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It should come as no surprise that Donald Trump, a man who bullies his opponents like a mobster, allegedly had business dealings with members of organized crime groups.



In a deeply reported piece for Politico, veteran Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David Cay Johnston details dealings with the mob-owned firms and corrupt labor fixers that allowed the Republican presidential candidate to erect his famous Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza buildings in Manhattan. The story even includes a gangster whose nickname is “Fat Tony.”

According to Johnston, a federal indictment of that same man—“Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family—found that Trump paid extra for concrete in exchange for union peace.

The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise.

Other incidents Johnston notes include a controversy over Trump employing illegal Polish workers, as well as allegedly providing a free apartment to a close associate of the Gambino crime family.

Again, we shouldn’t be shocked. Even the very jargon Trump uses is akin to that of a mobster’s threats. When Trump spoke to Johnston for the story, he said, “if I don’t like what you write, I’ll sue you.”