The idea of buying into Resorts was born on the slopes of Aspen during the Christmas season of 1986. Ever since the legendary fifty-eight-year-old Resorts chairman Jim Crosby had died the previous April, the company had floundered, marked for takeover on Wall Street but attracting little serious interest. The company's president, Jack Davis, who owned an Aspen condominium, was hunting for a white knight with access to enough money to salvage the company yet protect him, a career Resorts veteran. He'd gotten to know Trump during their years together in Atlantic City, and mamy noticed that Donald seemed especially attracted to the Davis bravura style.
There appeared to be at least a thirty-year difference between Jack Davis' weathered stone face and his musclebound body - the product of a lifetime of daily workouts. There was also a thirty-year difference between Jack and the thirtyish Caroline, the beautiful ex-stewardess he'd married a few years earlier. Davis, whose first wife had killed herself in a Miami hotel room after years of neglect, landed Caroline when her husband, millionaire Philadelphia Eagles owner Len Tose, went broke at Resorts and other Atlantic City casinos.
Before settling in with the company in Atlantic City, Davis had run its Paradise Island operation in the Bahamas, allowing the management of the company's casino to be turned over to the brother of Meyer Lansky's top aide, attracting government probes of a number of other mob connections, running a slush fund of cash, payments for Bahamian officials, and dating actress Janet Leigh. Together with other top Resorts executives, Davis had also helped provide a secluded hideaway for Resorts regulars like Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, Robert Vesco, and Bebe Rebozo, as well as exiled dictators Anastosio Somoza and the Shah of Iran.
There was just enough intrigue and sex appeal around the jaded Davis to titillate Donald. Davis and his wife eventually not only befriended Trump, but his new romantic interest, Marla Maples. The Davises reportedly put her up at their Atlantic City and Aspen homes in the early days, before she and Donald went public with their affair and while Ivana was still in charge at the Castle.
Without Crosby, however, whose daring investment strategies had both built and bedeviled the company, Davis was lost. While Crosby had weakened the company with bizarre forays into the seaplane and shrimp farm markets, no one questioned the potential value of Resorts' basic assets. Everything hinged, however, on the completion of the Taj, which had already consumed almost half a billion dollars in company revenue, without any bond or bank financing. Even if a new owner of the company could finally finish it, the 1250-room monstrosity would pose another problem - it represented a possibly fatal threat to the company's original Atlantic City casino, located next door in a refurbished but fading old hotel. The company's other principal property, Paradise Island, was also quietly aging and required an expensive overhauling.
In addition to these inviting yet troubled assets, a buyer would have to take on a double-edged and unusual corporate structure, one that was simultaneously a roadblock and an opportunity. Resorts had a two-tiered stock management so peculiar that it was forced to trade on the American Stock Exchange since the New York exchange would not countenance it.
[source : Wayne Barrett, Trump : The Greatest Show on Earth: The Deals, The Downfall, The Reinvention, Chapter 13]
So it's all there: Meyer Lansky; unusual corporate structure; Richard Nixon.
It was all about money laundering.
So what happened last year?
Yaaarp!
The casino was fined for money laundering.
Fee. Fi. Fo. Fum.
I smell the blood of a mobbed-up Don.
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