Photo credit: © 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP

Donald Trump listed $1.2 billion of losses on his tax filings from 1985 to 1994, according to a blockbuster report released by the New York Times Tuesday. Those were high-flying years for Trump, then a young, brash businessman getting more headlines-per-square-foot than any other developer. In 1985, Trump appeared by himself on the Forbes 400 list of America’s richest people for the first time, after inventing a fake persona to lie about a transfer of wealth from his father.

Forbes fell for that ruse—taking Fred Trump off the list and listing Donald alone. But five years later, we published an explosive story, uncovering the trouble brewing inside Trump’s empire. Leaning on nonpublic documents, Forbes writers Richard L. Stern and John Connolly identified the same sort of profitability problems that are still making headlines 29 years later. Forbes took Donald Trump off its list for the first time that year, explaining that a “decline in Atlantic City gaming revenues, unmasking of misstated asset values, declining real estate values and massive debt may have put The Donald within hailing distance of zero.”