Trump U: The Inside Story of Trump University

1.

In 1990, I enrolled in Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke, a town a few miles south of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Then I went to King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, a small Catholic school founded in 1946 by the Congregation of Holy Cross from the University of Notre Dame. While in school, I did male modeling, starting off walking a runway at fashion shows in Pennsylvania. Soon I was earning enough to become independent.

One day I received a call from an agent, and the next thing I knew I was in New York City for a shoot. It was a huge rush, and I wanted to keep doing it. I got more work in the city. I’d go there every weekend after my week at school. I modeled for Levi Strauss and other clothing companies. I modeled the Michael Jackson Elizabeth Taylor tribute jacket for men. Photographers ran the modeling world, and they introduced me to other photographers, who put me in their books. Soon I was getting calls without even auditioning.

Through modeling, I met a community of partiers who flocked to underground clubs. Some of my new friends were glamorous, some were wealthy, and some were both. They came together for the parties, which would always turn into all-nighters. The rich and famous came to these parties, too. Once I saw Eartha Kitt, who played Catwoman in the original Batman TV series, posing on a motorcycle, stark-ass naked.

While I was in New York, I stayed at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Built in 1925, the venerable Renaissance revival landmark had been home to luminaries like Humphrey Bogart (who married his first wife Helen Menken there), the Joseph P. Kennedy family (including young John F. Kennedy), Babe Ruth (a regular bar patron), and James Cagney and his wife.

Later decades saw people like Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, actor Matt Dillon, playwright David Mamet, the English punk band the Clash, Madonna, Debbie Harry, and David Bowie. I liked the vibe of New York energy and wealth. It was a long way from sleepy Pittston, Pennsylvania.

One night, a modeling friend and I went to a party in an abandoned subway tunnel. These were illegal gatherings that promoters would stage deep beneath New York’s streets. We gathered at midnight on a certain block, where we had been instructed to approach a designated agent. Having checked our names against the list, the agent told us to join a group of other people who were walking down a seemingly deserted street. Suddenly the people started disappearing! When we got closer, we saw that our fellow revelers were dropping down into an open manhole. When my turn came, I took a deep breath, prayed that I wasn’t making a horrible life-altering mistake, and climbed down the long ladder. After negotiating a dank corridor and descending a set of iron stairs, I found myself in a huge graffiti-covered concrete chamber lit by candles and flashlights. A motley marching band (there was no electricity down there for electric instruments) blared raucous tunes from a platform. It was like a bizarre scene from a post-apocalyptic movie.

As a denizen of New York nightlife, I popped Quaaludes, got high, and drank with friends. There were no limits. We seemed to be invincible. It got so bad that I was taking drugs to wake up in the morning and taking drugs to put me to sleep at night. The lifestyle was incredibly seductive. I experienced a life that had no consequences and one that proved that even too much was never enough. It’s scary, but I’m cool, I told myself. I can do it.

Fortunately, a friend took me aside. One night in the wee hours of the morning after a party, we went out to a pizza shop in Greenwich Village for a slice. My friend was a famous photographer who worked for Robert Mapplethorpe, whom I had met through my modeling. He was successful and had connections. He was a photographer for all the major magazines as well as for retailers like Abercrombie and Fitch. He was also doing his own work. He and other photographer friends, including Gene Pappis and the Morris brothers, saw me for what I was—a naïve kid who should not have been hanging out with these wild people on weekends. They were worried about my being caught up into that lifestyle. My friend told me that I would be eaten alive in New York City, that I would never survive, that I would be used, abused, and tossed aside like a half-eaten cheeseburger. He saw that I had potential, but he insisted that instead of partying I needed to start paying attention to the business. It was advice that I tried to take to heart. Maybe it kept me from doing anything really stupid.

As a model, I was often sent by my agency to mingle at private parties from Boston to Florida. My job was to stand around looking handsome. (Can you believe it? Getting paid just to stand around at a party?) At these events I didn’t have much to do but contemplate the lifestyle of the one percent. Perhaps because of my experience helping my uncle at his house and renovating other family properties, I started looking at the homes in which I was loitering. In retrospect, I suppose this was because the houses were more interesting to me than the boring rich people who owned them. I asked myself, what turns a house into a mansion? It was then that I first became interested in real estate, which would eventually become my life’s calling.

While I was figuring out what to do with my life, the man whose path I would soon cross had already built a real estate empire and was embarking on even bigger plans. In the early 1970s, Donald J. Trump had started his career in Brooklyn with his developer father, Fred Trump. Most people know the basic story about Fred and Donald Trump, but Donald’s penchant for making money can be traced back to his paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Christ Trump.

She was born in Germany on October 10, 1880. When she was twenty-two years old she married Friedrich Trump, a thirty-three-year-old entrepreneur who had been to America and had been successful in various businesses. The newlyweds moved to New York City, where Friedrich found work as a barber and also as the manager of a restaurant and hotel. He and Elizabeth lived at 1006 Westchester Avenue in the German-speaking Morrisania neighborhood of the Bronx. In 1904, their first child, a daughter, was born.

Despite living in a German neighborhood, Elizabeth was thoroughly homesick. For this reason, Friedrich decided to move the family back to Germany. He sold his assets in America, and before Christmas they were living in Kallstadt, a village near Mannheim in Rhineland-Palatinate.

But Friedrich had military draft problems. The family had barely arrived in Germany when, on December 24, 1904, the Department of the Interior in Germany announced an investigation to deport Trump from the country. Officially, they found that he had violated the Resolution of the Royal Ministry of the Interior number 9916, an 1886 law that stripped German citizenship from any man who emigrated to North America to avoid military service. A year later, after an unsuccessful appeal in which Friedrich announced, We are loyal Germans and stand behind the high Kaiser and the mighty German Reich, the family was expelled and forced to make the journey back to the United States.

In 1905, their second child Frederick Christ Trump (who was called Fred) was born, and they set up house on 177th Street in the Bronx. After Elizabeth gave birth to her third child, John, the family moved to Queens, where Friedrich began to develop real estate. In May 1918, Friedrich, with his thick mustache and bushy eyebrows, and young Fred, with his blond parted hair, were walking along the German shops of Jamaica Avenue when Friedrich said he felt ill.

Then, he died, Fred Trump recounted to author Gwenda Blair for a Trump family biography. Just like that.

His sudden death was not unusual. Known as Spanish Flu or La Grippe, the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 was a global nightmare. With total deaths somewhere between twenty and forty million people, influenza killed more people than World War I. It has been called the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. To those infected, death came with shocking swiftness and savagery. Victims were struck with illness on the street and died before reaching home. One physician wrote that patients with seemingly ordinary influenza would rapidly develop the most vicious type of pneumonia that has ever been seen, and when cyanosis—bluish skin—appeared in the patients, it was simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. The physicians of the time were helpless against this indiscriminate killer.

But Friedrich Trump had been busy in the New World: he left his young family an estate valued at $31,359—about half a million dollars today. Rather than being paralyzed with grief, Elizabeth Trump swung into action. While raising her three children, she took over the management of her husband’s properties. Showing a remarkable talent for keeping the real estate business going, she hired a contractor to build houses on an empty piece of property left by her husband. She sold the houses on the property, and then lived off the mortgages paid by the new owners. She groomed her three children to continue the family business after they had each finished school, but young Fred wanted to start earlier, so she founded a real estate company and called it Elizabeth Trump & Son. Since Fred was only eighteen years old, she had to perform the real estate closings for him and sign all legal documents on his behalf.

Fred turned twenty-two in 1927, and that was when Elizabeth Trump & Son was formally incorporated. While Fred became quite successful, his mother Elizabeth still remained involved in the business throughout her life. Even in her seventies, she would collect coins from the laundromats in Trump buildings. She died on June 6, 1966, at the age of eighty-five.

At age twenty-eight, Fred won the mortgage service business of a troubled German bank, and by 1938 was bragging in the papers about the throngs visiting his developments in Brooklyn. That year, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle referred to him first as a prominent Long Island builder, then as the Henry Ford of the home-building industry.

His ego grew with the press, and Fred became a showman. On a sweltering day in July 1939, New Yorkers seeking sun and surf at Coney Island were astonished to see a yacht, sixty-five-feet long, outfitted with enormous Trump signs and loudspeakers that blasted recordings of The Star-Spangled Banner and God Bless America.

The Trump Show Boat was hard to miss. As the boat floated toward the beach, the crew released brightly-colored swordfish-shaped balloons, each of which was redeemable for $25 in cash or $250 toward a new Trump Home. Bathers stampeded to snatch them up.

Fred was more than willing to adjust the facts to fit current reality—just as his son Donald would later do. During the Second World War, anti-German sentiment was strong. Fears of sabotage led to laws barring people of German descent from boarding boats and even from entering some cities. Perhaps to avoid problems in selling properties to Jewish customers, Fred Trump began to present himself and his family as descendants of immigrants from Sweden. This became the standard family line, even long after the war ended. Even Donald Trump, not known to be shy about embellishing facts, eventually questioned the need for this dissimulation. According to his cousin John Walter, the Trump family historian, when Trump was planning his best seller The Art of the Deal in the mid-1980s, he asked his father, Do I have to do this Swedish thing? I suppose the answer was yes, because in the book, published in 1987, he asserted that his father’s story was classic Horatio Alger, and that his grandfather Friedrich came here from Sweden as a child.

In 1936, Fred Trump married Mary MacLeod, who had been born in Scotland. They settled together in Queens. Beginning with Fred Freddy Trump Jr., born in 1938, they had five children. Donald, the fourth child, was born on June 14, 1946 in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Of his four siblings, three are still alive: Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert. Freddy, who as a youth was the heir apparent to the family business, eventually died in 1981 from alcoholism.

Years later, Donald Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network that Freddy had everything going, but when he went to college for some reason he started drinking. That was before the drug age and before the other things . . . but he drank and he drank a lot and he started drinking more and more and he ultimately died of alcoholism. As a result, Trump said, I never drank. He called it a defining moment.

While attending the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Donald worked for Elizabeth Trump & Son, and in 1968 he officially joined the company. When Freddy left the family business to pursue a career as a pilot (and eventually his self-destruction through alcohol), the path opened up for Donald Trump to inherit the Trump empire. He was given control of the company in 1971, and in one of his first acts, he renamed it the Trump Organization—the name it holds today.

Fred Sr. passed away in 1999, triggering a nasty familial fight over his will. When he died, Fred Sr. left an estate with an estimated worth of $100-300 million. His will divided most of his estate between the families of his surviving children, leaving a pittance to the widow and children of Freddy, Donald’s deceased older brother.

Freddy had a son named Fred III, who in turn had a son named William Trump. As a baby, William had been diagnosed with infantile spasms, a rare disorder that led to cerebral palsy. This chronic illness required a lifetime of 24-hour nursing care and frequent visits to medical specialists and emergency rooms. Fortunately for the baby and his family, William was covered under a medical plan that was paid for by a Trump family company.

In March of 2000, Fred III and his wife Lisa filed suit in Queens Surrogate’s Court, claiming that Fred Sr. had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and that his will had been procured by fraud and undue influence on the part of Donald, his brother Robert, a New York businessman, and his sister Maryanne, a federal judge in Newark, New Jersey. Fred III and Lisa demanded a larger cut of the estate.

The response was swift. On March 30th, Fred III received a certified letter telling him that the medical benefits provided to his family by The Trump Organization would end on May 1st. The letter prompted Fred III to return to court, this time in Nassau County, where a judge ordered the Trumps to restore the health coverage until the dispute was resolved. I will stick to my guns, Fred III told Heidi Evans, a reporter for the Daily News. I just think it was wrong. These are not warm and fuzzy people. They never even came to see William in the hospital. Our family puts the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional. Fred III’s sister Mary told the Daily News, William is my father’s grandson. He is as much a part of that family as anybody else. He desperately needs extra care.

Donald Trump, for his part, was unapologetic about his actions. Why should we give him medical coverage? he told the Daily News. When the reporter asked him if he thought he might appear cold-hearted given the baby’s medical condition, he replied, I can’t help that. It’s cold when someone sues my father. Had he come to see me, things could very possibly have been much different for them. Donald Trump has since said the suit was settled amicably.

Having established himself in Brooklyn, Donald crossed the river into Manhattan, where he opened his signature landmark Trump Tower in 1983. Looming fifty-eight stories over Fifth Avenue, it was an impressive sight. Originally the tallest all-glass structure in Manhattan, its pampered residents enjoyed unobstructed views of Central Park and midtown Manhattan and the status of the big TRUMP name across the entrance.

One day when I was in New York and strolling along Fifth Avenue, I wandered into the tower’s gleaming lobby, covered in its signature expensive pink white-veined marble. I saw the four gold-painted elevators that transported visitors from the lobby to higher floors. Someone said that one elevator led directly to the penthouse where the Trump family lived in gilded splendor. I made my way into the majestic five-level atrium, bedecked in rosy and yellow marble and crowned with its skylight. I admired the sixty-foot-high waterfall, with the suspended walkway providing breathtaking views, while shops, cafés, and a pedestrian bridge crossed over the waterfall’s sparkling pool.

What an impressive place! I could feel the power and smell the money. All around me were busy important people engaged in busy important things. The rousing song by the band Queen came into my head: We are the champions! No time for losers, ‘cause we are the champions! Here within the opulent walls of Trump Tower there were no losers, only champions. Here, greed was not merely good, as Gordon Gekko had said in the film Wall Street; it was celebrated as the highest calling of every citizen. If you weren’t greedy, there was something wrong with you, and you deserved to live in your crummy apartment in the Bronx or your plain split-level ranch-style house in Pittston.

I was a kid working as a male model trying