House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

by Gross, Michael

  Many purchasers preferred to be anonymous and hid behind LLCs, offshore companies, and trusts. Unit 11G, for instance, is held in the name of Tokolosh Holdings LLC of Washington State. A tokolosh is a mysterious beast in Zulu mythology. The owner behind that corporate mask clearly wants to be mysterious, too. Later, as interest in the building grew and public documents recording sales began to be filed, real estate and gossip reporters tried to discover who was behind those semi-anonymous entities. Despite them, in those first sales, 15CPW’s social profile began to emerge.

  Real estate professionals were the first to catch on to its value, and eventually several dozen developers, brokers, and realty financiers would buy or rent its apartments. Foreigners, whether they planned to be absentee investors or residents, would also emerge as an important cohort. Israelis and Koreans would pick up a half dozen apartments each. Chinese owners would follow closely with five units, and multiple apartments were sold to Russians, Greeks, Indians, and Central and South Americans. Other units would initially sell to an Italian businessman and a Senegalese cell phone tycoon.

  Wall Street buyers set the tone, though, thanks mostly to Goldman Sachs’s involvement. At Corcoran, brokers were convinced that Goldman executives and favored clients and counterparties were being given the inside track on apartments by the developers—and worried that brokers were being edged out. A letter went out from Goldman, insists a broker who says she saw it. “It was a huge mailing. It went not just to clients but to everyone they did business with. It said clearly they’d be treated preferentially. Clients wouldn’t talk to us. We were going nuts. We were furious. Can you imagine?” The Goldman Sachs executives insist that it did not send out any letters or make any organized effort to attract its network to the building. But neither did it keep the building a secret. “Within the culture, we knew,” says a longtime Goldman executive.

  It doesn’t take a Goldman Sachs executive to know that when you have early information you act on it—and many did, both for themselves and their clients. “It’s not unusual for clients to call” Goldman’s personal-wealth-management division and ask about potential investments, including real estate developments, says Goldman’s Alan Kava. “It was hard to get into the sales office,” he continues. So he made sure his Goldman colleagues and clients were taken care of. “We weren’t shy about that. They called us, we introduced them to the Zeckendorfs, and they bought.”

  Aside from Lloyd Blankfein and Justin Metz (who has since left Goldman for Steve Ross’s Related Companies), seven present and former Goldman bigwigs were among the first class of purchasers at 15CPW. The former partners, especially, had money to burn; significant fortunes were made when Goldman went public in 1999. Dan Neidich’s 0.9 percent stake in the firm, for instance, reportedly yielded him almost $150 million.

  In January 2006, Alan Shuch of Goldman signed its first 15CPW contract with his wife, Leslie Wohlman Himmel; the co-owner of a real estate investment company, she’s been called “the ranking female landlord” of commercial property in Manhattan. An MBA from Harvard and the daughter of an accountant, she started her career at Integrated Resources, the insurance and real estate company that went bankrupt just before its planned move into Zeckendorf Towers. She cofounded her own company in 1985, shortly after marrying her first investment banker. Shuch, her second husband, had joined Goldman Sachs in the bond division in 1976 after getting an MBA from Wharton. Credited with helping build the bank’s corporate and high-yield bond departments, he made partner after ten years, started Goldman’s money-management arm in 1988 when he was thirty-nine, and retired as a partner six years later, but remains with the firm as an advisory director and a member of several of its boards of trustees and managers. Shuch and Himmel could obviously afford the $8.6 million asking price of their D-line apartment on the twenty-sixth floor.

  A month later, John E. Waldron, a young star in Goldman’s investment-banking division, bought an $8.5 million D-line apartment in the house. An unusual investment banker, he was an English major in college who became global head of Goldman’s retail sales force. At the same time, Donald C. Opatrny Jr. bought a D-line in the tower for $11.8 million. He’d joined Goldman in 1978, become a partner the same year as Shuch, and had just retired. Opatrny would later sell his unit to Victor Vargas, a Venezuelan banker with six homes, a polo team, and a daughter who married Luis Alfonso de Borbón, a great-grandson of Francisco Franco and relative of the king of Spain. Vargas lives there with his girlfriend, Maria Beatriz Hernandez Rodriguez.

  Raj Sethi, a derivatives trader, was the next at Goldman to buy a Fifteen apartment, but his was comparatively modest. Sethi signed a contract for a $4.2 million tower apartment with north and west views in March 2006. Born in India, he’d come to America as a child and grown up in Connecticut, where his father was in charge of manufacturing for American Can. A graduate of Cornell, Sethi joined Goldman Sachs out of school in 1998 and spent the next fourteen years trading commodities while bouncing between New York, Singapore, and London, where he was living when he spotted Fifteen rising while in New York on a vacation and bought his apartment unaware that Goldman had helped finance the building.

  Apartment 7A in the house went to Ravi M. Singh, Goldman’s cohead of Global Securities Services and another partner, in May 2006, for a little over $16 million. Singh joined the firm right after graduating from Columbia University in 1989 and ran various departments trading derivatives. His brother Dinakar was also a Goldman partner until 2004, when he left to set up his own hedge fund. Ravi remained at Goldman until he retired late in 2008, a year that began tragically when his wife, Elizabeth Yeh, a television journalist and cookbook author, died at age forty-one, leaving him with their daughter. Singh listed his apartment for $32 million that September and fourteen months later sold it to an LLC called CPW Park Views, after his broker had repeatedly dropped the price and then taken it off the market. Behind CPW Park Views were Robert and Suzanne Karr, a persistent couple who finally talked him into selling at $22.5 million. Robert Karr had worked for the legendary hedge-fund manager Julian Robertson before setting up his own firm, Joho Capital, in 1996.

  Seven months later, another Goldman partner signed a contract at Fifteen. Ashok Varadhan, Goldman’s baby-faced, bespectacled head of currency trading and emerging markets, comes by his facility with numbers naturally. His father, Srinivasa Varadhan, is an award-winning professor of mathematics at New York University, specializing in esoteric fields: probability theory, stochastic processes, partial differential equations, and statistical physics. Raised in Greenwich Village, Ashok and his elder brother, Gopal, both studied math and went into finance.

  Ashok attended Duke, where he was manager of the men’s basketball team, then enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford, but, instead of finishing his degree, started his career at Merrill Lynch. He joined Goldman in 1998, was named head of interest-rate products in 2001, and became a partner in 2002 when he was only twenty-nine years old. In between those promotions, he lost his brother, who was in his Cantor Fitzgerald office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center when it was attacked on September 11, 2001.

  Varadhan lived in a loft on cobblestoned Bond Street in NoHo before buying his ninth-floor D-line unit at Fifteen for $16.3 million at the end of 2006, shortly before he was named Goldman’s global head of currency trading. At the time, finance gossip set his annual income at $10 million a year, and one blogger called him a demigod.

  The last of the Goldman Sachs buyers, Thomas Wagner, came on the scene so late, he paid a premium of more than $2 million over the initial asking price for his treetop-view D-line apartment in the house. Wagner had an accounting degree from Villanova and an MBA from Columbia when he joined Credit Suisse in 1998 as an analyst. Two years later, he moved to Goldman Sachs and spent the next seven years there, rising to managing director in 2004. Wagner’s wife, Cynthia “Cindy” Brower, also worked at Goldman for nineteen years in a group that handled sales of loans and distressed debt and was made a m
anaging director a year before her husband. The Wagners had lived together in an apartment across the park where they watched Fifteen rise out their windows and moved shortly after they got married.

  Wagner left Goldman early in 2008 to launch Knighthead Capital Management, a hedge fund reportedly begun with $750 million. Brower remained but, like Raj Sethi, left as part of a mass exodus early in 2012, which coincidentally or not, was around the same time that a London-based Goldman staffer announced in an op-ed article in the New York Times that he was quitting the firm because of its “toxic and destructive” environment. Brower’s next move was neither toxic nor destructive: she competed in a charity Ironman race in Kona, Hawaii. Retirement didn’t mean relaxation.

  It’s impossible to identify every Goldman Sachs–related purchaser at Fifteen, but many others heard about the building through the bank. Joshua S. Friedman, cofounder of Canyon Partners, a Los Angeles–based hedge fund (which ranked number 28 on the 2012 list of the Hedge Fund 100 in Alpha, a magazine that covers the industry), bought apartment 6B in December 2006 for about $11 million; its initial price was $7.25 million. A graduate of Harvard, Harvard Law, and Harvard Business School, he’d started his career at Goldman. Friedman’s roommate from Harvard, Mitchell R. Julis, graduated from Princeton and Harvard’s law and business schools and worked with him at pioneering junk-bond firm Drexel Burnham Lambert before starting Canyon with a third partner in 1990. A month after Friedman signed his contract, Julis bought at 15CPW, too, taking a fourth-floor A-line apartment for $10.335 million.

  “Aggressiveness is part of their DNA,” an investment consultant once said of Canyon’s partners. But Julis and Friedman aren’t so simply summed up. After one of their funds had its first down year, Julis began practicing Judaism. “I got shaken,” he told Aish.com, a Jerusalem-based humor and culture website he bankrolls. “I knew I needed something beyond my hedge fund to ground me. Torah was the answer.”

  Michael Alexandre Zaoui agreed to buy apartment 30A for almost $10.4 million in March 2006. Moroccan born, raised in Rome, and educated at the London School of Economics, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, and Harvard Business School, Zaoui started his career with Banque Rothschild in Paris and later joined Morgan Stanley’s mergers department in London, where he was a friendly competitor with his brother, Yoel, the head of European investment banking at Goldman. They sometimes worked together, too, on both the same and opposite sides in deals, together advising Elf Aquitaine, a French oil company, when it became the target of a hostile takeover by Total Fina, and Aventis, the French pharmaceutical firm, in a similar attempt by Sanofi. In 2000, they were reportedly the highest-earning bankers in London’s City financial district, hauling in £20 million between them. Still a resident of London (where he, his French wife, and their children live just behind the famous Bluebird restaurant on King’s Road), Michael retired from Morgan Stanley in 2008 at age fifty to become a freelance consultant. At the time, he’d rented his 15CPW apartment to Frank Newman, the former chairman of Bankers Trust and Shenzhen Development Bank of China, and a onetime deputy secretary of the treasury.

  The richest Goldman-related buyers are likely Pan Shiyi and Zhang Xin, the married heads of SOHO China, the third-largest property company in China, known for its stylish, starchitect-designed buildings and for collaborations with artists such as Ai Weiwei, the famously outspoken dissident. Both were born poor. Zhang Xin, who was shunted among relatives and friends after her parents split up during the Cultural Revolution, left mainland China at age fourteen and then departed Hong Kong for England at nineteen with money she’d made working in sweatshops. She studied at Sussex and Cambridge, wrote a thesis on privatization in China, and won a job at a merchant bank. After a move to Goldman Sachs, Zhang ended up on Wall Street in 1993, and a year later became an investment banker at Travelers Group, run by her future neighbor Sandy Weill.

  Zhang met Pan Shiyi at a meeting while on a business trip to China. The son of a family considered right-wing outcasts, Pan grew up a farm boy so poor he sometimes begged for food. But as Chinese society loosened up after the Cultural Revolution, he was able to move to Beijing to study and then won a job in China’s Ministry of Petroleum in the 1980s. Taking advantage of the country’s move toward free enterprise, he got into real estate. Later dubbed China’s Naughty Boy for painting an apartment complex in bright colors, he’d demonstrated his headstrong ways by proposing to Zhang four days after meeting her. A year later, they both quit their jobs to found the company that became SOHO.

  In China, they were considered an odd couple, she Westernized, he very much Chinese. But they adapted and became media sensations, with Pan often appearing on television and even blogging. In New York, they fit easily into four of the Fifteen tribes, the Goldman, real estate, entrepreneur, and foreign cohorts, after they agreed to buy their New York pied-à-terre, apartment 2A, for about $7.7 million in November 2006. According to Forbes, with the $2.65 billion they earned from taking their company public in Hong Kong, they are the twenty-first-richest family in China and rank number 442 on the magazine’s list of the world’s billionaires. The Times of London has dubbed them the It Couple of Beijing.

  Another Goldman apartment, 12L in the tower, went into contract in February 2007 for just over $4.4 million. The LLC that bought it was domiciled in Marlboro, New Jersey, at the home of Gary and Tamar Tolchin, philanthropists, thoroughbred breeders, and co-owners of a New Jersey restaurant. Tolchin was a partner at Spear, Leeds & Kellogg, a decades-old “clearing” firm—it served as an intermediary, clearing transactions and holding securities to facilitate trading, which is known as market-making. Spear, Leeds was sold to Goldman Sachs in 2000 for $6.5 billion, including $4.4 billion in Goldman Sachs stock, and Tolchin ended up with thousands of shares. He profited again four-plus years later, when he sold his apartment to Midwest shopping-mall heiress Deborah Simon for $7.5 million and bought a much larger condo on Upper Broadway for just over $10 million. That time, Tamar Tolchin’s name appeared on a document filed in public records.

  The Ofers and Zeckendorfs brought in buyers, too. Eyal Ofer knew the Laskaridis shipping family from Greece (apartment 27A, which went for $11.7 million), and the Logothetises (apartment 31D, $12.9 million), whose Libra Group has interests in shipping, aviation, real estate, hospitality, and energy. Anathasios Laskaridis, whose family has expanded into hotels and casinos and owns a large share of Aegean Airlines, asked Ofer for a discount. “I said, ‘If you want a discount, you better buy one today because tomorrow the price is going up.’ For which he was ever thankful. George Logothetis followed him” and sold his unit for $24 million in 2011 to Mac Holdings (America), a subsidiary of a shipping-based conglomerate based in Sri Lanka. Min Sun (apartment 14B, almost $14.5 million), who runs Transfield Asset Management, has been in shipping for twenty years. Transfield’s parent ships grains, fertilizers, and minerals, 85 million tons in 2007. Later, when apartments began to be resold, units traded to Elisabeth June Steckmest, whose family owns Viken Shipping of Norway, and Ruth McLoughlin, the daughter of shipowner Gunter Neunhoeffer, who runs Transocean in Monaco.

  There were Zeckendorf friends, too, such as James Kohlberg, the son of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts cofounder Jerome Kohlberg, and now his partner in Kohlberg & Co., a private equity boutique. He learned of the building through Will, whom he met through a mutual love of burgundy wines. Kohlberg bought apartment 6C as a pied-à-terre but never moved in, selling for a $5 million profit. But buyers and residents in the building, particularly those not previously identified, are a subject the Zeckendorf brothers are loath to discuss.

  The crucial element of the building’s success, though, was what might be called the Goldman Effect—not the Zeckendorf or Ofer social networks. Right from the start, a signal seemed to summon financiers from far and wide as effectively as one of those whistles that only dogs can hear. Goldman Sachs executives didn’t need to make phone calls or write letters to make its building desirable. The mere fact that G
oldman people were buying en masse made it so. “You had people here making a shitload of money, looking to upgrade, and this hit the market at the perfect time,” says a resident Morgan Stanley banker. “You knew they wouldn’t skimp on anything because Lloyd was going to live here.” The Zeckendorfs had figured right. There was a pent-up demand for luxury apartments in New York. And moneymen and -women and the sort of entrepreneurs Goldman financed and later invested for were the likeliest candidates to be clamoring for them.

  “Remember the time,” says Realtor Haidee Granger. “These people were making heinous amounts of money. Obscene funds were floating about. There was lots of construction, but it was mostly glass boxes. This had the Park Avenue accoutrements. And a brilliant location. It had the ethos of a co-op in a state-of-the-art building.” So Goldman didn’t need to “actively market,” says its Stuart Rothenberg. “People heard. People are always worried about the operation of a new building. We could say that the Zeckendorfs were going to live there. That was a great thing. It made the buyers feel good. It had a lot of hype, it’s the building this one and that one are in, so it’s the place people want to look. All the big names came out of the woodwork. Who wouldn’t want to look?”