Donald Trump (r) in 1990, after announcing his Taj Mahal casino bankruptcy. (Getty)
For the first time, complete records of three bankruptcy filings by Donald Trump and his Atlantic City casino have been posted online, thanks to the site BuzzFeed, which obtained the documents and made them publicly available on Wednesday.
The files total thousands of pages, but they could provide the most complete record yet available of Trump’s still-shadowy personal and business finances.
“Trump is not a self-made man. He is a self-made disaster who only avoided personal bankruptcy thanks to his father”
The bankruptcy filings date from 1990 through 1992.
The files for the Trump Taj Mahal casino bankruptcy are accessible at this link.
Bankruptcy filings for Trump’s Plaza can be accessed at this link.
Trump Castle also went bankrupt, and complete files from the case can be accessed at this link.
In one bizarre detail, Trump owed a $30,000 debt because he sublet an apartment to boxer Mike Tyson, who then destroyed the place.
Interesting tidbits in Trump bankruptcy docs posted by @BuzzFeedNews: $30K claim b/c Mike Tyson wrecked an apartment t.co/aTVvBaDd9B
In another of the many instances of settled debt claims, Trump’s business owed more than $34,00 to a laundry service in Millville, New Jersey. But Trump paid the laundry business less than $7,000 to settle the claim.
According to the BuzzFeed report, the three bankruptcy cases would have been part of the massive, $915,729,293 loss Trump claimed on his 1995 income tax returns, revealed Saturday by The New York Times. An explanation of Trump’s tax returns is contained in the following Times video.
Earlier this year, The Washington Post revisited Trump’s failed Taj Mahal casino, painting a picture of a business venture that was doomed from the start.
Trum was granted a license for the casino, which would be his third in Atlantic City making Trump the country’s top gambling impresario outside of Las Vegas, despite the fact that he was able to provide no evidence of his financial stability, other than the fact that “he was Donald Trump,” the Post reported.
“Because of his reputation as a dealmaker, he said, bankers were lining up to lend him money at prime rates. That meant he could avoid the risky, high-interest loans known as junk bonds,” Post correspondent Robert O’Harrow Jr. wrote.
But the favorable loans — that Trump told the state he could obtain easily on the strength of his reputation as a great dealmaker — never came. So Trump did exactly what he promised he would never do and financed the Taj Mahal with high-risk junk bonds. Within six months, Trump started stiffing his bondholders on their promised 14 percent interest payments.
Donald Trump’s dad bailed him out in 1970s with $8.5M in loans so he could avoid bankruptcy t.co/U0dmlmAji4
The three casino bankruptcies were not Trump’s first financial failures. According to a new report digging into Trump’s old business dealings from the 1970s, in 1978 Trump had racked up $38 million in debt in 1978 — the equivalent of more than $140 million today, adjusted for inflation — and needed a bailout from his own father to keep him out of bankruptcy at that time, more than a decade before his series of Atlantic City debacles.
This story is breaking and will be updated with new information it becomes available.
