John Walter

• 1990: Ivana Trump told a journalist that Walters used to greet Trump at the office with a click of the heels and a cry of "Heil Hitler." “A story by Marie Brenner in the next edition of Vanity Fair reportedly will tell how Donald Trump appears to take some aspects of his German background seriously. When Trump employee John Walter visits the boss in his office, Ivana says, he clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a joke.” (Miami Herald, August 8, 1990)
• John Walter was a cousin of Donald Trump who worked for the family business run by Donald’s father, Fred. “Fred was also protective of other members of his family, including John Walter, who received a 20 percent share of the proceeds from All County Building Supply & Maintenance. Donald also watched out for his cousin. In the early 1980s, he insisted that Alan Lapidus, architect of Trump’s first Atlantic City casino, Trump Plaza, use Walter as a security consultant on the project despite Lapidus's objection that Walter, who he found ‘brusque,’ had ‘no discernible credentials in this field.’ In turn, Lapidus said, Walter looked out for Donald and told Lapidus to install video cameras over the women's stalls in the count-room because ‘the women have twice as many places to stash the cash as the men.’” (Politico, October 7, 2018)
• Walter, a cousin of Donald Trump through his Aunt Elizabeth, was also the man who stored the financial records that exposed family tax fraud. “Walter, as any Trumpologist knows, was the self-appointed family historian and enjoyed sharing family lore and memorabilia with journalists. He had assumed this role by virtue of his close relationship to the family: He was the son of Fred Trump’s older sister, Elizabeth, who had herself served as Fred Trump’s bookkeeper early in his career as a builder and developer. When I was working on my Trump family biography in the 1990s, I met with Walter in a modest office that was down the hall from Fred’s own longtime quarters at Beach Haven, a government-subsidized apartment complex near Coney Island that Fred had built nearly half a century earlier. Walter, it seemed to me, doled out bits of info in a somewhat gloating way.” (Politico, October 7, 2018)
• John Walter maintained the tax records that indicated the Trump family had engaged in a massive tax fraud scheme. “Nearly 8,000 words into its exhaustive investigation of the elaborate and allegedly illegal schemes by which Donald Trump’s father conserved his wealth and promoted the myth of his son as a self-made billionaire, the New York Times revealed the existence of a sham business the Trump family used to hide massive gifts from Fred Trump to his children, saving himself millions in federal taxes. The company was called All County Building Supply & Maintenance and it was created in 1992 for the purpose of providing inflated invoices to contractors for Fred Trump’s sprawling real estate holdings in Brooklyn and Queens. ‘All County had no corporate offices,’ the Times reporters wrote. ‘Its address was the Manhasset, N.Y., home of John Walter, a favorite nephew of Fred Trump’s. Mr. Walter, who died in January at the age of 83, spent decades working for Fred Trump, primarily helping computerize his payroll and billing systems. He also was the unofficial keeper of Fred Trump’s personal and business papers, his basement crowded with boxes of old Trump financial records.’” (Politico, October 7, 2018)