Page 170 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

have been almost impossible to keep the news of dozens of sales a secret. They needed to complete the sale in one transaction, as quickly and as quietly as possible.
They succeeded on that score. It may be the only one of Donald’s real estate deals that received no press attention. Whatever objections Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert might have had, they kept to themselves. Even now Maryanne, almost ten years older, smarter, and more accomplished than the second youngest Trump child, deferred to him. “Donald always got his way,” she said. Besides, none of them could risk waiting; they all knew where the bodies were buried because they had buried them together in All County.
Split four ways, they each got approximately $170 million. For Donald, it still wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t for any of them. Nothing ever was.
When I visited Maryanne in September 2018, less than a month before the article was published, she mentioned that she had been contacted by David Barstow. My cousin David, who had tracked my grandfather’s old accountant Jack Mitnick, now ninety-one, to a nursing home somewhere in Florida, believed he must have been the source of the exposé. Maryanne brushed the whole thing off and suggested that the article was merely about the 1990 codicil controversy. If she did speak to Barstow, though, she must have known the extent of what they were looking into—All County, the potential tax fraud—but she seemed unfazed by it. I wondered, now for completely different reasons, why she and Robert hadn’t tried everything in their power to dissuade Donald from running for president. They couldn’t possibly have thought that he (and by extension they) would continue to escape scrutiny.
I met with Maryanne again shortly after the article ran. She denied all of it. She was just a “girl,” after all. When a piece of paper requiring her signature had been put in front of her, she’d signed it, no questions asked. “This article goes back sixty years. You know that’s before I was a judge,” she said, as if the investigation had also ended sixty years before. She seemed unconcerned that there would be any repercussions. Although a court inquiry had been opened into her alleged conduct, all she had had to do to put an end to it was retire, which she did, thereby retaining her $200,000-a-year pension.