Thomas Barrack is best known for being super wealthy and partly to blame for unpopular President Trump’s financial solvency.
Over the next seven days before Christmas, Barrack and his lieutenant, Bill Rogers, would jet from New York to Los Angeles, Taiwan, London and Saudi Arabia, begging billionaires to buy the loans and keep the bankers from Trump's throat.
"He nearly killed me that week," Rogers says now, recounting the frenzied middle-of-the-night flights that kept the $4.5 billion West Side Railyards site from being Trump's burial ground. "There's one person in this world who has historically had a non-fighting way of working with Donald -- and being successful."
That was back in 1994 when bankers wanted to be done with one of New York’s worst businessmen, Donald Trump. Sadly, scumbags like Trump tend to get buoyed by other scumbags like Barrack. On Thursday, June 8,
Reveal News published an exposé by Aaron Glanz that revealed how Thomas J. Barrack had created one of the largest scumlord rental schemes in the United States.
“Acquisition, retrofit” and rent it out, he told the audience. “I can’t get a plumber to come to my house for $1,500 an hour and we retrofit many of these houses for $1,500 total.”
An emerging body of evidence tells the other side of that story. For starters, while the company puts $19,000 into these homes when it buys them, according to
the company’s annual prospectus released last year, it spent just $800 on maintenance per home in 2016
.
The story reported on how Barrack was able to wholesale being a scumbag landlord to 31,000 homes under his Colony Starwood Homes. The news began to get picked up and lo and behold, Mr. Barrack decided to cut and run.
The move came late Friday, one day after Reveal published an exposé on the company he founded. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Barrack sold all his stock in Colony Starwood Homes and resigned his position as co-chairman of its Board of Trustees.
[...]
Barrack first signaled his intention to sell in a filing with the SEC on Wednesday, a week after Reveal contacted the company for comment andfive days after Reveal talked to Barrack by phone, telling him directly that we planned to publish an investigation into poor conditions and mass evictions by Colony.
Barrack hung up when told that many of the dozens of homes Reveal visited were “falling apart.” Representatives from Colony Starwood Homes also declined to be interviewed for the story and provided a statement that did not address questions about Barrack’s leadership of the firm.
Scumbag.