Trump in history

Business Insider

I've never been to New York City, but as a young man in the 1960s I used to buy the Village Voice at City Lights bookstore in North Beach. 

That's how I first learned about Donald Trump many years ago, probably from something written by Wayne Barrett:

In 1978, when then–Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett requested several thousand pages of records from the State Urban Development Corporation, the staff there set him up in a conference room so he could review them on site. He sat down alone, at a long table with stacks of papers, and began plowing through them.

Barrett was only 33 years old at the time. He’d been on staff at the Voice for less than a year, but the story he was chasing, about a series of multimillion-dollar real estate transactions, was a big one.

Some of the city’s most prominent power brokers were involved — including former New York mayor Abe Beame — and at the center was a brash young developer named Donald Trump.

As Barrett was sitting alone at the table doing his research, he was surprised when a nearby phone began to ring. “I didn’t know whether to pick it up or not,” Barrett says today. He couldn’t imagine who might be on the other end; no one but a few government employees could have possibly known he was even in that office. 

But after a few rings he lifted the receiver and heard an unfamiliar voice. “Wayne!” Barrett says, his voice booming, taking on Trump’s now unmistakable accent. “It’s Donald! I hear you’re doing a story on me!."

"I’d never talked to the guy in my life."

Though he’d been working on the story for several months, he hadn’t yet approached Trump. He was “circling,” as he puts it today, determined to have his ducks in a row by the time he sat down with his subject.

It was Trump’s way of letting him know he was keeping an eye on him, Barrett says. After all, the story he was working on, which would land Trump on our cover in January of 1979, wearing a sneer and a mop of brown hair, was the first detailed examination of Trump’s business practices to appear in the press. And the results weren’t pretty....