One of President Donald Trump's closest friends and confidants took advantage of the Great Recession to build an unprecedented real estate business that makes him tantamount to a modern-day slumlord buying up homes, bumping up rents and allowing the properties to fall into disrepair. Southern California billionaire Thomas J. Barrack is the mastermind behind the scheme, founding a company five years ago that has taken 31,000 single-family homes off the housing market and calling it “the greatest thing I've ever done.”
