Before he was sent to the Middle East and Russia to negotiate peace, and before he floated the idea of Eric Adams becoming ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Steve Witkoff was on a very different mission involving Donald Trump.

In late 2022, the Trump Organization ran a golf course in the Bronx, and the Bally’s Corporation wanted it to be the site of its next casino. Witkoff helped broker the arrangement: $60 million for Trump’s business up front and $115 million if Bally’s actually won one of the three licenses to operate a casino in the New York City area. “The deal was too good to refuse,” Eric Trump told the New York Post. 

It was also a long-shot bet. Eleven bidders, from Jay-Z to Miriam Adelson, were vying for those licenses, which were considered to be worth tens of billions of dollars apiece. Each team would have to clear a “community advisory committee” made up of representatives of local elected officials before a four-person board in Albany picked the ultimate winners by the end of this year.

One by one, most of those bidders dropped out or were blocked by local opposition. Now, after a rescue mission from Mayor Adams, a round of last-second dealmaking, and a must-have approval on Monday from the community advisory committee in the Bronx, Bally’s is indeed a finalist to get one of these lucrative casino deals, and the Trump Organization is set to get a nine-figure payday.

Two other bids, each connected to decrepit horse-racing tracks, also passed their community votes; Mets owner Steve Cohen’s bid for a resort next to Citi Field did the same on Tuesday. That means four bids for up to three licenses to be awarded by Albany — not bad odds for Bally’s, or for Trump. Rival bidders are worried, as one of them put it to me, that Bally’s may be “completely gift-wrapped and ready to go, that they’re gonna get one of the licenses because of the Trump involvement.”

Ferry Point started as a garbage dump. (“We used to come out here as kids with BB guns and shoot rats,’’ one golfer reminisced.) In 2000, the Giuliani administration had the idea to turn the 222-acre site in the southeastern Bronx into a luxe golf course. Years........

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