.
O'Brien got a copy . Trump had employed an Atlantic City casino license, and regulators were able to review his tax returns and personal and corporate debt, giving them the most precise image of his finances. They found that he had an income of about $100,000 annually, while his 1979 tax returns showed a 3.4 million taxable reduction. Trump's private assets consisted of a $1 million trust fund which Fred Trump provided to each of his children and grandchildren, several checking account with about $400,000 in them and a 1977 Mercedes 450SL. Nowhere did the record list an ownership stake in the residential apartments of the Trump Organization. Trump also owned a few parcels of valuable however highly leveraged property, funded with $22.5 million in debt, all of it procured by his dad's assets. He did not own stocks or a safe deposit box in publicly traded companies. In sum, Trump was worth less than $5 million, not the $100 million I reported in the initial Forbes 400.
Trump advised me that he had bought the adjacent 100 and the Barbizon Plaza Hotel Central Park South a sneak, for just $13 million. A broker allegedly called to offer him $100 million, while I was in Trump's office. While looking me in the eye, the offer was refused by trump; he pointed out that his net worth must include an equity increase of $87 million gain. I thought then that he utilized a staffer to point the telephone, and I resisted the fictitious valuation. However, the $13 million price tag for a valuable parcel was recorded in Forbes 400 files, and it soon showed up in other books, for example New York magazine . It stays on Wikipedia today. Yet tucked away on Page 63 of the Casino Commission report was a part describing the purchase of the property of Trump for $65 million. Much like many of his buildings, Trump's debt was his true equity much lower, and far higher, than he promised.
Roy Cohn had advised me that Trump received $250 million from Holiday Inn because of its. But according to O'Brien, Trump's real income in the bargain was a construction and management fee (not profit) of roughly $24 million, while Holiday Inn financed the construction of the $220 million casino.
[How do you write political satire when politics are a farce? ]
Later efforts by Trump to paint himself fantastically wealthy were duplicitous. In 1989, Trump delivered Forbes journalist Harry Seneker a report on his $3.7 billion net worth. I've obtained the letter. It signaled $900 million in assets. "I'm more liquid than any major developer in the USA," Trump composed, inducing the magazine to increase Trump's listing from $1 billion in 1988 to $1.7 billion in 1989.
But in accordance with the New Jersey Casino Commission, which issued a second report in 1991, by the end of 1990, Trump's whole cash position -- at both his business and private accounts -- was only $19 million. The sum was insufficient while covering his expenses of $ 1 million per month, to pay the debt on real estate holdings and his over-leveraged casino. His net worth, the commission estimated, was $205 million -- less than 6% of what he had told Forbes. In 1990, the magazine dropped Trumpin the list and kept him off it for five years.
Forbes declined to comment for this article, but its top editor, Randall Lane, interviewed then-candidate Trump for the Forbes 400 at 2015 and composed about the magazine's long struggle to correctly assess his net worth in an article titled"Inside The Epic Fantasy That is Driven Donald Trump For 33 Years ." Of those 1,538 tycoons who had been around the"Rich List" through the years, Lane wrote,"none has been fixated with their net worth estimate on a year-in, year-out foundation than Donald J. Trump."
*** *** *** ***
I was a top New York real estate reporter throughout the 1980s. I knew all the important players. I thought I had a handle on this material.
But Trump was in conning me, capable until 35 years later, I didn't know I'd been scammed. Rather, I have gone through my profession in national media using a misinformed sense of pride that, as a perceptive young journalist, I phoned Trump on his own lies and gave Forbes subscribers who employed the Rich List as a barometer of private riches a more accurate picture of his finances than the one that he had been selling.
The joke was on everyone else -- and me. Trump's fabrications given the foundation for a vastly inflated riches evaluation for the Forbes 400 that could give cachet for decades as a businessman that was successful to him.
In truth, almost nobody had a very clear image of Trump's novels. Trump brought in Steve Bollenbach as a chief financial officer to react to lender worries about his debt. "The small employees about the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower included three accountants. Each understood about even the condos the casinos, for instance, or pieces. However, nobody understood the overall image; there were not any consolidated financial reports"
In the absence of a functioning balance sheet, the listing didn't just make Trump feel like a winner, based on O'Brien; it might have provided some of the documentation he needed to borrow reckless sums of money -- vast loans he employed, for decades, to actually make him a winner. "The more often Forbes mentioned himthe more credible Donald's claim to vast riches became more," O'Brien said, asserting that Trump along with the record were"mutually reinforcing":"The more credible his claim to vast wealth became, the easier it was for him to get on the Forbes 400 -- which became the standard that other media, and apparently a number of the nation's main banks, used when estimating Donald's riches."
He fell it off . When he dropped his appeal in 2011, a New Jersey appellate judge summarized O'Brien's stage this way:"The largest percentage of Mr. Trump's fortune, according to three people who'd had direct knowledge of his holdings, apparently comes from his rewarding inheritance. This really is an enviably large sum of money by most people's standards but far short of the billionaires club."
The opacity persists. However he's never released his tax returns, and he's stated that the core Trump Organization advantage is the ownership of his trademark -- an advertising claim that is impossible to substantiate or refute.
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that, as a property developer, Trump had bought 110 Central Park West. The speech was 100 Central Park South. The post also included a quote that made it appear that a New Jersey judge was consenting in 2011 with writer Timothy O'Brien about Trump's net worth. In fact, the judge's quotation ]
The official was John Barron -- a name we now know as an alter ego of Trump himself. "Barron" advised me that Trump had obtained possession of the company he conducted with his dad, Fred. "Most of these assets have been merged to Mr. Trump," he said. "You have down Fred Trump [as half owner]. . . However, I believe that you can really utilize Donald Trump now." Trump, through this sockpuppet, was telling me how he owned"in excess of 90 per cent" of his family's company. Considering all the house runs Trump was hitting in real estate, Barron told me, he must be called a billionaire.
At the time, I guessed that some of this was untrue. I conducted Trump's assertions into the ground, and for several years I was proud of the fact that Forbes had telephoned him on his distortions and predicated his net worth on which I thought was strong research.
However, it took decades to unwind the farce Trump had enacted to project an image among the wealthiest people in the us. Every assertion supporting that claim was false. Trump was not only poorer than he said he had been. Over time, I've learned he shouldn't have been on the initial three Forbes 400 lists at all.
Audio from May 17, 1984, phone conversation
I was a decided 25-year-old reporter, and that I thought that, by reeling Trump back from some of his more outrageous claims, I'd done a public service and also exposed the truth. But his confident deceptions were so large that they had an unexpected effect: Rather than thinking they were outright fabrications, my Forbes colleagues and that I watched them simply as vain embellishments on the truth. We had been so wrong.
This was a model Trump would use for the remainder of his career, telling a lie so cosmic that folks believed that some kernel of it had to be actual. The strategy landed him a place he hadn't earned on the Forbes list -- and contributed to future accolades, press coverage and bargains. It paved a path contrary to the presidency.
Malcolm Forbes created the notion of the Forbes 400 at 1981 and assigned me to spend a year traveling around the country and interviewing wealthy people and individuals who worked together about one another. The sector was personal real estate riches. My grandfather was an accountant into a range of major New York programmers, so that I had the advantage of knowing many of the players . But the reporting was opaque, since few of the relevant financial documents were general; we relied on what people told us. As the project progressed, other experienced editors and colleagues joined what would become the most successful annual special issue in Forbes history.
Trump was obsessed. The project could provide a clear, supposedly authoritative statement of his status as a participant, and while many of the super-rich wanted to keep their names off the ranking, Trump was desperate to scale it.
[I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. ]
When I first contacted him for the first issue, Trump pulled all the stops to convince me he had been the wealthiest real estate developer in New York. In an afternoon-long meeting in his eponymous Fifth Avenue office, he also contended that his household was worth more than $900 million and deserved to be higher on our list than any of the far more accomplished developers (with titles like Rose and Rudin) who had spent generations building top-tier home in the gold borough of Manhattan. His father, Fred Trump, was well known for building the majority of the flats the Trump Organization owned before Donald even joined the firm, therefore it amazed me when Donald claimed he, rather than his father, owned 80 percent of the 23,000 apartments he stated they had in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. He added that these were almost debt free and worth $40,000 each.
I contested his evaluation. That would mean his family was worth a $500 million, still atop our listing for New York real estate tycoons.
But that figure seemed high. I anticipated that the flats to be worth about $9,000 each: They could not easily be converted into profitable co-ops, and Trump had falsely described the location of the Queens buildings. He had promised they were in Forest Hills when, in fact, they were in the much less precious Jamaica Estates neighborhood a few miles away. Since Donald's new jobs were still in growth or unproven, the outer-borough flats formed the foundation of a Trump household net worth estimate of $200 million.
Six weeks after my initial interview, I got a telephone at my desk from Trump's secretary and gatekeeper, Norma Foerderer. She said she wanted my work address so Trump would send me an invitation into a business party. Then she abruptly included:"Oh, Donald was only passing by!
Telephone conversation between Jonathan Greenberg and Donald Trump on July 15, 1982. (Jonathan Greenberg)
I changed my music recorder -- my regular practice -- as Trump voiced his concern for what he called"your small article." He invited me for a follow-up interview with him since , he said, he was richer than the remainder. "I really don't think that you have your facts 100 percent correct" about his position vis-a-vis other New York developers. I had been contemplating a too-low appraisal of the net worth, he said:"You had us down in a specific class, and then you mentioned other titles, and there's no competition, you know. I mean, there's no rivalry. So I just wanted to mention ."
Trump knew I had doubts about his assertions, therefore he had his attorney, Roy Cohn, telephone me. Cohn spent most of his time threatening suits, schmoozing with mobster customers and badgering reporters with off-the-record utterances that left his customers look good and their opponents look bad. I took notes . "This is Roy. Roy Cohn! You can't quote me! But Donny tells me you are putting together this listing of rich people. He says you have got him for only $200 million! That's way too low, way too low! Listen, I'm Donny's personal lawyer, but he said I could speak with you about this. I am sitting here looking at his current bank statement. It shows he's got over $500 million in liquid resources, just cash. That's just Donald, nothing related to Fred, and it is just cash." He concluded:"He's worth more than some of the other guys in this town!"
I offered to have a messenger pick up the bank statement at his workplace. Cohn insisted the document was private. "Just trust me," he said. I advised him without visiting the paperwork, I wouldn't take his word. "It is discreet!" Cohn yelled.
[I research liars. I've never seen one. ]
My Forbes editors and I spent many hours deliberating on where to put Trump. Based on what little we understood -- his claimsa 1976 New York Times profile that stated the Trump Organization owned 22,000 apartments; and Fred's reputation for housing a creation of working-class New Yorkers in Brooklyn and Queens -- we ranked Donald and Fred in the lowest tier among leading real-estate developers, each with half a $200 million flat empire.
Even though I heard later that this was money than Donald possessed, it did not satisfy him for the following year's edition. Throughout his 1983 interview, Trump claimed there were actually 25,000 apartments and that his net worth had ballooned due to the success of his new endeavors, Trump Tower and the Grand Hyatt Hotel on East 42nd Street, as well as a impending casino deal in Atlantic City.
Subsequently Cohn called again, this time was worth more than $700 million. Our chat was recorded by me. He started that Trump had received $250 million in the sale of a 50 percent interest in his project to build a Harrah's casino in Atlantic City. "A certain amount was removed, state, about a hundred thousand," Cohn said. ". . . But he used the balance to liquidate other items, which left his position quite impregnable. The gains on this are much greater than had been anticipated, and trump Tower has been going like a house afire, and the same goes with Grand Hyatt. On top of which he's been in a series of private trades, and he records with banks to get between $700 to $750 million, in addition to with Equitable" -- Equitable Life Assurance, the company that financed Trump Tower --"which backs him in all his deals."
Sound from June 21, 1983, phone conversation
Phone conversation between Donald Trump's and Jonathan Greenberg lawyer, Roy Cohn on June 21, 1983.
In retrospect, Fred Trump was likely worth that sum, and Donald should not have been on the list in any way.
The following year I received two calls from"John Barron," the fictitious Trump executive who advised me that Donald had taken"in excess of 90%" ownership from Fred. He suggested that Trump was on track to earn a $50 million gain each year. And so, in 1984, we raised Donald's net worth estimate to $400 million and left Fred in, to get his this past year on the Forbes 400, at $200 million. (Barron additionally bad-mouthed the contest, saying that developer George Klein had struck a"bad deal" to redevelop Times Square -- a bidding Trump had dropped -- and was"going to move down the tubes")
[Trump is calling Comey a liar because to Trump, all criticism is a lie. ]
I am publishing it here, although Trump asked Forbes to conduct the conversation from the record. I believe an intent to deceive -- equally with all the made-up character along with the content of the telephone -- released me. At a 1990 court case, Trump testified he had used false names in telephone calls. In 2016, when The Washington Post printed a similar record , Trump denied it was him.
Fred Trump turned down my efforts to interview him for the Forbes 400. He enabled Donald to say whatever he wanted about the family's company. In the only major interview he gave after Donald captured the limelight,'' Fred told that the New York Times in 1983 that"Donald has a competitive spirit and that I don't need to contend with him. . . . He disturbs me. He has gone way beyond me, completely."
Nearly every one of the pronouncements regarding his wealth of Trump unraveled.
The number of apartments was the problem. The mentioned figure -- that his family owned 25,000 units -- began together with the reference of 22,000 flats because fawning 1976 New York Times profile. In 1988, once Forbes was left by me, I discovered fewer than 8,000 and relied on the units. (I had been working briefly on a documentary about Trump that was not completed.) John Anderson, another Forbes reporter that year, discovered the exact same thing. He predicted the Trump management firm, he asked that an executive named Harry Green many flats the company owned, and told me then. "Around 10,000," Green told me, meaning that our 1982 family valuation of $200 million should've been only $90 million (under the cutoff at that point for inclusion on the list). A couple of minutes later, Green known as Anderson back and corrected himselfthere were.
Another brazen claim was that the outer-borough flats, which his dad built beginning in the 1930s of the company were, owned by Trump, not his father. According to what Trump said during 1983 interviews and our 1982, I'd presumed that Donald and Fred each possessed halfresisting the son's insistence that he merged the holdings himself or had purchased 80 percent of the units. In 1985, once I left the job, Trump was estimated to be worth $600 million, also this remark went into the Forbes 400 records, and his father was off the list.
[Could a president that disregards the truth maintain his oath of office? ]
It would be decades before I learned that Forbes had been scammed: At the early 1980s, Trump had no equity in his father's business. According to Fred's will (portions of which appeared in a lawsuit), the father retainedlegal ownership of his residential empire before his death in 1999, at which point he left it to be split between his four surviving children and some of his grandchildren. He did not, although he might have used his own assets as security if he had had some worth that amount.
O'Brien got a copy . Trump had employed an Atlantic City casino license, and regulators were able to review his tax returns and personal and corporate debt, giving them the most precise image of his finances. They found that he had an income of about $100,000 annually, while his 1979 tax returns showed a 3.4 million taxable reduction. Trump's private assets consisted of a $1 million trust fund which Fred Trump provided to each of his children and grandchildren, several checking account with about $400,000 in them and a 1977 Mercedes 450SL. Nowhere did the record list an ownership stake in the residential apartments of the Trump Organization. Trump also owned a few parcels of valuable however highly leveraged property, funded with $22.5 million in debt, all of it procured by his dad's assets. He did not own stocks or a safe deposit box in publicly traded companies. In sum, Trump was worth less than $5 million, not the $100 million I reported in the initial Forbes 400.
Trump advised me that he had bought the adjacent 100 and the Barbizon Plaza Hotel Central Park South a sneak, for just $13 million. A broker allegedly called to offer him $100 million, while I was in Trump's office. While looking me in the eye, the offer was refused by trump; he pointed out that his net worth must include an equity increase of $87 million gain. I thought then that he utilized a staffer to point the telephone, and I resisted the fictitious valuation. However, the $13 million price tag for a valuable parcel was recorded in Forbes 400 files, and it soon showed up in other books, for example New York magazine . It stays on Wikipedia today. Yet tucked away on Page 63 of the Casino Commission report was a part describing the purchase of the property of Trump for $65 million. Much like many of his buildings, Trump's debt was his true equity much lower, and far higher, than he promised.
Roy Cohn had advised me that Trump received $250 million from Holiday Inn because of its. But according to O'Brien, Trump's real income in the bargain was a construction and management fee (not profit) of roughly $24 million, while Holiday Inn financed the construction of the $220 million casino.
[How do you write political satire when politics are a farce? ]
Later efforts by Trump to paint himself fantastically wealthy were duplicitous. In 1989, Trump delivered Forbes journalist Harry Seneker a report on his $3.7 billion net worth. I've obtained the letter. It signaled $900 million in assets. "I'm more liquid than any major developer in the USA," Trump composed, inducing the magazine to increase Trump's listing from $1 billion in 1988 to $1.7 billion in 1989.
But in accordance with the New Jersey Casino Commission, which issued a second report in 1991, by the end of 1990, Trump's whole cash position -- at both his business and private accounts -- was only $19 million. The sum was insufficient while covering his expenses of $ 1 million per month, to pay the debt on real estate holdings and his over-leveraged casino. His net worth, the commission estimated, was $205 million -- less than 6% of what he had told Forbes. In 1990, the magazine dropped Trumpin the list and kept him off it for five years.
Forbes declined to comment for this article, but its top editor, Randall Lane, interviewed then-candidate Trump for the Forbes 400 at 2015 and composed about the magazine's long struggle to correctly assess his net worth in an article titled"Inside The Epic Fantasy That is Driven Donald Trump For 33 Years ." Of those 1,538 tycoons who had been around the"Rich List" through the years, Lane wrote,"none has been fixated with their net worth estimate on a year-in, year-out foundation than Donald J. Trump."
*** *** *** ***
I was a top New York real estate reporter throughout the 1980s. I knew all the important players. I thought I had a handle on this material.
But Trump was in conning me, capable until 35 years later, I didn't know I'd been scammed. Rather, I have gone through my profession in national media using a misinformed sense of pride that, as a perceptive young journalist, I phoned Trump on his own lies and gave Forbes subscribers who employed the Rich List as a barometer of private riches a more accurate picture of his finances than the one that he had been selling.
The joke was on everyone else -- and me. Trump's fabrications given the foundation for a vastly inflated riches evaluation for the Forbes 400 that could give cachet for decades as a businessman that was successful to him.
In truth, almost nobody had a very clear image of Trump's novels. Trump brought in Steve Bollenbach as a chief financial officer to react to lender worries about his debt. "The small employees about the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower included three accountants. Each understood about even the condos the casinos, for instance, or pieces. However, nobody understood the overall image; there were not any consolidated financial reports"
He fell it off . When he dropped his appeal in 2011, a New Jersey appellate judge summarized O'Brien's stage this way:"The largest percentage of Mr. Trump's fortune, according to three people who'd had direct knowledge of his holdings, apparently comes from his rewarding inheritance. This really is an enviably large sum of money by most people's standards but far short of the billionaires club."
The opacity persists. However he's never released his tax returns, and he's stated that the core Trump Organization advantage is the ownership of his trademark -- an advertising claim that is impossible to substantiate or refute.
[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story said that, as a property developer, Trump had bought 110 Central Park West. The speech was 100 Central Park South. The post also included a quote that made it appear that a New Jersey judge was consenting in 2011 with writer Timothy O'Brien about Trump's net worth. In fact, the judge's quotation ]
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