Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA" fifu-data-src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/vHo2eoVj.Z0.BNmiMAqmwA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtoPTQyMw--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_guardian_765/4ce8e809c39dfaae94215e22a174b357" data-src="https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/vHo2eoVj.Z0.BNmiMAqmwA--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTcwNTtoPTQyMw--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/the_guardian_765/4ce8e809c39dfaae94215e22a174b357">A spokesperson for Donald Trump would not say if the previous president knew a infamous Philadelphia mobster, after the two guys ended up photographed jointly at a Trump-owned golf club previously this thirty day period.
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“President Trump can take plenty of pictures with people,” the spokesperson advised the Philadelphia Inquirer, which acquired the photograph of Trump and Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino standing collectively and producing thumbs-up gestures.
“That does not indicate he is familiar with just about every one man or woman he will come in make contact with with.”
The Inquirer reported the image was furnished by a source who requested anonymity. It shows Trump with two adult men, a single unidentified, the other Merlino.
Merlino, the paper claimed, was as soon as “a leader of a violent crew on his way up to becoming manager of an organised crime procedure lively in Philadelphia and Atlantic City” – the latter city a person wherever Trump had casino interests.
Merlino was convicted on racketeering fees in 2001, and spent a decade in jail. He was imprisoned once again in 2018, just after pleading guilty to a gambling cost, then produced in 2020.
Merlino and Trump, the Inquirer mentioned, “share an affinity for golf and an aversion to cooperating witnesses who ‘flip’ to support federal investigators”.
Trump made his view apparent in 2018, when his previous lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen, who went to jail on marketing campaign finance fees and for lying to Congress, commenced to cooperate with investigators searching into Trump’s links to Russia.
“It’s referred to as flipping and it practically should to be illegal,” Trump reported then. “It’s not a reasonable matter, but that’s why he did it. He built a extremely fantastic offer.”
The same 12 months, just after staying sentenced, Merlino stated: “President Trump was right. They have to have to outlaw the flippers.”
Trump has often been in comparison to a mafia don, supplied his penchant for threatening those people who do not do his bidding and back links to New York organised criminal offense figures which include, notoriously, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno.
Talking to CBS in 2013, Trump was questioned if he experienced “ever knowingly performed business with organised crime”.
He explained: “You know, expanding up in New York and performing business in New York, I would say there could have been just one of people figures along the way, but generally talking I like to keep absent from that group.
“I have met on occasion a couple of of those men and women. They happen to be quite nice folks.”
He included: “You just really don’t want to owe them income. Never owe them dollars.”
Relevant: US mobster Skinny Joey receives two years in jail – and agrees with Trump on ‘flippers’
A few a long time later on, Trump gained the presidency. He shed it in 2020 but is now the only declared prospect for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
His marketing campaign has been dogged by controversy, not least with regards to extensive legal jeopardy above his small business methods, his try to overturn his 2020 defeat, his retention of categorized documents and an allegation of rape by the writer E Jean Carroll, which he denies.
Before long immediately after Trump introduced his 2024 campaign, last November, he ran into hassle when it was revealed he had dinner with the rapper Kanye West, who has expressed extraordinary, antisemitic views, and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist activist.
Trump’s defense was that he did not know Fuentes.
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