A key tip on a story about Donald Trump’s underworld connections came from Trump himself
Reporting on the triangle between the entrepreneur, an FBI agent and an informant
For months, I have explored aspects of Donald Trump’s life, sifting through documents and talking to sources to get a sense of the man who might be president. In addition to writing stories, I was one of more than two dozen Post reporters, researchers and who contributed to “Trump Revealed,” The Post’s biography of the Republican nominee.
My latest story focuses on Trump’s association with people with connections to the criminal underworld during the early days of his career in New York and Atlantic City. A tip for it came from an unlikely source: Donald Trump himself.
It is the story about an odd triangle involving the entrepreneur, an FBI agent and an informant — a tale that offers new insights about methods Trump used as a young man to establish his real estate and casino empire.
My reporting began in the spring, after a conversation with my colleague Marc Fisher, co-author of “Trump Revealed.” He had heard that the FBI once interviewed a New York City official who was said to have made troubling claims about Trump around 1980.
Fisher told me there might be an FBI 302 — a report that agents write to document their interviews. Finding it down was a long shot, even if the tip were true and the 302 existed. But the claim was so potentially important that we had to try.
An old FBI contact in New York told me he had never heard of such an interview, but he offered the names of a couple of former agents who might know. When I tracked them down, they were equally unaware.
My contact said there was one more possibility: Trump had been friends with an FBI agent back in the day. Maybe he would know something. The agent’s name was Walt Stowe.
But there was a problem. How was I supposed to ask a friend of Trump about an allegation that could prove unflattering or possibly even damaging to his reputation? Facing a tight deadline, it quickly began to look like the tip was a bust, at least for the purposes of the biography.
Several weeks later, along with several colleagues, I was interviewing Trump about his career in New York and Atlantic City. We sat together in a glass conference room, conversing with Trump on speaker phone. We hoped to nail down details and seek new insights before filing our chapter feeds for “Trump Revealed.”
I asked Trump about a labor consultant and union activist he had relied on, a man named Daniel Sullivan who was known to be associated with organized crime figures. Trump’s tie to Sullivan had received media attention over the years, but I thought there might still be some loose ends to pursue.
Trump surprised me — and instantly took my reporting in another direction. He told an anecdote about Sullivan to justify their relationship more than three decades ago. Trump told us that Sullivan was a big story teller who liked to say how close he was to the FBI. Trump made it clear he had been skeptical. But then one day, he said, Sullivan arrived at his office with two FBI agents in tow.
“You know, they gave me their card and everything else. They were legitimately FBI agents. I said, ‘What do you think?’” Trump said. “They said, ‘This man is 100 percent clean, Mr. Trump. He’s beautiful.’ They really liked him. To be honest with you, if a guy walks into my office with two FBI agents, I think I remember it. You don’t [know] the names of these agents?”
“No,” I said. “But if you do, I would love to chat with them.”
“I’ll give you one. I think his name was Walt Stowe. S-t-o-w-e.”
The name had stuck with me. Reporters involved in long, enterprising stories hope for such serendipitous moments. You read mountains of documents, develop new sources, make your timelines and hope for insight. Then something pops onto the radar screen that starts to make sense — or at least provide a clearer path to follow.
A pattern had just revealed itself. And it carried a clear message: Find Walt Stowe. S-T-O-W-E.
With help from Washington Post researcher Alice Crites, I got a handful of possible phone numbers and email addresses linked to his name in various data systems. One cell phone number eventually connected me to Stowe, who was more than willing to chat.
I found out Stowe had risen through the ranks at the FBI, and then had a second career in the gaming industry. He seemed to like talking about his work as an undercover agent in New York, including investigating the mob, and he remembered fondly his “professional friendship” with Trump and Sullivan.
Stowe and I made a date to meet and talk more in Utah, where he would be on vacation. In the meantime, I obtained thousands of pages of court records from cases containing details about Trump, Sullivan and their relationship. I sought advice from investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who wrote a Trump biography and once worked for for the Village Voice. He recommended speaking with William Bastone, co-founder of The Smoking Gun.
Bastone had old FBI files relating to Sullivan, and he agreed to share them with The Post. It turned out that some of them were written in part by Stowe. They contained an unexpected amount of information about Trump and his businesses.
I also reached out to the New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission. Through the state’s open record law, I obtained hundreds of pages of commission documents that touch on Trump and Sullivan.
Reporting that began with a dead-end ultimately paid off with a story that illuminates some of the people with underworld connections that Trump relied on at a key juncture in his life to further and protect his business interests.
You can read my story here.
Robert O’Harrow Jr. is a reporter on the investigative unit of The Washington Post. He writes about law enforcement, national security, federal contracting and the financial world. Follow @robertoharrow
