Word: trumps
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...elegance -- carved laurels in a window casement, a Victorian turret, delicate porch columns -- that lend the scene the haunted air of a horror-movie set. At times the Inlet seems just a bad joke. Standing over one bunker-style housing & project is a billboard touting one of developer Donald Trump's two casinos: TRUMP CASTLE. WHERE BETTER IS NOT ENOUGH. Just beyond the corner, in the distance, pokes the upswept prow of Trump's 282-ft. yacht, the Trump Princess, at which local kids like to throw rocks. Even Al Glasgow, who has knocked around Atlantic City for 18 years...
Gilliam-Mosee's job is to create some goodwill between the city and the casinos, a task that is just about impossible. The trouble is that the two centers of power have completely different visions for Atlantic City. At one extreme is Trump, who believes Atlantic City should be turned into a giant nonresidential entertainment park on the scale of Disneyland. At the other extreme is Benjamin Fitzgerald, the city clerk since 1985. "Does Trump think people in Atlantic City are going to be just like lemmings and go to the sea and drown?" asks Fitzgerald. "This is an industry...
Instead the casinos have sometimes behaved cavalierly -- even arrogantly -- toward their hosts. Under an early, vague requirement that casinos invest in Atlantic City, Caesars Atlantic City Hotel Casino tried to get credit for the $625,000 statue of Caesar Augustus that guards its entrance. Trump promised to build affordable homes in Atlantic City when he bought Resorts International Casino Hotel in 1987. Then last year he sold the casino to entertainer Merv Griffin, leaving Griffin with $925 million in debt. "I gave that obligation to Merv," says Trump now. "He got the debt, and he got the low-income housing...
...taken on in the past three years, much of it through junk bonds, either to fight off takeovers or engineer them. Atlantic City's casinos have incurred more than $2 billion in debt, $6 for every $1 of equity. Some analysts say that next year, with the opening of Trump's Taj Mahal, two of the weaker casinos may go under. "If they can't fend for themselves, how can they possibly meet the greater social goal of an urban renaissance?" asks Anthony Parrillo, director of New Jersey's division of gaming enforcement...
...same could be said about present-day Atlantic City, which is, above all, Trump's town, with a Trump Plaza, Trump Castle, Trump Princess and billboards all around the city trumpeting the message YOU'RE LOOKING VERY TRUMP TODAY. When his Aladdin-style Taj Mahal is completed next spring, Trump will control 31% of the city's gaming capacity, 39% of the first-class hotel rooms, 40% of the convention space, 35% of the parking spaces and almost half a mile of frontage along the five-mile Boardwalk. "I'll tell you, it's Big Business," he says, peering down...