It was just beginning to get dark when I pulled into my driveway. The three reporters were waiting for me in David’s white SUV, which sported a pair of reindeer antlers and a huge red nose wired to the grill. When I showed them the boxes, there were hugs all around. It was the happiest I’d felt in months.

When Sue, Russ, and David left, I was exhausted and relieved. It had been a head-spinning few weeks. I hadn’t fully grasped how much of a risk I was taking. If anybody in my family found out what I was doing, there would be repercussions—I knew how vindictive they were—but there was no way to gauge how serious the consequences might be. Anything would pale in comparison to what they’d already done. I finally felt as though I might be able to make a difference after all.

In the past, there had been nothing I could do that would be significant enough, so I hadn’t tried very hard. Because being good or doing good didn’t count for much; whatever you did had to be extraordinary. You couldn’t just be a prosecutor; you had to be the best prosecutor in the country, you had to be a federal judge. You couldn’t just fly planes; you had to be a professional pilot for a major carrier at the dawn of the jet age. For a long time, I blamed my grandfather for my feeling this way. But none of us realized that the expectation of being “the best” in my grandfather’s view had applied only to my father (who had failed) and Donald (who had wildly exceeded Fred’s expectations).

When I finally realized that my grandfather didn’t care what I accomplished or contributed and that my own unrealistic expectations were paralyzing me, I still felt that only a grand gesture would set it right. It wasn’t enough for me to volunteer at an organization helping Syrian refugees; I had to take Donald down.

After the election, Donald called his big sister, ostensibly to find out how he was doing. Of course, he thought he already knew the answer; otherwise he wouldn’t have made the call in the first place. He merely wanted her to confirm very strongly that he was doing a fantastic job.

When she said, “Not that good,” Donald immediately went on offense.

“That’s nasty,” he said. She could see the sneer on his face. Then, seemingly apropos of nothing, he asked her, “Maryanne, where would you be without me?” It was a smug reference to the fact that Maryanne owed her first federal judgeship to Donald because Roy Cohn had done him (and her) a favor all those years ago.

My aunt has always insisted that she’d earned her position on the bench entirely on her own merits, and she shot back at him, “If you say that one more time, I will level you.”

But it was an empty threat. Although Maryanne had prided herself on being the only person on the planet Donald ever listened to, those days were long past, which was illustrated not long after, in June 2018. On the eve of Donald’s first summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, Maryanne called the White House and left a message with his secretary: “Tell him his older sister called with a little sisterly advice. Prepare. Learn from those who know what they are doing. Stay away from Dennis Rodman. And leave his Twitter at home.”

He ignored all of it. The Politico headline the following day read “Trump Says Kim Meeting Will Be About ‘Attitude,’ Not Prep Work.” If Maryanne had ever had any sway over her little brother, it was gone now. Aside from the requisite birthday call, they didn’t speak much after that.

While they were working on the article, the Times reporters invited me to join them for a tour of my grandfather’s properties. On the morning of January 10, 2018, they picked me up in David’s SUV, still adorned with its antlers and red nose, at the Jamaica train station. We started at the Highlander, where I’d grown up, and over the course of the day we traversed snow drifts and patches of ice in an effort to visit as much of the Trump empire as possible.

After nine hours we still hadn’t managed to see all of it. I had traded in my crutches for a cane by then but was still exhausted, mentally and physically, when I got home. I tried to make sense of what I’d seen. I’d always known that my grandfather owned buildings, but I’d had no idea just how many. More disturbing, my father had apparently owned 20 percent of some of the buildings I’d never heard of before.

On October 2, 2018, the New York Times published an almost 14,000-word article, the longest in its history, revealing the long litany of potentially fraudulent and criminal activities my grandfather, aunts, and uncles had engaged in.

Through the extraordinary reporting of the Times team, I learned more about my family’s finances than I’d ever known.

Donald’s lawyer, Charles J. Harder, predictably denied the allegations, saying: “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory. There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone.” But the investigative reporters laid out a devastating case. Over the course of Fred’s life, he and my grandmother had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to their children. While my grandfather was alive, Donald alone had received the equivalent of $413 million, much of it through questionable means: loans that he had never repaid, investments in properties that had never matured; essentially gifts that had never been taxed. That did not include the $170 million he had received through the sale of my grandfather’s empire. The amounts of money the article mentioned were mind-boggling, and the four siblings had benefited for decades. Dad had clearly shared in the wealth early in his life, but he had had nothing left to show for it by the time he was thirty. I have no idea what happened to his money.

In 1992, only two years after Donald’s attempt to attach the codicil to my grandfather’s will, effectively cutting his siblings out, the four of them suddenly needed one another: after a lifetime of their father’s playing them off against one another, they finally had a common purpose—to protect their inheritance from the government. Fred had refused to heed his lawyers’ advice to cede control of his empire to his children before his death in order to minimize estate taxes. That meant that Maryanne, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert would be responsible for potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of estate taxes. In addition to dozens of buildings, my grandfather had amassed extraordinary sums of cash. His properties carried no debt and brought in millions of dollars every year. The siblings’ solution was to establish All County Building Supply & Maintenance. At that point, my grandfather was effectively sidelined by his increasing dementia—not that he would have objected to their scheme. And since my father was long gone, Maryanne, Donald, and Robert could do whatever they wanted; they were our trustees, but there was no one to force them to fulfill their obligations to Fritz and me, and they could easily keep us out of the loop.

My aunts and uncles detested paying taxes almost as much as their father did, and it seemed the main purpose of All County was to siphon money from Trump Management through large gifts disguised as “legitimate business transactions,” according to the article. The ruse was so effective that, when Fred died in 1999, he had only $1.9 million in cash and no assets larger than a $10.3 million IOU from Donald. After Gam’s death the following year, the combined value of my grandparents’ estate was said to be just $51.8 million, a laughable assertion, especially since the siblings sold the empire for more than $700 million four years later.

My grandfather’s investment in Donald had been extremely successful in the short term. He had strategically deployed millions of dollars, and often tens of millions of dollars, at key moments in Donald’s “career.” Sometimes the funds had supported the image and the lifestyle that came with it; sometimes they had bought Donald access and favors. With increasing frequency, they had bailed him out. In that way, Fred purchased the ability to bask in Donald’s reflected glory, satisfied with the knowledge that none of it would have been possible without his expertise and largesse. In the long run, however, my grandfather, who had one wish—that his empire survive in perpetuity—lost everything.

Whenever my brother and I met with Robert to discuss my grandfather’s estate, he was emphatic about honoring my grandfather’s wish that we get nothing. When it came to their own benefit, however, the four surviving Trump siblings had no compunction about doing the one thing my grandfather least would have wanted: when Donald announced his desire to sell, nobody put up a fight.

In 2004, the vast majority of the empire my grandfather had spent more than seven decades building was sold to a single buyer, Ruby Schron, for $705.6 million. The banks financing the sale for Schron had assigned a value of almost $1 billion to the properties, so in one fell swoop my uncle Donald, the master dealmaker, left almost $300 million on the table.

Selling the estate in bulk was a strategic disaster. The smartest thing would have been to keep Trump Management intact. With practically no effort on their part, the four siblings could have earned $5 million to $10 million a year each. But Donald needed a much bigger infusion of cash. Such a paltry sum—even if it came to him annually—wasn’t going to cut it.

They could also have sold the buildings and complexes individually. That would have added substantially to the selling price. That process, though, would have been a lengthy one. Donald, whose Atlantic City creditors were nipping at his heels, didn’t want to wait. Besides, it would have been almost impossible to keep the news of dozens of sales a secret. They needed to complete the sale in one transaction, as quickly and as quietly as possible.

They succeeded on that score. It may be the only one of Donald’s real estate deals that received no press attention. Whatever objections Maryanne, Elizabeth, and Robert might have had, they kept to themselves. Even now Maryanne, almost ten years older, smarter, and more accomplished than the second youngest Trump child, deferred to him. “Donald always got his way,” she said. Besides, none of them could risk waiting; they all knew where the bodies were buried because they had buried them together in All County.

Split four ways, they each got approximately $170 million. For Donald, it still wasn’t enough. Maybe it wasn’t for any of them. Nothing ever was.

When I visited Maryanne in September 2018, less than a month before the article was published, she mentioned that she had been contacted by David Barstow. My cousin David, who had tracked my grandfather’s old accountant Jack Mitnick, now ninety-one, to a nursing home somewhere in Florida, believed he must have been the source of the exposé. Maryanne brushed the whole thing off and suggested that the article was merely about the 1990 codicil controversy. If she did speak to Barstow, though, she must have known the extent of what they were looking into—All County, the potential tax fraud—but she seemed unfazed by it. I wondered, now for completely different reasons, why she and Robert hadn’t tried everything in their power to dissuade Donald from running for president. They couldn’t possibly have thought that he (and by extension they) would continue to escape scrutiny.

I met with Maryanne again shortly after the article ran. She denied all of it. She was just a “girl,” after all. When a piece of paper requiring her signature had been put in front of her, she’d signed it, no questions asked. “This article goes back sixty years. You know that’s before I was a judge,” she said, as if the investigation had also ended sixty years before. She seemed unconcerned that there would be any repercussions. Although a court inquiry had been opened into her alleged conduct, all she had had to do to put an end to it was retire, which she did, thereby retaining her $200,000-a-year pension.

In the interim, she had transferred her suspicion from the geriatric Jack Mitnick to her first cousin John Walter, my grandfather’s sister Elizabeth’s son, who had died that January. I marveled at the ease with which Maryanne jumped to that conclusion. John had worked for and with my grandfather for decades, had benefited enormously from his uncle’s wealth, had been heavily involved in All County, and, as far as I knew, had always been very loyal. I thought it strange she would implicate him—although her suspicions of him worked in my favor. What I didn’t know at the time was that John’s obituary had neglected to mention Donald. John had always been interested in Trump family history and boastful of his connection with Trump Management, so that was a remarkable omission.

More surprising, though, was the fact that Maryanne didn’t seem to think that I would find anything in the article disturbing—as if she, too, had come to believe a version of events that obliterated the truth and rewrote history. It didn’t occur to her that the revelations would affect me in any way.

In fact, the vast amounts of money the siblings had possibly stolen made their fight with us over my grandfather’s will and their drastic devaluation of our partnership share (which I now understood for the first time) seem pathologically petty and their treatment of my nephew vis-à-vis our medical insurance even more cruel.