This past week, Ed Davey, leader of the UK Liberal Democrats, stood up in the UK Parliament and denounced Trump as a dangerous gangster. They were powerful words. Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word, stated that the phrase “a dangerous and corrupt gangster” would define Donald Trump’s legacy. Only took a year. I have referred to Trump as a gangster since the day he won the 2024 election. I don’t say this out of any chip on my shoulder, but my incredulity that Trump’s staggeringly long list of criminal connections and activities has always been siloed from discussions about his role as president of the United States. Early last year, as threats against Canada escalated, I was interviewed by CNN, where the host said to me, “You view him as unreasonable.”
I haven’t been invited back. The Al Capone comment was not about a colourful flair. It was an attempt to remind people that we were dealing with a man who has a deep history with threat, intimidation and outright gangsterism. And this criminality didn’t just lurk in his deep past but has been present at every level of his political career. Consider the threat he made against Justice Tanya Chutkan in 2023, as she was investigating his role in undermining the 2020 election.
The threat couldn’t be more direct. It wasn’t whispered in the judge’s ear or sent in an anonymous letter. It was posted and signed online for maximum impact. The next day, Chutkan received her first death threat. But the intimidation kept coming. Special security had to be set up at the courthouse. Large security vans were parked outside her home at all times. When she went for a morning jog, special agents had to accompany her. This is the kind of threat you might expect from taking on a mafia don in Italy, or a Latin American narco-boss. Not from the former president of the United States on the eve of his re-election in 2024. Trump’s threats were so severe that it was feared that it might be impossible to find jurors willing to serve at the trial.¹ What Justice Chutkan faced was par for the course for any judge who drew the short straw in dealing with the most powerful lawmaker in the United States. In 2023, Justice Juan Maerchon had special protections put in place for him and his family as he dealt with 34 felony counts against Trump.² When Trump turned the threats on the judge’s daughter, the court had to issue a special gag order for fear of her life. In February 2024, Justice Arthur Engoron was investigating the Trump crime family, including sons Eric and Don Jr., who were guilty of massive fraud. The threats against the court were deadly serious. Trump not only went after the judge but targeted court clerk Alison Greenfield. She faced a torrent of threats and anti-semitic hate because Trump falsely claimed that this court official was in a relationship with 74-year-old Chuck Schumer.³ In the end, Justice Engoron issued a ruling of $350 million in damages against the Trump crime group. But Trump didn’t need to sweat it. He had just been re-elected and had been given a total immunity card by his appointees on the Supreme Court. Such is the relationship between the courts and the man who has been brought to court 4,000 times over his career on lawsuits over fraud, defamation, sexual assault, real estate deals gone south, and harassment. Two separate accusations of child rape were dropped when the complainant went into hiding after receiving death threats. His first run-in with the courts was in 1973 when he and his developer father, Fred Trump, were sued by the Department of Justice for their openly racist policy of refusing to rent to Black people. The evidence was overwhelming. Trump’s lawyers advised him to settle and avoid the bad press. Trump didn’t like the advice. He reached out to Roy Cohn, who was a fixer for the Mafia in New York. Wayne Barrett, who conducted major investigations into Trump’s connections to the criminal underworld, described Cohn as “incandescent evil.” He advised Trump to take the fight to the Justice Department. They launched a $100 million countersuit claiming they were being persecuted. It was ridiculous, and the effort failed. But in the court of public opinion, Trump had learned a valuable lesson — always turn the tables, always blame, never admit to anything. Cohn became Trump’s political confidant and advisor. Low Rent Godfather It’s often said that the character of Don Corleone from The Godfather is based on Carlo Gambino. The Trumps, with their real estate holdings in Queens were no strangers to the Gambinos or the Genovese crime syndicate. They knew how to cut deals. Cohn was the glue between them and the Trumps. But as Trump was coming into his own, the old school crime families were on their way out. They were being marginalized by a new brand of criminal — ones with track suits, gold chains and lots of tattoos. In the late 1980s, the Russian mafia began setting up in Brighton Beach and looking to take over the Big Apple. The Russians weren’t interested in small time Mafia shakedowns like jacking up the price of cement on building sites like Trump Tower. The Russians had looted the national economy of the former Soviet Union and were looking to launder massive amounts of stolen money through American businesses. Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote about the mob in the 1980s, describes the difference between the old mob and the new one:
The Italian mafia was into shaking down shopkeepers. The Russians were buying prime property. No wonder they fell in love with Donald Trump. Trump’s real estate deals and sketchy morals made him an obvious choice for the incoming mobsters. David Bogatin, who was connected to the Simion Mogilevich transnational crime syndicate, was the first to move into Trump Tower. In 1984, he paid the then-staggering fee of $6 million to buy into Trump Tower. Such a huge investment should have set off alarm bells in US intelligence. But the deal was cash. This is how foreign money gets laundered. Russian mobster Vyachelav Ivankov also set himself up at Trump Tower. He was tied to gambling, prostitution and arms smuggling. Then there was Felix Sater, another convicted felon with ties to the crime family. He moved into Trump’s building and began working with Trump on real estate deals. A Former FBI official said Trump Tower was crime central, “Everything was moving in and out of there.”⁵ Felix later bragged that he would work with Vladimir Putin’s crew to get Trump elected president. Anatoly Golubchuk owned a condo in Trump’s International Beach Resort and helped set up a $100 million gambling operation in Trump Tower. The gambling operations were done in two locations. Art dealer Hillel Nahmad purchased the entire fifty-first floor and set up a very lucrative casino operation for the wealthy and powerful. The other gambling den was run by an associate of Mogilevich, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. He was on the FBI’s most-wanted list but owned an extremely luxurious apartment on the 63rd floor, just below Trump’s quarters. The suite featured alabaster walls, a floor of amethyst imported from Africa, and 24-carat-gold faucets. When the FBI broke in, they arrested 13 men but couldn’t find Tokhtakhounov. He would be later spotted sitting very close to Trump at the infamous Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. Preet Bharara was the U.S. Attorney who led the investigation into this scheme in Trump Tower. He was fired as soon as Trump became president. Since the Trump election in 2016, the Trump crime family has turned global politics into a form of shakedown. When Jared Kushner had difficulty covering the costs of a massive real estate development at 666 Fifth Avenue, he was bailed out by the Saudis. He was then accused of pushing a blockade of American ally Qatar to benefit the Saudis.⁶ Congressman Dan Goldman pointed to a $2 billion payment to Jared Kushner’s investment firm as an example of the patterns of what Vanity Fair referred to as “the real White House Crime family.”⁷ Kushner’s father, Charles, was the recipient of one of Trump’s many pardons for a shakedown crime that former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie says was “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes” he ever prosecuted as U.S. attorney. Trump pardoned Kushner’s father and made him the ambassador to France. In my writings on Trump, I have consistently used the term “gangster fascism” to define the MAGA movement. When people think of the Nazis, they think of the mass rallies, the choreographed movements, the groupthink and the unbelievable violence against targeted enemies. Often overlooked is that they were the ultimate criminal organization. The Nazi economy was a smash-and-grab enterprise at every level of the administration. Historian Richard Evans documents how, during the 1938 Anschluss, the Nazis broke into homes of Jewish families to steal whatever they could find. People were stopped on the streets and robbed of their fur coats and wallets. By the 1940s, this shakedown was so thorough that it included stealing gold teeth from the corpses of murdered civilians. The difference between Nazi gangsterism and Trump gangsterism is that Trump gets his thrills by showing off his lawlessness. And this is where he differs from traditional mob families, which believed in the “Omerta” code of silence and carried out their deals in the shadows. The Trump crime family have done everything in the open. And those who have tried to take Trump on are the ones who pay a price. Trump used his presidency to actively undermine the rule of law and to turn both the Justice Department and the FBI into his personal vendetta machine. Former acting FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was a legal expert on the Russian mob. Before being fired, he met with Trump and described it as the same as meeting a “mob boss.”
If you’re a crook, kissing the ring of America’s top crime boss pays off – just ask Rudy Giuliani, recently pardoned by Trump for attempting to overthrow the 2020 election. But it has been his willingness to protect larceny — even from people that he doesn’t know – that has defined the gangster nature of his regime. It is hard to keep up with the more than 1,800 people who have received the “get out of jail free” card from the White House. But in March 2026, the governor of California issued a list of some of the more notorious criminals who have received pardons from Donald Trump. The list provides a guide of Trump cronies who read like a who’s who of American fraudsters and crooks. There was Trevor Milton, guilty of securities fraud and jailed for 4 years, who was pardoned by Trump. Lawrence S. Duran, former co-owner of American Therapeutic Corp., was sentenced to 50 years in jail for multiple felonies, defrauding Medicare, health care fraud and money laundering. Or Jason Galanis, described as “porn’s new King,” was sentenced for securities fraud. Devon Archer defrauded the Oglala Sioux in a $60 million scheme. Trump not only freed Archer but also absolved him of the court’s repayment order. Adriana Camberos was found guilty of mail and wire fraud and ordered to pay $48 million in restitution, but that payment was erased by Trump. Carlos Watson was given a 116-month prison term for securities fraud and aggravated identity theft, and he also got to walk away from his $36 million restitution order. The list also includes Julie and Todd Chrisley, reality TV stars, guilty of defrauding the United States and tax evasion and Imaad Shah Zuberi, a Trump political donor, was sentenced to 12 years for unregistered foreign lobbying, illegal campaign contributions and obstruction of justice. Trump’s crime spree is now international. He has told Venezuela that they must come up with 50 million barrels of oil, which he will sell and deposit into an offshore account controlled by him. Smash and grab. His “Board of Peace,” which was supposed to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza, came with a membership price tag of a billion dollars — payable to Trump. To understand the threat from the White House, we need to know who we are dealing with. Trump is a politician in name only. What we are really dealing with is a two-bit gangster who can run global shakedowns through the use of aircraft carriers. If any photos or images on this site are under copyright please let us know and we will give appropriate credit. Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting.1 Leonnig, Carol, Davis, Aaron C. Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. Penguin Books. New York. 2025. P. 246. 2 Judge in Trump’s Criminal Case has Received Dozens of Threats, Police Sources Say. ABC News. April 6, 2023. 3 Trump’s attacks on Engoron lead to threats and harassment. He doesn’t care. MS News. November 25, 2023. 4 Unger, Craig. House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. Dutton. 2019. (e-book edition) 5 Russian Mafia Boss Still at Large After FBI wiretap at Trump Tower. ABC News. March 21, 2017. 6 The Troubling Overlap between Jared Kushner’s Business Interests and American Foreign Policy. The Guardian. July 8, 2019. 7 “The Real White House Crime Family”: Dem Representative tells the GOP to Stop Wasting Time with Hunter Biden and Subpoena Jared Kushner. Vanity Fair. February 29, 2024. 8 Andrew McCabe. Every Day is a New Low in Trump’s White House. The Atlantic. February 19, 2019. Thank you for reading Charlie Angus / The Resistance. If you’d like to upgrade to a paid subscription your support will help keep this project independent and sustainable. I’m grateful to have you here - thank you for your support.
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