About all those other taxes he supposedly paid

Back in 1986 and likely for many years before, Donald Trump colluded in tax evasion with Bulgari Jewelry Store in New York, a high-end posh location with tony clientele right out ofLifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Here’s how the scam worked:

Trump would go into the store with his wife, his girlfriend, his…whatever (to use his vernacular). He would then buy her an expensive necklace or wristwatch. Normally, such a transaction would face the New York city and state sales tax, which would be pretty high on luxury jewelry.

In an illegal attempt to evade the tax, Trump “asked” the store to instead ship the jewelry to an out of state location, where no New York sales tax could be collected. In fact, the store would merely send an empty jewelry box to the location, while Trump and his lady friends walked out the door with the jewelry that very day.

The state and city tax collectors eventually caught onto this scheme, and Trump promptly testified against his erstwhile tax evasion colluding partners at the jewelry store in order to save his own skin.

The empty box scam is just the most colorful example of Trump’s history of crossing the line from legal tax avoidance to illegal tax evasion. Many other such stories can be told about his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida by local reporterFrank Cerabino.

The first Palm Beach story is interesting. Trump bought the property from the estate of breakfast cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. He got it for a relative bargain at $7.5 million, something he bragged about in The Art of the Deal. Yet he refused for years to pay local property taxes on the actual value of the property, $11.5 million at the time he bought it. He tried to have it both ways–buy the property for a steep discount and also pay property taxes at that under-valued level.

Try that with your town’s property tax assessor sometime and see what he says.