Video shows Trump with mob figure he denied knowing.

A newly uncovered video appears to contradict Donald Trump’s claim that he never knew a high-stakes gambler who was banned from New Jersey casinos for alleged ties to organized crime.

The reputed mob figure, Robert LiButti, can be seen standing alongside Trump in the front row of a 1988 “WrestleMania” match in Atlantic City, N.J. LiButti wasn’t there by accident, according to his daughter, Edith Creamer, who also attended the event. “We were his guests,” she told Yahoo News in a text message this week.

The video was given to Yahoo News by a confidential source who discovered it in the online archives of World Wrestling Entertainment, the sponsor of “WrestleMania.”

The video appears to lend new support to assertions Trump once had close relations with LiButti, who was banned from the state’s casinos in 1991 because of his ties to Mafia boss John Gotti, then the chief of the Gambino crime syndicate. Separately, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission that same year levied $650,000 in fines against the Trump Plaza hotel over its dealings with LiButti, who gambled huge sums at the hotel’s casino. LiButti died in 2014.

“That’s definitely Bob LiButti standing right next to Donald Trump,” said David Cay Johnston, an author and former Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist who, as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, extensively interviewed the gambler in the early 1990s. At the request of Yahoo News, Johnston reviewed the video of the “WrestleMania IV” contest, held at the Atlantic City Convention Hall on March 27, 1988. “It’s at an event that Bob described to me a quarter century ago when I spent an afternoon in his Saddle River home,” Johnston added. “The ‘WrestleMania’ event is just one of many times that Trump was close to Bob, who was the biggest loser at Trump casinos and therefore Trump’s most important customer.”

In the video, LiButti can be seen alongside Trump as the real estate mogul greets the ring announcer, sportscaster Bob Uecker, and later as Trump kisses on the cheek special guest Vanna White. LiButti can also be seen sitting during the match in a front-row seat alongside Trump and his then wife, Ivana.

By Michael Isikoff.

Full story at Yahoo News.