Cinque has longstanding personal and business ties to Donald Trump, some of which were laid out in a Chicago Tribune article in May of 2016. “Joey No Socks” runs a sham organization called the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences (AAHS), which has bestowed its “Five Star Diamond Award” on three of Trump’s hotels — the Mar-a-Logo resort in Palm Beach, the Trump International Hotel in New York City, and the Trump Taj Mahal hotel and casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which closed permanently last year. The AAHS’ YouTube page shows Trump accepting the Lifetime Achievement Award from the organization on New Years’ Eve.

However, as celebrity gossip site Radar Online reported, the AAHS is essentially a phony front run by Trump, with the help of Cinque, who is the President and CEO of AAHS, to bestow awards upon his own properties.

In addition to three of Trump’s own staffers, his close pal Cinque, Cinque’s girlfriend, Susan Bender, and Trump’s old crony, labor leader Ed Malloy, all sit on the board of trustees–exactly the number needed to bestow an award. "You see these big plaques in his places, but very few people know that the whole board is controlled by Trump,” says a source. “He’s basically giving himself those awards.

“Donald has done business with people with the Russian mob. He’s done business with con artists,” Johnston said in a September interview with Democracy Now. “The guy who supplied his helicopters and managed his personal helicopter, called the Ivana, from his first wife back then, was a major cocaine trafficker, who actually handled the drugs. And after he went to prison, Donald wrote a letter pleading for mercy for him, so he got 18 months as the head of the ring. The little fish who delivered the drugs, they got 20 years.”