BIRDS OF A FEATHER RANT #3

      I posed a question at the end of my Birds of a Feather Rant #2: Did Fred Trump bring his Klan ideals to the dinner table after his children were born? Now, I should (and would, if I was a bit more principled) jump to Fred and Don’s history of housing discrimination. Instead, I think I’ll side-step long enough to reviews a second component of Fred Trump’s legacy.

      In 1954, Fred was subpoenaed by a Senate Banking Committee investigating developers who profited, through fraud of one kind or another, from loans issued by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The accusations were far ranging and the Committee examined many witnesses, most of whom took the Fifth. Not Fred. Under oath, he admitted for example, that he wildly inflated costs related to a development in order to secure far more in loans than he was entitled to. For another, William McKenna, an investigator for the committee, specifically cited a Trump investment to illustrate a particular scam. Trump and James Tomasello bought a vacant lot in Queens for $34,2000, turned it over to a trust, then leased it back to the corporation for 99 years at a staggering cost of $60,000 per year. This way, should the government-financed apartments they erected on the site default, the Federal Housing Association would owe the corporation 1.5 million dollars. A third example defines the extent of Fred’s willingness to ignore the rules. Trump applied for federal funds, claiming he intended to build an apartment complex, but erected a shopping center instead.

      Never charged with a crime, Trump was denied further access to FHA funds.

      Young Donald took no part in these shenanigans, these necessary manipulations on the way to accumulating the kind of fortune from which dynasties are made. He was eight-years-old when his dad was called before the Senate Banking Committee. But if asking whether Fred brought his Klan leanings to the dinner table is valid, it’s worth asking if he brought his shady business practices as well. Wayne Barrett in his book, Trump, The Deals and the Downfall, catalogues the names of mafioso with ties to the Trump organization, some through secret partnerships. The list includes dozens of individuals, many of them, like Paul Castellano, Fat Tony Salerno and Nicky Scarfo, household names at the time.

      Did any of this rub off on Don the Con? One thing sure, Fred began Donald’s training while his son was still in high school, taking him to building sites on weekends and in the summer, explaining the intricacies of financing and the benefits of using other people’s money. Did this training include the sort of contempt for the law that brought Fred before the Senate Banking Committee? Did he, like his Dad, break the law in order to fatten the Trump Organization’s bottom line?

      The Civil Rights Bill of 1968, better known as the Fair Housing Act, forbids discrimination on the basis of race to landlords throughout the country. That the Trump Organization violated this law by actively discriminating at one of his properties, The Wilshire, is beyond doubt. But the accusations were more far ranging. The suit filed by the Justice Department alleged discrimination in 39 Trump-owned properties. According to a Trump rental agent named Stanley Leibowitz, there wasn’t a single African-American living in any Trump-owned apartment.

      Fred and Don fought the initial accusation for a time, launching a countersuit against the Justice Department, along with a familiar charge: the dreaded federal government was forcing him to rent his apartments to “welfare recipients”. And why not make the charge? The year was 1973 and George Wallace had been raging against welfare queens throughout his three Presidential runs. Not that it did Fred and Donald any good. The Trump suit was dismissed and the Organization eventually negotiated a consent decree. Trump Management would furnish the Urban League with list of all vacancies. The League would present applicants for one out of every five openings.

      Trump’s response: He was thankful that the agreement did not “compel the Trump organization to accept persons on welfare….”

      Predictably, given Fred’s mortgage-manipulating past, the Trumps failed to honor the deal and the Justice Department had to once again sue Fred and Donald before a single back woman, Maxine Brown, was permitted to rent an apartment at The Wilshire. A pyrrhic victory if there ever was one, Ms. Brown remained the only African-American tenant for a decade. The suit, incidentally, marked the first time that Donald Trump’s name appeared in the New York Times.

      Much later, after establishing himself in Manhattan, Donald claimed that racial discrimination of this kind was almost universal in the outer boroughs. Landlord discrimination in white neighborhoods, as this claim would have it, was driven by pragmatic concerns, not racism.

      “What could I do? You move the blacks in, the whites move out.”

      There’s truth to this argument, although it brands the landlords as living money-driven lives, lives without a moral compass. Discrimination in New York City, whether in the sale of homes or the leasing of apartments, persists to this day. But the Trumps, apparently, took their discrimination more seriously. A Trump Organization employee named Thomas Miranda testified that management employees ordered him to put a “c” for “colored” on applications filed by African-Americans. In the 1950’s, in New York and elsewhere, black men and women were commonly referred to as “colored people”. The coloreds this, the coloreds that. That changed abruptly. By the early sixties, and even more so as the decade advanced, the word “colored” was understood to be demeaning and rarely used, even by white ethnics, who preferred the n-word in any event.

      But there’s more. And worse.

      Swifton Village in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a troubled apartment complex of 1154 units. Fred Trump bought it at a Sheriff’s sale after the apartments were foreclosed on by a union pension plan. He paid 5.7 million in 1964 and sold it in 1972 for 6.75 million after sinking a half-million into the infrastructure. If that sounds routine, a return of about 9% after eight years (Don the Con later falsely claimed to have made six million), what happened in between was far from routine.

       The tactics employed by a city agency, Housing Opportunities Made Equal (HOME), differed little from those employed by civil rights groups throughout the nation. A black family would be told there were no available apartments in Swifton Village. A white family would then appear, also seeking an apartment. Swifton Village had a vacancy rate of 35% when Fred put Donald in charge of management. Filling those vacancies was Donald’s main task, filling it with, as things turned out, white people. The white testers who followed the black couple were almost always told that apartments were, indeed, available. They were then taken to inspect the unit in question, whereupon the black couple would show up.

      Heywood and Rennell Cash, a black couple, spent four-and-a-half years seeking an apartment in Swifton Village before they teamed up with HOME. They were again told there were no vacancies when they applied for an apartment, which came as no surprise. Nor did the annoyance of Irving Wolper, the rental manager, when the Cash family arrived as he was showing an apartment to a tester named Maggie Durham. Wolper, in fact, lost his cool altogether, calling Ms. Durham, according all witnesses except Wolper, a “nigger lover” and a “race traitor”.

      OK, I admit the obvious. Blaming Donald Trump for the rental manager’s outburst seems unfair, at least at first glance. But in Trump’s ultimate con-job, The Art of the Deal, in a section entitled the Cincinnati Kid, Don claims that Swifton Village was his “first big deal”. Further, he goes out of his way to praise Irving Wolper.

      Some time ago (years, in fact), I watched an interview with a group of African-American executives in conference at an expensive resort. These were individuals who’d made it in the business world. In speech, in dress, in manner they reflected a corporate sensibility that transcended race. Yet each, when prompted by the interviewer, had been punished at some point – or many points – for the crime of driving while black. In several cases, these men, successful by any reasonable standard, were humiliated while their families watched. They laughed about it, by the way, knowing, as they did, there was no escape from the prison African-Americans have inhabited for centuries.

     Now consider Heywood and Rennell Cash. Also decent, also hardworking, wanting only a home for themselves and their growing family. What, essentially, did Irving Wolper tell them? You can never escape. No matter how hard you work, no matter how church-attending, no matter how law-abiding, you will always be confined, physically, emotionally, spiritually. You cannot succeed because of who you are. Go back to the ghetto.

      Bottom line, speaking as white man, I’m surprised, not by the anger of black Americans, but by their restraint.