Cash payments allegedly smoothed way to jobs at Trump Tower
NEW YORK — Six years after George Gjieli left federal prison, where he’d been sent for trying to break out a triple murderer, Donald Trump gave him a job running Trump Tower, where the billionaire businessman lived and worked.
For a decade, the Albanian immigrant, whom federal prosecutors had described as having “utter disdain for the laws of our country,” was the live-in residential superintendent of Trump’s most prized Manhattan high-rise.
Trump himself has said he cares more about his supervisors’ ability to get things done than their tactics or pasts, writing approvingly in his best-selling “Art of the Deal” about a “con man” project manager who probably stole $50,000 annually from the company, including from his secretaries’ funeral fund used to buy flowers.
In a close-knit service industry, word of Gjieli’s influence spread, drawing in workers like Gabriel Mitrea, who recalled in an interview taking the elevator up to Gjieli’s Trump Tower office in the late 1990s with $2,000 cash in an envelope to secure a doorman job at a non-Trump-owned building near Central Park.