Former US President Donald Trump posed for a ikon with former (some say still) Philadelphia Mob hirer Joey Merlino earliest this month.
The mental image obtained past The Philadelphia Inquirer shows Trump, Merlino, and an unidentified single(a) flashing thumbs-ups for the photographic camera at the Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach.
While there’s no more indication that Trump knew who Merlino was, or that he was doing anything other than obliging a quest for a photograph, it’s unfit optics for the former president, who harbors ambitions of reverting to the Patrick Victor Martindale White House in 2024.
“President Trump takes unnumerable photos with people. That does not miserly he knows every single mortal he comes in physical contact with,” a Trump spokesperson told the Inquirer.
Bad Company
Nevertheless, Trump has been careless about the accompany he keeps. In November, a week after he announced his young bidding for the presidency, it emerged that he had dined at Mar-a-Lago with white-hot supremacist Nick Fuentes. Also pose was Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who would foretell his esteem for Adolf Der Fuhrer on social media and describe as a Nazi just weeks later.
Trump loyalists are concerned the former chair isn’t hearing to the advice of those within his run tasked with vetting and approving the people he meets.
Reputed City of Brotherly Love Mob chieftains should follow in high spirits on the list, especially since some of the bring down on which Trump built his 1st Atlantic Ocean City casino was linked to that rattling unionized offense syndicate.
Trump paid $1.1 meg for nearly a 5,000-square-foot patch that became parting of the Trump Plaza parking lot. Sellers were Salvy Testa and Frank Narducci Jr, both hitmen for and so Philly hirer Nicky Scarfo.
Merlino was prohibited from all Atlantic City casinos in 1984 for his Mob connections, the twelvemonth the Trump Plaza opened. He is also prohibited from entering any casinos in Pennsylvania.
Trump doesn’t abnegate that he has “on occasion” consorted with members of the Mafia. The Mob controlled most of the grammatical construction unions inwards New York and owned many twist companies in the 1980s when Trump was underdeveloped inwards Manhattan.
“They happen to live very nice people,” he told Saint David Letterman in 2013. “You just don’t require to owe them money.”
Dapper Don
For his part, Merlino has declared himself to be a diehard Trump supporter. Maybe he identifies with the former president. Both were in the East Coast gaming business, albeit one inward the illicit variety, before rising to the rattling pinnacle of powerfulness in their elect vocation paths. Meanwhile, both get an averred dislike of cooperating witnesses.
Merlino claims he’s no yearner the powerful Sicilian Mafia boss of the 1990s who survived 25 assassination attempts and who controlled the Philly crime families’ gambling, loan sharking, and extortion rackets.
After serving 12 years for racketeering, he relocated to Florida upon his free inwards 2011 and opened a restaurant, since closed. In 2016, he was once again indicted on RICO charges and was eventually convicted for illegal gambling, serving two years. He now claims to be in the carpet-fitting business.