Reason # 39: Mob Concrete
Why do we need to defeat Donald Trump and ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House?
When Donald Trump announced that his gleaming new Trump Tower on 5th Avenue would be built with “ready mix” concrete, many New Yorkers were puzzled. Most skyscrapers were constructed using steel girders. Reinforced concrete construction was faster, but much more expensive. The bill was $22 million for Trump Tower. Why so expensive? The generally understood reason was the “Concrete Club”.
If a builder decided to use concrete, he had to do business with a small group of companies with mob connections. That was just the first problem. Next, was the problem of mafia influence in construction worker unions. If a ready-mix cement mixer showed up to pour at a construction site and was blocked by a union dispute or other disruption, a very expensive batch of concrete was wasted.
In the Big Apple, concrete was poured by members of Teamster’s local 282. John Cody, the union president was sentenced to five years in prison for racketeering in 1982 and was later convicted of attempted murder for trying to arrange the assassination of the new union president from prison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cody_(union_leader)
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/10/nyregion/gotti-defense-challenges-details-in-murder-story.html
It is alleged that Trump Tower and Trump Plaza were built using mob concrete and that mob connections ensured against labor disruption.
David Cay Johnson investigated Donald J Trump for ten years and summarized his findings for Politico
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
“But Trump was not clean as a whistle. Beginning three years earlier, he’d hired mobbed-up firms to erect Trump Tower and his Trump Plaza apartment building in Manhattan, including buying ostensibly overpriced concrete from a company controlled by mafia chieftains Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano.”
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-mob-organized-crime-213910/
Trump has acknowledged that he had met with some prominent New York city criminals. He even allowed that some of them are “very nice people”. Let’s meet just a few nice people.
Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino crime family and “boss of bosses” lived on Todt Hill on Staten Island and his protégé, Thomas Bilotti, grew up in a home less then a mile from mine. They were both murdered outside Spark’s restaurant in Manhattan in 1985. Castellano’s son Philip ran Scaramix Concrete Co. while his father held half-ownership in S and A Concrete and guided Gambino family interests in the Concrete Club, which received a 2% kickback on large projects. –(Wikipedia).
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/26/nyregion/company-owner-described-as-fearful-of-rejecting-mob.html
Anthony Salerno ran the notorious uptown Genovese family faction out of the Palma Boys Club in East Harlem, on 116th Street, ten blocks away from my medical school apartment. He was one of those indicted and convicted in the famous “Mafia Commission” trial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/116th_Street_Crew
“The indictment on which Salerno was convicted in 1988 and sent to prison, where he died, listed the nearly $8 million contract for concrete at Trump Plaza, an East Side high-rise apartment building, as one of the acts establishing that S &A was part of a racketeering enterprise.”
https://infamousnewyork.com/tag/concrete-club/
Wayne Barrett, who wrote a biography of Donald Trump, asserted that he had been told by an associate of lawyer Roy Cohn, that
“Trump didn’t just do business with mobbed-up concrete companies: he also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn.”
Is this tale plausible; was Cohn a mob lawyer? Yes indeed, Roy Cohn represented both Castellano and Salerno (and many other New York City mafiosi) legally, after he was hired by Carlo Gambino to defend John Gotti, for a very public murder in a Staten Island tavern in 1973 and got the Teflon Don off on a short sentence for manslaughter. Coincidentally, Cohn also represented Fred and Donald Trump in 1973 in a federal race discrimination case.
Sammy “the bull” Gravano, notorious hitman and snitch, has endorsed Donald Trump for president saying, “we need a mob boss for president”.
Do you really want a man with the moral compass of a mob boss as your president?
Have a heart; use your mind, search your conscience, and vote for Democratic candidates – across the ballot – on November. 5th.
Please share this message with your friends and please, add your thoughts, to expand upon what are only brief sketches here.
Fred Grannis
August 27, 2024