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The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost
It's as if they're reading DU or something:
Blast from the past: Atlantic City Woman Enjoys Victory Over Donald Trump (1998)
The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost
By Manuel Roig-Franzia September 9 at 5:34 PM
Vera Coking’s house on Columbia Place in Atlantic City is dwarfed by Trump Plaza in 2011. The house was the focus of a prominent eminent domain case involving Donald Trump. (Helayne Seidman/For The Washington Post)
There once was a widow who lived in a house by the sea. ... It wasn’t much of a place, just a fading, clapboard-clad box a few steps from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
....
The cast of characters populating that house’s curious history over the past three decades includes a friend and co-author of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a legendary pornographer, and a famed investor. But the central figures in its life and death saga are a feisty, obstinate woman named Vera Coking and a billionaire, the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.
Trump is dominating his Republican opponents in the polls. But in the long melodrama that is Trump’s business career, the house in Atlantic City is the place where all the billionaire’s money and all the billionaire’s men couldn’t keep a 5-foot-3 widow from whupping him. ... Trump wanted Coking’s house — not to live in, but as a place to park limousines for his casino next door. But Coking wouldn’t let him have it. No way. No how. Never.
“It is a classic case of a schoolyard bully growing up,” said Clint Bolick, who co-founded the legal institute that defended Coking in a 1990s lawsuit with Trump and years later co-authored an immigration book with Bush, Trump’s nemesis and Republican presidential opponent. “He’s a thug.”
Vera Coking’s house on Columbia Place in Atlantic City is dwarfed by Trump Plaza in 2011. The house was the focus of a prominent eminent domain case involving Donald Trump. (Helayne Seidman/For The Washington Post)
There once was a widow who lived in a house by the sea. ... It wasn’t much of a place, just a fading, clapboard-clad box a few steps from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.
....
The cast of characters populating that house’s curious history over the past three decades includes a friend and co-author of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a legendary pornographer, and a famed investor. But the central figures in its life and death saga are a feisty, obstinate woman named Vera Coking and a billionaire, the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.
Trump is dominating his Republican opponents in the polls. But in the long melodrama that is Trump’s business career, the house in Atlantic City is the place where all the billionaire’s money and all the billionaire’s men couldn’t keep a 5-foot-3 widow from whupping him. ... Trump wanted Coking’s house — not to live in, but as a place to park limousines for his casino next door. But Coking wouldn’t let him have it. No way. No how. Never.
“It is a classic case of a schoolyard bully growing up,” said Clint Bolick, who co-founded the legal institute that defended Coking in a 1990s lawsuit with Trump and years later co-authored an immigration book with Bush, Trump’s nemesis and Republican presidential opponent. “He’s a thug.”