In 2013, three years before Trump’s presidential victory, David Letterman asked him about it bluntly on his CBS talkshow. “Have you ever knowingly done business with organized crime?” the host asked. Trump grimaced, then said: “I’ve really tried to stay away from them as much as possible. “You know, growing up in New York and doing business in New York, I would say there might have been one of those characters along the way, but generally speaking I like to stay away from that group.” Then he added: “I have met on occasion a few of those people. They happen to be very nice people.” Trump’s characterization of New York crime families as “very nice people” might surprise those at the receiving end of Gambino racketeering, Lucchese loan sharking or Bonanno fraud. Not to mention the murders. But then Trump has a habit of seeing the good in those generally deemed beyond the pale. His remark about the mafia echoes his comment after the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed. Then, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides”. The mafia simile is not a purely stylistic matter for Trump, whose conversation with the Ukrainian president on 25 July reads in parts like a Martin Scorsese screenplay. “I would like you to do us a favor,” the US president said, encouraging Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Biden and saying of his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani: “I will get him to call you along with the attorney general.” As Trump suggested in his Letterman interview, he has in reality crossed paths with the New York mob. For example, the late Roy Cohn, a predecessor to Giuliani as Trump’s personal lawyer, had among his other clients the boss of the Genovese crime family, “Fat Tony” Salerno, and John Gotti of the Gambinos.“Are you talking to me?” says the ‘spray-tanned Samuel L Jackson’