Atlantic City: Weak from heart surgery and a sepsis infection that would soon kill her, Patricia Paone was resting at home last summer when an apparition appeared on the TV - a famous businessman who had struck a deal with her husband years before.
“He's a crook!” she roared, according to a son who was with her that day. “I can't listen to this.”
A quarter of a century had passed since Donald Trump refused to pay $1.2 million for the paving stones her late husband installed at Atlantic City's Taj Mahal casino. But for Paone and others like her — the dozens of contractors and their families who never got all they were owed — it could have happened yesterday.
The contractor who provided the onion domes atop the Taj had to eat $2 million in losses. The contractor who supplied the Carrara marble from Italy ended up filing for personal bankruptcy. The contractor who put in the bathroom partitions had to lay off his brother.
“Anytime I went to Atlantic City and I'd see that Trump sign, I'd think of the little guys,” says bankruptcy lawyer Arthur Abramowitz who worked with contractors for years after the casino itself went bankrupt. “It wasn't just the money; a lot of these guys went into depression.”
After the Taj opened in April 1990, the self-anointed “King of Debt” owed $70 million to 253 contractors.
