Republican
presidential hopeful Donald Trump's vociferous legal battle over the fallout of
Trump University is one of more than 3,500 lawsuits the real estate mogul has
faced over the past three decades, many of them involving cases of alleged
nonpayment, according to a recent USA Today analysis.
Paul
Friehl, formerly an accountant at Philadelphia cabinet maker Edward J. Friehl
Company, says his family's business was ravished by Trump's perplexing failure
to pay nearly a quarter of a $400,000 contract for work completed at Harrah's
at Trump Plaza in 1984.
The
Friehl family business, founded in the 1940s, had been given the job to
complete registration desks, bars and the bases of slot machines at Harrah's,
one of four Atlantic City casinos shuttered in 2014. When the company completed
its work, it submitted a bill to a general contractor for the Trump
Organization in the amount of $83,600.
Trump
never paid up, Friehl claims, and the GOP disruptor later arranged a meeting
with his father. The cabinets at Harrah's were inferior, Trump allegedly said,
even though the general contractor had approved them. Friehl would not receive
the full amount, but the company was still invited, bizarrely, to accept future
contracts on other Trump properties.
A
combination of legal records, New Jersey Casino Control Commission documents
and newspaper clippings from the period in question confirm that hundreds of
other contractors experienced Trump's nonpayments, late payments or tough
renegotiations, according to USA Today's review of Atlantic City Casinos.
In
one set of casino commission records from 1990, an audit reflects $69.5 million
owed to 253 subcontractors on the Trump Taj Mahal. Many of those companies had
already sued Trump, while others were attempting to recover what they could for
work on everything from plumbing and lighting to ornaments including the
casino's iconic minarets.
The
volume of lawsuits and the nature of the complaints exposes an evident
contradiction between Trump's actions and his message about serving the
American worker. In February, for example, Trump weighed in on the decision of
a Northeast Philadelphia auto-parts remanufacturer, Cardone Industries, to lay off 1,300 workers and move the
division to Mexico.
"I
am the ONLY one who can fix this!" Trump wrote on Facebook. "We need
to keep jobs here in AMERICA!"
Yet
among the findings of USA Today's analysis — which covered lawsuits, liens,
judgments, and government filings — Trump's companies have been cited 24 times
since 2005 for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, including 21 at the
Trump Plaza.
Current
cases against Trump include labor disputes in California, New York and Florida,
where hourly workers claim they were denied tips, barred from taking breaks and
left unpaid for thousands of dollars in paint work.
Edward
Friehl, who once hired an attorney to sue Trump, was ultimately advised that
the case would result in exorbitant legal fees far outweighing anything the
family might recoup. Devastated by the nonpayment, the company's finances fell
apart, Friehl struggled to find work in Atlantic City and the business went
bust within five years of working for Donald Trump.
Source: Philly
Voice
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