Palm Beach real estate agent who wrote a letter calling it a ‘practical impossibility’ for Trump to secure $454 million bail is ‘friend’ and Mar-a-Lago member who put him on the golf course met and testified in his fraud trial

You are a former president who is on the hook for almost half a billion dollars after a court judgment against you.

Where can you go to find an institution willing to issue a potentially risky bond pending an appeal?

If you’re Donald Trump, that person is an old Palm Beach friend and Mar-a-Lago member who you first encountered on a golf course in the 1990s.

With Trump’s real estate empire at stake, Trump’s lawyers on Monday submitted a six-page letter from Gary Giulietti, president of the world’s largest private insurance brokerage, vouching for the president’s difficulty in finding one company that was willing to support him after contacting up to 30 of them.

In a March 15 attestation letter, Giulietti cited his 50 years in the industry and described efforts to obtain bonds for Trump and his companies. He called it a “practical impossibility” to get a bond, partly because of companies’ refusal to obtain bonds. Taking Trump’s real estate assets as collateral.

What Trump’s lawyers didn’t mention was that Giulietti has been a member of both Mar-a-Lago — where Trump keeps his house while he talks about what he calls a ridiculously low assessment of its value in his fraud trial — and his Trump International Golf Course in West Palm Beach, with a relationship that extends from personal to business.

He also hosted a charity event at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey and posted about it online.

Testifying as an expert witness on behalf of Trump’s company in the fraud trial, Giulietti praised Trump’s negotiating skills, saying he will “fight like a dog,” while also celebrating his diversity reach among Hispanics and other groups.

Giulietti, who signed the letter from Palm Beach Gardens, where he has a home not far from Trump’s, testified last year about his “personal relationship” with Trump as Trump’s team battled allegations of inflated real estate valuations and fraud.

“How do you know him?” a prosecutor asked during the trial. “Golf,” was Giulietti’s first one-word response.

“Did you meet him on the golf course?” a lawyer followed. ‘Yes.’ Asked to describe the personal relationship, he replied: “Play golf with him occasionally; have lunch with him occasionally. Belong to some of his clubs, that is.’

Sometime in 2017 and 2018, he also developed a business relationship, helping solve an undisclosed problem for the then-president and then being appointed as a broker for him in 2021 after Trump left the White House.

It put him to work for a high-profile client after helping arrange surety bonds for giant clients like Boston’s Big Dig and the Port Authority of New York.

Giulietti testified that the Trump Organization was “a pretty large, diverse, amazing organization,” while saying the burden was on the shoulders of insurers to do their due diligence in dealing with the company, in a case involving Trump and his companies were accused of insurance fraud.

At one point he revealed that he had recently helped issue seven bonds for Trump through the Zurich Insurance Group.

“Do you understand from the attorney general’s complaint that they are alleging that the Trump Organization in general defrauded Zurich’s insurance companies?” he was asked.

“I – not really,” he replied.

Both Giulietti and his son, David Giulietti, work on the Trump Organization account, which is itself a family affair, with sons Don Jr. and Eric Trump hold leadership positions and are named in the lawsuit and sanctioned by Judge Arthur Engoron. He said a team at Lockton of about 100 people worldwide was handling the bill.

He was not paid to testify, but he said that as a partner in his firm, he has an equity stake in the company and gets a percentage of the business he does based on his clients. Kansas City-based Lockton gets a 10 to 15 percent commission when he writes an insurance policy for the Trump Organization, he said.

Prosecutors tried to press him on some of his own language, agreeing that he believed Zurich had not conducted “real financial analysis” and had used “pie in the sky and witchcraft” in its dealings with Trump entities.

“Yes, true,” he said. But prosecutors argued that the company would have no other way to conduct property appraisals other than asking Trump for them.

‘They could have done that. They had to choose it,” he said. He later added, “They should have asked if they wanted it.”

Giulietti studied business at St. Michael’s College, went to Harvard Business School (“I don’t know if you’d call them degrees”), started his career at American Mutual in Connecticut before spending 20 years at Willis. and then became the founder of Lockton.

Giulietti did not respond to emails and a phone call requesting comment.

He also vouched for Trump in an interview as the reality TV star and real estate developer was running for the White House. “All my life I was kind of a deal guy,” he said.

He told DailyMail.com in 2016 that Trump was “honer than hell.”

‘He wants the best for his properties, he wants a competitive price. But he treats everyone with respect. When he needs to honor something, he does so. Even if he disagrees, he will compromise,” he said.

“He’ll fight you like a dog when he’s negotiating, but if you make a deal, he’ll find a way to make you his friend to work with you.”

He even confronted Trump on the diversity front, at a time when he was criticized for saying during his campaign launch that Mexico was sending “rapists” to the US.

“He takes on and promotes every ethnic group in the world. “If you look at his clubs, it’s mostly Hispanics who run them, and they love Donald Trump,” he said.

Giulietti hosted a celebrity golf tournament to benefit wounded warriors at Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and posted photos from the event and a video of Trump at the event.

Trump’s lawyers relied on Giulietti’s letter to ask an appeals court to suspend the demand after the $46 million bond.

‘Based on my more than 50 years in the insurance industry and on my actual experience over the past few weeks, in which I have interacted with some of the largest insurance companies in the world in an attempt to obtain bond for defendants, I am believes that obtaining an appellate bond of $464 billion is not possible under the circumstances presented,” he wrote in the “affirmation” they submitted to the court, quoting him twice in the second paragraph of their filing.

But in his deposition for the fraud trial, Giulietti at times described Trump as having sufficient liquidity to support the acceptance.

“Even without $24.4 million in Vornado Partnership funds in 2018, President Trump’s liquidity far exceeded the $20 million total exposure for the Zurich escrow program,” Trump’s lawyers wrote, citing Giulietti.

There are limits to what his statements on behalf of his friend and client can achieve. Starting Monday, state Attorney General Letitia James could potentially seize property or seize liens from Trump who is unable to find the money or anyone who can underwrite a bond.