With so much money streaming in from tourists, there was little incentive for locals to build a self-sustaining economy. That thinking would backfire profoundly as the advent of the automobile allowed Americans to visit any beach—not just those they could reach by train. The interest in Atlantic City waned even more dramatically after World War II, when affordable air travel brought Florida and the Caribbean within reach. As a last-ditch effort to turn things around, Atlantic City spent $600,000 of its taxpayers’ money to lure the Democratic Party to host its 1964 presidential convention there, hoping to spark some national interest and media coverage. But that gambit backfired after the media’s attention was instead drawn to the city’s collapsing economy and dilapidated facilities.
By the late 1960s, Paddy and his brother Joe decided they needed to do something to return Atlantic City to its glory days. Paddy still resented Farley and the corrupt Republican political bosses he felt had held the city back by coddling their cronies. The first order of business would be shaking up the establishment.
Joe was a promising political candidate. The valedictorian of his college class, he went on to serve as an Army surgeon during World War II, then returned home to become the main obstetrician in Atlantic City; few babies were born in town that he had not delivered. He spent a few years as a councilman and mayor of an Atlantic City suburb, and now—with Paddy serving as his campaign manager and behind-the-scenes fixer—he planned to challenge Farley for his state senate seat in the 1971 election.
With Joe as the front man and Paddy as the muscle working behind the scenes, the two brothers ran a campaign in South Jersey aimed at convincing voters that Farley and his Republican Party were corrupt and had to be thrown out. The campaign worked. Joe won overwhelmingly, and from his first days in office he and a young Democratic assemblyman from the area who had also just been elected fixated on the one thing they believed could bring back Atlantic City: legalized casino gambling. Joe and the assemblyman—a Yale-educated reformer named Steven Perskie—thought they could create Las Vegas on the East Coast, providing the region with a massive new industry to create jobs and return Atlantic City to its former self. To legalize gambling, Joe and Perskie needed to persuade the state legislature to pass a massive piece of legislation, a project that would take several years. They got a boost in that effort from Resorts International, a former paint company that had refashioned itself as a hotel and gambling enterprise that wanted to build one of the first casinos in Atlantic City. Resorts had hired Paddy to help grease the skids locally.
The push eventually worked. In 1976, the state legislature legalized gambling. Across the top of the front page of The Press of Atlantic City, the headline read, “CITY REBORN: Casinos, New Charter Win.” Joe’s legacy as one of the godfathers of legalized gambling in Atlantic City had been cemented, and anyone paying attention knew that Paddy was now a player as well.
Joe eventually faded from political life after a series of electoral setbacks, but Paddy’s career thrived as the gambling industry the brothers helped start began minting money. Local officials feared a rush of companies would allow the Las Vegas mob to muscle its way into Atlantic City, so for the first year of legalized gambling, Resorts was the only company licensed to operate a casino. It raked in piles of cash, and patrons would line up for hours around the casino waiting to get in. The lines would get so long and slot machines were so novel and enticing that some gamblers were even known to urinate on themselves rather than lose their place in line.
Clients lined up at Paddy’s door, too. In the legal profession, if you’re one of the few lawyers who understands a new and important part of the law, you can become indispensable. Paddy was the lead lawyer for Resorts, making him essentially the first local attorney to learn how the New Jersey gaming industry would operate. His knowledge made him a must-hire for the next wave of casino owners targeting Atlantic City and for anyone else who needed a lawyer to navigate local politics and secure the proper licenses. Among those who noticed Paddy’s emerging importance in Atlantic City was a young New York real estate developer looking to cash in on the gambling industry.
* * *
—
Donald J. Trump’s career as a real estate developer was on the ascent in the late 1970s. He had successfully developed the Grand Hyatt in midtown Manhattan in a partnership with Chicago’s Pritzker family, but he was eager to set out on his own. He had heard about the success of Resorts and the Atlantic City gold rush and wanted a piece of the action for himself. He knew nothing about the casino, hotel, or entertainment businesses, but he had a strong nose for fast cash and celebrity, and Atlantic City had plenty of both.
Trump eventually built his first casino, the Trump Plaza, at the foot of the Atlantic City Expressway—the main gateway into town and a location that turned the property into a cash cow.
In February 1982, when Trump couldn’t get the city council’s approval to expand the Plaza’s footprint, he turned to Paddy McGahn. Trump wanted to build a bridge connecting his casino to a parking garage on an adjacent street, and Paddy went to work on the local officials, helping push the approval through by purchasing air rights over the road. There was nothing wrong with selling the air rights; such deals happen between developers and cities all the time. But this deal was sketchy. The air rights were worth tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars given the property values in the area. But in a move that smacked of Atlantic City’s old-school cronyism, Paddy arranged for Trump to purchase them for just $100—fleecing taxpayers of money they should have received for the sale.
The deal elated Trump, who gave Paddy more and more business. Paddy also fit the model of the type of lawyer Trump liked to rely on: scrappy, street-smart, willing to bend the rules, and presiding over a small firm that was highly dependent on his business. The more beholden Paddy became to Trump, the more willing he was to push boundaries to keep Trump happy (and the more susceptible he became to Trump’s refusals to pay his entire legal bill—a common danger for anyone who did business with the young tycoon). Still, Paddy continued to work for Trump for years in a relationship that was mutually beneficial.
Paddy also knew how to hide things and how to make problems go away.
In 1982, Trump wanted to buy a property adjacent to the Plaza. But it was owned by the sons of high-ranking Philadelphia mobsters, and Trump wanted to conceal his name from the deal—not because he was concerned about dealing with mobsters (he had done so willingly in the past), but because he was worried they’d raise their price if they knew he was the buyer. So Paddy arranged for the land to be sold to his secretary, who then had the property transferred to Trump. Through the 1980s, as Trump expanded his Atlantic City operations, it seemed as if Paddy could do no wrong, and Trump openly boasted about his work. He was even so appreciative of his lawyer’s efforts that he named a bar in the Taj Mahal, his doomed mega casino, Paddy’s Saloon.
When three of Trump’s top casino executives were killed in a helicopter crash on their way to Atlantic City in 1989, Paddy handled the legal fallout. He also kept a secret for Trump, who had lied to the media by claiming he narrowly missed flying on the ill-fated helicopter. Paddy knew Trump was lying because he had been with him in a scheduled meeting at the time of the crash.
Even as Paddy grew older, and Trump’s businesses began to spiral toward bankruptcy, the developer didn’t tire of his fixer. Shortly after the helicopter crash, the president of the Plaza went to Trump to complain about the high fees ($150,000 to $200,000 per month) that Paddy was charging. Trump shooed one of his deputies, Jack O’Donnell, away.
“Jack, I’m 13 and 0 with this guy,” Trump said, as O’Donnell later recounted in his book Trumped! “What do you want me to do? He gets things done in this town.”
But by the early 1990s, Trump’s luster was gone and his businesses were failing. He had overexpanded, larded his operations with debt, and found it difficult to make money in a busi
ness that should have been a cash register. He had little understanding of what made the business work and spent too much time glad-handing high rollers and putting on boxing matches, instead of tending to the more mundane things like slot machines, where all the money was to be made. He was also overextended in other ways and about to slip into a series of corporate bankruptcies in New York and Atlantic City that would put him on the cusp of personal bankruptcy.
After a fresh group of casino executives began eyeballing Paddy’s bills, they complained about him to Trump. For example, they said, Paddy had charged Trump for 23.75 hours of work on a single day and 24.75 hours for another day of work. This time, Trump listened. He stopped paying Paddy’s bills, even as he kept him working full-time. Then Trump sued him.
Paddy jumped into the litigation with gusto, certain he would win because he had the records and a good explanation for why he had billed so much. When asked in depositions about his bills, Paddy explained that he needed a second lawyer to shadow him at every meeting. He needed a shadow, he testified, because Trump lied so much. Paddy described Trump as an “expert at interpreting things”—meaning that Trump’s account of events and reality had little to do with each other. The legal brawl didn’t officially conclude until Paddy died in 2000, taking to his grave the claim that Trump still owed him about $1 million in back legal fees.
Paddy, who kept his Marine haircut until he died, was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with a twenty-one-gun salute. One of his nephews, a young elections lawyer, drove down to the burial from the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. Don McGahn had seen his uncle only a few times in the past decade and a half because a family dispute about an Atlantic City property deal had divided the family, but he knew about his uncle’s experience with Trump.
In the decade and a half that followed, Don rose to become one of the more prominent election lawyers in Washington. By the 2016 cycle, he had become convinced the only way to beat Hillary Clinton was to eschew the self-examination that the Republican Party had undertaken following Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012—the so-called autopsy that had advocated an aggressive outreach to minorities and an embrace of immigration—and instead run to the far right. When Trump first hired Don McGahn to work for his campaign, McGahn did not mention his uncle’s ties to the candidate. McGahn had a sense of what had happened between the two but was unsure whether to bring it up.
“There’s three sides to every story: There’s one side, the other side, and somewhere between is the truth,” McGahn would later say. “My instinct was that the conflict was not so much personal with Trump. And that’s a different generation, a different time, and I’m a different guy.”
★ ★ ★
JANUARY 24, 2017
113 DAYS UNTIL THE APPOINTMENT OF SPECIAL COUNSEL ROBERT S. MUELLER III
FBI DIRECTOR’S CONFERENCE ROOM—“Let’s take a cold shot at him,” Comey told the counterintelligence agents and senior bureau officials assembled around him.
His agents had briefed Comey on how they wanted to interview Flynn. For the past several weeks, the investigators had scoured his phone records, examined his contacts, and sifted through intelligence. They had found little that gave them greater insight into why the incoming vice president and chief of staff were falsely claiming that Flynn had never talked to the Russian ambassador about sanctions.
Now, the investigators told the director, they wanted to speak with Flynn, and Comey had to make a decision.
Giving the go-ahead to interview Flynn was the easy part for Comey. It was the logical next step for the investigators. When a bureau investigation hit a dead end as this one had, they typically moved to interview their subject, because it was seen as their last chance to learn something. For all the powers the FBI had amassed over its nearly century-long history, it was in interviews where the agents most often turned up the keys that unlocked the mysteries they sought to solve. The bureau’s interviews came with an added layer of leverage over the person they were speaking to: Making false statements to a federal agent is a felony. If interviewees lie, they can be prosecuted.
While green-lighting the interview made sense, determining how to do it was far more complicated. It was just the fourth day of the Trump administration. Speculation swirled about ties between Trump, his associates, and the Russians. The most powerful law enforcement agency in the country—led by the only high-level official in the entire government whom the president supposedly could not replace—had an open investigation into the campaign of the new president. And now that agency wanted to interview one of the people closest to the president about Russia.
The FBI, the White House, and the Department of Justice had a long-standing protocol for when the bureau wanted to interview someone in the White House. The bureau did not just send its agents over to the executive mansion whenever they wanted to question someone. Such a move would be seen as far too aggressive, especially for an agency that, after all, was part of the executive branch and worked for the president. Under protocols, the FBI would contact the Justice Department, which would tell the White House counsel’s office whom the bureau wanted to speak with and what they wanted to question them about. Parameters were set for the interview and the administration official would be accompanied by a lawyer from the counsel’s office and sometimes a personal lawyer. This ensured the FBI did not rummage around the White House. In rare cases, it was done less formally, and top FBI officials would call a very senior official at the White House—like the chief of staff—and say that they needed to have agents come over to speak with someone for an investigation or give them what’s called a “defensive briefing,” which is essentially a tutorial on how to ensure they are not targeted by a foreign adversary trying to spy on them.
But Comey and his counterintelligence agents now wanted to throw those protocols out the window and do something different. The bureau likes to conduct “cold interviews,” where witnesses have little time to prepare and no lawyer is present. In those settings, interviewees tend to be the most forthcoming. If the Justice Department called the White House counsel’s office and said that agents wanted to question Flynn about his ties to Russia, all sorts of red flags would go up. The White House would likely delay, if not altogether block, an interview. But maybe, if someone senior from the bureau called over to Flynn, he would agree to quietly sit down with them.
In his career, Comey had never so aggressively worked around the protocol. But to him, the question of whether the national security adviser—the top foreign policy aide to the president—could be in cahoots with a foreign adversary that had just launched the most audacious attack on the United States’ democracy ever was so troubling that it justified abandoning the protocols. And the four-day-old Trump administration had acted in a way that made it a sitting duck. Comey was ready to pounce. The director had a sense of the chaos in the new White House and was concerned about the false and misleading statements, the bizarre lies about inaugural crowd sizes.
Comey knew he could not have gotten away with circumventing the White House counsel in a functioning, more organized White House, such as the two previous ones. But he had never faced a problem like this, where he couldn’t trust that the White House wasn’t working with the country that had just attacked the American elections. No FBI director had ever faced that problem.
Comey asked his deputy, Andrew McCabe, who had known the retired general from their days working on counterterrorism together, to call Flynn and say the bureau wanted to question him about the calls. McCabe told Flynn he could have a lawyer present. But if Flynn wanted a lawyer, they would have to go through the hassle of running everything through the Justice Department. Flynn said there would be no need for that. The FBI, Flynn added, already knew what he had said on the calls, telling McCabe he assumed the bureau had been listening in.
Comey determined he needed to defy normal operating procedures even further. For the previ
ous couple of weeks, he and acting attorney general Sally Yates had been going back and forth about what to do. Instead of conferring with her about this move—by far the most important one the bureau would make in the investigation—he decided to make the decision to send in the agents on his own, without telling her.
“If it takes us in a bad direction, it will immediately be attacked as an Obama holdover trying to get the Trump administration,” Comey recalled.
So, as the agents headed over to the White House for the interview, Comey called Yates, who happened to be conferring with her staff about whom she should reach out to at the White House to alert them to the problems with Flynn.
Comey told her what he had set in motion.
Yates erupted in anger. She thought they had been working together on this, and again here was Comey, just as he had done in the July Clinton email press conference, freelancing whatever he thought was right without consulting his bosses.
She told Comey that she wanted to be briefed right after the agents returned.
As Yates chewed out Comey, the agents arrived at the White House. To ensure no one else figured out what they were up to, an FBI agent who had been detailed to the White House quietly signed the agents in, allowing them to get on the grounds without having to go through formal channels.
Flynn met the agents in the West Wing and seemed completely at ease, giving them a quick tour as he ushered them to his office down the hall from the president. On their way, they passed the Oval Office, where they could see Trump telling movers where they should place the room’s new art. Flynn did not introduce the agents to the president but told them that Trump had a real eye for decorating.
In Flynn’s office, the agents spoke to him for an hour about his contacts with the ambassador, then returned to the FBI, where they immediately briefed Comey and other senior FBI officials in his conference room. The agents said that Flynn repeatedly lied to them, saying that he had not discussed sanctions with the ambassador. Flynn claimed that all he had talked about was setting up a call between Trump and Putin.
Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674) Page 15