Page 122 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

wanting more—after all, it had worked for his father. But Donald didn’t understand, and refused to learn, that owning and running casinos were vastly different from owning and running rental properties in Brooklyn, from the business model and the market to the customer base and the calculus involved. Because he couldn’t see that glaring distinction, it was easy for him to believe that more was better in Atlantic City, just as it had been for my grandfather in New York’s outer boroughs. If one casino was a cash cow, three would be a herd of them. He would do with casinos what Fred had done with his apartment buildings.
The only part of the scenario that defies explanation is the fact that the banks and investors in his first two casinos didn’t object more strenuously to his opening a third, which would cut into their own bottom lines. It made even less sense that he could find anybody interested in investing in it. Even a casual glance at the numbers—not least, the debt service—should have scared the most reckless lender away. In the late 1980s, nobody said no to Donald, thereby legitimizing another misguided project that had the ancillary benefit of bolstering the ego of a man who had no way of making it succeed.
In August of that year, Surviving at the Top was published, and within weeks it would become clear that the book’s subject matter and timing were bad enough to qualify as parody.
In June 1990, Donald missed a $43 million payment for Trump’s Castle. Six months later, my grandfather sent his chauffeur with more than $3 million in cash to purchase chips at the Castle. In other words, he bought the chips with no intention of gambling with them; his driver simply put them in a briefcase and left the casino. Even that wasn’t enough. The next day, my grandfather wired another $150,000 to the Castle, presumably for more chips. Although those maneuvers helped temporarily, they resulted in my grandfather’s having to pay a $30,000 fine for violating a gaming commission rule prohibiting unauthorized financial sources from lending money to casinos. If he wanted to continue lending Donald money to keep his casinos afloat (which he did), he would also be required to get a gaming license in New Jersey. But it was too late. Donald might have controlled 30 percent of Atlantic City’s market share, but the Taj was making it impossible for his two other casinos to make money (the Plaza and Castle lost a combined $58 million the year the Taj opened), the three properties