Joey Merlino: Donald Trump didn’t know who I was when we posed for a photo at his golf club

Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, the former head of the Philadelphia mob, calls Donald Trump “the greatest president we’ve ever had.”

But Merlino said Trump did not know or recognize him when they posed for a photograph at Trump International Golf Course West Palm Beach earlier this month.

“The guy had no idea who I was,” Merlino said in a brief phone interview with The Inquirer Monday. “I’m a golfer. There were 100 people in line waiting to take pictures. He takes pictures with everybody. He’s the nicest guy in the world.”

Merlino was less forthcoming about the identity of a third man in the photo. A source who provided the picture to The Inquirer and asked not to be identified in order to discuss it said the third man is a friend of Merlino’s.

“I don’t even know who he was,” Merlino said when asked if the man was a friend. “I’m not answering no more questions.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s presidential campaign declined to say if Trump knew who Merlino was when they took the photo.

“President Trump takes countless photos with people. That does not mean he knows every single person he comes in contact with,” the Trump spokesperson said after requesting to review the photo.

Trump controlled a collection of casinos in Atlantic City in the 1990s at a time when Merlino was well-known and on the rise in an organized crime operation with interests in Philadelphia and Atlantic City.

Merlino said he spoke out to “clear the air” about the photo, which The Inquirer obtained and published Monday.

Merlino’s lawyer, James Leonard, called the encounter “nothing more than a chance photo opportunity” that lasted less than 30 seconds.

“There is absolutely nothing more to this,” Leonard said. “This is much ado about nothing.”

The photograph was shared widely on social media Monday, drawing attention to Trump’s lack of protective political infrastructure, the sort of staffing safeguards that could prevent a presidential candidate from appearing in a picture with a convicted mobster.

» READ MORE: Donald Trump posed for picture with former Philly mob boss Joey Merlino

Trump declared his third bid for president in mid-November. A week later, he dined at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Palm Beach with Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who had shown up with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who was under fire then for a series of antisemitic remarks.

Democrats and Republicans condemned that meeting, with Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, calling for Trump to apologize. Trump complained that he did not know who Fuentes was or about his fiercely bigoted ideology when they met.

Trump’s campaign vowed to enact new protocols for vetting and approving people he met with.

The Merlino photo raises questions about those protocols. A Trump spokesperson did not respond when asked about that.

Merlino, convicted in a 2001 federal racketeering case, spent a decade in prison. He had refashioned himself, moving to Boca Raton in southern Florida, working as maître d’ at an Italian restaurant named after him.

A new federal indictment in 2016, as Trump was running for president, resulted in Merlino pleading guilty in 2018 to a gambling-related charge. He was sentenced to two years in prison and was released in July 2020, as Trump was seeking a second term.

After being sentenced, Merlino publicly declared his support for Trump, echoing criticism the then-president had made about federal prosecutors “flipping” witnesses to cooperate in criminal cases.

“President Trump is right — they’ve got to outlaw the flippers,” Merlino said outside a New York courthouse in 2018.

That was a reference to a Fox News interview in August 2018, when Trump responded to his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, pleading guilty to a campaign finance crime. Cohen, who admitted paying women to keep quiet about affairs they had with Trump, implicated his former client in the scheme.

“It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal,” Trump said in that interview.

That shared aversion to flipping witnesses resurfaced just after Trump lost the 2020 election, when a website known for trafficking in misinformation falsely claimed Merlino had been paid $3 million to help Joe Biden win Philadelphia with thousands of fake ballots.

That claim was amplified in a tweet then by Jordan Sekulow, an attorney who had served on Trump’s legal team for his first impeachment.

The claim was swiftly debunked by several media organizations, including Fox News.

At the time, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s attorney, described the claim on Fox News as “far-fetched.”

John Meringolo, another Merlino attorney, told Fox News then that Merlino “is a Trumper” and that the claim “is just complete fiction.” Meringolo added that Merlino “is against cooperating witnesses and against making uncorroborated deals with snitches, which is what the president is against.”