Trump, who praised the mob in 2013 on David Letterman, has a habit of seeing the good in those deemed beyond the pale

‘Very nice people’, Trump said of the mafia. ‘Just don’t owe them money’

Is Donald Trump behaving like a mafia boss? Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, thinks so.

Schiff said the way Trump leaned on Ukraine, seeking dirt on political rival Joe Biden was a “classic, mafia-like shakedown”. Many others have made the same comparison.

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But it doesn’t take Congress or the Twittersphere to establish Trump’s affinity for the mob. The real estate developer and former reality star has talked about it himself – on late-night TV.

In 2013, three years before Trump’s presidential victory, David Letterman asked him about it bluntly on his CBS talkshow.

“Have you ever knowingly done business with organized crime?” the host asked.

Trump grimaced, then said: “I’ve really tried to stay away from them as much as possible.

“You know, growing up in New York and doing business in New York, I would say there might have been one of those characters along the way, but generally speaking I like to stay away from that group.”

Then he added: “I have met on occasion a few of those people. They happen to be very nice people.”

Trump’s characterization of New York crime families as “very nice people” might surprise those at the receiving end of Gambino racketeering, Lucchese loan sharking or Bonanno fraud. Not to mention the murders.

But then Trump has a habit of seeing the good in those generally deemed beyond the pale. His remark about the mafia echoes his comment after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed.

Then, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”.

The mafia simile is not a purely stylistic matter for Trump, whose conversation with the Ukrainian president on 25 July reads in parts like a Martin Scorsese screenplay.

“I would like you to do us a favor,” the US president said, encouraging Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and saying of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani: “I will get him to call you along with the attorney general.”

As Trump suggested in his Letterman interview, he has in reality crossed paths with the New York mob. For example, the late Roy Cohn, a predecessor to Giuliani as Trump’s personal lawyer, had among his other clients the boss of the Genovese crime family, “Fat Tony” Salerno, and John Gotti of the Gambinos.

Trump Tower, the president’s New York bunker and home on Fifth Avenue, was built in the early 1980s largely out of ready-mix concrete which at the time was controlled by Salerno and other mob leaders.

Wayne Barrett, the late Village Voice reporter who was the authority on Trump’s dealings, observed in his book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall that Trump’s life “intertwines with the underworld”.

Having praised the crime families as “very nice people”, Trump gave Letterman a piece of advice drawn from his own extensive experience.

“You just don’t want to owe them money,” he said. “Don’t owe them money.”