In the months that followed, the vilification of Goldman and of Blankfein continued. He was repeatedly summoned to Washington to testify before Congress and the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and was the investment bank’s face when it was sued for fraud that April by the SEC. Goldman initially dismissed the claims (related to CDOs it packaged) as unfounded, but later that year it paid $550 million, one of the largest such settlements on record, though the sum represented only about two weeks’ worth of profits for the firm. At the press conference in April 2011 where the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations released its report on the mortgage mess, Senator Carl Levin, its chairman, called Goldman a “financial snake-pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest, and wrongdoing.”
Goldman and Blankfein began fighting back with a press blitz at the end of 2009. “People are pissed off, mad, and bent out of shape,” Blankfein told London’s Sunday Times. “I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer.” But he went on to defend Goldman, ending with what he later characterized as a joke that went a step too far. Goldman, he said, was doing “God’s work.”
Afterward, it was reported, he was inundated with as many as a hundred pieces of hate mail a day—and that brought security at 15CPW to a whole new level. Suddenly, says the ex-staffer, “he’d get whisked away, a split-second thing, in and out of the building, usually through the garage, but sometimes out the front. He’d have a bodyguard with him, another one outside, a driver-bodyguard waiting in the lobby. He also had security for his wife.” The staff was ordered not to address him by name in the lobby. Yet despite the wall of security, and his somewhat fearsome position in the financial world, Blankfein is one of the best-liked people in the building, “the nicest guy around,” says a member of Fifteen’s Morgan Stanley tribe, “humble, sweet, always says hello.” Laura Blankfein, the former lawyer? Not so much. “She can bite your head off,” says the current employee. “She’s a tough nut to crack, hot and cold.”
“The boss’s wife is tough,” a banker and 15CPW neighbor agrees. “She’s tough.”
Like Blankfein, Sandy Weill had a security detail and an intricate security system in his apartment, which was lavish, customized to his specifications for an extra $10 million or so by Robert A. M. Stern and designed by Mica Ertegun. When it appeared in Architectural Digest, identified only as the home of “major philanthropists,” the magazine called it “about as glamorous a pad as can be imagined.” It was the product of two years of weekly Monday meetings. Weill was “going for broke,” as he put it in describing the decor, and let Ertegun execute an art deco theme echoing 15CPW’s lobby in precious materials such as rosewood and ebony.
Stern raised the ceilings as much as he could and redesigned the master bedroom as an oval to maximize the full views of skyline and park from the bed. Weill, who watched over the work through binoculars from his office across the park, was a micromanager. He insisted on extra closets for his wife; book-matched onyx walls for his bathroom (because mismatched stone made him dizzy); a living room designed to accommodate a suite of paintings by Thomas Hart Benton that he’d bought from American Express; and a particular narrow antique brick from France to line his fireplace. He also specified the size of the fireboxes to fit the precise length of wood he liked to burn. He designed the sconces and Murano glass chandeliers himself and personally chose every piece of china.
The electronics installation was particularly elaborate, with moisture sensors that e-mail the resident manager in case of leaks, temperature sensors on water pipes, and an anemometer on the roof to measure wind speeds and retract the canvas awnings over the terrace. All the technology was “stealth,” said Architectural Digest. “You don’t see a thing.” Yet malfunctions still occurred. One night a Weill alarm went off and security men darted through the lobby. “It was a false alarm,” says a renter who watched. “He’d left a window open.”
Unlike the Blankfeins, both Weill and his wife are disliked by some staffers. Weill, says a former 15CPW employee, “is a very controlling man, and very cheap.” The current employee says much the same. “Everyone ran for him and no one liked him,” he said shortly after the “very demanding” Weill sold the penthouse and again began using their tiny staff apartment as their city pied-à-terre. “An automatic call is made to the manager if a letter or a magazine doesn’t arrive when it’s supposed to. But you get used to them and you just don’t screw up. He’s a pain in the butt but he’s rarely there. They’re either on their yacht or in their place in Florida.”
Working at a building like 15CPW can be lucrative. At first, the staff had had high hopes for Weill. In 2008, he was “very generous,” says a former staffer, “but the second year they cut their tips in half.” Weill’s alleged cheapness should be seen in context. Another former staffer thinks Weill handed out about $90,000 the first year. An ex-staffer recalls another early move-in, a former Goldman Sachs partner. It was December 2007 and he arrived bearing gifts, Christmas tips for everyone on the staff, even though he’d just met them. The typical resident gives $100 to $500 to every employee, says a staffer still employed in the building. Jesse Itzler tipped $650 a head. Fashion executive Elie Tahari, who rented, gave $300 and a $200 shirt. In 2011, the typical employee’s holiday take was about $22,500. The concierges and anyone who does special favors “get more,” up to $100,000. One employee thinks the resident manager, poached from Time Warner, is the highest paid in the city, estimating he is paid $600,000 before tips, making him a truly super-intendent.
To facilitate tipping, a two-page list headed “Happy Holidays” is distributed to all residents, with captioned, color thumbnail photos to help them remember employees, their job titles, and when they joined the staff. The list shows that the resident manager arrived in January 2007, followed by four concierges and a security man and doorman that summer. The slow, steady accretion of staff is indicative of the slow pace of renovations and move-ins. One concierge was added that September, two more the following spring. A second doorman arrived in fall 2007, a third the next January, a fourth that April, and a fifth a year later. The other jobs were filled at a similar pace. The building wasn’t fully staffed until spring 2009.
The staff is paid to serve the needs of the owners and residents. But some tenants need more. “Billionaires don’t worry about anything,” says an employee. “They don’t want to be bothered. Sting has a private chef, three or four assistants all day long. They handle everything. You can tell how demanding [the owners] are by how their household staff acts.”
The most annoying tenants, though, are those “in lesser apartments,” who deal with Fifteen’s staff themselves. “People who have to get taxis are like, ‘Get me a taxi!’ ” They’re the ones who need to tell the world they live at 15CPW.
“Where I live, I know my neighbors,” observes a 15CPW employee. “It’s very rare [Fifteen occupants] have conversations. It’s only their kids that get them together.” But it’s the families with children who, most of all, have made the apartment house a home. “There’s definitely a sense of family, which you wouldn’t expect,” says Lindsay Boutros-Ghali, an architect who rented broker Robby Browne’s apartment. “Everyone has children. It’s surprising to see so many small kids. It may look like a cross between a Four Seasons and a gentleman’s club, but there’s a huge caring about the kids. They’re not just appendages.” When she and her husband, Adam Klein, a South African–born academic, strategic consultant, and former executive of companies such as Ask Jeeves and Hasbro, moved out in 2012, so they could live closer to their daughter’s school, she was sad, but adds hopefully, “That doesn’t mean we won’t come back.”
One of the Goldman Sachs buyers didn’t know a soul in the building when he bought, but has gotten to know lots of his neighbors since moving in, thanks to their children. “It’s very family friendly,” he says. “Lots of kids have been born in the building, and that’s a big shared theme. It’s nothing superdeep, but just living lives. I don’t think we’re linked because o
f the area or industry where we work. But the people are all very accomplished and, through various avenues, arrived here.” Asked if he feels the building symbolizes anything, he pauses to think. “Yes, I think it does,” he says, “but I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to sound boastful.”
Benjamin Cohen, an actor, lives in a 1,658-square-foot, two-bedroom tower apartment overlooking Broadway, thanks to his father, Michael, a managing director of JPMorgan Securities in Chicago, who decided to save the money he was spending on hotels for his son when Benjamin was appearing in a revival of Gypsy on Broadway. “My mother and I forced my father to buy. I had to wait years for it to be built, of course,” says Benjamin, who would sometimes visit the construction site just to watch. “It’s depressing to be an unemployed actor.”
When they took possession, Benjamin moved in, even though the bathroom marble and cabinets were damaged. “They said they’d fix it right up and they did,” he says. “And it turned out to be a great place to live. My dad used a treadmill in the gym next to Bob Costas. One time, I walked out and Lloyd Blankfein looked at me like, Do I know you? Should we share a car? I looked at him like, No, we shouldn’t. It’s funny for us, who are not those people. There’s not a lot of camaraderie, but there are a lot of New Yorkers, a lot of families. It’s a lot of people who’ve done well for themselves. But you can actually live in New York in this building.” He laughs at himself. “That’s a Midwesterner talking.”
Sobhi el-Debs, a Lebanese Muslim born in Japan and educated in San Diego, whose wife, Wafaa, was born in Lebanon and raised in Austin, Texas, agrees. The couple decided to move from Japan to New York “for our kids’ sake,” he says. El-Debs, whose grandfather founded a textile business and sent his siblings to England, Africa, and the Far East in search of cheap sources of cotton and manufacturing and new markets, calls himself “a third-culture kid,” with New York as that third culture. “I don’t have a home,” he continues. “I didn’t want my kids to go through the same identity crisis. I wanted them to be in an international atmosphere, so the choice was London or New York. For me, New York was easier because I have acquaintances and business opportunities here.”
He started looking for an East Side rental in 2002 and was shocked by how high rents were and how little value he could get for his money. “Then I started to understand,” he says. “You could smell it from the brokers.” The message appeared to be that his family wouldn’t fit in. “My wife liked way downtown, but it wasn’t suitable for families, so we started looking on the West Side” and began to think about buying. Money obviously wasn’t an issue: they moved into the posh Mandarin Oriental Hotel while they searched. Looking at another apartment, they overheard someone talking about 15CPW and went straight to its sales office at Carnegie Tower. “I asked for a discount,” el-Debs admits. “You know, our people have to get a little break. The response was, give us a deposit within seventy-two hours or that’s it.”
They signed the building’s eightieth contract in December 2005, buying unit 7B for just over $9.5 million. Two years later, almost to the day, they took possession of their apartment. Though el-Debs often travels, “my family is here full-time,” he says. “Our kids are basically New Yorkers.” He loves his building. “It has East Side glamour and a West Side heart. Everyone is friendly with each other. Everything on the other side of town feels like a façade.”
Bruce and Avis Richards moved to Fifteen when their kids left home, but still managed to bring a family feeling with them from the suburbs. Richards, the cofounder of Marathon Asset Management, a $10 billion hedge fund that manages money for the US Treasury, and more typical investors, read about 15CPW and called a friend at Goldman Sachs, who was “very helpful with the transaction,” he says. It was a complicated one because they originally bought 9D, just under Arthur Zeckendorf, when no A-lines were available. “It was like pulling teeth,” says Bruce, when he tried to find out what would be available and when. “They wouldn’t tell you.” Months later, they were given permission to flip their contract to 12A, when Goldman’s Ashok Varadhan decided he wanted 9D.
Like Lloyd Blankfein, Richards grew up in Brooklyn. Though his parents were both college educated, his father had a construction job from eight to four and then drove a Daily News delivery truck every night from midnight to 5:00 a.m., “until he could finally move to Maryland and open a hardware store,” says Richards, who worked there after school. His future wife shopped in their store when she was a student at the University of Maryland and thinks she may have met her future husband cutting keys there. “Bruce grew up on the wrong side of the tracks,” Avis says, and was bused from his working-class suburb to middle school in inner-city Washington, DC. He went on to Tulane, graduated summa cum laude in economics and math, and in 1982 headed to New York.
“I barely had two shekels,” says Bruce, who slept on a cousin’s floor on arrival. “Just my bar mitzvah money. No job. I knew nobody. But I’d read the Wall Street Journal every day from high school on, and I knew I wanted to work there because it was a system of meritocracy, hard work, and competency as opposed to a Fortune 500 company, where you have to climb the ladder. I was always first in, last out, falling asleep with textbooks on my chest. I was hell-bent and driven to never go back to where I came from.”
Avis and Bruce, both new to New York, met again in a West Side bar and dated for seven years before marrying in 1989. She developed health clubs and he got jobs at Paine Webber, Lehman Brothers, and Donaldson, Lufkin, & Jenrette, where he headed the mortgage-backed securities desk. Avis rarely saw him; he was always working or studying. “He’s still the same, up at five-fifteen a.m.,” she says, “though he may not be the first in the office anymore.”
Their first apartment together was a co-op on Central Park West, but they moved to a tower condo at the Century with a three-thousand-square-foot terrace in 1989. “We watched the Mayflower for years,” Avis says. “We always knew something would happen there, and we kept our ears open.” They moved to the Westchester suburbs in 1993 when their daughter was two and a half and stayed almost sixteen years. In the interim, Richards moved to Smith Barney. After he took classes to learn to curb his demanding intensity, he and a colleague formed the predecessor to Marathon, named for themselves. They started investing with $17 million, more than half of it their own, and were faced almost immediately with the shocking collapse of Long Term Capital which caused sharp drops in the values of many similar funds-though not theirs. Though it's been suggested that concerns about the general economic situation caused them to change the name of their management firm to one that didn't contain their own names, Richards says he was just moving the focus to his “world class team.” By fall 2001, they were managing more than $400 million. Today, Marathon has offices in London and Singapore and about 130 employees.
When their eldest child approached college age, Avis started Birds Nest Productions, a nonprofit that produces multimedia materials and films for charities (she’s won Emmy nominations for her work), and the couple began to think about buying another place in Manhattan. “We were thinking of a pied-à-terre and someplace to move to later,” she says, but then they decided, “Let’s get [our son] into school in New York and get a different life.” A visit to Time Warner proved a disappointment. “I asked why it was so quiet,” says Avis. “There was nobody there. I didn’t want that.” Then Bruce heard about Fifteen.
The apartment they ended up with is over 4,000 square feet with a 355-square-foot terrace that gives them river as well as park views. “When we saw those, it was like, ‘Wow!’ ” says Avis. “You couldn’t tell that from the model.” As the building rose, they enrolled their son in a Manhattan prep school and drove him in every morning. While Bruce went to work, Avis went to a restaurant in Time Warner for breakfast “to watch the building being built for a year,” she says. “I could see straight across Broadway to my apartment. It got taller and taller, the limestone went on. It was exciting to watch.” After breakfast, she took a local
spin class, meeting others from the neighborhood. At day’s end, she would pick up her son and drive back to Westchester. “I created a whole new life,” she says. “It made moving back so much easier.”
After they closed on Valentine’s Day in 2008, the Richardses took a table, two chairs, and candles into the apartment and had a romantic dinner. Then they moved in without renovating because they’d just lived through a renovation in the suburbs. They didn’t even decorate. “We wanted to really take our time and plan.” Three years later, in 2012, they moved out and began turning their public rooms into “one big loft space,” says Avis. “We’re going very modern.” She professes to love “old, traditional buildings, but to have services and amenities makes a world of difference.” She also moved her company into 15CPW, buying a ground-floor suite.
Though they knew none of their future neighbors beforehand, “we all moved in at the same time,” Avis continues, “and when that happens, people are open to meeting. It created a real community. I go to dinner in the restaurant now and I know almost everybody.” The restaurant is “a huge plus,” she says. “They try to be farm-to-table and use organic meat and poultry. There are very educated palates in the building and they listen to the residents.”
The restaurant (which is so accommodating, it keeps a separate set of kosher pots for one family) caters Bruce’s partner dinners and provides a venue for parties such as the one they held for a child’s graduation. “I invited all the neighbors,” Avis says. Not that she needs excuses to see them. “The building has a real sense of community. Six or seven hundred people come to a Thanksgiving brunch before the parade,” which passes right by Fifteen’s front door. “It’s become an instant tradition.” The restaurant also offers wine classes and such events as a Super Bowl party, a Mother’s Day brunch with unlimited buffets ($55 for adults, $25 for kids, with a special drink included for Mom), Sunday dinners with a family focus, Wednesday grill nights in the garden in summer from 5:30 p.m. until dusk, and women’s lunches every two weeks with speakers on such subjects as yoga, art collecting, and surgery-free “facial rejuvenation.” “Forty or fifty women come,” says Richards, who takes issue with the staffer who thinks residents rarely mingle. “I see Sting with his bicycle and working out in the gym. Lloyd is a sweetheart. We all ride the elevators together. There’s no class difference, no separation between the front of the building and the back. Everyone is just so happy to live here.”
House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address Page 34
