Let us begin with the cabinets.
In 1984 a family cabinetry firm in Philadelphia, founded in the 1940s by the current owner’s father, completed a job at Harrah’s at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. They built the bases for the slot machines, the registration desks, the bars. They did the work, they finished on time, nobody complained about the cabinets, and they submitted an invoice for eighty-three thousand six hundred dollars, at which point the money simply did not arrive, in the manner of a bus that has been discontinued without notice.
The owner’s son, who was the company accountant, could still produce that figure from memory more than thirty years later, which is not how anyone remembers a number they were eventually paid. He said it began the demise of the firm his grandfather started.
Eighty-three thousand dollars is not a fortune. It is a nice car. A man who was at that moment erecting a casino with his own name on the outside of it in letters large enough to be read from a passing helicopter declined to pay for the cabinets inside it, and a business that had survived the Depression, a world war, Korea, Vietnam, stagflation, and the arrival of particleboard did not survive him.
This is, in a vacuum, a billing dispute. In the context of the full inventory it is a founding document.
Because there is an inventory, and it runs from that invoice in 1984 to a police department in Pennsylvania that has hosted him three times and been paid on none of them, and it includes, along the way, a dishwasher, forty-eight waiters, two hundred and fifty-three subcontractors on a single job, ten American cities, and the attorney who bankrupted himself trying to overturn an election on his behalf.