Video shows Trump with mob figure he denied knowing
Last edited Wed Nov 2, 2016, 08:42 AM - Edit history (1)
https://www.yahoo.com/news/video-shows-trump-with-mob-figure-he-denied-knowing-090025964.html
A newly uncovered video appears to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that he never knew a high-stakes gambler who was banned from New Jersey casinos for alleged ties to organized crime.
The reputed mob figure, Robert LiButti, can be seen standing alongside Trump in the front row of a 1988 “WrestleMania” match in Atlantic City, N.J. LiButti wasn’t there by accident, according to his daughter, Edith Creamer, who also attended the event. “We were his guests,” she told Yahoo News in a text message this week.
The video was given to Yahoo News by a confidential source who discovered it in the online archives of World Wrestling Entertainment, the sponsor of “WrestleMania.”
The video appears to lend new support to assertions Trump once had close relations with LiButti, who was banned from the state’s casinos in 1991 because of his ties to Mafia boss John Gotti, then the chief of the Gambino crime syndicate. Separately, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission that same year levied $650,000 in fines against the Trump Plaza hotel over its dealings with LiButti, who gambled huge sums at the hotel’s casino. LiButti died in 2014.
“That’s definitely Bob LiButti standing right next to Donald Trump,” said David Cay Johnston, an author and former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who, as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, extensively interviewed the gambler in the early 1990s. At the request of Yahoo News, Johnston reviewed the video of the “WrestleMania IV” contest, held at the Atlantic City Convention Hall on March 27, 1988. “It’s at an event that Bob described to me a quarter century ago when I spent an afternoon in his Saddle River home,” Johnston added. “The ‘WrestleMania’ event is just one of many times that Trump was close to Bob, who was the biggest loser at Trump casinos and therefore Trump’s most important customer.”
In the video, LiButti can be seen alongside Trump as the real estate mogul greets the ring announcer, sportscaster Bob Uecker, and later as Trump kisses on the cheek special guest Vanna White. LiButti can also be seen sitting during the match in a front-row seat alongside Trump and his then wife, Ivana.
Asked to comment on the video, Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks replied by email: “This was obviously a massive event, which took place decades ago. Mr. Trump attended many similar events with thousands of people during this time period.”
In the past, Trump has consistently downplayed his relationship with LiButti. “If he was standing here in front of me, I wouldn’t know what he looked like,” Trump told the Philadelphia Inquirer when he was first questioned by Johnston about LiButti, in 1991.
Earlier this year, when questioned again about LiButti by Yahoo News, Trump emailed a reporter: “During the years, I very successfully ran the casino business, I knew many high rollers. I assume Mr. LiButti was one of them, but I don’t recognize the name.”
A Yahoo News story last March documented multiple dealings between LiButti, a professional horse breeder, and Trump in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Creamer, LiButti’s daughter, said then the casino mogul was a “liar,” adding that “it pisses me off that he denies knowing my father.” In fact, she said, her father gambled millions of dollars at the Trump Plaza, flew frequently on Trump’s private Super Puma helicopter and partied aboard his yacht.
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