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READ THIS. list

1 Donald Trumps History of Schemes
OLIVIA NUZZI, GIDEON RESNICK

2 Cleared by DNA, Prosecuted Again Anyw

CHRISTOPHER MORAFF

3 When A Kid Dreams of Being an Account

PROFILES IN MOTION

4 Was Carla Bruni The Donalds Waterloo?

DANA KENNEDY

5 Trumps Blue-Collar Con

BETSY WOODRUFF, TIM MAK

UNJUST

CHRISTOPHER
MORAFF

03.09.16 10:15 PM ET

Cleared by DNA in Murder, Prosecuted

Again Anyway
Anthony Wright spent 23 years in prison before new evidence revealed another man
raped the woman he was accused of killing. Despite that, and a questionable
confession, hes been put on trial again for the same crime.
PHILADELPHIA For more than two decades prosecutors in Philadelphia
were convinced they knew exactly what happened to Louise Talley, who was
murdered inside her home in 1991.

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A BRIDGE TO SELL YOU

WRITTEN BY
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03.09.16 10:03 PM ET

A Brief History of Donald Trumps

Get-Rich Schemes
If you can consume it, Donald Trump has probably tried to sell it to youincluding his
presidential campaign.
At its core, the Art of the Scheme is that hell get rich by promising to make you
rich.
Throughout his decades-long business career, Donald Trump has launched a
series of businesses that follow this model, with his presidential campaign being
the latest. But in between founding phony universities and multi-levelmarketing scams, Trump has also fallen victim to many of his own plainly
stupid ideas.
And, apparently, its a sore subject.
Forty seconds into his victory speech in Jupiter, Florida Tuesday night, just
after winning the Mississippi and Michigan primaries and a few hours before he
would win Hawaii, Trump interrupted the scheduled programming for a word
from the nights sponsor: Donald Trump.
Its really wonderful to have you at Trump National Golf Club! he said. Jack
Nicklaus did this. Its a Jack Nicklaus signature course and its a great, great
resort and place and we have a lot of our members here, I see, we love our
members!
At a table off to the side of the stage, Trump branded wines, water, and raw
steaks were strewn about on a white tablecloth.
They were props that served a strategic purpose.
Five days earlier, on March 3, Mitt Romney had spent close to 20 minutes
reaming Trump, from a stage in Utah, for his lack of statesmanlike qualities.
Trump, Romney said, has few specific plans to follow through on his promise to
Make America Great Again! and the plans he does have are either idiotic or
dangerous for the country.
But none of those criticisms seemed to bother Trump much.
It was something else that Romney said that got under his naturally sun-kissed
skin.
You say, wait, wait, wait, isnt he a huge business success? Doesnt he know
what hes talking about? Romney said. No he isnt and no he doesnt!
The crowd cheered.

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University? And then theres Trump Magazine and Trump Vodka and Trump
steaks and Trump mortgage. A business genius he is not.
And so Trump laid out the raw meat and the Trump-branded alcohol and the
cases of water in plastic bottles bearing his name.
I have very successful companies, Trump told the audience.

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Well, theres the water company! We

sell water and we have water and its a
very successfulyou know, its a
private, little water company and I
supply the water for all my places and

its good, but its very good, Trump said.

Trump Natural Spring Water, according to Trumps website, is one of the
purest natural spring waters bottled in the world and its proudly served at
Trump Hotels, Restaurants and Golf Clubs worldwide.
But, as Times Zeke Miller pointed out, the label on Trump Natural Spring
Water suggests its bottled by Village Springs Water, located in the pristine
hills of Willington, Connecticut.
Trump didnt dwell on that detail.
Trump steaks! he said, moving on.
Where are the steaks? Do we have the steaks? We have Trump steaks. He said
the company! And we have Trump steaks! And by the way, if you want to take
one, well charge you, what, about 50 bucks a steak.
Trump Steaks hit the market in 2007, via The Sharper Image catalogue. When
it comes to great steaks, Ive just raised the stakes! Trump said in an ad at the
time. Trump Steaks are the worlds greatest steaks and I mean that in every
sense of the word!
Trump Steaks are, by far, the best-tasting, most flavorful beef youve ever had!
Reviewers, on QVC.com, where Trump steaks were also sold, disagreed, calling
them extremely greasy and tasteless and mealy.
However they tasted, nobody in Jupiter, Florida Tuesday night found out,
perhaps because Trump Steaks were discontinued in 2014. Sharper Images
website says they are no longer available but their legacy endures.
The steaks on display were purchased from a local vendor, the Bush
Brothersno affiliation with Jeb (!). The label from the company was
conspicuously left on the packaging. But apparently to Trump, any steak in his
general vicinity qualifies as a Trump Steak. He continued to assert that they
were Trump Steaks during an interview with Anderson Cooper on Wednesday
night.

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sell steaks to Trump properties on a daily basis. He was unclear as to how

Trump had used their product to promote himself on Tuesday.
Trump didnt mention it.
We have Trump Magazine! he said.
He walked offstage, out of the shot of the camera, and grabbed a glossy
magazine that was not called Trump Magazine.
He said Trump Magazine is out! I said, it is? I thought I read one two days
ago. He held it up in the air. This comes out and its called The Jewel of Palm
Beach, it goes to all my clubs. Ive had it for many years and itsthe magazine
is great. Anybody want one?
He tossed the magazine out into the audience.
The Jewel of Palm Beach, an annual publication published by Palm Beach
Media Group (which NPR reported Trump does not appear to own) and
described as the exclusive publication of Donald J. Trumps spectacular
Mar-a-Lago Club is not the Trump Magazine that Romney was talking about.
Trump Magazine, a quarterly that sold for $5.95, launched in 1998, according
to the New York Daily News. Its creative director, Aaron Sigmond, described it
as wealth porn, an aspirational publication for people who wished to live like
Trump.
It folded in 2009.
So, Trump said, and the airline! By the way, I sold the airline I actually
made a great deal, complicated and in really terrible times, the economy was
horrible, and I made a phenomenal deal. I had the shuttle, and I sold it!
In 1988, Trump acquired a fleet of 22 aircrafts from Eastern Airlines for $365
million and decked them out in classic Trump style, even requiring his female
flight attendants to donn (faux) pearls. According to a Daily Beast report from
October, sources close to Trump at the time of his aviation experiment said he
seemed less interested in the inner workings of the business than in what it
could do for his brand.
And in the end, it didnt even do much for that.
Trump defaulted on Trump Shuttles debt and, in 1991, sold the company to
U.S. Air.
In his 2008 book, Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into
Success, he wrote that I knew it could be successful but admitted, it never
turned a proper profit.
If Trump couldnt have his own shuttle, he was determined to have his own
travel agency.

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Trump style.
According to a 2011 Rolling Stone report, the site promised a 120 percent price
guarantee on certain hotel deals offered up by the Donald himself.
Trumps own sell for GoTrump reads like a preview for his campaign speeches.
I love to negotiate, he boasted on the companys website. And when I
negotiate, I make sure that I get the best deal out there. At GoTrump.com, you
will get the lowest online rate on a wide variety of flights, hotels, and travel
packages. With over 60,000 hotels worldwide to choose fromthe selection is
tremendous. There is no arguing with a great dealbecause in the endit is all
about the Art of the Travel Deal.
Tamar Niv Bessinger, the trademark lawyer associated with this site, as well as
many of Trumps other failed endeavors, didnt offer any insight on the project.
When The Daily Beast tried to contact her and ask about GoTrump specifically
she said Im going to stop you right there: no comment.
GoTrump.com shut down only a year after it began, in 2007. The website
currently redirects to DonaldJTrump.com, the digital home of his presidential
campaign.
And by the way, Trump said, Trump University? Were holding it, when I win
the lawsuitwhich Ill win, he trailed off.
So, were putting it on hold and if I become president that means Ivanka, Don,
Eric, and my family will start it up, but we have a lot of great people who want
to get back into Trump University. Its gonna do very well!
Trump University was founded in 2005, a for-profit online school that sold
courses$300 each, on CD-ROMon entrepreneurship, real estate, and
marketing. The idea was to capitalize on the success of The Apprentice, which a
year earlier had become one of NBCs highest rated shows, and, at least
according to Trump and his faculty at the time, to remodel education for the
digital age.
But things soon went awry, and, according to what one former Trump
University professor told The Daily Beast, Trump shifted his focus away from
online curricula and to expensive real estate seminars. By 2010, Trump
University was forced to change its name to the Trump Entrepreneur Initiative,
and then it ceased operations altogether.
Today, Trump University is the subject of three major lawsuits: two class action
suits in California, one of which will go to trial, with Trump as a witness, this
spring or summer, and a $40 million civil suit brought by Eric Schneiderman,
New Yorks Attorney General.
By the way, the wineryyou see the wine, cause he mentioned Trump Vodka.
Its the largest winery on the East Coast, I own it 100 percent, no mortgage, no

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in the United States, he died and he built one of the great vineyards of all time.
Theres nothing like it. Close to two thousand acres. Its in Charlottesville,
Virginia, right next to the Thomas Jefferson memorial and were very proud of
it, we make the finest wine, as good a wine as you can get anywhere in the
world.
I believe, he added, repeating himself, its the largest vineyard and the largest
winery on the East Coast!
Trump Vodka went on the market in 2006. Its slogan was Success Distilled.
According to Time, Trump promised that the Trump and tonic and Trump
martini would become the most popular drinks in American bars.
Trump Vodka stopped production in 2011. In 2012, Trump purchased the
Charlottesville, Virginia, estate of John Kluge, for less than $10 million, despite
its value of $60 million. The estate came with a winery, and now interested
parties can purchase the Trump 2008 Sparkling Reserve for just $50.
Throughout the course of his campaign for the Republican presidential
nomination, almost no Trump speech or rally has resembled a standard
political event.
While others talk in churches and school auditoriums, Trump lures tens of
thousands into stadiums that are usually home to concerts and monster truck
rallies.
And while most candidates use their time in front of an audience to paint their
vision, usually in at least some detail, for the countrys future, Trump tends to
ramble semi-coherently about his own greatness.
But it wasnt until Tuesday night that a Trump speech had crossed over
completely into the realm of late night infomercials and home shopping
network programming, rehashing his decade-plus career of selling hunks of
beef and college degrees.
And Trumps speech didnt even cover most of the half-baked, get-rich-quick
plans hes birthed over the last few decades.
Theres a litany of other ideas he trademarked and later abandoned, including
but not limited to: Trump Super Speedway, a potential NASCAR-like race track
in New York; Trump Power, a line of carbonated non-alcoholic fruit drinks; The
Trump Executive Collection, described as a set of toys (primarily die-cast
vehicles); Trump Follies, an entertainment service that was going to feature live
comedic performances and theatrical shows; Trump Mortgage, which sunk in
2007 after a year in the hands of a neophyte Wall Street broker; and The Trump
Network, a multi-level marketing scheme that Trump launched in 2009, at the
height of the financial crisis.
The Trump Network wants to give millions of people renewed hope and with
an exciting plan to opt out of the recession! He said in a promotional ad for the

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wellness formulas and a system where you can develop your own financial
independence.

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But theyre willing to stake the integrity of the American justice system on their
belief that Anthony Wright had something to do with it.
Last week, Wright went on trial a second time on charges that he murdered the
77-year-old widow during a drug-fueled burglary. A jury found Wright guilty of
murder in 1993 and he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the
possibility of parole, narrowly escaping the death penalty. Wright spent the next
23 years in prison before DNA evidence proved that another man was
responsible for the crime.
Yet Wright is back on trial for the same murder today.
A judge vacated Wrights conviction in 2014, but now hes being tried again for
the same crime. (Since a jury did not acquit Wright of murder in the first place,
the Constitutions prohibition on double jeopardy cant protect him.) Now the
Philadelphia District Attorneys office led by Seth Williams argues that Wright
must have had an accomplice who left the incriminating DNA.
That man was Ronnie Byrd, a former crackhead who had racked up a long list of
felonies including convictions for assault, robbery, and receiving stolen
property before he died in prison in 2013.
Having tried and failed to put Wright away for life without scientific evidence,
the DA is trying again.
A spokesperson for the district attorneys office refused to comment on the case,
citing agency policy. Wrights attorneys did not return phone messages seeking
their input. However, Bradley Bridge, a veteran attorney with the Defender
Association of Philadelphia who represented Wright as a juvenile, spoke to The
Daily Beast about the case and said the DAs inconsistencies are troubling.

They advanced one theory for decades, discovered that its undercut by the
science, and now theyre advancing a different theory, which is totally at odds

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stretching to come up with a theory of this case that isnt supported by the
evidence.
In fact, the DAs office was so hell-bent on keeping Wright in prison that it
fought to prevent DNA testing from even taking place originally. It took
attorneys from the Innocence Project at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in
New York nine years of legal wrangling (all the way up to the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court) to get prosecutors to drop their objections.
For all the controversy surrounding Wrights retrial, its undisputed that Talley
met a horrifically violent end. According to court records, when police entered
her home on Oct. 19, 1991 at the behest of concerned family members, they
found the property had been ransacked. The victims body was discovered on
the second floor, naked, and lying face down in her bed. An empty blood-soaked
purse was found beneath her body. On the floor next to Talley police retrieved a
bloody kitchen knife from inside the folds of her discarded bathrobe.
The medical examiner would later rule that Talley died as a result of blunt force
trauma and multiple stab wounds on her neck, chest, and back. A semen stain
on her sheets indicated she had been raped before she died, investigators said.
Wright was brought in next morning for questioning. If police are to be
believed, he waived his Miranda rights and provided a full confession all within
the time it takes to watch an episode-and-a-half of Law & Order. The nine-page
statement he signed describes in detail how he forced Talley to strip, raped her,
and then stabbed her when she began to struggle. As all this was going on,
Talley was begging him not to hurt her, according to the statement.
Wright recanted the confession at trial, claiming he had been handcuffed to a
chair by police and forced to sign it without reading it. Wrights interrogation
was not recorded, and the only witnesses were the detectives asking the
questionsthe ones Wright says promised to skullfuck him if he didnt
cooperate.
In 1993 a judge denied a motion by Wrights court-appointed lawyer to
suppress the confession, on the grounds that it was given voluntarily.
Astoundingly, the judge overseeing Wrights case, Sandy L.V. Byrd (no relation
to Ronnie Byrd), ruled to allow the confession as evidence in his current case.
The DNA evidence proves that significant portions of Wrights questionable
confession could not have happened as described.
While the original investigation said it discovered semen on Talleys sheets,
follow-up testing showed there was none present on items retrieved from the
bed. Instead, ejaculate was found inside Talleys vagina and rectum (where the
medical examiner failed to discover it the first time). Most importantly, DNA
from the semen matched with Byrd and excluded Wright.
Whats more, the prosecutions smoking gunclothing items long believed to
have been worn by the killerturned out upon further inspection to be less than

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Wrights confession described the clothes he was wearing at the alleged time he
killed Talley as a black Chicago Bulls sweatshirt, a pair of blue jeans, and Fila
sneakers. Detectives testified that they recovered these items from Wrights
home the day of his arrest and that they were spattered with blood. Wright and
his mother have long maintained the items werent his, and sophisticated
testing failed to turn up any of his DNA inside the clothing. Instead
investigators found forensic evidence suggesting that the clothes belonged to
Talley, not her murderer.
Marissa Boyers Bluestine, legal director of the Pennsylvania Innocence Project
at Temple University, said the district attorneys office will need to articulate
how it made such a profound error about such an important piece of evidence.
On the one hand, it seems highly unlikely that the police walk into a crime
scene, take clothing away and plant it on him, she told The Daily Beast. But
there are host of questions there. Were talking about clothing that we now
know was not Mr. Wrights. To be honest I can not come up with a sustainable
narrative to explain it.
The clothing evidence is so integral to the prosecutions case against Wright
that last Wednesday the DAs office asked for a continuance so it could test a
single strand of hair that was only recently discovered in the sweatshirt. Even if
that hair turned out to be Wrights, the absence of his DNA as a dominant
source on the clothes is problematic given the prosecutions original narrative.
One would expect to find the suspects wearer DNA on contact points tested
unless a barrier such as under clothing prevented a transfer of skin cells to the
garment, said Joe Minor, a former forensic supervisor at the Tennessee Bureau
of Investigation who now consults on DNA evidence.
The absence of a single mention of Byrd in Wrights confession suggests either
the person who concocted the statement didnt know the man existed, or
Wright purposely left Byrd out when writing the nine-page statement and took
the full blame in a murder case where the death penalty was likely.
For his part Wright insists he never knew Byrd and since the time of his trial
has steadfastly proclaimed he is innocent. Yet theres still the perplexing
question of why a 20-year-old with presumably nothing lose would sign what
could have amounted to his own death warrant. Wright was facing capital
murder charges; a deadlocked jury during the sentencing phase of his trial
spared him from that fate.
Talley was murdered in the Tioga-Nicetown neighborhood, where drug gangs
competed for influence with cadres of corrupt cops as the city notched more
than 500 murders. The precincts narcotics unit was overseen by supervisors
known on the street as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They were later
convicted of shaking down so many drug dealers, planting so much evidence,
and cracking so many skulls that hundreds of drug cases would later be

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The attitude of most Philly cops in the 1980s and 1990s was summed up in a
statement by Officer Christopher Rudy, who was on duty when he helped a
friend violently settle a personal dispute in 1993.
Im a cop. Aint nothing going to happen.
Three years before Talleys murder, Wright broke Officer Bohndan Fylystyns
nose and jaw with a piece of lumber, also knocking out several teeth.
Despite calls to try Wright as an adult for the assault, Bridge (his public
defender) managed to keep his case in juvenile court and secured for his client a
sentence that colleagues of Fylystyn no doubt considered too lenient: two years
in a wilderness boot-camp program.
Its unknown if the detectives who questioned Wright in connection with
Talleys murder knew Fylystyn, but breaking a police officers face in Philly does
not go unnoticed by his brothers.
So its almost no wonder that police zeroed in on Wright as a suspect in Talleys
murder before they had even left the crime scene.
Officers testified in 1993 that they received a tip that the man responsible for
the murder could be found at a house on the street just behind Talleys that had
recently become a source of drug activity.
Over the next 12 hours homicide detectives would detain and question that
homes owner, Roland Saint James, who admitted to operating a crackhouse on
the premises, and his roommate John Richardson. Both men had extensive
criminal records, and by their own accounts were heavy crack users. Under
questioning each fingered the younger man for Talleys murder, but their stories
varied considerably. For instance, Saint James offered at least three different
descriptions of the clothing Wright was wearing the night of the murder.
The two were released within hours of giving their statements and neither was
ever charged in connection to the case, despite the fact that Wrights nine-page
confession mentions Saint James and Richardson as accessories to the crime.
Nearly every piece of evidence investigators obtained in building their case
against Wright (with the exception of the fraudulent confession) can be traced
back to this crackhead duo, who, according to neighbors, expanded their flop
house into a full-fledged drug operation in the months following Talleys
murder. Despite all of that, Judge Byrd ruled that their statements from 1991
can still be used as evidence in Wrights retrial. (Both men are deceased.)
The prosecution called two other eyewitnesses at Wrights original trial: Both
were teenagers at the time and claimed they saw Wright casing Talleys house.
Both have reportedly recanted their testimony and now say it was coerced.
According to reporting on the case last year by Rolling Stone, one of the
witnesses said police warned him that hed never see his mother again if he

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In light of these major evidentiary issues, its possible the DA will ultimately
drop the case against Wright. A status hearing is scheduled for June, and the
trial is slated to resume in August. That gives prosecutors plenty of time decide
that losing graciously is better than doubling down on potentially grave
miscarriage of justice.

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