Who is he? Allen Weisselberg is Trump’s self-proclaimed ‘stickler’ CFO
He’s Donald Trump’s tight-lipped money man with the chevron mustache.
Allen Weisselberg, the self-proclaimed “stickler” CFO now facing criminal charges in Manhattan, has been managing the Trump family’s fortune for nearly a half century.
In a portion of previously sealed 2015 deposition testimony recently obtained by the Daily News, Weisellberg confirmed he was paid handsomely for his longstanding loyalty.
He said his base salary had been around $450,000 for “a long time” and that he also received an annual bonus as high as $400,000.
“I’ve always felt that Donald Trump and I had a relationship where if I needed to have an increase in salary, I would go and ask for it,” he testified.
In his own words, he described his micromanaging ways and how his fealty caused him to work virtually around the clock.
“Throughout all of our entities, people do know it’s important to involve me when it comes to financial matters because later on if things don’t prove out to be where they should be, they’ll have to deal with me on answering the question as to why,” he testified.
“I take no vacations. That’s not even funny. My wife doesn’t laugh at all. I don’t. I just ― I work a lot, and pretty much I — I’m in work all the time,” he said.
Weisselberg, who grew up in Brownsville and attended Thomas Jefferson High School, started working for Trump’s father Fred in Brooklyn in 1973 after earning an accounting degree from Pace College.
He eventually started moonlighting for Fred’s limelight-loving son Donald, helping with the accounting for the Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan and with ground leases in Atlantic City, he said.
“I was doing a lot of Donald’s work on weekends or at — or at night. And that’s what eventually led me to leave Fred in 1986 and move into Manhattan to work for Donald,” he testified.
He started as the controller for the future president and later became Trump’s CFO, working on the same floor as his boss in Trump Tower and talking to him almost daily.
“Am I his eyes and ears for his investments? From an economic standpoint,” he said of Trump.
He confirmed in 2015 he was the only person that he knew of outside of Trump’s family who was allowed to sign checks “for all our entities.”
By keeping his iron-clad control, he was able to manage Trump’s company “on a day-to-day basis” so money wasn’t spent in a way he “didn’t deem appropriate,” he said.
