MADE IT, MA! TOP O' THE WORLD!

So Mike Pence wants a permanent American presence on the Moon, does he?  How about a penal colony, whose first inmates could be members of the Trump crime family?  Better build it fast, though.

Donald Trump has always been shady, and now, as his alibis turn to ashes and his legal options dwindle, he’s begun talking like a mobster. Since he pretty much is a mobster, talking like one isn’t a big stretch.  He’s even tweeted sympathetically about Al Capone.  The G-Men could never convict Capone on any of his manly gangster crimes.  Instead, the poor fellow had to do time in Alcatraz for income tax evasion.  Witch hunt!

When Michael Cohen turned on him, Trump exposed his criminal mindset by calling his former fixer a rat.  Not a liar, mind you, but a snitch.  He complained to Fox & Friends that it was unfair that small time crooks were encouraged to inform on their bosses in return for lighter sentences.  Paul Manafort, though – now there’s a stand-up guy.  Trump praises the grifters and con artists in his Cabinet, but complains bitterly about his own appointees in the Justice (or “Justice”) Department who are actually behaving honorably.  He’s trying to run the American government like a crime family.

Maybe that’s not surprising, since Trump has been around crime figures all his life.  I poked around and found some fascinating links between the New York Mafia’s Five Families in the 1970s and Trump’s contemporary legal difficulties.

I’ll start with Carlo Gambino, the most powerful organized crime figure in the country in the early 70s.  In 1973, a small-time crook named James McBratney murdered his nephew.  Murdering relatives of Mafia dons is not the key to living a long life, and it wasn’t long before McBratney was gunned down in a bar. There were several witnesses, all of whom identified John Gotti as one of the shooters.  He and an accomplice were charged with murder.

Enter Roy Cohn, hired by Gambino to defend the killers.  Remarkably, Cohn negotiated the charge down to attempted manslaughter.  I guess you could argue that there was indeed an attempt to slaughter a man, although usually when those attempts are successful, it’s called murder.  Be that as it may, Gotti was sentenced to four years in prison and was paroled after serving two.  We’ll pick up his story shortly. 

Roy Cohn was a man of many parts, all of them bad.  He was Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel in the 1950s, and abetted McCarthy’s attempt to purge the government of suspected communists and homosexuals.  The “communists” were mostly imaginary, but the lives of many gay men were ruined during the “lavender scare” of the early 50s. 

After McCarthy’s career went down in flames, Cohn moved to New York and became a lawyer/fixer for the rich and powerful, one of whom was Donald Trump.  Trump’s corporation violated the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent space in their 39 apartment buildings to African Americans.  Cohn and Trump lost that case, but Cohn proved helpful to Trump in other ways.  Among other things, Cohn introduced Trump to Rupert Murdoch, the man who is responsible for Fox News, which is where Trump gets most of his fake news and bad advice.  Cohn was eventually disbarred for a variety of unethical and unprofessional acts. 

Interestingly for a guy who was so publicly homophobic, Cohn himself contracted AIDS in the 80s, and died of the disease.  His pal Roger Stone insists that “Roy wasn’t gay.  He was a man who liked having sex with men.”  That seems like a distinction without a difference.  Roger Stone is another guy who became a friend of the Donald.  Stone acknowledges that he’s likely to be charged in connection with the Trump-Russia collusion scandal. 

As for John Gotti, he returned to the Gambino family when he got out of prison, and found that it was riven by factional disputes.  Carlo Gambino had died while Gotti was in prison, and had named his brother-in-law, Paul Castellano, as his successor.  There were other claimants to the throne, and Gotti sided with them.  He was an ambitious guy, and in 1985, he made his move.  He put a hit on Castellano and became the new head of the Gambino crime family.

Unlike his peers in Mafia leadership, Gotti enjoyed publicity, and was lionized by the New York tabloids as “the dapper Don” and “the Teflon Don.”  He lost his Teflon in the early 90s when he ran into the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, a fellow named Robert Mueller.  Mueller was appointed as the Director of the FBI in 2001, while Gotti died in prison in 2002.    

Al Capone didn’t die in prison.  Frank Nitti and the Chicago Outfit were getting along just fine without him, and Capone was in no shape to run a criminal empire in any event.   By the time he was paroled in 1939, he was suffering from late-stage syphilis.  His doctors said he had the mentality of a 12-year-old.  And that brings us nearly full circle.  Capone knew he was sick, and spent the last years of his life in various care facilities. 

Our guy with the mentality of a 12-year-old has no such self-awareness.  He wants a wall, a parade, a Space Force, and now, apparently, a moon colony.  He probably won’t have much luck with those. 

But what he wants most is to dominate people, and as president, he has the power to do a lot of damage.  Because he has the mentality of a 12-year-old boy, he’ll screw it up, but the next few months are likely to be a rough ride.  Buckle your seatbelts, everyone.