My grandfather’s investment in Donald had been extremely successful in the short term. He had strategically deployed millions of dollars, and often tens of millions of dollars, at key moments in Donald’s “career.” Sometimes the funds had supported the image and the lifestyle that came with it; sometimes they had bought Donald access and favors. With increasing frequency, they had bailed him out. In that way, Fred purchased the ability to bask in Donald’s reflected glory, satisfied with the knowledge that none of it would have been possible without his expertise and largesse. In the long run, however, my grandfather, who had one wish—that his empire survive in perpetuity—lost everything.
Whenever my brother and I met with Robert to discuss my grandfather’s estate, he was emphatic about honoring my grandfather’s wish that we get nothing. When it came to their own benefit, however, the four surviving Trump siblings had no compunction about doing the one thing my grandfather least would have wanted: when Donald announced his desire to sell, nobody put up a fight.
In 2004, the vast majority of the empire my grandfather had spent more than seven decades building was sold to a single buyer, Ruby Schron, for $705.6 million. The banks financing the sale for Schron had assigned a value of almost $1 billion to the properties, so in one fell swoop my uncle Donald, the master dealmaker, left almost $300 million on the table.
Selling the estate in bulk was a strategic disaster. The smartest thing would have been to keep Trump Management intact. With practically no effort on their part, the four siblings could have earned $5 million to $10 million a year each. But Donald needed a much bigger infusion of cash. Such a paltry sum—even if it came to him annually—wasn’t going to cut it.
They could also have sold the buildings and complexes individually. That would have added substantially to the selling price. That process, though, would have been a lengthy one. Donald, whose Atlantic City creditors were nipping at his heels, didn’t want to wait. Besides, it would have been almost impossible to keep the news of dozens of sales a secret. They needed to complete the sale in one transaction, as quickly and as quietly as possible.
They succeeded on that score. It may be the only one of Donald’s real estate deals that received no press attention. Whatever objections Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert might have had, they kept to themselves. Even now Maryanne, almost ten years older, smarter, and more accomplished than the second youngest Trump child, deferred to him. “Donald always got his way,” she said. Besides, none of them could risk waiting; they all knew where the bodies were buried because they had buried them together in All County.
Split four ways, they each got approximately $170 million. For Donald, it still wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t for any of them. Nothing ever was.
When I visited Maryanne in September 2018, less than a month before the article was published, she mentioned that she had been contacted by David Barstow. My cousin David, who had tracked my grandfather’s old accountant Jack Mitnick, now ninety-one, to a nursing home somewhere in Florida, believed he must have been the source of the exposé. Maryanne brushed the whole thing off and suggested that the article was merely about the 1990 codicil controversy. If she did speak to Barstow, though, she must have known the extent of what they were looking into—All County, the potential tax fraud—but she seemed unfazed by it. I wondered, now for completely different reasons, why she and Robert hadn’t tried everything in their power to dissuade Donald from running for president. They couldn’t possibly have thought that he (and by extension they) would continue to escape scrutiny.
I met with Maryanne again shortly after the article ran. She denied all of it. She was just a “girl,” after all. When a piece of paper requiring her signature had been put in front of her, she’d signed it, no questions asked. “This article goes back sixty years. You know that’s before I was a judge,” she said, as if the investigation had also ended sixty years before. She seemed unconcerned that there would be any repercussions. Although a court inquiry had been opened into her alleged conduct, all she had had to do to put an end to it was retire, which she did, thereby retaining her $200,000-a-year pension.
In the interim, she had transferred her suspicion from the geriatric Jack Mitnick to her first cousin John Walter, my grandfather’s sister Elizabeth’s son, who had died that January. I marveled at the ease with which Maryanne jumped to that conclusion. John had worked for and with my grandfather for decades, had benefited enormously from his uncle’s wealth, had been heavily involved in All County, and, as far as I knew, had always been very loyal. I thought it strange she would implicate him—although her suspicions of him worked in my favor. What I didn’t know at the time was that John’s obituary had neglected to mention Donald. John had always been interested in Trump family history and boastful of his connection with Trump Management, so that was a remarkable omission.
More surprising, though, was the fact that Maryanne didn’t seem to think that I would find anything in the article disturbing—as if she, too, had come to believe a version of events that obliterated the truth and rewrote history. It didn’t occur to her that the revelations would affect me in any way.
In fact, the vast amounts of money the siblings had possibly stolen
