Trump had a reputation as a relentless haggler with contractors, always suspecting that they were cheating him. One of the reasons some contractors heard for the delay in pay: Trump said he needed to complete audits first to make sure they weren’t overcharging. “Donald Trump was flamboyant, but he was an immensely successful contractor who paid his debts.” “Naturally, you assumed you’d get paid,” Molded Fiber Glass CEO Morrison wrote in a book about the Taj published in 1994. Far from being overstretched, he told Newsweek, he was looking to expand: “I think the people with a lot of cash -and I have a lot of cash - are going to be able to make beautiful deals in the next few years.” Trump was denying he was in financial trouble: “I have a tremendous amount of cash,” he told the Washington Post that March. Many contractors didn’t know what to think. An invoice sent a few weeks earlier for $1.4 million still hadn’t been paid. was pressing his workers to finish the domes and minarets and other faux Moorish ornaments in time for the April opening - and worrying about who was going to pay for all of it. “We got a problem,” he said.įive hundred miles away, in Ashtabula, Ohio, Robert Morrison of the Molded Fiber Glass Co.

Rosenberg, whom Trump would eventually owe $1.1 million, walked down the hall and entered his brother’s office.

“We got next to nothing,” says Michael MacLeod, whose 40-person studio made the giant elephant statues at the entrance to Taj. It took years to get the rest, assuming the companies survived long enough to collect. A year later, when the casino collapsed into bankruptcy, those owed the most got only 33 cents in cash for each dollar owed, with promises of another 50 cents later. And when it went south, his moves to avoid a financial hit to his empire hobbled many small businesses with little cushion to absorb the blow.Īfter the Taj opened in April 1990, the self-anointed “King of Debt” owed $70 million to 253 contractors employing thousands who built the domes and minarets, put up the glass and drywall, laid the pipes and installed everything from chandeliers to bathroom fixtures. It was his biggest gamble, the “eighth wonder of the world,” as he dubbed it. Of all the real estate and casino deals in Trump’s long career, the Taj arguably sheds the most light on how the would-be U.S.

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