Donald Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J., nearly flushed Forest Jenkins’ company Triad Building Services down the toilet.
In 1988 and 1989, Jenkins, a contractor, spent months installing the stall walls in the bathrooms of the mega-casino. The job was supposed to pay $231,000. The check for the work, though, never showed up, stretching the finances of Jenkins’ small construction business. Eventually Jenkins, whose business did manage to survive the episode, was paid $70,000, or 30 cents on the dollar in the restructuring that followed. The episode still upsets Jenkin’s daughter, Beth Rosser.
“I grit my teeth every time I see him on television talking about what a wonderful businessman he is,” Rosser said of Donald Trump in a CNN interview in September. “He stepped on a lot of people.”
But Trump may not have only “stepped on” Jenkins and others. It now appears that Trump may have used those unpaid bills to contractors and other small businesses—their losses—to give his bank account a second lift, using a tax maneuver many are calling essentially a “double dip.”
Last week, the New York Times published portions of Donald Trump’s 1995 tax returns
, which showed, among other things, that Trump claimed he had a $916 million loss that year—a loss that according to the Times may have allowed Trump to avoid taxes for nearly two decades. Since then, journalists and observers have tried to figure out how even a wealthy person could have lost nearly a billion dollars, and what exactly made up Trump’s high-nine-figure ocean of red ink.
Trump, through a campaign spokesperson, declined to comment for this story.
A lot has already been written about the fact that Trump’s multiple bankruptcies stiffed a long-list of small businesses, from carpet suppliers to chandelier distributors to cabinet-makers for slot machines. What hasn’t been reported before is that those unpaid bills were also used to swell Trump’s future tax deductions. In other words, Trump not only stiffed many contractors, he also www.thebiginfotoday..com