Not everyone agrees. Such as the divorce lawyer Robert Stephan Cohen, who thought 15CPW felt a little too much like a hotel, with its long, beige corridors and transient renters. Another renter, a twenty-eight-year-old who’d grown up in a prominent business family on the East Side, was also put off by Fifteen, but for different reasons. “It was a little too much,” he says. “To stand out for not standing out was not enjoyable. In my parents’ building, nobody is a big shot. This was too fast-paced.”
Quotidian life at Fifteen keeps to a steady rhythm. Its men are early risers and hard workers. The lobbies and elevators are busy from 7:00 to 8:00 a.m., then dead until lunchtime. Family activities, nannies, and dogs rule the day, then the men come home and the place drops dead by 9:00 p.m. At least, in the public spaces. Jesse Itzler’s poker games aren’t the only late-night diversion. A few of the younger residents, such as Bob Diamond’s daughter, are partyers, says a staff member. In her early days at Fifteen, Tyler Ellis drew a Gossip Girl crowd and complaints about loud music.
Residents also fill the rust-colored leather loungers in the screening room all the time. Avis Richards loves it when neighbor Caroline Lieberman, an aspiring producer, invites her to see a documentary. Lieberman is described as a socialite when she makes the papers, but she’s another of Fifteen’s heiresses, and like Tyler Ellis, she comes from the fashion business. Caroline Lewkowitz’s family fled the Holocaust in Eastern Europe for Australia, where her father got into the dress business. His children inherited a small fortune and Caroline formerly had a penthouse overlooking Sydney Harbour.
Married briefly (to a Lieberman), she lived on the East Side, but was on her own when she bought a $3.38 million rear apartment at Fifteen in fall 2005. She was looking at Time Warner, saw the hole in the ground, and dived in. Soon, a 15CPW doorman greeted her: “Welcome home, Miss Socialite.” That annoyed her. “To me, a socialite is a lady who lunches, spends the husband’s money, and goes to charity balls. I was in fashion,” says Lieberman, who designed bodywear and accessories in Australia. “I have more substance. I’m an executive producer.” She has a musical version of Dr. Zhivago that’s “going to be very big,” she continues. (Fifteen producers are listed on its website, and ten associate producers. She is one of the latter.) She’s also writing a book about her Havanese, Mumbai, whose adventures she chronicles in e-mails to her friends. “He’s a little boy in a dog’s body,” she says, then sounds distracted. “Yes, we’re talking about you, Bubby.” Back to the subject at hand. “Make me look like the most incredibly beloved person in the building.”
Another heiress is Rebecka Belldegrun, who has a rich husband, too. One of Lindsay Rosenwald’s bigger successes was a company that Arie Belldegrun, an Israeli-born urologist and medical school professor, founded and chaired called Cougar Biotechnology, which develops cancer drugs and was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 2009 for about $1 billion. His wife is one of two children of Shlomo Zabludowicz, a Polish rabbi’s son who survived the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz and moved to Finland. There, in the 1950s, he became an industrialist specializing in heavy machinery and arms. An Israel-based subsidiary manufactured advanced artillery systems, mortars, and ammunition for the Israel Defense Forces and had annual sales of as much as $100 million; it also supplied weapons to Iran and Far Eastern countries. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Zabludowicz sold out and diversified into real estate, hotels, and high tech, doing business with the Ofer family, among others, and putting his fortune into trusts in Liechtenstein and Gibraltar. After his death, his daughter and son fought over their inheritance. A friend of hers says they settled in 2004 with Rebecka getting less than half. Her brother is one of the richest men in Britain, with a fortune of about £2 billion.
In 2008, through an LLC called BMRD Properties, the Belldegruns, whose primary residence is a sprawling Charles Gwathmey–designed estate in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles, bought apartment 36B for $12.4 million. Their connections at 15CPW run deep. Aside from their link to the Ofers, they are close friends of Norman and Lyn Lear’s and fund a directorship in a life sciences program at the University of Pennsylvania named for Roy Vagelos, the former CEO of Merck, the pharmaceutical company, who owns the $21 million–plus apartment 14A.
Another LLC, Tatacis, would have hidden the heiress owner of the $6 million apartment 3C if she had not chosen to rent it out, but she ended up in court with her tenant. Marisa Chearavanont’s father-in-law, Dhanin, is the richest man in Thailand, with a fortune estimated by Forbes at $9 billion. Her husband, Soopakij, one of three sons, is the CEO of the family’s CP Lotus Corporation, a subsidiary of their agricultural business, Thailand’s largest. The family fortune sprang from a seed, fertilizer, and insecticide company opened in 1921 by two migrant Chinese brothers. Dhanin took over in 1964; CP’s revenues exploded as it went into livestock and feed and, in the late 1970s, entered China. It became the world’s largest producer of prawn feed, its second-largest producer of poultry, and the third-largest producer of animal feed. It invested in everything from China’s CP Lotus supermarkets and Kentucky Fried Chicken and 7-Eleven franchises to telecommunications. Its revenues in 2009 were $25 billion.
Five months after closing on her apartment, the Hong Kong–based Chearavanont, who is Korean by birth, rented it for $20,000 a month to Russell Abrams, who’d founded the Titan Capital hedge fund, in 2001, and needed a place to live while renovating a nearby brownstone. Abrams was yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus, though he only worked there two years before moving on to positions at Swiss and French banks and Merrill Lynch.
Abrams sued Chearvanont’s LLC and her real estate broker in 2010, alleging that he’d been promised a two-year rental and then been asked to vacate (along with his wife, their ten-month-old daughter, and two puppies) due to the broker’s “unbridled greed,” and her “transparently desperate” desire for a five-figure commission from a new renter, fashion’s Elie Tahari, who’d already signed a $30,000-a-month lease. Though Abrams knew he would have to reapply to the condo board for a second year, he claimed he’d depended upon the broker’s assurance that an extension would not be an issue.
At the time that suit was filed, Abrams was knee-deep in litigation, beginning with a suit brought by his wife, Sandra, right after they moved into 15CPW. She sued two former administrative assistants at Titan who were pursuing a sexual harassment claim against her husband and Titan through the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They claimed that late in 2008, Abrams had asked one of them to get some film from his honeymoon developed, which included topless photos of his wife, and that he “smirked callously, taking pleasure in [her] obvious embarrassment and discomfort” when she handed the pictures over. “You liked them, didn’t you?” he allegedly demanded.
Abrams’s wife sued to get back copies of the photos her husband somehow managed to leave with the employee and asked for damages of $1 million, in what the employees’ lawyers would later describe as Abrams’s retaliation against them through his wife. The dispute went public, complete with accounts of messages left on one of the employees’ answering machines by Abrams’s brother Marc, another target of the complaint, who had dated her. He supposedly called her “a hooker,” a “cheap, piece-of-shit stripper” and a “fucking rotten piece of dirt.” Another message left on her boyfriend’s answering machine described how she’d given Marc Abrams “the longest blow job in my life.” The two former employees filed and withdrew a federal case and then sued in a New York court instead. Their suit recounted other litigation involving Abrams. A fresh matter was added to the stack at the end of 2010 when one of Titan’s investors sued for fraudulent misrepresentation after losing most of its money.
Abrams’s suit against Chearavanont’s LLC was thrown out of court, he says, and after reaching a cash settlement with the broker, he and his family moved out of Fifteen in August 2010, making way for Tahari. Chearavanont’s lawyer told the Wall Street Journal it was a case of “a wealthy guy not being used to being told no.” Sand
ra Abrams’s suit against her husband’s former employees was thrown out of court, too, and though their claim was dismissed by the Equal Opportunity Commission, their suit against Abrams, his brother, and Titan is ongoing as this is written. Fortunately for 15CPW, the whiff of that scandal left the building with Abrams. But he was hardly the only tenant who attracted unwanted attention.
In November 2010, in an episode of television’s The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Camille Grammer is shown in apartment 14K, which her husband, the actor Kelsey, had rented from Jesse Itzler and Sara Blakely that April for just under $29,000 a month. It was his crash pad while he appeared on Broadway in a revival of La Cage aux Folles. The reality TV crew taped his then wife and children as they checked the place out, and Camille griped on camera about the thirty-five-hundred-square-foot apartment. “For us, it’s small,” she said. “That seems pretty obnoxious [but] I’m used to living in a substantial-sized house.”
Between the taping of that show and the time it aired, Camille Grammer filed for divorce after thirteen years, citing irreconcilable differences. Her husband immediately married a former flight attendant, Kayte Walsh, twenty-seven years his junior. Another renter at Fifteen at the time thinks he knows what triggered the divorce. “Kelsey Grammer’s wife called from California before she knew about his girlfriend,” he says. “They told her his wife was already in the building. They genuinely didn’t know. Incidents followed.”
Writing about Grammer’s rental, Jennifer Gould Keil, a reporter who’d taken over her husband’s New York Post column after his 2009 death, wrote that Grammer was joining a cast of prominent renters that included two “noted philanderers.” One of them was Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez, the highest-paid player in professional baseball, who’d been in Manhattan since joining the New York Yankees in 2004. A-Rod was looking for a rental at Fifteen even before it opened. He saw one owned by Warren Estis and Gary Rosenberg, real estate law partners who have a sideline in condos. That twenty-sixth-floor, C-line unit was later rented to Mark Wahlberg, the actor, and when it sold three years later to a Monte Carlo–based shipping heiress, Ruth McLoughlin, for more than twice what the partners had paid for it, Jason Sheftell of the Daily News wrote, “There are so many bold-faced names involved with this unit, we wonder if any apartment in this building doesn’t have a celebrity attached to it.”
A-Rod then turned to the larger and higher 35A, offering slightly below the asking rental price, but a local financier named Henry Silverman, Jennifer Gould Keil’s other philanderer, swooped in and took it away. A-Rod tried to match the higher offer, but was told no and rented the smaller 35B next door, instead. A year later, his lease up, he would try to dislodge the latest renter to take 26C by offering more money for it. Again, his offer proved insufficient. “It was bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and A-Rod struck out,” says broker Ken Deutsch, who had that listing. “But how many people could have even stepped up to the plate?”
Silverman and A-Rod both rented from Leroy Schecter, a steel manufacturer from New Jersey. Born in Brooklyn, Schecter was “a very poor kid who worked for his father’s floor-finishing business and moved back home after serving in the navy,” says his second cousin and real estate broker Emily Beare. Schecter made his fortune from a company he bought in 1975 that cut and shaped steel.
Schecter was another who’d heard about 15CPW while considering an apartment at the Plaza. He wanted a view and agreed to buy 35B for $8.5 million in February 2006 because it was the highest unit then available, but he really wanted something bigger, so after he closed, he slipped a note under the door of the next-door A-line unit, offering to buy it. When its owners, Florida’s Falcone brothers, decided to flip, they sold it to Schecter for $18 million (sorely frustrating Monsoon’s Peter Simon, who would immediately make the offer for 32A that John Fowler couldn’t refuse).II
Schecter decided to keep both, furnished them, and moved into the A-line unit. A year later, he decided to combine them, but the condo board had decided that combinations would have to wait until owners of single units had finished their renovations. On learning that, Schecter decided to move to a $22.5 million, 16,228-square-foot house he’d bought in 2006 in a gated community with a golf course on a private island near Miami Beach and rent out both apartments. It was late 2009 “and the [sales] market was funny, but rentals were still pretty good,” says Beare. “He got immediate offers.”
The first was from Silverman, who already lived downstairs in a unit on the sixteenth floor of the tower, owned by Saurabh K. Mittal, cofounder of Indiabulls Financial Services Ltd., a New Delhi–based $10 billion holding company. The sixty-eight-year-old Silverman had moved there in October 2008 after leaving his wife of three decades, Nancy, for Karen Hader, a Pilates instructor forty years his junior. They’d met after Silverman’s hip surgery when Hader was his physical therapist.
A onetime tax lawyer, Silverman had moved to Wall Street in the 1960s and learned the takeover game while running a leveraged-buyout fund for Saul Steinberg, the famous corporate raider; its principal investor and adviser was Michael Milken, the head of Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk bond brokerage that was forced into bankruptcy in 1990. After that, Silverman moved to Steve Schwarzman’s Blackstone, using the private equity group’s capital to found Hospitality Franchise Systems, an umbrella company for hotel brands. After taking it public, Silverman became its CEO.
Over the next five years, Silverman acquired Avis, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, and more hotel companies, too, making HFS the largest hotel company in the world, and in 1997 he merged it with a direct-marketing goliath to form Cendant, a $38 billion company, which agreed to pay him $258 million the next year, but almost immediately announced the discovery of accounting irregularities at the marketing firm. That caused Cendant’s stock price to drop by almost half. A raft of class-action lawsuits and an SEC investigation followed.
Silverman was furious, some say humbled, but not defeated. He and wife number two, Nancy, stopped going out. He saw a psychiatrist, became a gym rat, replaced the company’s executives (many of whom would later be convicted and jailed for their part in the fraud), sued its accountants, stabilized the company and made it profitable again, and spun off subsidiaries, earning more millions for himself. By mid-2006, when Cendant ceased to exist, he was out the door, running one of the spin-offs. Having announced he’d retire at the beginning of 2008, he sold that company to the parent of the real estate investment company AREA and went to work there. His severance package totaled $110 million.
Silverman seemed set for a relaxed last act. But still, he was vilified. “If they were building a Mount Rushmore for overpaid CEOs, they’d reserve several spaces on that edifice for Henry Silverman’s likeness,” said an executive of a proxy advisory firm. No longer a CEO, he dropped from the public radar—at least until he left his wife and moved to Fifteen. In 2009, Karen Hader got pregnant, and Silverman gave her an upgrade, Fifteen-style, renting Leroy Schecter’s A-line apartment for $40,000 a month. A-Rod immediately settled for a one-year rental next door for $30,000 a month.
A-Rod turned out to be “the best tenant,” says Emily Beare. “He decorated the apartment beautifully. It was impeccable. He paid on time.” In spring 2010, Schecter put the two units—still separated—on the market for $55 million. “No one wants people walking through,” says Beare, but A-Rod “was fantastic” about letting the apartment be shown and then, when he moved out a few months later, “returned it in better condition than he got it. He removed the paneling, the wallpaper. You’d have never known anyone had lived there.” And he never once complained about the paparazzi outside.
Henry Silverman turned out to be a different story, or rather his girlfriend did. “Henry was great” is all Beare will say when asked about a story that went around the building. His lease had a show clause, too, allowing potential tenants and purchasers to see it, but the flu was going around, Karen Hader, a new mother, became quite germophobic, and random visits from strangers didn’t sit w
ell with her. She often got upset over last-minute showings and, once, demanded building security accompany the broker and a sneezing client, yelling at them to take off their shoes, use hand sanitizer, and limit their visit to five minutes. The potential renter turned and walked out.
In spring 2010, Silverman bought a town house off Central Park on West Seventy-Sixth Street and began renovating it. He and Hader got engaged as his bitter divorce from Nancy slowly played out; they’d never signed a prenuptial agreement, and Nancy was determined to exit the marriage a wealthy woman. A year later, Silverman and Hader left Fifteen for their new home. Shortly afterward, a judge rejected Silverman’s attempt to introduce “scientific” evidence in court to prove that his and his wife’s joint property should all be his because his genius, his “innate intellectual talents,” and his “unique personal traits” disqualified her from sharing in his $450 million fortune. The judge decided that Nancy had managed their lives, raised their daughter, and provided introductions that had to be taken into account in distributing their property.
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address Page 35