Does Donald Trump have mob ties? It’s a question that was briefly explored in “Trumpology,” but neither affirmed nor denied by the experts who provided the information in that piece. Timothy O’Brien concluded with, “There’s a lot to be explored there.” However, both authors O’Brien and Wayne Barrett reported some pretty damning evidence which point to possible ties Trump has had with mob characters.

O’Brien said that he obtained the original casino regulatory interviews with Donald Trump inquiring about his business partners in Atlantic City when he was planning his first casino. Two of the names which emerged were Danny Sullivan and Ken Shapiro:

“He assembled a real estate site with a guy named Danny Sullivan. . . he was essentially a labor racketeer in the construction trade — and Ken Shapiro, who was a bag man for the Scarfo crime family in Philadelphia. Atlantic City was petrified of becoming Vegas. They wanted to make sure people coming in were clean. They asked him about these relationships, and he said he thought they were good guys, he didn’t see anything untoward about any of them, and so on.

And then, when I was reporting my book, we were on his plane, somewhere over the Midwest, and we began talking about these guys, and I said, “Did you ever think that Ken Shapiro or Dan Sullivan had mob ties?” And Trump said to the effect that. . . “Oh, sure. I was definitely worried. There were rumors that Dan Sullivan killed Jimmy Hoffa. And, uh, yeah, maybe because I was wary of these guys, that’s what saved me,” which was completely at odds with his reported testimony in the early 1980’s.

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