The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost

There once was a widow who lived in a house by the sea.

It wasn’t much of a place, just a fading, clapboard-clad box a few steps from the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Yet, somehow, that house has turned into a clogged intersection of American celebrity and wealth, an odd mash-up of failed dreams, bombast, stubborn indignation, name-calling, angry taunts and legal bombardment.

The cast of characters populating that house’s curious history over the past three decades includes a friend and co-author of Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a legendary pornographer, and a famed investor. But the central figures in its life and death saga are a feisty, obstinate woman named Vera Coking and a billionaire, the Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump.

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