Page 168 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

Donald’s lawyer, Charles J. Harder, predictably denied the allegations, saying: “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.” But the investigative reporters laid out a devastating case. Over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed. That did not include the $170 million he had received through the sale of my grandfather’s empire. The amounts of money the article mentioned were mind-boggling, and the four siblings had benefited for decades. Dad had clearly shared in the wealth early in his life, but he had had nothing left to show for it by the time he was thirty. I have no idea what happened to his money.
In 1992, only two years after Donald’s attempt to attach the codicil to my grandfather’s will, effectively cutting his siblings out, the four of them suddenly needed one another: after a lifetime of their father’s playing them off against one another, they finally had a common purpose—to protect their inheritance from the government. Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes. In addition to dozens of buildings, my grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance. At that point, my grandfather was effectively sidelined by his increasing dementia—not that he would have objected to their scheme. And since my father was long gone, Maryanne, Donald, and Robert could do whatever they wanted; they were our trustees, but there was no one to force them to fulfill their obligations to Fritz and me, and they could easily keep us out of the loop.
My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business transactions,” according to the article. The ruse was so effective