That same day, Barbara charged, he told his two sons he wanted her to get more, and in response one of them uncovered the eighteen-page prenuptial agreement the couple had signed before they married and demanded she read it again. “That’s all you’re getting,” the son allegedly said. According to Barbara, neither she nor Ullman had even bothered to keep a copy, and so, to ensure she got her due, Ullman had his will revised, increasing the sum he’d agreed to leave to her in a trust from $25 million to $40 million. Though he signed that revision six days before he died, his widow also claimed he’d promised to redraft it entirely once he recovered, as he was sure he would. After their father died, her complaint continued, Ullman’s two sons invaded her Florida home, changed the locks, and refused to give Barbara access to it or any of her belongings within. Not only did they refuse to let her stay there, they hired security guards to keep her out when they thought she might show up.
In an answer to the lawsuit, Kenneth Ullman denied most of the claims it contained, but, besides swearing that his father had, in fact, begun writing a new will prior to the cancer diagnosis, did not offer an alternate version of the events around his death. The lawsuit, which was filed in a Florida state court, apparently hinged on Barbara’s proving she was a permanent resident of Florida, a notion the children rejected. Soon, the case was moved to a federal court, where a document indicating that the matter had been settled via mediation was filed two months after Barbara Ullman first sued her stepchildren.
Early in 2013, Barbara still occupied the Ullman Family Partnership’s duplex at Fifteen, but someone close to the Ullman children predicted that her tenure there would be limited. By August, she was indeed gone, according to a building employee. When the duplex was listed in mid-October by Sandy Weill’s broker, Kyle Blachmon, for $62.5 million, the first resale of one of its crowning duplexes began to feel imminent as well as inevitable.
Part Nine
* * *
TOP OF THE WORLD
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given,
and he shall have more abundance.
—MATTHEW 13:12
When Larry Ruskin, the retired Canadian oil and gas executive, bought his apartment at Fifteen Central Park West, Gregg Carlovich, the building’s resident manager, told him that 168 of its 201 apartments had already been or were being renovated. In the end, most of the apartments were altered somehow, with the work ranging from mere decoration to gut renovation, and at any given moment a hundred separate jobs were in the pipeline between request and completion. Practically, that meant that normal life at 15CPW wouldn’t begin for a year or two past the day the first buyers put keys into their doors. As with their planning, bidding, and building, the Zeckendorf brothers put a skilled team in place to deal with the transition from transactions to the takeover of the building by its residents. But they are understandably unwilling to discuss anything that happened after closings began.
Some hints can be found, however. “I facilitated the goals of the most exacting and demanding residential purchasers in the world along with their design and construction teams,” Thor Thors, an independent project manager for developers, explains on his website. Her job as sponsor representative, says Margaret McAdams on her LinkedIn résumé, “required intensive and direct communication with a formidable cadre of Unit Owners, and with the project’s governing entities, to establish a superior quality of life for those who chose to purchase a home in this premiere property.”
Like Fifteen’s architecture, its transition from a business deal to an apartment house worthy of its “formidable cadre” of “exacting and demanding” owners was a collaborative effort involving architects, engineers, interior designers, contractors, and Brown Harris Stevens, which has managed Fifteen since it opened. That effort actually began in the sales office, where some buyers wanted contractual “adjustments” to the design of their apartments. “If they wanted the world’s biggest shower directly over someone else’s living room, we tried to figure out how to make it work” ahead of time, since new buildings full of demanding, wealthy people can have “huge problems if you give them too much freedom,” says a hand-over team member. “Our job was to prevent that from happening,” usually by convincing the owner he didn’t really want that bathroom after all.
Formal, detailed alteration requests weren’t reviewed until after closings, and the first big requests were from the first owners who closed, and the rest of what the team member calls “the penthouse people—all these billionaires living on top of one another.” They and their designers “make demands and we had to both keep the last construction on track and not be unduly influenced by powerful people wanting to do things their way. There were two things the Zeckendorfs wanted: first, that what they’d agreed to in the sales process was adhered to, and second, that personal influence, the who-is-more-important game, would not unduly influence what was going on.” Each owner expected a dream apartment, and their hired hands were determined to give them what they wanted. The more alterations, the higher the fees they earned.
Negotiating the shoals of those relationships was a delicate art. “It’s a very different type of clientele, and a certain decorum is expected,” says Patricia Garza, a former girl Friday at Zeckendorf Development who was recruited to help with punch-list issues—the little details purchasers feel haven’t been properly completed by the developers. Before closings, she “brought in a majority of the clients to see what needed attention, riding in the construction hoist a majority of the time,” she says, then returning again to ensure “the work was done to their specifications.”
Garza singles out Sandy Weill and his wife, Joan, as the nicest people she dealt with. “I have to say the people who were the most genuine and who you loved were the people like them that just have all they need and then some. I can see where I got that impression. I met them when they were staying in their chef’s apartment, living in servants’ quarters!” Garza is less forthcoming about those she didn’t like. “It tended to be people who came by their millions all at once who were a little entitled,” she says.
The team had to deal with everything from cracked marble and misaligned corners to the owner of a terraced apartment whose architect had decided “to put a forest on the roof,” as one of the closers puts it. That architect came away horrified and wasn’t alone in claiming that the Emperor of Condos wore shabby clothes. In the ranks of general contractors, there was lots of talk of Fifteen’s growing pains. Bovis, the giant multinational construction contractor now called Lend Lease, was still in the building “fixing things that got mangled in construction,” says a contractor on one of the early gut renovations. He thinks that where the Zeckendorfs abjured value engineering—the art of cutting corners—their builder’s work was “junk” because “they had to come up with a way to hit their numbers.” He saw three apartments, each of them finished “up to union and legal standards,” he says, “but union residential work is generally garbage and the high end doesn’t care about legal requirements. It wants perfect. Nothing was quite right. Entire apartments went into Dumpsters. The bathrooms weren’t top tier. Nobody wanted base-level junk stone, mediocre Carrara, Calacatta gold.” He felt the bathrooms had been designed to be demolished.
“It looks nice to someone who doesn’t know better,” says the contractor, citing a long list of immediate issues: floors off level, too-small pipes in heating and air-conditioning systems, inadequate subfloors, cheap hinges and levers, shoddy doors, and windows he compares unfavorably to the brass ones at 740 Park, where he has also worked. There, windows are heavy as guillotines, he says, in a bit of unintended irony. At 15CPW, “they’re not great. They’re certainly not the best in New York. They’re acceptable. But they’re a cheap tie on a good suit.”
A member of the development team scoffs at these complaints. “Contractors complain so they can pull everything out and charge two thousand dollars per square foot to replace it,” he says. “No developer spends that much. It’s an unfair com
parison.”
The renovation teams were more justified in being frustrated by the gridlock caused by dozens of contractors. Everyone was renovating simultaneously. Freight came from the street, down to the basement, which seemed like a cholesterol-filled artery. Then, it had to go upstairs to apartments, but the elevator configuration—two cores per building, two elevators per core (the apartments in the base of the Broadway building had an elevator of their own), with only one per core equipped for service use—proved woefully inadequate to the task at hand. “Deliveries took four hours,” says the contractor. “You had a rush of a hundred guys at once. You had guys on lockdown, collecting dust in the basement. Everyone was on the same schedule.” Construction hours were limited: 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with no loud noise before 10:00 a.m. Tempers flared because many construction crews are subject to penalties for delays.
As the ranks of high-profile owner-occupants swelled, things got rougher. One morning, Bob Costas came home off an overnight flight and wanted to get some sleep. Contractors working in apartments around his were asked to stop making noise. “It’s not uncommon,” the contractor sighs, “but you get nothing done in a two-and-a-half-hour workday.” There were issues outside, too, particularly with the Century, which overlooked Fifteen’s loading dock and service entrance. “The street was jammed with moving vehicles and tradespeople,” says Penny Ryan, chairman of the local community board. “But street closures are pretty routine and the two buildings worked it out.”
Those “daily inconveniences” were “nothing outstanding,” agrees Roberta Gratz, the neighborhood activist who watched from the Century as sofas, artwork, and pianos that wouldn’t fit in the elevators were hoisted up to apartments by cranes. Which doesn’t mean that she considers 15CPW’s occupants good neighbors. “What struck me was the excess,” she says. She’s also irked that many of them encourage their drivers to park illegally in the fire lane directly in front of Fifteen, which is clearly marked a no-standing zone. “They triple-park!” she complains. “It is nothing short of an outrage that both Trump International and Fifteen get unmatched parking privileges. Some days, there are a dozen limousines. They don’t own the sidewalk and the streets, but they act as if they do.” That limos do the same thing all over Manhattan gives Gratz no comfort. “It’s the arrogance of wealth that gets too much respect in this city. It’s symbolic of the divide that we live with. They don’t play by the same rules and that offends me. It’s an affront to urban democracy.”
In December 2009, fifty-four people were on the Fifteen payroll, led by the resident manager, his assistant, a chief engineer, a security manager, and a handyman. There were seven concierges, six doormen, eight white-gloved lobby attendants, three package-room attendants, eight porters, a maintenance man, four security guards, twelve part-time engineers, and an administrative assistant. Six people man Fifteen’s lobbies by day, two each for the doors, concierge desks, and lobbies. Three more work the package room, and four porters and one or two engineers are always on duty. Another man is always stationed at the security entrance on Sixty-Second Street. The day shift runs from 7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the afternoon shift until 11:00 p.m. At night, the visible staff is cut in half and the pavilion off the motor courtyard closes and residents must enter on Central Park West. One employee predicted how a resident would react to the limited access: I just bought an eighty-million-dollar condo and I want to drive into the courtyard. You gonna tell me no?
The staff was hired and began assembling before the first closings, studying the building. First, they learned “the geography, so you know where you’re going,” says a former staffer. “Figuring out how to get people in and out without being seen. They want to come home and relax without any problems.” That wasn’t really a problem until spring 2008, when people first started to move in en masse. The elevators were “a nightmare,” the ex-staffer says. “A lot of kinks had to be taken care of.”
There were kinks both inside and outside: those complaints about the chauffeured cars stacked up out front, for instance. The former staffer doesn’t think anyone cared about Roberta Gratz and her ilk. “There’s an underground NYPD precinct across the street in the subway,” he says. “They didn’t want cars out front. They were ticketed, towed.” Then, the powers-that-be at 15CPW “started greasing the wheels,” he continues. “It became a corruption thing.” The chauffeured cars still wait there.
The NYPD might just be outgunned at Fifteen. Security is tight—and for good reason. Members of the staff believe that terrorists have threatened, if not targeted, the building. Several of the high-profile in-house bankers have been threatened, too. One of them, Bob Diamond of Barclays, “had his private security team train us about what to watch out for,” says the staffer. “Badly taped boxes, misspelled names. It was a bit ridiculous. I think Al Qaeda is a little more sophisticated than that.”
But no one was taking any chances. Renter Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez of the New York Yankees and owner Denzel Washington both used pseudonyms, the former for guests, the latter for deliveries. At New York’s Department of Buildings, a clerk says 15CPW is classified as a “sensitive building,” and unlike the files on most residential buildings in New York, its records and building plans can’t be shown to just anybody who walks in and asks to see them.I
One absentee owner, a New Jersey pain doctor who rents out her rear tower apartment, worries the building has become so high-profile, its address alone makes her a target. Some who actually live there might really be targets. So private security men, many of them former NYPD cops, are everywhere, not just accompanying visiting Russian officials and the politicians who breeze through for fund-raisers.
Paparazzi are often outside, but they’re not waiting for the bankers. Rather they are hoping for a week like the one in October 2011 when Alec Baldwin, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton came to 15CPW for a fund-raiser, Rick Perry visited a resident, and Robert Downey Jr., Robert De Niro, Lady Gaga, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Bruce Springsteen, and Jake Gyllenhaal all passed through, en route to a sixtieth birthday party for Sting, who’d finally moved in after massive renovations (including the installation of a private elevator) in his duplex.
The photographers come by “twenty-four/seven,” says an ex-staffer, often waiting “in cars across the street with superzooms. I’ve seen myself on TMZ.” But they mostly focused on the building’s handful of high-profile renters such as Rodriguez, and the actors Kelsey Grammer and Mark Wahlberg, and not on its less famous if far more powerful owner-occupants. The stars may take a different view. “For celebrities, the money people are celebrities,” says the staff member. “You see it when they come for dinner. They’re nervous.” Who wouldn’t be when, as once happened, Sandy Weill hosted Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?
Aside from its resident music and film stars, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs is the highest-profile person in the building, usually named, alongside Sting, Denzel Washington, and his fellow banker Sandy Weill, among its marquee names. Born in the South Bronx, the child of a bakery truck driver who reinvented himself as a postal clerk after getting fired and a receptionist at a burglar-alarm company, Blankfein is one of 15CPW’s notable self-made men.
He was raised in a housing project in Brooklyn, where he shared a bedroom with his grandmother and earned spending money working as a lifeguard and as a hot dog vendor at Yankee Stadium. He attended a public high school once renowned for its accomplished Jewish graduates, where he was a teacher’s pet, as witty as he was smart. Though his school and the neighborhood around it were deteriorating (Thomas Jefferson High would later be shut down due to its low graduation rate), Blankfein skipped a grade and graduated at the top of his class at age sixteen. Then came Harvard and Harvard Law where he was a scholarship student. He “had to work in the cafeteria and was shunned by the social clubs,” William D. Cohan wrote in Money and Power, a book on Goldman Sachs. Blankfein’s friends were other lower-caste outcasts shunned by Harvard’s privileged preppies and clubs. After graduating in
1978, he spent four years as a tax lawyer, then joined a commodities-trading subsidiary of Goldman. His fiancée, also a lawyer, cried when she heard that, afraid he was throwing his future away.
Blankfein first got attention when he designed a $100 million trade for an Islamic client who needed a way around Islam’s rule against receiving interest payments. By 1984, he’d been put in charge of the bank’s team trading foreign currencies. Propelled by his strength at managing others, he began to rise, making partner in 1988, taking over his division in 1994, and in 1999, when Goldman went public, gaining new recognition as the head of its most profitable unit, which traded with the firm’s own capital. By 2004, when he was named Goldman’s president and COO, the right-hand man of chairman Henry “Hank” Paulson, effectively running the firm while Paulson played Mr. Outside, Blankfein owned Goldman stock worth almost $200 million. The boss was sure he deserved it. “He ate, slept, drank the business and the markets,” Paulson told Cohan. In 2006, as a Goldman vice chairman, Blankfein joined the ranks of Wall Street’s best-paid executives when he took home $54.4 million and topped that the next year, earning about $68 million.
During the financial crisis, Blankfein’s reputation took a series of hits, most notably in summer 2009, when Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi wrote an exposé of Goldman Sachs, famously damning the bank as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
“In fact,” Taibbi continued, “the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who’s Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.” Goldman alumni populated the Department of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve Bank, the White House, the State Department, the New York Stock Exchange, and the SEC. Taibbi also pointed out that, in 2008, Goldman had paid $14 million in taxes, an effective rate of 1 percent, and one-third the $42.9 million Blankfein made that first year of the Great Recession as Wall Street’s highest-paid executive.
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address Page 33
