In an upcoming book from New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, former President Donald Trump acknowledged past business interactions with organized crime.
CNN reports that Haberman’s new book, titled “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” offers new details about Trump’s past business practices, which came into the public spotlight earlier this week when New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit alleging the former president and three of his adult children engaged in years of systemic fraud.
One particularly noteworthy detail involves Trump’s admission of having to deal with organized crime figures as part of the price of doing business as a real estate developer in New York.
“Well, anybody that built in New York City, whether you dealt with them indirectly, or didn’t even know they existed, they did exist,” Trump said. “Well, you dealt, you had contractors and you don’t know if they were mob or controlled or maybe not controlled, but I will tell you getting bids sometimes is very tough. You’d get one bid, it’d be a high end disappointing bid. And then there was nobody else to bid.”
Haberman also reports that Trump was directly involved in the drafting of a misleading earnings statement that earned a rebuke from the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite the fact that his attorneys said at the time that Trump had no involvement in the statement.
“Haberman reports that a former company consultant, Alan Marcus, said that Trump personally marked up a draft of the release in question and made existing projections rosier,” CNN writes. “Trump denied that account, according to Haberman.”