After the first course had been served, I decided to find Maryanne. As I wound my way through the tables, Donald took to the stage to give his toast. If I hadn’t known who he was talking about, I would have thought he was toasting his secretary’s daughter.
I spotted Maryanne and paused. Fritz and I would not have been invited to Ivanka’s wedding without Maryanne’s approval. She didn’t see me until I was standing right in front of her.
“Hi, Aunt Maryanne.”
It took her a few seconds to realize who I was. “Mary.” She didn’t smile. “How are you?” she asked, her expression rigid.
“Everything’s great. My daughter just turned eight, and—”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
Of course she didn’t know I had a daughter or that I was raising her with the woman I’d married after my grandfather’s funeral and then divorced or that I had recently received my doctorate in clinical psychology. But she acted as if her lack of such knowledge was an insult to her. The rest of our brief conversation was equally tense. She mentioned that Ivana had missed Ivanka’s wedding shower but said, sotto voce, that she couldn’t discuss why.
I retreated to my table, and when I realized the vegetarian meal I’d ordered had not arrived, I ordered a martini in its stead. The olives would suffice.
Sometime later, I saw Maryanne, looking determined, head toward us as if on a mission. She walked straight up to my brother and said, “We need to talk about the elephant in the room.” Then, gesturing to include me, “The three of us.”
A few weeks after Ivanka and Jared’s wedding, Fritz and I met with Maryanne and Robert at her apartment on the Upper East Side. It wasn’t clear to me why Rob was there, but I thought perhaps he planned to make good on his claim that the “statute of limitations” on family estrangement had passed. I took it as a good sign, but as the afternoon wore on, I became less sure. We didn’t discuss anything that seemed pertinent. As we sat in the living room with its spectacular view of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maryanne made passing references to “the debacle,” as she called the lawsuit, but nobody else seemed eager to go down that road.
Rob leaned forward in his chair, and I hoped finally we were going to start dealing with the so-called elephant in the room. Instead he told a story.
Ten years earlier, Rob had still been working for Donald in Atlantic City when Donald’s financial situation was dire. His investors were getting hammered, the banks were after him, and his personal life was in shambles. When things were at their worst, Donald had called Rob with a request.
“Listen, Rob, I don’t know how this is all going to end,” he had said. “But it’s tough, and I might drop dead of a heart attack. If anything happens to me, I want you to make sure Marla will be okay.”
“Sure, Donald. Just tell me what you want me to do.”
“Get her ten million dollars.”
I thought, Holy shit, that’s a lot of money! at the same moment that Rob said, “What a cheap bastard.”
Rob laughed at the memory as I sat there stunned, wondering how much money those people had. Last I’d heard, $10 million would have been one-third of my grandfather’s entire estate.
“Around the same time, Donald called to tell me I was one of his three favorite people,” Maryanne said. “Apparently he forgot he had three children.” (Tiffany and Barron were still to come.)
We never met with Rob again, but Fritz and I, separately and together, had lunch occasionally with Maryanne. For the first time in my life, I got to know my aunt. Not since I’d spent time with Donald while I was writing his book had I felt a little bit as though I were part of the family.
* * *
A couple of months after my aunts’ April 2017 birthday party, I was in my living room lacing up my sneakers when the front doorbell rang. I don’t know why I answered it. I almost never did. Seventy-five percent of the time it was a Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionaries. The rest of the time, it was somebody wanting me to sign a petition.
When I opened the door, the only thing that registered was that the woman standing there, with her shock of curly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses, was someone I didn’t know. Her khakis, button-down shirt, and messenger bag placed her out of Rockville Centre.
“Hi. My name is Susanne Craig. I’m a reporter for the New York Times.”
Journalists had stopped contacting me a long time before. With the exception of David Corn from Mother Jones and somebody from Frontline, the only other person to leave a message before the election had been from Inside Edition. Nothing I had to say about my uncle would have mattered before November 2016; why would anybody want to hear from me now?
The futility of it annoyed me, so I said, “It is so not cool that you’re showing up at my house.”
“I understand. I’m sorry. But we’re working on a very important story about your family’s finances, and we think you could really help us.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“At least take my card. If you change your mind, you can call me anytime.”
“I don’t talk to reporters,” I said. I took her card anyway.
* * *
A few weeks later, I fractured the fifth metatarsal of my left foot. For the next four months, I was a prisoner in my home, my foot elevated at all times as I sat on the couch.
I received a letter from Susanne Craig reiterating her belief that I had documents that could help “rewrite the history of the President of the United States,” as she put it. I ignored the letter. But she persisted.
After a month of sitting on the couch, scrolling through Twitter with the news constantly on in the background, I watched in real time as Donald shredded norms, endangered alliances, and trod upon the vulnerable. The only thing about it that surprised me was the increasing number of people willing to enable him.
As I watched our democracy disintegrating and people’s lives unraveling because of my uncle’s policies, I kept thinking about Susanne Craig’s letter. I found her business card and called her. I told her that I wanted to help but I no longer had any documents relating to our lawsuit years before.
“Jack Barnosky might still have them,” she said.
Ten days later I was on my way to his office.
The headquarters of Farrell Fritz was located in one of two oblong buildings sheathed in blue glass. Bitterly cold air pushed between them across the wide-open space of the enormous parking lot. It’s impossible to park anywhere near the entrance, so after I found a spot, it took me ten minutes to get to the lobby on my crutches. I negotiated the escalator and the marble floors very carefully.
By the time I arrived at my destination, I was tired and overheated. Thirty banker’s boxes lined two walls and filled a bookshelf. The room’s only other contents were a desk and a chair. Jack’s secretary had kindly put out a pad of paper, a pen, and some paper clips. I dropped my bags, leaned my crutches against the wall, and half fell into the desk chair. None of the boxes was labeled; I had no idea where to start.
It took me about an hour to familiarize myself with the contents of the boxes and compile a list, which required wheeling around the room on my chair and lifting boxes onto the desk while standing on one leg. When Jack stopped by, I was flushed and soaking wet. He reminded me that I couldn’t take any documents out of the room. “They belong to your brother, too, and I need his permission,” which wasn’t at all true.
When he turned to leave, I called after him, “Jack, wait a second. Can you remind me why we decided to settle the lawsuit?”
“Well, you were getting concerned about the costs, and, as you know, we don’t take cases on contingency. Although we knew they were lying to us, it was ‘He said, she said.’ Besides, your grandfather’s estate was only worth thirty million dollars.” It was almost word for word what he’d told me when I had last seen him almost twenty years earlier.
“Ah, okay. Thanks.” I was holding in my hands documents that proved the estate had
actually been worth close to a billion dollars when he died; I just didn’t know it yet.
After I was sure he had gone, I grabbed copies of my grandfather’s wills, floppy disks with all of the depositions from the lawsuit, and some of my grandfather’s bank records—all of which I was legally entitled to as part of the lawsuit—and stuffed them into my bags.
Sue came by my house the next day to pick up the documents and drop off a burner phone so we could communicate more securely going forward. We weren’t taking any chances.
On my third trip to Farrell Fritz, I methodically went through every box and discovered that there were two copies of everything. I mentioned the fact to Jack’s secretary and suggested that it obviated the need to get my brother’s permission, which was a relief since I didn’t want to involve him. I would leave a set of documents for him in the unlikely event he ever wanted one.
I was just beginning to look for the list of material the Times wanted when I got a message from Jack: I could take whatever I wanted, as long as I left a copy. I hadn’t been prepared for that. In fact, I had plans to meet Sue and her colleagues Russ Buettner and David Barstow (the other two journalists working on the story) at my house at 1:00 with whatever I’d managed to smuggle out. I texted Sue with the news that I’d be late.
At 3:00, I drove to the loading dock beneath the building, and nineteen boxes were loaded into the back of the borrowed truck I was driving since I couldn’t work the clutch in my own car.
It was just beginning to get dark when I pulled into my driveway. The three reporters were waiting for me in David’s white SUV, which sported a pair of reindeer antlers and a huge red nose wired to the grill. When I showed them the boxes, there were hugs all around. It was the happiest I’d felt in months.
When Sue, Russ, and David left, I was exhausted and relieved. It had been a head-spinning few weeks. I hadn’t fully grasped how much of a risk I was taking. If anybody in my family found out what I was doing, there would be repercussions—I knew how vindictive they were—but there was no way to gauge how serious the consequences might be. Anything would pale in comparison to what they’d already done. I finally felt as though I might be able to make a difference after all.
In the past, there had been nothing I could do that would be significant enough, so I hadn’t tried very hard. Because being good or doing good didn’t count for much; whatever you did had to be extraordinary. You couldn’t just be a prosecutor; you had to be the best prosecutor in the country, you had to be a federal judge. You couldn’t just fly planes; you had to be a professional pilot for a major carrier at the dawn of the jet age. For a long time, I blamed my grandfather for my feeling this way. But none of us realized that the expectation of being “the best” in my grandfather’s view had applied only to my father (who had failed) and Donald (who had wildly exceeded Fred’s expectations).
When I finally realized that my grandfather didn’t care what I accomplished or contributed and that my own unrealistic expectations were paralyzing me, I still felt that only a grand gesture would set it right. It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees; I had to take Donald down.
* * *
After the election, Donald called his big sister, ostensibly to find out how he was doing. Of course, he thought he already knew the answer; otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call in the first place. He merely wanted her to confirm very strongly that he was doing a fantastic job.
When she said, “Not that good,” Donald immediately went on offense.
“That’s nasty,” he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, “Maryanne, where would you be without me?” It was a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago.
My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, “If you say that one more time, I will level you.”
But it was an empty threat. Although Maryanne had prided herself on being the only person on the planet Donald ever listened to, those days were long past, which was illustrated not long after, in June 2018. On the eve of Donald’s first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Maryanne called the White House and left a message with his secretary: “Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at home.”
He ignored all of it. The Politico headline the following day read “Trump Says Kim Meeting Will Be About ‘Attitude,’ Not Prep Work.” If Maryanne had ever had any sway over her little brother, it was gone now. Aside from the requisite birthday call, they didn’t speak much after that.
* * *
While they were working on the article, the Times reporters invited me to join them for a tour of my grandfather’s properties. On the morning of January 10, 2018, they picked me up in David’s SUV, still adorned with its antlers and red nose, at the Jamaica train station. We started at the Highlander, where I’d grown up, and over the course of the day we traversed snow drifts and patches of ice in an effort to visit as much of the Trump empire as possible.
After nine hours we still hadn’t managed to see all of it. I had traded in my crutches for a cane by then but was still exhausted, mentally and physically, when I got home. I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I’d always known that my grandfather owned buildings, but I’d had no idea just how many. More disturbing, my father had apparently owned 20 percent of some of the buildings I’d never heard of before.
On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.
Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.
Donald’s lawyer, Charles J. Harder, predictably denied the allegations, saying: “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.” But the investigative reporters laid out a devastating case. Over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed. That did not include the $170 million he had received through the sale of my grandfather’s empire. The amounts of money the article mentioned were mind-boggling, and the four siblings had benefited for decades. Dad had clearly shared in the wealth early in his life, but he had had nothing left to show for it by the time he was thirty. I have no idea what happened to his money.
In 1992, only two years after Donald’s attempt to attach the codicil to my grandfather’s will, effectively cutting his siblings out, the four of them suddenly needed one another: after a lifetime of their father’s playing them off against one another, they finally had a common purpose—to protect their inheritance from the government. Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes. In addition to dozens of buildings, my grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance. At that point, my grandfather was effectively sidelined by his increasing dementia—not that he would have objected to their scheme. And since my father was long gone, Maryanne, Donald, and Robert could do whatever they wanted; they were our trustees, but there was no
one to force them to fulfill their obligations to Fritz and me, and they could easily keep us out of the loop.
My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business transactions,” according to the article. The ruse was so effective that, when Fred died in 1999, he had only $1.9 million in cash and no assets larger than a $10.3 million IOU from Donald. After Gam’s death the following year, the combined value of my grandparents’ estate was said to be just $51.8 million, a laughable assertion, especially since the siblings sold the empire for more than $700 million four years later.
* * *
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.
Too Much and Never Enough Page 19