The father of 2016 Republican party presidential candidate Donald Trump--Fred Trump [II]--apparently made a lot of money during the 1950's from his friendship with the Democratic Borough President of Brooklyn between 1940 and 1961,John Cashmore, to get the Democratic City government in NYC to purchase for a public housing project a parcel of Luna Park/Coney Island land in Brooklyn that Trump's father had previously purchased. As former Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett's 1992 book, Trump: The Deals and The Downfall, recalled:
"...Fred [Trump II] was one of a select number of [then- Democratic Brooklyn Borough President John] Cashmore friends to visit him periodically at his Park Slope home. When [then-Democratic NYC Mayor Robert] Wagner's Housing Authority chief, Warren Moscow, went to see Cashmore in 1955 to get him to support Authority projects on various Brooklyn sites, Cashmore had only one condition. `You've got to take care of my friend Fred Trump,' the borough president said. `I want you to talk about his site in Luna Park.'
"In the end, the City paid Trump $1.7 million for the parcel, giving him a $300,000 [equivalent to over $2.3 million in 2015 dollars] profit. Then Trump bought back a commercially zoned slice of the site, paying the City almost precisely the profit he'd taken on the overall deal. Fred [Trump] effectively got this prime property for nothing, and the 9-store shopping center he built there was an immediate gold mine, serving the 1,576-unit project that the Housing Authority soon opened next to it..."
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