Has the Trump family historian dropped a dime in the New York Times?

In his exhaustive investigation of nearly 8,000 words of allegedly illegal schemes by which Donald Trump's father retained his fortune and promoted the myth of his son as a self-proclaimed billionaire, the New York Times revealed the existence of a fake business that the Trump family was hiding from his children thanks to important gifts donated by Fred Trump, saving millions in federal taxes.

The company's name was All County Building Supply & Maintenance and was established in 1992 to provide inflated invoices to contractors for the huge real estate properties of Fed Trump in Brooklyn and Queens.

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"All counties had no headquarters," Times reporters wrote. "His address was in Manhasset, NY, at John Walter's, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump. Died in January at the age of 83, Mr. Walter worked for decades for Fred Trump, primarily by computerizing his payroll and billing systems. He was also the unofficial guardian of Fred Trump's personal and professional documents, his basement filled with boxes of Trump's old financial records. "

As every Trumpologist knows, Walter was a self-proclaimed family historian. He enjoyed sharing family information and memories with reporters. He had taken on this role because of his close family relationship: he was the son of Fred Trump's elder sister, Elizabeth, who had been Fred Trump's accountant at the beginning of his career as a builder and of developer. When I was working on my Trump family biography in the 1990s, I met Walter in a modest office located just steps from Fred's home at Beach Haven, a government-subsidized apartment complex located near Coney Island and that Fred had built almost half. a century earlier. Walter, it seemed to me, was distributing information with a certain jubilation.

For many years, during the long period when his first cousin, Donald, was a regular at New York tabloids' gossip pages, and then the star of the television series "The Apprentice," the archives services of Walter were little in demand. . Donald Trump was master of his own story. That changed when Trump went to the presidency and Walter was quickly the target of more and more beleaguered of a flow of almost endless requests. By the time his cousin had become the 45th surprise president, Walter had almost resigned from his unofficial position. As he told Michael Kruse in the summer of 2017: "I do not do anything. I let Donald do his thing. I just can not get involved and give information that is not always good … I promised everyone that I would not do it.

Today, Walter's hard work as an amateur historian seems to have become a major source of Time'Piece of blockbuster. For me, after chronicling several generations of the Trump family, this is the ironic moment to see this blatant violation of Donald Trump's long practice of never leaving a trace. No memos, he told his staff at Trump Tower, a habit he might have inherited from his father, legendary to keep the details in his head.

But Walter, as Time notes, kept things in his basement. the Time Journalists say their work "relies on tens of thousands of pages of confidential documents: bank statements, financial audits, accounting books, disbursement reports, invoices and canceled checks. The documents include more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. Do not the authors say that this love came out of these boxes?

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The roots of Walter minor but pivotal role in the family goes back 100 years.

At the age of 12, his father Friedrich, a young real estate developer from Queens, died at the age of 49, at the age of 49, died of the flu pandemic. It left a $ 30,000 estate, worth about $ 500,000 in 2018, but was quickly hit by severe inflation after the First World War. His widow, Elizabeth Christ Trump, was able to pull what she could from her holdings and sewing, but she was determined to continue what he had started and proposed a long plan. family-oriented term. Her eldest son, also named Elizabeth, who was 14 at the time of Friedrich's death, ran the office and kept the books; the youngest, John, 10, would be the architect; and the middle child, Fred, would be the builder.

In order to realize this plan, the young Elizabeth left high school earlier, which was not unusual at the time, and went to the secretarial school; John began to study architecture; and Fred, who was attending carpentry, plumbing and other construction skills, built his first structure, a garage for a neighbor. As the children were under 21, their mother incorporated the new company as E. Trump & Son, and the family became nomadic in real estate, passing from a newly completed home to a new one. other in Queens.

Unfortunately, the two brothers found it difficult to work together. Fred wanted to sell the houses as quickly as possible, whether they were finished or not, while John wanted to dwell on the last details of each. After Fred's victory, John bailed out and began a career in physics, but Elizabeth remained in place even after her marriage to bank trainee William Walter in June 1929. But four months later, in October 1929, the stock market fell. # 39; collapsed. Real estate market has dried up and Fred Trump has been forced to suspend the construction of his home and open a food market in Queens

The career change was only temporary. In 1934, Fred cleverly headed his bankruptcy proceedings in a federal court in Brooklyn, involving a large mortgage company. Through a series of inflated claims and side agreements, the same strategy that Donald will repeatedly use decades later, he emerged with a mortgage management contract that would put him back into real estate. This time it was for good.

In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Fred Trump refined his approach to maximize profits through government-subsidized housing at the national and regional levels. He regularly submitted bids for projects such as Beach Haven to the Federal Housing Administration on the basis of cost estimates, delivered the finished product at a significantly lower price, and pocketed the difference – a practice that aroused sharp criticism. from the press and a subpoena to testify. a congressional hearing, but no real sanctions. The housing programs of the State of New York have allowed him to earn additional extra profits through scams such as the creation of shell companies with whom he rented construction equipment at inflated prices. This led to more bad press and an appearance before a state commission, but no fines or criminal charges.

Throughout these years, he has worked tirelessly to ensure that his family never faces the same financial pressure as his mother and siblings after the death of his father. Long before Donald Trump met Roy Cohn and adhered to his philosophy, Fred took the same approach, making Donald a millionaire in third grade and providing him with a lifeline safety net that would protect him from the consequences of reckless movements and rash decisions.

Fred was also protective of other family members, including John Walter, who received 20% of All County Building Supply & Maintenance revenue. Donald also monitored his cousin. In the early 1980s, he insisted that Alan Lapidus, architect of Trump's first casino in Atlantic City, Trump Plaza, uses Walter as a security consultant on the project, despite Lapidus' objection that Walter , that he found "abrupt", had "no discernable title In turn, said Lapidus, Walter looked for Donald and told him to install video cameras on the women's booths in the counting room, because "women have twice as many places to store money as men".

Fred Trump died in June 1999 and in 2004, his four surviving children sold most of his real estate empire. According to New York TimesDonald has received the lion's share of Fred's largesse, $ 413 million in assets and $ 60 million in loans, many of which have never been repaid. As long as the outside world can not view Donald Trump's tax returns, it will be impossible to know exactly how and where his father's money could still play a role in his life. There is little doubt that this is welcome, given a report recently released in Forbes, according to which his net worth is down almost $ 1 billion since the start of his presidential race. which puts it at 138 places on the list of the 400 richest citizens of the country, according to Forbes.

Walter's family did not answer Politico's calls to discuss the financial statements. But when Michael Kruse asked him to comment on another story in September, Walter did not seem to want to cooperate with a journalistic investigation, let alone an investigation alleging real wrongdoing. He seemed somewhat nostalgic for days before Trump entered politics.

"A long time ago, everything was fine. But everything went crazy, he told Kruse. "I just can not help you. I am sorry.

"Maybe later," he said, "when things are going well. But for now, everything is screwed up.

Michael Kruse contributed to this report.