It's Nov. 11, 1986, and Rudolph Giuliani is standing in a courtroom at the federal courthouse in New Haven, Connecticut. It's the opening day of the trial of Stanley Friedman, one of the political bosses of New York.

The trial — on charges Friedman and others had turned the city's Parking Violations Bureau into a money-making operation for themselves — had been moved from the city because of arguments Friedman would not have been able to get a fair trial. Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York — arguably one of the most powerful law enforcement officials in the country. Giuliani had made an image of himself as a crusading prosecutor — taking on the mob and political corruption. Sometimes those paths intersected.

On this day in New Haven, he wanted to give the jurors an idea of just who Friedman was, just how powerful he was, just how corrupt he thought Friedman was. To do so — as Jack Newfield and Wayne Barrett recounted in their book, "City for Sale" — Giuliani took jurors back more than 10 years, to when Friedman was a deputy mayor in the city and put together a tax abatement package for an up-and-coming developer.

That developer: Donald J. Trump. It was 1976, and Friedman was getting ready to leave City Hall to be a law partner with Roy Cohn. Cohn had first gained notoriety as an aide to Sen. Joseph McCarthy and then built on that reputation by representing people such as mob bosses like the head of the Genovese Family, Fat Tony Salerno.

Cohn reportedly would allow Salerno to host Mafia Commission meetings in his townhouse, allowing the mobsters the protection of attorney-client privilege.

One of Cohn's other clients was Trump and, as Friedman got ready to make the switch to the Cohn firm from City Hall, he was pushing the city to finalize a deal that would give Trump what was then the largest tax write-off in city history.

Trump was buying the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street and was looking to turn it into what would become the Grand Hyatt. It was a hotel in desperate need of renovation, and it would be his first deal in Manhattan. He did not have financing in place but the owner, Penn Central Railroad, was bankrupt and eager to sell. Still, even with help from his father and Hyatt, Trump needed a tax break from the city to help make the deal happen.