Mafia-linked labor racketeer John Cody must have been making a few more rollicking rolls in his grave on Tuesday.
Cody was head of Teamsters Local 282 back in the '80s when Donald Trump was building the Fifth Avenue tower he named after himself.
Thanks to Cody, Trump Tower was the only construction site in New York that remained open when the Teamsters mounted a citywide strike.
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Trump made no mention of Cody or the strike when he reminisced about his own construction days in a speech Tuesday before a crowd of union workers at the site of a multibillion-dollar petrochemical plant being built in Pennsylvania. He rhapsodized about his dealings with the Teamsters back in the day.
“They would drive those cement trucks up to my building and those trucks were always on time, and sometimes they were lined up for six blocks,” Trump said.
Actually, the trucks were sometimes suddenly not there at all. As Cody’s son, Michael, recalled in a 2017 interview with The Daily Beast, “Any time Trump didn’t do what he was told, my father would shut down his job for the day. No deliveries; 400 guys sitting around.”
Michael Cody recalled he was with his father during one shutdown when Trump called, begging to have the site reopened.
“Whatever you say, John,” Trump said by the son’s recollection.
The son also heard Trump tell his father, “Anything for you, John.”
Michael Cody recalled, “My father walked all over him.”
The son described Trump as, “a guy who would talk tough, but as soon as you confronted him, he would cry like a little girl. He was all talk, no action.”
When Trump Tower opened, a woman who was close to Cody had title to a pair of apartments worth as much as $10 million that were directly below Trump’s penthouse.
“I believe he slept there now and again,” Michael Cody said of his father and the apartments.
The son said John Cody made his continued power known when Trump’s then-wife, Ivana, hired a contractor to paint their apartment.
“My father found out,” Michael Cody remembered. “He said, ‘No, no, you don’t do that.’ They had to hire who my father told them to hire.”
After Cody was convicted of racketeering and tax evasion in 1984, then forced out of his union position two years later, Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to evict the imprisoned labor leader’s lady friend. Trump began speaking of Cody much as he later would of Felix Sater and other people with whom he did not want to be associated.
“I didn’t really know him,” Trump said on more than one occasion. “He was a bad guy.”
After Trump was elected president, Michael Cody said his father, “must be rolling in his grave, laughing.” The son figured John Cody was doing more of the same after Trump’s speech on Tuesday at the Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex, in which our president reminisced so fondly about his dealings with the Teamsters in New York.
“That’s funny,” Michael Cody told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.
The son suggested that his father might have proven useful if he were still around.
“He’s the only one who could control that Trump,” Michael Cody said.
The son noted that Trump seems to have adopted some of his father’s bearing since those days of “whatever you say, John... anything for you, John.”
“I wonder if Trump learned his swagger from my father,” Michael Cody said. “My father was a bully for people like Trump. I’m guessing Trump learned a thing or two from him.”
