Business Notes

Cash-strapped Donald Trump surprised all the experts last December when he came up with an $18.4 million bond payment on his Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City. At the time, Trump explained that the casino got an infusion of a "relatively small amount of money." Relative is right. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump's 85-year-old father Fred, a megarich developer based in Brooklyn, dispatched a lawyer in December to buy $3 million worth of chips at Trump Castle, in effect giving Donald a loan. Last week the younger Trump would acknowledge only that "a group bought some chips, and that's not a totally unstandard thing." According to casino regulators, this would mean they will have to evaluate whoever bought the chips to determine whether the individuals are legally qualified to be investors in the casino business.