A Private War: Marie Colvin and Other Tales of Heroes, Scoundrels, and Renegades by Marie Brenner

Author:Marie Brenner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism, Wars & Conflicts
ISBN: 9781501183867
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2018-10-23T03:00:00+00:00

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As his father had had Bunny Lindenbaum for his fixer, Donald Trump had Roy Cohn, the Picasso of the inside fix. “Cohn taught Donald which fork to use,” a friend told me. “I’ll bring my lawyer Roy Cohn with me,” Trump often told city officials a decade ago, before he learned better. “Donald calls me fifteen to twenty times a day,” Cohn once told me. “He has a maddening attention to detail. He is always asking, ‘What is the status of this? What is the status of that?’ ”

In a Trump tax-abatement case, according to Cohn’s biographer Nicholas von Hoffman, the judge was handed a piece of paper that looked like an affidavit. It had just one sentence on it: “No further delays or adjournments. Stanley M. Friedman.” By then Friedman had become the county leader of the Bronx. It wasn’t necessary to exchange money for such favors. This was a classic “marker”; the power of suggestion of future favors was enough.

Friedman had also been crucial to Trump’s plans for the Commodore Hotel. “In the final days of the Beame administration,” according to Wayne Barrett, “Friedman rushed a $160 million, forty-year tax abatement . . . and actually executed the documents for the lame duck Beame.” Friedman had already agreed to join Cohn’s law firm, which was representing Trump. “Trump lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn,” Liz Smith once remarked.

In New York, Trump soon became known for his confrontational style. He also became the largest contributor to Governor Hugh Carey of New York, except for Carey’s brother. Trump and his father gave $135,000. He was moving quickly now; he had set himself up in a Fifth Avenue office and a Fifth Avenue apartment and had hired Louise Sunshine, Carey’s chief of fund-raising, as his “director of special projects.” “I knew Donald better than anyone,” she told me. “We’re a team, Sunshine and Trump, and when people shove us, we shove harder.” Sunshine had raised millions of dollars for Carey, and she had one of the greatest address books in the city. She took Donald to meet every city and state power broker and worked on the sale of the Trump Tower apartments.

Real-estate tax is immensely complicated. Often profit-and-loss accounting does not run parallel with cash flow. Sometimes a developer can have tremendous cash flow and yet not report taxable earnings; tax laws also permit developers to have less cash flow and greater taxable earnings. It is up to the developer. When Donald Trump broke ground on a new apartment building at Sixty-first Street and Third Avenue, Louise Sunshine was given a 5 percent share of the new Trump Plaza, as it was called.

There was some friction in Sunshine’s relationship with her boss. As a result of Trump’s accounting on Trump Plaza, Louise Sunshine, according to a close friend, would have had to pay taxes of $1 million. “Why are you structuring Trump Plaza this way?” she reportedly asked Donald. “Where am I going

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