The evening was long. With so many guests traveling about an hour from Manhattan to Bedminster, photographs, the traditional ceremony, the extended hora, the Jewish customs, the toasts, it amounted to an eight-hour affair for some. But it was not altogether unwelcome, and many of the guests took it in stride by imbibing perhaps more than they were used to doing in black tie to pass the time. What happens in Bedminster stays in Bedminster, unless it happens at a Trump wedding, where prying eyes commit it all to memory and gab about it for years to come. And everyone walked away from the evening happy. As a gift, they gave out a little Hebrew book to each guest, along with a pair of white flip-flops with the tag: “Ivanka and Jared—what a perfect pair.”
Before the couple set off on a safari honeymoon in Africa, the Kushners gifted them a weekend away at the Mayflower Inn in Washington, Connecticut, which, funnily enough, was owned by Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin’s father, Robert. They spent a weekend at the spa relaxing before they took several flights to South Africa—one delayed to Amsterdam, and a round of lost luggage on the way.
Almost a year after their wedding, they had what amounted to a second honeymoon—a vacation from a vacation, as it happened. A guest at their reception owned a hotel in Sardinia and gifted them a five-night stay. On their first day, Ivana texted her daughter, saying that she’d heard Ivanka and Jared were in town. Ivana was nearby on a friend’s boat and decided to book a room at the same hotel. They spent the days of their second honeymoon with Ivanka’s mother. At night, she would start partying when the newlyweds went off to sleep.
After the marriage was official, the Kushners warmed to Ivanka, who spent weekends at their beach house on the Jersey shore, unplugged like the rest of them on Shabbat, enrolled their children in Jewish day schools, and cooked and cleaned up after holiday dinners like the rest of the women in the family. They took pride in her clothing and accessories line, typically marketed to younger shoppers on a budget keen to pick through racks at mass department stores like Macy’s and discount retailers like T.J.Maxx. That demographic does not include observant billionaires with real estate empires in the tristate area, yet the Kushner women have taken to wearing Ivanka-branded shoes like a badge of honor.
“These people are made of money, and they all wear Ivanka Trump shoes. Every day,” one associate said. “They’ll be like, ‘Oh, you have to get these. They are the best.’”
Ivanka found a little familiar charm in some of the Kushner quirks, too. The family, worth billions of dollars, stocked their office on the fifteenth floor of 666 Fifth Avenue with snacks from Costco, those colossal plastic tubs of pretzels and chocolate-covered almonds. When Ivanka was a child, her mother would pile her and her brothers in their car to take them to the wholesaler, a thrill for the woman who never wore the same dress twice and gilded anything not nailed down in their triplex. “She would get so excited. You have no idea,” Ivanka said of Ivana on these trips. “She’d say, ‘Why would I buy something that’s more expensive when I could get the same product for less?’”
That frugality is a trait that Jared and Josh both inherited. One tech entrepreneur who went to see the Kushner brothers in the midst of a fund-raising round remembers the horror on their faces when they looked over the business plan. The founder had budgeted in an executive assistant to start in the third month, once the business had got off the ground. That stopped both Kushners in their tracks. “They told me that they only invest in companies whose founders are willing to steal toilet paper from a nearby Starbucks until they start turning a profit,” the entrepreneur, who went on to build an e-commerce empire without the Kushner money, said. “That was the kind of entrepreneur they were interested in.”
Of course, the Kushners could spend their money more lavishly, particularly on their grandchildren. When their grandchildren were born, Charlie and Seryl bought multimillion-dollar apartments in Manhattan for each one individually, placing them in a trust called Kinderlach, the Yiddish word for “children.” This means that little Arabella, Joseph, and Theodore, and all of their cousins on the Kushner side, have pieces of property waiting for them when they reach whatever age is given in the trust.
Their grandparents also started a tradition for their grandchildren when they celebrate their bar or bat mitzvahs. Each twelve- or thirteen-year-old can choose to go anywhere in the world on a trip with their grandparents. The catch is that each trip has to first start off in Novogrudok, the town of 30,000 in western Belarus where Charlie’s mother, Rae, grew up and later made an unthinkably nervy escape from a Nazi ghetto. They are unfailingly giving with their children and grandchildren, who, in turn, readily express how their parents or grandparents gave them everything.
As aware as the kids are of Charlie and Seryl’s generosity, they understand how depraved they can be, too. Associates refer to Charlie as a “psychopath,” a “torturer,” “truly the worst person in the world,” someone whose temper is so fierce that people around him when he erupts ask, “How can a person be so angry?” Seryl’s own darker side has earned her the nickname “Lady Macbeth” among people who have worked with the family.
Not long after Jared bought the Observer, Jared invited a few writers on the staff to a lunch at 666 Fifth Avenue. It was a speaker series of sorts, and a few of his editors and reporters got to mingle with the Kushners and their developer friends before the program officially began. When one of his writers met Seryl there for the first time, pleasantries were not exchanged. She did not shake the female writer’s hand. She did not say a single word. She did, however, take note of a hair clinging to the reporter’s black sweater. She reached over, pulled it off, and walked away.
It’s not as though Jared and his siblings, Dara, Nicole, and Josh, don’t see this. In meetings, when Charlie would erupt and rip into everyone around him, Jared would repeatedly tap his father on the shoulder and whisper, “Dad, stop it. Dad, stop it. Dad, stop.” One associate likened Jared and Josh to the Menendez brothers, the handsome, wealthy Beverly Hills siblings who murdered their parents and then spent much of their time behind bars talking about how much they loved them. “Their parents are insane, in their brains, they know it, and yet, they say, ‘I love them. They have given me everything.’”
They are blood; there is, at least, a twisted fealty born out of both nature and nurture. Relationships with in-laws tend to lack those genetic blinders, making them some of the trickiest to navigate, particularly when your married family are, by all accounts, monsters. Ivanka, though, has a deep affection for Charlie and Seryl, whom she calls “mom and dad.” As one person close to the family pointed out, Ivanka was essentially neglected by her parents as a child, so having parents around who think to buy her and her children long underwear when they are going to be outside in the cold for a long time, as Seryl did for Ivanka, Jared, and their children to have for the inauguration events, is appealing.
Chapter 8
You Are Who You Marry
To understand why the Kushners accepted Ivanka despite their reservations about her not being a Jew is to understand both how Jared blossomed into the entwined family’s golden boy and gained leverage within it through a sibling rivalry turned catastrophe that is one part Shakespearean, one part Cain and Abel, with a sprinkle of Dallas and The Godfather, only darker, on top. To get to events that resulted in Charlie spending sixteen months in a federal penitentiary in Montgomery, Alabama, you have to kick the dirt off the roots of the Kushners’ bitter history, the details of which are written in ink in a hardbound book displayed in the Kushner Companies office lobby.
The Miracle of Life tells the story of Rae Kushner, Charlie’s mother and the family’s matriarch. The Nazis arrived in Novogrudok, where she was raised, in 1941, executing its Jewish lawyers, doctors, and intellectuals in the town square as an orchestra played. Soldiers rounded up a group of fifty teenage girls, including Rae, to scrub the blood of the dead off the soaked cobblestones, and tens of thousands of Jews were sent to a ghetto that served as a labor camp.
On Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, Nazis sorted the residents into two lines. Those to the right would die; those to the left would live. Rae’s sister, Esther, was one of the more than five thousand Jews killed that day, after she tried to run to a nearby building to hide. By the night before Rosh Hashanah of 1943, only a few hundred Jews remained. Months earlier, they had decided that if they were going to survive, their only hope was to tunnel out. Late at night, they’d used scrappy instruments to dig. A human chain backed up the excavators, passing bags of soil from person to person to person all the way up into a hiding place in an attic.
It stormed on the eve of the new year, and a group of the survivors, including Rae and her father, sister, and brother, decided to go. After removing the nails from metal roofs so they would rattle in the wind and drown out the noise they made, they crawled hundreds of feet through the tunnel to nearby forests. Rae and her family had waited for her father, so they climbed behind the rest. They had hoped to find a farmer who they’d heard had gathered an army of Jewish resistance fighters, hiding out on the other side. But the Germans caught on, and were waiting for them outside the tunnel. When the first Jews crawled out, they opened fire. Rae’s brother Chanon, for whom Charlie is named, ran in the wrong direction. He was killed, along with fifty others.
Rae made it to the farmer in the woods, where she found others living on straw beds in bunkers. This is where she met a man named Yossel, a carpenter who’d fled from a labor camp and had been living for three years in a hole he’d dug in the woods, coming out only to rummage for food. They stayed at the Bielski camp until the Soviets arrived. Rae married Yossel, and the two walked, step by step, to Italy, where they spent more than three years in a displaced persons’ camp while they waited for the visas that would allow them to immigrate to the United States.
They came to New York in 1949. Yossel became Joseph, and the family moved to Brooklyn. They had two sons—Murray first, then Charles—and two daughters, Linda and Esther. Joseph worked construction in New Jersey until he saved up enough to buy three lots of land in Union County with two partners, brothers named Harry and Joe Wilff (the Wilff family now owns the Minnesota Vikings). Joseph was part of a group of survivors known as the Holocaust Builders, and developed somewhat of a specialty building and renting garden apartments. His sons took on the trade, too. Murray was the academically gifted one, graduating summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he went on to law school. Charlie was a passable undergrad at New York University, and got an MBA and a law degree from Hofstra at the same time.
By 1985 Joseph had built four thousand apartments, and Charlie asked him to go into business. They worked together at Kushner Companies for nine months, until Joseph had a stroke and died. Charlie, the second son, ascended to the family throne, giving his brother and sisters a stake in what he would soon turn into an empire.
This, when the money became real, and familial resentments boiled over without the patriarch there to mind the pot, is where the darkness set in.
Charlie’s business exploded. In less than a decade, the company had more than 22,000 apartments, a bank, and commercial real estate holdings, making him one of the most prominent private landlords in the country who came to be worth about about a billion bucks. His drive was relentless, and his discipline bordered on bionic. He would clock double-digit runs before work, or, if he wasn’t outside, swim 180 laps in the Short Hills Sheraton before heading in to his office, where he kept a closet full of crisp dress shirts, in blue and white, each hung an inch apart. Just like his own parents, he had two sons, Jared and Josh, and two daughters, Dara and Nicole.
Charlie knew how to read a room, and as many have described, he could have a room eating out of his hand if he flicked on his charm. He knew how to flip open his checkbook, which, unsurprisingly, worked just as well. He became a macher in the worlds of Jewish philanthropy and politics, and, in his mind, a kingmaker and a Jewish Kennedy. In New Jersey, there was the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and the Rae Kushner Yeshiva High School, and the rabbis at each couldn’t reach him fast enough to shake his hand when he walked in the door. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, he forked over nearly $1.5 million to Democratic politicians, from Chuck Schumer to Jon Corzine. In July 2000, Vice President Al Gore, running for president at the time, trekked to Livingston for a fund-raiser chez Kushner, forcing rush-hour traffic to a screeching halt as police descended and the motorcade squeezed through. Jared, a teenager, was called on by Charlie to say a few words at the event, surprising elders in the room with his maturity and ease. Hillary Clinton paid Charlie a visit, too, after she won her Senate seat that same year, sitting down for a Shabbat meal in the family’s beach house on the shore.
Charlie placed a bet on Jim McGreevey, first as the mayor of Woodbridge Township and then, later, in 2002, in his bid for governor of New Jersey. McGreevey made good on all of Charlie’s years of support by nominating him to be the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a few months after his inauguration. It was a plum job for a number of reasons, one that would make any developer in the tristate area at that time drool. It would have put him in charge of billions of dollars in state contracts as the states rebuilt the World Trade Center after the September 11 attacks.
Charlie never got the gig. He removed himself from consideration as his family grudges and business misdeeds hemorrhaged into public view. Money and long-standing grudges were thicker than blood, but not quite as sticky as the bile between brothers and sister. And ultimately, it tore them all to pieces.
It had all started to unravel a few years before, in 1999. Murray had dragged his feet and pulled out on a few business deals that would have catapulted Charlie’s business into a new stratosphere, both in the scope of his holdings and in how much the business would be worth. It was more personal than that, as family business matters tend to be. Charlie had never accepted Murray’s wife, Lee, who he deemed not religious enough. Soon the brothers agreed they would no longer work together, after a series of public fights, and friends and associates had to choose between the brothers. Their sister Esther and her husband, Billy Schulder, sided with Murray. It was a betrayal that infuriated Charlie, only adding to his distaste for Schulder, his former business partner, who’d had an affair with one of their employees years earlier. Schulder left Charlie’s office and went to work for Murray.
Murray sued his brother on the night before McGreevey’s election, a coincidence too poorly timed to ignore, alleging that his brother had mismanaged the business and owed him money. Not long after, in November 2002, a Kushner Companies accountant filed his own lawsuit, followed by a second one in February, claiming that Charlie had used company money to make philanthropic and political donations, including the $125,000 speaking fee paid to Bill Clinton for delivering remarks at a Kushner Companies–owned bank.
The lawsuits were catnip for Chris Christie, then a Republican US attorney for the state of New Jersey. They also burst any chance for Charlie’s Port Authority gig as Christie’s investigation became public. The already fractured family split right open when Charlie thought his sister was cooperating with the attorney’s office. Charlie brought in a buddy named Jimmy O’Toole, a then soon-to-be cop he’d met on the running trails in town, and floated an idea for how he could retaliate for Esther and Schulder’s disloyalty. O’Toole recruited his brother to join as Charlie hatched a plan for how to exact revenge. A prostitute and a videotape would do the trick. He offered O’Toole $25,000 and slipped a chunk of it in cash to him across his desk, along with the number of a woman who went by the name Suzanna, an East European blonde who had misgivings about the whole thing but went along with it anyway. Charlie offered to pay between $7,000 and $10,000 cash if she agreed to have sex with his brother-in-law on tape.
Thanksgiving rolled around, and one cold morning, as Schulder downed his usual breakfast at the Time to Eat Diner in Bridgewater, Suzanna and the business suit that clung to every inch of her walked in. She was in town for a
job interview and her car had broken down, she told Schulder. She’d need a ride back to her motel. He turned down an invitation into her room but didn’t pass up taking her number. It was snowing by the next morning when he pulled back off Route 22 and into the lot outside the Red Bull Inn. He parked and walked inside, where Suzanna performed oral sex on him in full view of the miniature video camera that had been hidden inside the room’s alarm clock.
The O’Tooles, who’d been surveilling the whole thing, called Charlie right away, and brought the tape to his Florham Park, New Jersey, office. He and Seryl’s brother, Richard Stadmauer, who worked for him, covered the glass windows in the Kushner Companies conference room with newspaper and popped in the tape. Once he’d stopped laughing at Schulder’s heat-of-the-moment exclamation that he felt “like he was in a movie,” Charlie ordered copies. It worked so well that he tried to set up his former accountant, the one who’d sued him over his campaign contributions, too, but the accountant rebuffed the advances of the woman Charlie’d hired, and a couple of offers to have a drink in her motel room. She was paid $2,000 for her troubles.
Charlie held on to the tapes of his brother-in-law until May, when investigators began targeting members of his inner circle. Then, he ordered the tape and still photos sent to Esther in a padded envelope that left no trace of where it came from. Murray was her first call; she told her brother not to go home. Both Esther and Lee were convinced they were going to be killed. Esther took the envelope and its contents to federal law enforcement agents and turned them all over.
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