Conquer Club

“As I was reading the indictment, the one thing I kept thinking was: ‘My God, this is some street-level mobster bulls**t,’” they said. “Two sets of books? That’s like ‘how to commit tax fraud 101’ at crime college.”

While many extremely online liberal commentators have long expected a Trump Organization indictment to include counts for exotic and rarely charged financial crimes, the 15-count indictment against Weisselberg and the Trump Organization lays out a relatively simple scheme. According to prosecutors, the company allegedly kept a separate set of financial records (an “internal spreadsheet”) that detailed funds used to pay for Weisselberg’s rent, car payment, and other personal expenses, but which were different than the records used to prepare tax returns for him and the company.

It’s a scheme that experts say has been used by countless defendants in countless tax fraud cases. And while Trump’s lawyers call the charges “unprecedented,” they would’ve been quite familiar to his most famous lawyer, the late Roy Cohn.

In the late 1970’s, Cohn defended Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager — the owners of New York’s Studio 54 nightclub (a famous Trump hangout) — against charges that they’d evaded taxes by skimming cash from the nightclub’s registers and keeping two separate sets of receipts: one that showed the whole amount of cash taken in each night, and one with the lesser amount which they used for tax purposes.

Nick Akerman — a former federal prosecutor who worked in the US Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York at the time Rubell and Schrager were prosecuted — said the scheme used by the Trump Organization and Weisselberg is similar to the one used by the infamous nightclub owners, as well as a large number of crooked restauranteurs who he prosecuted on the same kinds of charges.