Former President Donald Trump thanked Salvatore “Sammy The Bull” Gravano over social media for an interview in which the notorious former Mafia underboss seemingly vouched for Trump’s moral character.
Gravano never managed to rope Trump into his illegal schemes, he said in an undated interview Trump posted to his platform Truth Social.
As a 1980s real estate mogul, Trump surrounded himself with former FBI-officers for security, according to the ex-mobster.
“I tried a couple times to press him, and make arrangements where I could work with him. I did that with other big contractors. I had the power of the unions. I could do all kinds of little things, but I couldn’t get to him. He wouldn’t bite,” Gravano said in the clip.
A headline over the clip read: “THIS IS WHY WASHINGTON HATES HIM.”
“Thank you to Sammy the Bull,” Trump wrote Friday, after a week of dealing with his myriad legal problems in the run-up to Iowa’s Republican caucuses.
Referencing his New York lawsuits, Trump added: “I hope Judges Engoron & Kaplan see this. We need fairness, strength and honesty in our New York Courts. We don’t have it now!”
Judge Arthur Engoron is in charge of Trump’s civil real estate fraud case. Judge Lewis Kaplan oversees writer E. Jean Carroll’s latest defamation suit against Trump, which is set to go to trial next week.
Gravano infamously turned on his boss — the original “Teflon Don,” John Gotti — to become a witness for the government in the early 1990s, helping put Gotti behind bars until his death. Trump earned the same nickname during his political career for repeatedly managing to survive scandal after scandal that would likely sink other elected officials.
After serving his time in prison, Gravano has appeared in documentaries about the Mafia and launched his own true crime podcast, where he also talked about the former president.
“Trump ran around in some different circles all over the place,” Gravano said in an episode last year.
“He was very wealthy. Came from a very wealthy family. Not self-made. His father was a heavyweight construction guy with a ton of fucking money, and a ton of connections with the government. And you start getting people that connected — fucking with them is not a smart move. Trying to shake them down is not a smart move.”
From his new home in Phoenix, Arizona, Gravano has publicly admitted to being involved in 19 homicides, including “a few” in which he personally killed someone — explaining in a November interview with AZ Family, a local news station: “When I’m ordered to kill, I kill.”
