There’s always been a lot of rumours and hearsay flying around about Donald Trump‘s fabled plans to build a casino in Sydney back in the 80s. The plan never eventuated, and it was never entirely clear why that was.

There’s a doozy of a report in The Australian today that’s worth your time. The long and short of it? Trump’s Sydney casino was killed off because of a “high-level police report” which alleged that he had ties to the Mafia.

As per The Australian:

Donald Trump’s plan to build and operate Sydney’s first casino was killed off in 1987 by the NSW government on the back of a high-level police report that warned against the now-US President’s bid because of his “mafia ­connections’’.

The secret report by the NSW Police Board into the suitability of tenderers for the inner-city ­Darling Harbour casino project cautioned that it would be “dangerous’’ to go ahead with Mr Trump’s joint venture with the Queensland-based Kern Corporation, headed by the late developer Barry Paul.

Of course, you’d be hard-pressed to find a New York City developer in the 80s who didn’t have some ties to the mob. And it’s definitely funny that NSW Police – an absolute hive of scum and villainy in that decade – would have the temerity to allege organised crime links. The sheer temerity!

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Cabinet, as well as finding Trump’s alleged mafia links “unacceptable,” also found that the join Trump / Kern Corporation tender made claims about casino profitability that were so absurd that no one could take them seriously.

According to the cabinet minutes, a report by Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Australia found the Kern/Trump proposal was financially viable on the basis that the projected financial structure put forward by Kern/Trump was reasonably based. “However, the projected casino revenue estimates are not soundly based and the quantum of the ­potential overstatement is so mat­erial that the tender is not financially viable,” the CIBC report found. “Also, the tender is not fin­ancially viable on the basis of expected returns to equity investors.”

The whole thing’s worth a read, but here’s your takeaway: even Trump was allegedly too corrupt for bloody New South Wales in the 1980s. That’s saying something.