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Martin Scorseses new film, The Irishman, conjures up a lost world. It depicts an era when the Mafia was so powerful that it set off alarms in the Kennedy White House, and Scorsese even hints that organized crime was behind JFKs assassination.

But by the end of the three-hour-plus movie, the nostalgia fades and so does the pinkie-ring finery. Every made man Scorsese introduces to the viewer is snuffed out until all thats left is Frank Sheeran (played by Robert DeNiro), a disheveled, wheelchair-bound ex-hit man whos haunted by his memories. At the films end, a pair of FBI agents plead with Sheeran to talk about his victims, telling him theres no reason to keep silent anymore because theres no one left to protect. Everybodys dead, Mr. Sheeran, one agent says. Theyre all gone.

Well, many still remember. One person who knew the real-life mob families that show up in The Irishman is President Donald Trump.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Trumps buildings and his casinos attracted underworld figures like Fat Tony Salerno, the Fedora-wearing, cigar-chomping boss of the Genovese crime family. Salerno, whos portrayed in the film by Domenick Lombardozzi, supplied the fast-drying concrete that built Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Salerno also controlled the local concrete workers union, and when a strike shut down construction in Manhattan in 1982, the one of the few buildings that wasnt affected was Trump Tower.

The Irishman is based on the 2003 book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank The Irishman Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt. (The title is a reference to the special kind of painting Sheeran did that left his victims brains on the wall.) The book is full of characters who didnt make it into the movie, but they did surface in Trumps world. One is Philadelphia mob boss Philip Testa, the chicken man whose 1981 murder by nail bomb Bruce Springsteen sings about in the song Atlantic City. Testas son sold Trump premium land that became a casino parking lot. Another figure in the book is Testas successor, Nicodemus Little Nicky Scarfo, whose associates tried to lease Trump land for his casino in Atlantic City until New Jersey casino regulators quashed the deal.

Trump wasnt the only one who knew the people in the world of The Irishman. In addition to being a hit man, Sheeran was president of a local Teamsters union in Delaware. In 1972, shortly before Election Day, a prominent lawyer who was very big in the Democratic Party came to see him. There were some political ads that would run in the local newspaper every day in the last week before election, and the lawyer didnt want them to run. So Sheeran set up a picket line outside the newspaper, and he knew the Teamsters union drivers who delivered the paper wouldnt cross it. So the ads were never delivered, and on Election Day, Delaware had a new senator: a young man named Joe Biden. After that, Sheeran said Bidens door was always open. You could reach out for him, and he would listen, he wrote.

The Biden story isnt in the movie. There wasnt room enough for everyone to make it into Scorseses epic Mafia biopic, but Salerno does and with good reason. Salerno ran the most powerful of New Yorks five Mafia families. Im the fucking boss, thats who I am, Salerno once boasted in a secretly recorded conversation. Connecticut is mine; New Jersey is mine. Nothing got built in New York without Salerno dipping his meaty hand into the till.

In 1983, the year Trump Tower opened its doors, the future president reportedly met the Genovese family boss. The common thread linking Salerno and Trump was Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer who represented both men. Cohn, the heavy-lidded henchman to Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced the two men in his Manhattan townhouse, according to the late journalist Wayne Barrett. Under oath, Trump swore that wasnt true, but he also swore that he didnt know that Cohn represented Salerno, a fact that had been widely reported in Cohns obituary a few years earlier.

And its not just Trump who has links to the world depicted in The Irishman. It also overlapped with some of the figures in Trumps world, past and present. Roger Stone, Trumps longtime political adviser, also met Salerno when he visited Cohns Manhattan brownstone. This was in 1979, and Stone had been tapped to run Ronald Reagans political operation in New York. Cohn, dressed in a silk bathrobe, introduced Stone to the mobster and then offered to help him with the Reagan campaign. Cohns advice would change the course of Stones life: What you need is Donald Trump. Cohn sent the young political operative off to meet the up-and-coming real estate developer. It was a path that would lead 40 years later to Stones conviction last month on charges of lying to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks.

Rudy Giuliani, the presidents personal lawyer, also crossed paths with Salerno as New Yorks top federal prosecutor in the 1980s. Giuliani was obsessed with Salerno. Tony was the Tip ONeill of the underworld and would reside forever in Rudy Giulianis mind, wrote the legendary New York columnist Jimmy Breslin. Giuliani went after Salerno with such zeal that the mobsters defense attorney complained that the prosecutor has made it his personal mission to bury my client.

In March 1986, Giuliani announced that a grand jury had indicted Salerno and others on charges that included rigging construction bids. Trump Plaza, a co-op apartment building on Manhattans East Side, was specifically mentioned in the 29-count indictment. Salerno arranged things so his concrete company got a $7.8 million contract at Trump Plaza. It just so happens that while these bids were being rigged, the building was under construction, right around the time that Trump met Salerno in Cohns townhouse. Even so, the indictment makes it clear that the bid-rigging occurred without the knowledge of developers.

The FBI had uncovered the concrete bid-rigging scheme at Trump Plaza by secretly bugging Mafia homes and hangouts, including the Palma Boys Social Club, where DeNiro and his rabbi Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, sit down with Salerno in Scorseses film. Giuliani, by his own account, listened to countless hours of secretly recorded conversations of mobsters, and he reportedly was able to pull off a convincing impression of the mobsters scratchy voice. When you listen to those guys for thousands of hours, you cant help but sound like them, Giuliani once said.

More than three decades later, its Giuliani who is under federal investigation for his dealings in Ukraine, Trump is the president on the brink of impeachment, and bosses like Salerno are dead and gone, except for in the movies. As Giuliani finds himself in the crosshairs of prosecutors with the U.S. attorneys office he once ran, its worth pondering what was on those tapes. Salerno died in prison in 1992, but his words captured on tape live on. When Giuliani says he has insurance on his famous client, is it to Trumps connection to the lost word of The Irishman that hes referring?

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The Real-Life Mob Families of The Irishman? Donald Trump Knew Them - Rolling Stone