In the fall of 1993, on the island of Palm Beach, future U.S. president Donald J. Trump became friends with Leslie Greyling, an illegal immigrant and accused con artist who is a fugitive from the law.

Back then, the local sections of the Palm Beach Post and Palm Beach Daily News nervously followed every zig and zag of Trump's crass galumph through island society. "Just about anything he does qualifies as news," the Post exclaimed November 3, 1993. The future president's scheme to turn the old Marjorie Post estate at Mar-a-Lago, which he had purchased eight years earlier, into a social club was gauche but exciting. Not since the Pulitzer divorce in 1982 had any island happening promised so much public tawdriness. Indeed, when the town council resisted Trump's rezoning plan, he threatened to sell Mar-a-Lago to Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon.

Meanwhile, Greyling — a rotund white South African arriviste — purchased the mansion at 1094 South Ocean Blvd., next door to Mar-a-Lago, in October 1993. Or rather, he bought the shell company, L&V Investments, that owned the mansion. In this way, both Greyling and the sellers kept the sale price from the public record.

The property sits on the southwest corner of the intersection of South Ocean and Woodbridge Road, and though not the most opulent of the 14 properties along Woodbridge, it is the one closest to the Atlantic Ocean, to which it has access. A single-story home that takes up about 6,500 square feet, including the cabana house off the large pool, it has marble floors and an orange-beige exterior.

Just a month after buying the Woodbridge mansion, Greyling sold it for $1.6 million to Trump, who coveted it as a potential addition to Mar-a-Lago. The sale would be unremarkable, except that realtors listed the sale price at $3.95 million when Greyling bought it. That would mean a discount of more than $2 million for the future president of the United States and a big loss for the South African. Jeffrey Paine, a lawyer involved in all stages of the deal, told the Miami Herald that Greyling had taken a "substantial" loss, and wondered if he planned to make it up in another deal with Trump. But the whole thing was soon forgotten.

"It's no secret Mr. Greyling and Mr. Trump are friends." Facebook

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The purchase of this oceanfront property from Greyling is a lost chapter in Trump's long history of proximity to sleazy characters. It marked the beginning of a relationship that brought the Queens-born entrepreneur into contact with a collection of Palm Beach characters so shady, so venal, you could mistake them for Dick Tracy villains or even cabinet members.

Greyling would be expelled from the country and indicted twice for stock fraud. His disgraced underling would die in a Mexico City bathtub. Trump's broker on the Woodbridge deal would shoot himself in a rented Cadillac in a downtown West Palm Beach parking garage in 2012; his suicide was followed by reports of irregularities in his business. The lawyer notarizing the deal would be disbarred for his role in a scam for which he was sentenced to five years in prison, and today calls the very deal he notarized "nefarious." And the president himself gave credibility to a sham company run by Greyling that tanked, costing scores of ordinary investors millions of dollars. Trump at first called Greyling a "friend," but when things went south, he said he barely knew the man.

The story begins with two questions: Did Greyling really give Donald Trump a multimillion-dollar discount on 1094 South Ocean? And if so, why would he do a thing like that?

Donald Trump got a big discount on a property next door to Mar-a-Lago. Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

Leslie Greyling, now age 67, had been pursuing dodgy business ventures in the United States for almost a decade when he crossed paths with Donald Trump. Greyling arrived in 1985 and soon incorporated some 40 companies in South Florida — one of them with partner Herman J. Schannault, whom the Miami Herald called a prostitution kingpin and whom the Detroit Free Press once termed the "king of Detroit massage parlors."

Here on a visitor's visa, Greyling was forced out of a Boca Raton apartment in 1988; his landlord later told the Palm Beach Post he had squatted and taken furniture when he left. (Greyling told the Post a very different story, of a "nasty" landlord who broke the lease.) Greyling and Schannault were sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission two years later over what the agency called a penny-stock scam. Without admitting guilt, Greyling settled by promising not to engage in stock fraud.

In 1993 and 1994, Greyling was making a Trump-style stir in Palm Beach society. He looked remarkably like a joyless John Belushi, pug-faced and balding. He drove a Rolls-Royce and, with his shirt unbuttoned and surrounded by ringing phones, conducted business in the office over the garage of his rented Palm Beach mansion. At that time, he transacted much of his business by neither cash nor check, but by purchasing goods with shares of stock in a Winter Park-based company he chaired, Members Service Corporation.

It is with these shares, in part, that Greyling rented a mansion for himself and bought the one at 1094 South Ocean next to Mar-a-Lago. And it is by promising to deliver a great many of these shares that he walked out of House of Kahn, a tony jewelry store on Peruvian Avenue, with $128,000 in diamonds, emeralds, and a gold watch on Christmas Eve 1993. Or at least that is what Adele Kahn, the store matriarch, told the Palm Beach Post in 1994. She said she never received the promised stock. Eventually, she won an $86,000 judgment for the unpaid balance against Greyling in Palm Beach County Circuit Court, though she would never get the money.

Members Service Corp. was a shape-shifting holding company that always claimed to be on the verge of offering some good or service but never quite managed to do it. It had been founded in the late '80s by a used-car salesman, Leon Hooten III, who, after being booted from the company in 1990, went on to run baroque financial schemes predicated on the existence of a fictional micro-nation in the Pacific. (Hooten III died in 1997, a month after Texas regulators shut down his operations.)