You only need to lightly scrape the family tree of Donald Trump to find the ugly truth of where the family money originated. Trump isn’t alone. Most of the wealthiest of the wealthy have a closet full of skeletons, but Trump’s Grandpappy, or “The Fred” as he self-described, stands among the best of the bad.
Trump boasts about how rich he is in nearly every breath he takes. Yet, without his $3 billion hope chest, there is no way he would be as rich as he is today. In fact, he might not be rich at all. So how did Trump’s family have so much money to hand out to its descendants? It turns out that Grandpappy Trump built the family fortune on stolen land, fraud, booze, and hookers.
Fredrich Trump, one of 16 children, didn’t want to follow in the family business, so he left his widowed mother in the lurch and came to this country. He Americanized his name to Fredrick and went west – young man — to a red-light district in Seattle. According to Trump family biographer, Gwenda Blair:
“There he leased a tiny storefront restaurant named the Poodle Dog, which had a kitchen and a bar and advertised “private rooms for ladies”–code for prostitutes. It would allow the resourceful Trump, who renamed it the Dairy Restaurant, to offer the restless, frustrated public some right-now satisfaction in the form of food, booze and easily available sex.”
Trump followed the Chillkoot Trail, nicknamed the Drop Dead Trail, during the Klondike Gold Rush and met his business partner, Ernest Levin. The two set up the two-story New Arctic Restaurant and Hotel in Bennett Town, where they served up more than mashed potatoes to the gold-hungry passersby’s.
According to a posting in the Yukon Sun newspaper:
“I would advise respectable women traveling alone, or with an escort, to be careful in their selection of hotels at Bennett. For single men the Arctic has excellent accommodations as well as the best restaurant in Bennett, but I would not advise respectable women to go there to sleep as they are liable to hear that which would be repugnant to their feelings – and uttered, too, by the depraved of their own sex.”
Then, ahead of the curve as always, Trump saw that the path of the new railroad would bypass the little town. When the ice broke, the partners moved their whole hotel onto a boat and moved it to the next town on the railroad track, boomtown Whitehorse Rapids.
The hotel operated around the clock and served 3000 meals a day. Unfortunately, Trump’s partner started drinking and running up debts; and, at the same time, rumors rumbled that Whitehorse intended to crack down on “gambling, drinking, and prostitution,” the very business they were operating. Not only that, the gold rush was on its way out.
Just three years after he came to the west, he declared himself not responsible for any of his partner’s debts and skipped town with enough money to bankroll himself in another startup. He traveled to Germany to find a wife, then he turned to New York City. His first-born, Fred Jr., made hundreds of millions as a real-estate magnate.
His son, Donald, inherited his grandpappy’s ability to see around corners. He built his golden empire in that same city, bankrolled by the blood, sweat, and tears of the less fortunate.
Featured image: Uphere
