Alleged threats against Stormy Daniels are a startling reminder of Trump's mob ties (ThinkProgress)

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https://thinkprogress.org/donald-trump-history-with-the-mob-787eb1bd652f/

One journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston, spent the past three decades cataloging Trump’s seedy ties throughout his years as a developer in New York and New Jersey. In 2016, before Trump’s election, Johnston provided a tour de force introduction into Trump’s ties to the dons and lieutenants of the New York mafia.

Trump “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,” Johnston wrote. And it wasn’t just business, either. Trump “also probably met personally with Salerno at the townhouse of notorious New York fixer Roy Cohn.”

Trump also routinely worked with individuals connected to the mob in Atlantic City. One of his associates, court records later revealed, was in turn an “associate of the Scarfo crime organization, serving as a financier of mob activities in South Jersey and Philadelphia,” the Washington Post wrote.

Nor, of course, was it only the American crime networks in close proximity to Trump. From Azerbaijan to Iran to Russia, Trump’s dealings — and his properties themselves — often played key roles in money laundering for organized crime and drug cartels.

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All told, as Johnston found, “[n]o other candidate for the White House [in 2016 had] anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks.” Trump’s mob ties were so extensive, and so concerning, that Australia eventually barred Trump from opening a hotel casino in the country. As authorities wrote, “Atlantic City would be a dubious model for Sydney and in our judgment. The Trump Mafia connections should exclude” Trump from consideration.

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