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

by Gross, Michael

  Though his company had gone public in 1998, Peter Simon tightly controlled it through a family trust set up to benefit his four children. A onetime hippie who’d lived in a nudist colony on the Spanish island of Ibiza and started his business selling hand-crocheted coats out of a stall in London’s Portobello Market, he’d made about $100 million when Monsoon (so named because Simon was born during a rainstorm in Sri Lanka) went public.

  Just before he bought at Fifteen, Simon was the subject of a brief but spicy column in London’s Sunday Express, detailing what it deemed his eventful year. After pegging his fortune at £600 million, columnist Adam Helliker reviewed Simon’s romantic entanglements, beginning with the twenty-year marriage that produced his four children before ending in divorce in 2000. His ex-wife had then had a two-year fling with James Hewitt, who’d first famously bedded Diana, the Princess of Wales. Simon went on to have a son with a girlfriend named Svetlana Astakhova before segueing to a Belarussian model named Liudmilla Bakhmat, “who is at least two decades his junior,” Helliker wrote, and was “still married with two small daughters.”

  Simon was apparently generous with his women. A member of the “Simon clan” told the columnist that while Bakhmat was partying in Simon’s “palatial villa” on Ibiza, Astakhova was living next door to his home in London, subsidized by “a huge monthly cheque.” That family member was likely pleased when Peter installed Bakhmat across the Atlantic Ocean at 15CPW, considering the last words of the column. “Liudmilla is ghastly,” the relative said. “Svetlana’s an angel compared to her.”

  The first closings took place in August 2007, beginning with the buyers of the white-box apartments in the house such as Jeff Gordon, Barry Rosenstein, and Sandy Weill, who had the most work to do. By November, apartments in the lower floors of the tower were finished and began to be transferred to buyers. The Weills were the first to move into the building, albeit into their little one-bedroom in the bottom of the tower. A month later, closings began on the upper floors of the tower, too. Daniel Loeb took possession of his penthouse in February 2008. That July, Daniel Och was the last to close on a penthouse. A handful of apartments on the second and third floors of the house and on the twenty-third floor of the tower closed last, after the construction crews, who finished a floor at a time, “backed out” of the building.

  By then, the flipping had accelerated. The next apartment to be resold belonged to Michael Holtz, the founder of a boutique luxury-travel agency, Smartflyer. Holtz and a friend had each bought a three-bedroom in the tower with views of Broadway, Sixty-Second Street, the reflecting pool, and a bit of the park and planned to combine them. Holtz had rented in the Park Millennium when he first came to New York, bought his first apartment, and “got hooked” on luxury real estate, he says. He owned an apartment in one of the Richard Meier glass towers on Perry Street and had just sold another in the Park Imperial to Sean Combs, the rap impresario, when he bought at Fifteen on impulse. “In 2005, there was only one way the investment could go and that was up,” he says.

  His partner was Evan Cole, who’d cofounded ABC Home in the early 1980s with his wife, whose family had owned ABC Carpet, a huge rug emporium, for more than a century. After their 1999 separation, he’d taken over the company, but the year before buying at 15CPW, he’d sold his share to his ex and gone to California, where he opened a home-furnishing company of his own. He also kept an apartment around the corner from Fifteen on Central Park South, loved the neighborhood, and was fascinated by the Mayflower property. “I wanted to be in that location and park there for the rest of my life,” Cole says. “It just beckoned to me.” When he heard about 15CPW from a friend at Madison Capital, which had bought half the retail condo, he went to the sales office with his friend Holtz, and they bought apartments together. Cole didn’t care that they were in the back of the bus. “My whole apartment on Central Park South faced the park,” he says, “and it’s a static picture. Central Park views are the most overrated thing ever.”

  Cole was planning to move to New York and had just sold his home in Los Angeles. But at a good-bye party, he met the woman of his dreams, and when she asked him why on earth he would sell his house, “I ripped up the contract,” he says. “She’s my wife now and we have a beautiful son. I’m staying in California.” He’d already planned the design of the 15CPW duplex, but she found the building pretentious and announced she’d never live there. “So I stopped the whole thing,” Cole says. “If she’d said jump out the window, I would’ve. I was going with the love juice.”

  When he and Holtz closed, the building was still unfinished. Holtz liked living downtown and Cole had recommitted to Los Angeles (“the nicest place on earth as long as you don’t talk to anybody,” he says). “I had no idea how successful it would be,” adds Holtz, who put his unit on the market for $8.5 million three days after buying it. Three months later, he got his price. Cole sold his a month after that for $9.15 million to an investment manager in Chicago, whose son would eventually occupy the apartment. Cole thought they were “Goldman Sachs people,” he says, “but I didn’t look. They’re probably smarter than me. I’m sure it’s worth millions more than they paid.”

  Holtz’s buyers clearly knew what his place was worth; they already owned two apartments in the building. Under the name Lovebirds LLC, Jesse Itzler and Sara Blakely had bought 37A, a three-bedroom stunner with park, river, and downtown views, for $12 million two years earlier and had added 14J, next door to Holtz, eight months later for another $2.7 million.

  Jesse Itzler’s father was a plumber and his mother, the president of the Board of Education in the New York suburb of Roslyn. After graduating from American University in 1990, Itzler had a brief career as a self-styled frat-rapper under the name Jesse Jaymes. He also staged $50-a-head parties for Manhattan singles at which guests played the part of bride, groom, and guests at a mock wedding and reception. Then, at twenty-two, the tall, athletic, curly-blond-haired Itzler and a rapper partner named Mozie penned a theme song for the New York Knicks and wrote more music for sports franchises, then started and sold a record label to SFX Entertainment in 1998 and went to work for its owner, an entrepreneur who told them to think big. Flying around the country in private jets for SFX, they had a lightbulb moment. “This is the drug,” Itzler’s partner declared.

  After researching the private-jet industry, they identified a vacuum, decided to broker flight time in jets owned by others to the young and wealthy, and cofounded Marquis Jets just before the 9/11 attacks turned commercial flying into a nightmare for passengers. Financed by the partners, who put up $1 million each, and hedge funds and investors who put in another $4 million, they bought aircraft hours from NetJets and resold them in twenty-five-hour blocks. By 2003, they had seven hundred clients, including sports stars and celebrities such as Madonna, Michael Jordan, and LeBron James. “We target the hip-hop guys who have made their first $2 million and don’t want to take their shoes off before getting on a flight,” Itzler said. By 2007, Marquis had $700 million in annual revenues.

  Itzler met Sara Blakely when she became a Marquis client. The daughter of a lawyer from Clearwater, Florida, and granddaughter of the owner of clothing stores, Blakely started dreaming up moneymaking schemes as a child and became a champion high school debater at sixteen, right around the time her parents divorced. In one version of a story that’s been told several ways, her father gave her a set of motivational tapes as a parting gift. She listened to them so often, she knew them by heart by the time she became a Tri Delta sorority girl at Florida State University. After disappointing LSAT results that dashed her childhood hopes of following her father into the law, she started her adult life as, depending on which version of the story you’re reading, a chipmunk at Disney World (she was too short for the Goofy costume) or wearing Mickey Mouse ears while buckling visitors into rides, and then spent seven years selling photocopy and fax machines door-to-door, rising to the post of national sales manager for an office-supply company.

 
Several versions of how she got the idea for her Spanx line of underwear and hosiery have also circulated. Both involve a pair of white pants with a visible panty line and her desire to wear them with open-toed shoes. In one, she was going to wear them to a party, in another it was while moonlighting as a stand-up comic in Atlanta in 1998. Regardless, she cut the feet off her panty hose, and a legend was born.

  One of her sorority sisters later told a reporter that the Tri Delts had actually discovered that if they cut the legs off control-top panty hose, they were left with a perfect body-shaping undergarment. No matter. Armed with that idea, her skills as a public speaker and saleswoman, and $5,000 (alternately described as a loan from her grandmother and her fax-selling savings), the sprightly blonde researched and improved her product so they wouldn’t roll up her legs, applied for a patent for her invention, and launched Spanx the next year, with its slightly sassy name (ending with an easily remembered K sound inspired by brands like Kodak and Coca-Cola) and slogan (“We’ve got your butt covered”), after finding a hosiery-mill owner whose daughters liked her idea, and talking her way into a Neiman Marcus order by changing clothes in a bathroom stall to show a store buyer how well Spanx hid panty lines.

  Abjuring advertising, she used her Tri Delta sisters as a word-of-mouth marketing force and cleverly sent prototypes to Oprah Winfrey’s stylist with a note thanking the talk-show host for inspiring her. “I love Spanx, I’ve given up panties,” Oprah declared on air in 2000. That was either three weeks after or two weeks before Blakely quit her job to sell Spanx full-time. Sales took off, rising from $4 million the first year to $10 million the second. Pitching herself as a model entrepreneur, she became a women’s-page favorite. By the time Blakely turned thirty-five, a year later, Spanx had annual global sales of $250 million.

  Blakely met Itzler in Las Vegas. Urged by her Marquis salesperson, she asked for a seat at a poker tournament he sponsored. It was sold out, but when Itzler saw her photos, he agreed to make room for her. Soon Blakely broke her engagement to a photographer and put on a new ring from Itzler. “Jesse was the first person I had ever really dated where I didn’t feel like I was carrying the load,” she later told Worth. “We were old enough to know that how we felt about each other was really rare.” So both put their businesses on hold for six months of whirlwind romance.

  A thoroughly modern couple, they bought their home first and got married later. In the interim, Blakely did some reality TV and Itzler formed a brand-development and marketing company and invested in coconut water, a vodka, and a racehorse syndicate, bringing in Marquis customers such as Jay-Z and quarterback Tom Brady. (He would sell Marquis to NetJets owner Berkshire Hathaway in 2010.) The invitations to their wedding, a twelve-page bound booklet, informed the invited that Itzler and Blakely had rented out the entire Gasparilla Inn resort near Boca Grande, Florida, for a long weekend for the October 2008 nuptials. “We had very successful people and, like, thugs,” says Itzler. Olivia Newton-John performed. Sara promptly got pregnant and gave them a son to share their home in the sky.

  That’s where she sat for an interview with the New Yorker early in 2011, during which she claimed to have a fear of heights, as well as a fear of flying and stage fright, despite her years spent on private planes and appearing in public. “When we first got this apartment, I thought I might have to sell it as soon as we moved in,” she said. To calm her fears, the couple hired a former Navy SEAL to suggest emergency escape plans.

  Their apartment “is decorated in a modern rococo style,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote. “Hidden behind the bar are jet packs and an inflatable motorboat.” Blakely confided that in the event of an emergency, they’d jump out the window and, presumably, jet-pack their way to the Hudson River, where they’d float their boat and escape, leaving behind the books noted by Jacobs, which included a Wayne Dyer library, Living Gluten-Free for Dummies, and works by the New Age advice author Eckhart Tolle, as well as by Henry Miller, Milan Kundera, and Phyllis Diller.

  That was a banner year for the Blakely-Itzler household. In May, a company founded by Itzler and LeBron James, among others, launched a controversial product called Sheets, caffeinated strips that dissolve on the tongue and give users a burst of energy. In July, Blakely spent $8.8 million on two lots and a mansion surrounded by hedges on a thin isthmus of land between the Gulf of Mexico and St. Joseph Sound in her hometown of Clearwater, Florida. They’d just sold the second of their two small units at Fifteen for a $1 million profit. They’d already unloaded the one they’d bought from Holtz but, according to Florida’s St. Petersburg Times, still had homes in La Jolla, California; New Fairfield, Connecticut; and Atlanta, where Spanx is still based.

  In 2012, Blakely made the cover of Forbes’s twenty-fifth annual billionaires issue, billed as its “youngest self-made woman.” She was one of seventy-four people tied for last place on the 1,226-person-long list; Forbes deemed the value of Spanx at $1 billion. In the flurry of press that followed, Itzler revealed that he’d hired another Navy SEAL to move in with them and give them cardio workouts. “Money makes you more of who you are already,” Blakely told the Times of London. “It holds a magnifying glass up to you. So if you’re an asshole, you become a bigger asshole; if you are insecure, you become more insecure; if you are nice, you become nicer; and if you’re generous, you become more generous.” It’s a tribute to Itzler and Blakely that they are singled out for both admiration and praise by a member of the building staff. “They’re very approachable,” he says. Itzler often entertains associates, inviting LeBron James and Jay-Z to poker games and Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen to use the gym. “He’s the coolest guy in the building,” says the staffer, who adds that Itzler is referred to downstairs as Mr. Cool. “But he belongs in California surfing, not at Fifteen Central Park West.”

  It was hard for some to resist the chance to double what they’d paid for a Fifteen apartment. As the building rose, Realtor Dorothy Somekh’s partner worried that the real estate market was peaking, so they put 7J on the market right after closing late in 2007. Thanks to Barry Salzberg, who’d just been named the CEO of Deloitte and Touche, the Big Four accounting firm, and his wife, Evelyn, who bought it, Somekh and partner walked away with a profit of more than $2 million on a $2.5 million investment.

  Arie and Doreen Liebeskind’s investment did even better, but their story, which includes a cameo appearance by Itzler and Blakely, was anything but happy at the end. The Liebeskinds had met as medical students in the mid-1960s. Arie was from Haifa, Israel; Doreen was the daughter of a fabric manufacturer in New York’s garment district. They worked together for years as radiologists, eventually opening clinics near their home in Great Neck and later on Park Avenue. Shortly after they sold 255 acres to New York State for a state park, the Liebeskinds, who also owned a hotel suite in the Trump International, were taken to the Fifteen construction office to meet Robert A. M. Stern and found themselves among the first half dozen buyers in the building.

  Music lovers, they’d decided to move into Manhattan full-time, but only if they could find a new home near Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. “I took them to lunch and said, ‘This is what you should buy,’ ” says broker Douglas Russell. “I got them in quick and they got a little discount because they were in the first tranche.” Through an LLC named Amanda for their dog, a rescued cockapoo, they paid $6.9 million for apartment 29C in the tower after Doreen was assured she could bring in a piano with a crane if it wouldn’t fit in the elevator. When they left their clinic on Park Avenue, they could look across town and see the building going up. But in May 2006, eight months after they signed their contract, Arie, then sixty-eight, got sick and was diagnosed with cancer. A few months later, Doreen was stricken, too. She died first, early in 2007, and never saw her dream apartment. The ailing, grieving Arie did get to see it, but then put it on the market the day he closed.

  “The question was how to price it,” says one of their children, Marc, also a radiologist. “The value kept going up by the
week—ten and a half million, no, eleven million dollars.” It was finally listed for $12.5 million, and within a week there were two offers. Trying to break the deadlock, the brokers announced a deadline for final sealed bids. That’s when Itzler flew Blakely in on a Marquis jet to see it—and submitted a winning bid of $14.1 million. Unfortunately, Josh Barbanel of the New York Times, who’d recently begun writing its Big Deal realty gossip column, had realized that 15CPW was making news, chose that week to write about it, and learned of the bidding war for the apartment. Though he didn’t print their names and some of the numbers were off, Barbanel disclosed Itzler and Blakely’s bid, and when Itzler saw the item, “he pulled out,” says Marc Liebeskind. The runner-up, an LLC called Fifteen Timber Trail, won the apartment for $13.8 million. Behind it was Parag Saxena, CEO of a private equity firm, who lived on Timber Trail in Rye, New York. The Liebeskinds “doubled their money to the penny,” says Russell, but Arie didn’t live to enjoy it. He died two days before Saxena signed his contract.

  Unlike the Liebeskinds, lots of buyers flipped quietly—and the profits they made were a clear indication that Fifteen was amazingly unaffected by the economic turmoil that had turned other cities, and other buildings, into real estate sinkholes. The building was also so immediately desirable that its co-op–like thirty-two-page package of transfer requirements didn’t prove a deterrent to resales. Buyers had to jump through twenty-three hoops and offer up personal and financial references, bank and brokerage account numbers, the names of schools they’d attended and clubs they belonged to, fill out a financial-disclosure form and back it up with monthly bank and brokerage statements, and acknowledge they’d read and agreed to seven pages of single-spaced house rules. They also had to pay two months’ common charges as a transfer fee, a $1,000 nonrefundable move-in fee, an additional $2,500 move-in deposit, $1,400 to Brown Harris Stevens for a credit report and application processing, and a deposit to ensure that all closing documents would be completed. The only difference from the co-op admission process is the absence of a board interview. But even though one top-tier broker calls the process “brutal, ludicrous, anal,” there is no indication that a buyer has ever balked over 15CPW’s requirements.