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Casinos And Controversy Marked Donald Trump's Connecticut Years
By Christopher Keating
October 28, 2016
Decades before crisscrossing the nation as a presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump spent years trying to reshape Connecticut's casino landscape.
Playing offense and defense at the same time, Trump was trying to build his own casino here while simultaneously blocking any others from doing it.
Over the years, he pitched a commercial casino in Bridgeport and later an Indian casino near Foxwoods. He floated proposals for the world's largest Ferris wheel in Bridgeport and then an Indianapolis 500-type racetrack.
While no plan for a Trump casino was successful, a 35-story skyscraper in Stamford bears his name and bottled water found at Trump properties around the world comes from a spring in Willington.
To Lennie Grimaldi, who worked as his chief spokesman back in the 1990s, today's controversial presidential candidate is very similar to the outspoken developer he worked closely with in Bridgeport. At the time, Trump ranked among the nation's gambling kingpins by operating three casinos in Atlantic City.
"When he hired me, he said, 'Look, if a casino happens, I want it,'" Grimaldi recalled in an interview. "If I can't have it, I want to kill it."
Grimaldi said Trump was terrific as a client who paid well and provided exciting work. But he said he would never know what Trump would say next.
"Dealing with Trump is like riding a bronco. Every day with him was like a day at the rodeo," recalled Grimaldi, who was later jailed in a city hall corruption scandal that sent Mayor Joe Ganim to prison.
"I'd say these are the talking points, and he says, 'Yes. Yes. Yes.' Then he walks out the door, and you hold your breath."
Clash With Weicker
Trump's biggest clash in the 1990s in Connecticut came against Lowell P. Weicker, Jr., the outspoken governor who rarely held back in his verbal sparring with the New York developer. Their war of insults resembles the coarse political dialogue that has characterized the 2016 presidential campaign.
The battle started in October 1993, when Trump testified at a high-profile hearing in front of a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee in Washington, D.C. Clashing with members of Congress at times, Trump blasted the Mashantucket Pequot tribe by saying, "They don't look like Indians to me."
Jay B. Levin, a lobbyist hired by Trump to track casino interests, called Trump to tell him he was offended by the remarks.
"I'm Jewish, and I had to grow up with people trying to classify me by my looks or what type of Jew I was and whether I was acceptable to people who were not Jewish," Levin said. "I told him I was just as offended when that [remark] was used as against any other person of any ethnic group."
"He told me that he would not apologize, and Donald Trump does not apologize," said Levin, who immediately dropped Trump as a client.
Weicker, who had cut a deal for the state to receive slot machine revenues from the tribe, called Trump "that dirtbag" after the incident.
"I called him a bigot, if I recall, and he hasn't changed," Weicker said recently. "He called me a fat slob, but I have lost weight."
Trump's outspoken comments and clash with Weicker had a spillover impact on the lobbyists and others whom he had hired to provide advice on his casino interests.
After Levin departed, Trump soon hired Carroll J. Hughes, one of the best-known lobbyists at the state Capitol. That did not last very long, either.
"We represented him for about a month and a half," Hughes recalled recently. "I'd give him advice, but he wouldn't take it well. He'd take it, but then he'd do what he wanted to do."
When Trump's casino project in Bridgeport went nowhere, he sold six prime acres back to the city in exchange for $1 and the waiver of unpaid property taxes at the spot where the baseball stadium for the Bridgeport Bluefish is now located.
In another infamous chapter involving money and controversy, Trump was among thousands of investors in the Colonial Realty scandal during the early 1990s. The real estate scheme promised huge returns for investors, but in reality it was a fraud that generated millions of dollars only for Colonial partners Jonathan N. Googel, Benjamin J. Sisti and Frank M. Shuch — and nothing for the 6,800 investors.
Backing another tribe
Despite his well-publicized quote about the Mashantucket Pequots not looking like Indians, Trump went in the opposite direction and later became a key investor who backed a Connecticut tribe that was seeking recognition.
Trump invested more than $14 million to help the Paucatuck Eastern Pequots, a faction of a tribe in North Stonington that was recognized by the state but never gained the necessary federal recognition.
Trump was heavily involved in 2003 and 2004, and he eventually filed a civil lawsuit against the Eastern Pequots after saying they broke a 10-year deal that he had made in 1999 to allow him to operate a casino.
Trump had backed one faction of the tribe, while Florida magnate William Koch and Southport golf course developer David Rosow had supported a separate, larger faction. The tribe eventually picked Koch's team, leaving Trump out of the loop.
Although the two factions were later deemed a single entity, the Pequots never won the required federal recognition that would have allowed them to operate a casino.
Greenwich Years
While Trump's persona and greatest public success came in New York City with the construction of Trump Tower and other buildings, he also maintained a part-time home in Greenwich from 1984 until 1991.
Trump's family sometimes made news in Greenwich, but locals say Trump was never involved deeply in the fabric of the town — in politics, business or charities.
Democrat Ned Lamont, who served on the Greenwich Board of Selectmen and later on the Board of Estimate and Taxation during the Trump years, said the developer had little impact on the community.
"I don't know a soul who knows him here," Lamont said in an interview. "I think it was more a crash pad for him. I would have known people who had run into him in places. If anybody had run into him 25 years ago, you would have heard about it. … I haven't heard any stories about Donald Trump in town. He was not a big deal here in Greenwich.'
But Republicans remember a huge fundraiser at Trump's spectacular six-acre waterfront estate for the National Republican Senatorial Committtee. The locals say many of the attendees were from New York City and from Westchester County, where Trump made friends at the famed Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck. The crowd included the late smokeless-tobacco kingpin Louis F. Bantle, a major Republican contributor until his death from cancer.
One reason for Trump's relatively low-key profile is that he lost the Greenwich mansion during his 1991 divorce from his first wife, Ivana. She remained in the home and sold it seven years later for $15 million.
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