New York’s Trump Tower, a sky-high home for celebrities and charlatans

Hillary Clinton slept here.

The year was 2000. Clinton was in the middle of her first political campaign, running to be New York’s junior senator.

Steven Spielberg, an enthusiastic donor to Mrs Clinton who had the use of a pied-à-terre in Trump Tower purchased for him by Universal Pictures, barely stayed at the place, despite its views of Central Park, and offered it to the candidate as a crash pad on gruelling campaign days.

Trump Tower in New York. Photo: Bloomberg

Donald Trump and Clinton were on good terms back then. He donated money to her candidacy and called her “tough and smart”. Moreover, Trump was skilled in the art of spinning his associations with celebrities into publicity.

This was particularly true at Trump Tower.

Michael Jackson lived in Donald J. Trump’s gleaming Midtown edifice. So have gamblers, a disgraced dictator, a Ponzi schemer and a stock huckster. Credit Photo Illustration by Peter Horvath; photographs by Chad Batka for The New York Times (Trump); Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times (tower); Shannon Stapleton/Reuters (Clinton); Matt Rourke/Associated Press (Manafort); Laurent Rebours/Associated Press (Jackson); Chris Weeks/Liaison, via Getty Images (Willis).

Johnny Carson, Liberace and Paul Anka had condominiums there in the 1980s, and Michael Jackson rented one in the 1990s. In 2000, Bruce Willis closed on a place, too.

President Donald Trump." />President Donald Trump. Photo: AP

Pre-opening reports of Prince Charles and Princess Diana moving in turned out to be false, but that didn’t stop Trump from using them to his advantage. The “sale that never occurred”, as Trump called it in The Art of the Deal, was “the one that most helped Trump Tower.”

Trump Tower, at 721-725 Fifth Avenue, opened to the public on February 14, 1983, when the man who would become the 45th president was in his first flush of flame. It was 58 storeys, but that didn’t stop the developer from promoting it as a 68-storey building, to the chagrin of its chief architect, Der Scutt. The first 19 floors housed commercial enterprises; the first residential floor, the 20th, is listed as the 30th.

With its grand atrium, made largely of Italian Brecchi Perniche marble, and with retail tenants that eventually included Gucci, Landau jewellery and the Trump Store, the building is not exactly homey. “When we were there, most people seemed to own more as an investment,” said Marina Fareed, who lived there recently with her husband, Qazi Shaukat Fareed, a Pakistani diplomat. “It was not full-time people.”

Trump Tower. Photo: Karsten Moran/New York Times

The completion of a grand tower in Midtown’s high-end retail district cemented Trump’s status as a force to be reckoned with in New York.

Until he moved into the White House in January, he made his home in the building. His primary residence was a three-storey penthouse apartment estimated at more than 929 square metres by Forbes. Originally designed by Halston’s interior designer, Angelo Donghia, it had a smoky Helmut Newton vibe, with black lacquered walls, velvet furniture and handsome mid-century tables. A private elevator connected Trump to the 26th-floor office where he conducted Trump Organization business.

Then Trump went to the nearby Olympic Tower for a dinner held by Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, encountered a living room bigger than his own and decided to remodel.

Bonwit Teller building in New York, Aug. 1, 1980." />Donald Trump with a model of Trump Tower before it was built on the site of the Bonwit Teller building in New York, Aug. 1, 1980. Photo: Don Hogan Charles/New York Times.

Out went the mirrors, brass and mahogany. In came the Greek columns, gold leaf paint and Louis XIV-inspired furniture.

For the rest of the go-go 1980s, Trump lived in that airy show palace with his wife, Ivana, and their children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric. In the 1990s, after a tabloid divorce and a wedding at the nearby Plaza hotel attended by Howard Stern and OJ Simpson, he was joined by his second wife, Marla Maples, and their daughter, Tiffany.

In 2001, two years after his divorce from Maples, Melania Knauss moved in. She and Trump were married in 2005, and their son, Barron, was given a floor of his own, with quarters for his mother and a nurse, after he came along in 2006. (Melania Trump and Barron made the White House their new home in June.)

The plan for a gleaming tower in place of the 12-storey Bonwit Teller store, a stately structure built as Stewart & Co. in 1929, was hatched in 1978. At the time, Donald Trump was renovating the old Hotel Commodore, which became the Grand Hyatt, near Grand Central Terminal. The work on Trump Tower began in 1980, and its namesake developer was soon revealed to be someone who did not mind playing the villain.

After he declared his intention to donate the building’s pair of two-tonne limestone relief panels of dancing women to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which wanted them for its sculpture collection, work crews instead demolished them, resulting in a torrent of negative publicity. Edward I. Koch, then the city’s mayor, lambasted Trump for “ignoring the interests of the city.”

Never one to apologise, Trump told New York magazine that all the negative publicity had only helped him sell more units. “It was fantastic promotion,” he said.

Few residents garnered as much publicity for the building as Michael Jackson, who for 10 months around 1994 rented a duplex apartment near the top and turned one of the bedrooms into a mirrored dance studio.

Trump made Jackson’s acquaintance in 1988, when he attended a Madison Square Garden concert that was part of the singer’s tour in support of his Bad album. After the show, he made a backstage visit.

In 1990, Trump persuaded Jackson to show up at the opening of the Trump Taj Majal in Atlantic City, parading him in front of camera crews and reporters. The next day, Jackson’s friend Ryan White died of AIDS, and the developer accompanied him on a visit to the grieving family in Indianapolis, bringing along a journalist to document the deed.

After Mr. Jackson moved into his Trump Tower apartment, Mr. Trump took him to a low-key dinner at Le Cirque. “There was no entourage, no posse,” said Mario Wainer, the restaurant’s longtime maître d’hôtel. “He came as a guest of Mr. Trump, and that was it.”

Although Trump called himself “the law and order candidate” in 2016, his namesake tower has been welcoming to those who have run afoul of the law.

“Criminals got to go somewhere,” said Robby Browne, a broker at the Corcoran Group.

Joseph Weichselbaum, an executive at a helicopter company that flew gamblers to Trump-run casinos in Atlantic City, knew Trump well. His firm also took care of Trump’s $US10 million ($12.6 million) Super Puma helicopter.

After being charged with drug trafficking, Weichselbaum rented an apartment owned by Trump himself at the Trump Plaza building on East 61st Street. Trump wrote a letter on his behalf to the presiding judge in the case, calling him a “credit to the community” shortly before Weichselbaum pleaded guilty and was given a three-year sentence.

In 1990, after serving his time at Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan, Weichselbaum moved into adjoining apartments on the 49th floor of Trump Tower that had been purchased by the woman he was with at the time. He moved out of the building in 1994 and has not had legal troubles since then.

Another notorious resident was Jean-Claude Duvalier, the former Haitian dictator overthrown in a 1986 popular uprising, who owned a $US2.5 million condominium through a Panamanian holding company.

Since Trump’s political career took off, there have been questions about his possible ties to Russia. In January 2017, he took to Twitter saying, “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

But in 2002, the Bayrock Group, a real estate investment fund run by two Russian-born entrepreneurs, Tevfik Arif and Felix Sater, moved into office space on the 24th floor of Trump Tower, where they began work on the future Trump SoHo and used their connections to explore a possible Trump building in Moscow.

In 2006, Sater stayed with Donald Trump Jr. and Ivanka Trump in Moscow across from the Kremlin. The next year, The Times reported that Sater had been convicted of a felony assault and had pleaded guilty to running what authorities called a “pump and dump” scheme – buying large blocks of stocks in four companies, then flooding the market with false and misleading information about them.

He avoided jail time by becoming a government informant who, according to former attorney-general Loretta Lynch, provided crucial intelligence about a variety of international crime syndicates.

Trump has repeatedly tried to play down his involvement with Sater.

In 2007, he told The Times that he “didn’t know (Mr Sater) very well.” In 2015, he told a reporter from Associated Press that he was “unfamiliar” with him.

In 2017, Sater met with Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, at the Loews Regency on Park Avenue. There, Sater gave him a letter proposing the lifting of sanctions against Russia.

The letter, The Times later reported, was delivered to Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser at the time. The next week, Flynn was fired.

Of late, Trump has also been distancing himself from another Trump Tower resident with ties to Russian interests. In addition to holding the deed to an apartment on the 43rd floor of Trump Tower since 2015, he was for several months last year the manager of his landlord’s presidential campaign.

His name: Paul Manafort.

This story was first published by the New York Times.