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

by Gross, Michael

  Silverman remained capable of infuriating his soon-to-be-ex-wife, even introducing Hader as his spouse at parties. He blamed conflict between Nancy and his two daughters from his first marriage for precipitating their divorce. Finally, though, just before they were set to battle it out in court, the couple settled. Hader and Silverman married and have since had a second child together. Nancy is said to have walked away with $150 million, their Manhattan apartment, and their beach house in Southampton and is described by friends as radiant and restarting her life, too.

  Despite all they see and all the fortunes housed above them, the 15CPW staff are still dazzled by celebrity, taking note when supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Gisele Bündchen visited, respectively, Andrea Kerzner or Jesse Itzler, or when Cameron Diaz left her boyfriend Alex Rodriguez’s apartment, sailed out the front door, and hailed her own cab. “But sometimes you had to get a cab and bring it down to the garage to wait for her,” says a staffer. “I got hassles from the drivers, but I’d just say, ‘You’ll be happy when you see who you’re waiting for.” But fame alone was not enough to win the praise of Fifteen’s staff or its residents. Diaz “was way too nice for A-Rod,” the staffer continues. “He was a douche. No one liked him.” An owner from the Morgan Stanley tribe agrees, describing A-Rod as “the exact opposite” of Lloyd Blankfein, “not a nice guy, an unfriendly narcissist.”

  That is likely why staff members tell tales they probably shouldn’t about the Yankee slugger, who was still married when he got to the building. One day, his wife showed up—and said she was Mrs. Smith. “We didn’t know who she was so we wouldn’t let her in,” says a former staffer. “Why didn’t she say who she was? She was uptight, nonresponsive, and belligerent. When Alex came in ten minutes later, we knew. He was with Goldie Hawn’s daughter.”

  Fifteen became A-Rod’s home plate as he segued from dating Madonna (who lived a few blocks north at Harperley Hall), to Kate Hudson (whose mother, Hawn, lived a few blocks to the south at Bill Zeckendorf’s Central Park Place), and then to Diaz. But apparently, they weren’t enough for A-Rod. “He got hookers all the time,” says the building staff member. “Usually two at a time, two times a week. One time he had two go up, they came down and left, and ten minutes later, Cameron Diaz walks in. He doesn’t care. I hate the guy. He thought he was God.”III

  The staffer adds that ill-behaved celebrities should generally be wary of building staff. “We’re here twenty-four/seven. We know everything you do. We know your secrets.” Any other secrets? “Some crazy parties. Illegal things for sure. Dealers come weekly. It’s usually for the kids. A couple of them smoke weed. The engineers get complaints.” A former engineer, Pasco Cornejo, says he was often called to one apartment to stop floods and faced another sort of crazy. “I was told don’t worry what I saw,” he recalls. What did he see? “Paraphernalia. Sexual toys.” The resident was, “let’s say, walking around with very sexy see-through. We’d see her diddling herself.”

  Sandy and Joan Weill’s first year at 15CPW was likely not perfectly happy. Citigroup crumbled and Weill’s successor as CEO was disposed of in the autumn of 2007 after the bank revealed subprime-mortgage losses of $11 billion and was forced to raise billions in new capital from Abu Dhabi’s investment authority; sovereign wealth funds from Singapore and Kuwait; an arm of the New Jersey government; 15CPW neighbor Gregg Ireland’s Capital World Investors; and Saudi prince al-Waleed bin Talal. Weill even put some money where his pride was, investing $20 million of his own. Citi also cut its dividends to shareholders, saving another $4.4 billion.

  Then, early in 2009, just after Citigroup borrowed $45 billion more in bailout funds from taxpayers, the New York Post ran a front-page photo of Weill with the headline “Pigs Fly; Citi Jets Ex-CEO to Cabo.” Weill had taken a corporate jet full of relatives to Mexico on vacation. And at the end of that year, Weill was the subject of a profile in the New York Times with the poignant headline “Citi’s Creator, Alone with His Regrets.” Reporter Katrina Brooker noted that Weill’s vast office in the General Motors Building across the park from Fifteen “feels empty. Other than a few assistants, he is alone.” The scene, she decided, was “incongruous.”

  Weill told Brooker he was horrified by his bad press, and declared that he would never take Air Citi again. “The most important thing to my husband was his reputation,” Joan Weill said. “There are a few people I want to kill, but I am not going to name names.” Brooker ended her piece with the nugget that Weill had been dropped from the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans, even though he still had three homes and his yacht, named April Fool for the day he met his wife, and would shortly buy a 362-acre Sonoma County vineyard for $31 million.

  A year later, in November 2011, Weill abruptly began, as he put it, “downsizing a little bit,” offering both his Fifteen penthouse and his yacht for sale, explaining to Josh Barbanel, who’d moved to the Wall Street Journal, that it was “a pretty good time” for the American rich “to be quiet,” and that his intention was to give “the proceeds of what we get” to charity. In August 2010, he and his wife had signed Warren Buffett and Bill Gates’s Giving Pledge, promising to give away most of their wealth before they died.IV Within weeks, their penthouse was reported sold, and just before Christmas, the buyer revealed himself—sort of.

  First, word leaked that Dmitry Rybolovlev, the same Russian who’d tried to buy Shlomo Ben-Haim’s penthouse, had finally gotten a foothold at Fifteen, buying Weill’s penthouse for the asking price. When Barbanel sought confirmation, a spokesman for the Russian oligarch was ready with a statement: it wasn’t Rybolovlev but his elder daughter, Ekaterina, a twenty-two-year-old student at an unnamed American college, doing the buying. That assertion set off one of the looniest episodes in 15CPW’s short history.

  That fall, father and daughter had repeatedly visited another brand-new condo, starchitect Jean Nouvel’s 100 Eleventh Avenue, to look at one of its penthouses. After a bidding war, six weeks of negotiations, and an engineering inspection, they flew into New York late in November to sign a contract to buy it for about $20 million. They’d set up the appropriately named Property NY 100–11 LLC to do that a few weeks earlier. The apartment was to be Ekaterina’s to use while she went to school in America. But that day, Dmitry’s lawyer called, asking for one more site visit—and appeared with the pair, who spoke only in Russian until Ekaterina turned and coolly told the broker, “We’ll let you know.” It later emerged that on the spur of the moment, she or they had decided to buy Weill’s penthouse instead. They used that same LLC to do it.

  Back in Russia, Rybolovlev had an issue: the Kremlin was trying to take Uralkali away from him, opening a fresh investigation of the mine collapse two years earlier, which drove its stock down 60 percent. More of the backstory had emerged after December 22, 2008, when his wife, Elena Rybolovleva, filed for divorce in Geneva and sought both immediate financial relief and a freeze on his assets, alleging that he’d been hiding their money for at least six months.

  Elena’s divorce petition explained that they lived in Cologny, Switzerland, where they’d bought properties and received permission to demolish existing structures and build a new “sumptuous” estate, including a concert hall with a stage big enough for thirty-five musicians. Elena said that she’d stopped working as a doctor after moving to Switzerland in the 1990s; she’d later studied cosmetic surgery in Paris, but turned down a job there because their second daughter, Anna, had just been born. Instead, she returned home, where she raised their daughters, managed their staff (a butler, a cook, a gardener, two chauffeurs, a nanny, and a maid), and created “a vast social network” to support Dmitry’s endeavors. But soon she concluded that her husband had lived a double life since they’d moved to Switzerland. In 2000, when she was four months pregnant, she’d received an anonymous package containing a photo of her husband and another woman.

  Five years later, she alleged, Rybolovlev had asked her to sign a postnuptial contract that would have given her $100 millio
n in the event they split up. But he was worth $1 billion then, so she saw a lawyer and refused. Ever since, she continued, he’d kept having affairs, and spending lavishly on his girlfriends. Early in 2008, she’d mentioned divorce but then backtracked, hoping for a reconciliation. That spring, she alleged, he booked a trip to the ski resort of Courchevel and shuffled his mistress out of his hotel a mere four hours before she and Anna, then seven, arrived. By June, he was on his yacht in Croatia, where he first entertained multiple young women and then, again, the mistress. More trips and more assignations followed in Venice, Monaco, and Dubai. When she confronted him, she said he boasted of his conquests of girls Elena suspected were younger than Ekaterina. She even alleged that he shared his women with other oligarchs and said he’d bragged he’d organized everything “in an industrial way”: the girls were all virgins and submitted to VD tests before boarding his yacht. Ekaterina, Elena believed, knew all about his exploits and Elena charged that he’d bought his daughter’s silence with gifts: a $1 million horse and a $500,000 car.

  In December 2008, while the couple were looking at American real estate together, he again asked Elena to sign a document—a surety bond for €45 million; he claimed he was under financial pressure and would have to fire their staff and cut their living expenses if she didn’t sign. Again, a lawyer warned her not to, and Rybolovlev left for a weekend in Paris with his mistress at the posh Hotel George V. So, was he going broke or not? That’s when Elena sued.

  Elena then quantified the family’s fortune, which fluctuated between $7 billion and $13 billion, and provided a list of their assets, which included more real estate in Gstaad, Moscow, Perm, and Cyprus; four private jets; two yachts; three Mercedeses, a Bentley, and a Rolls-Royce; art and furniture worth $670 million; bank accounts and billions in stock, tucked away in banks and anonymous shell companies in Cyprus, the British Virgin Islands, Panama, and Jersey, all tax havens known and loved by the rich for their loose financial regulation.

  She listed multiple paintings by Modigliani, Monet, and Picasso, and more by van Gogh, Gauguin, Degas, and Rothko, and a vast collection of museum-quality, eighteenth-century French and German furniture originally intended for their Swiss estate. The art and furniture had recently been moved to London and Singapore. Though she’d known of the shipments, she worried Dmitry had “the intention of moving them out from her reach.” She asked for custody of Anna, and a limit on his visits, as she feared he would try to kidnap her. “Love and trust has completely disappeared from the life of the couple,” the filing concluded. “Madame can no longer put up with his infidelities, his egotism and contempt.”

  In spring 2009, Dmitry agreed to pay family support, the mortgage on her home in Cologny, and her share of their taxes while they battled it out over their fortune. But he also informed Elena that in 2005, just after she refused to sign the postnuptial agreement, he’d transferred most of his assets to two irrevocable trusts on Cyprus, and now, even though he was the protector of those trusts, as well as a beneficiary (the others were his daughters, but not his wife), under Cypriot law the trustees were refusing to tell him what they contained or what they earned, and he insisted that, anyway, he didn’t own any of the companies she’d listed in her divorce papers. He also pointed out that she was the co-owner of their Swiss properties, another in Paris (reportedly bought from the fashion designer Pierre Cardin), and that in 2008 he’d given her jewelry worth almost €29 million.

  Back and forth the charges flew. Court filings show that two of his Panamanian companies bought a €100 million apartment in Monaco and rented it to him for €600,000 a year, and that though he’d paid the Russian government $71.8 million in damages for the Uralkali mine collapse in 2009, he was still in jeopardy of being dunned for more. The following June, the war of the Rybolovlevs became an international affair when the Palm Beach Post uncovered documents showing Elena had sought a court order there to freeze the former Trump mansion. Her husband suddenly changed his tune, saying he didn’t own it after all.

  As the sparring continued, a process server claimed he’d twice served legal papers on Rybolovlev in Maui, Hawaii, slapping them onto the windshields of two different Cadillac Escalades as their drivers sought to evade him. By then, Elena had hired a New York law firm to quarterback her multifront battle with Dmitry; she’d also sought asset freezes in the BVIs, London, Singapore, and Cyprus. In March 2012, after the Swiss divorce court ordered all his assets frozen, she filed suit in New York, too, seeking to freeze his new Fifteen apartment—and all hell broke loose. The suit contended that the apartment wasn’t Ekaterina’s at all, but rather that the LLC was a sham created “with the specific intent of hiding and diverting” Dmitry’s assets. The story was an irresistible feast for the city’s feisty tabloid press.

  The New York suit claimed that, in the preceding eighteen months, Rybolovlev had liquidated his potash interests, which had been in the hands of that Cypriot holding company (controlled by Dmitry through a Cypriot trust), and had gone on a spending spree, buying a $295 million stake in a Cyprus bank, a majority interest in AS Monaco, a soccer team, and the Weill apartment. Simultaneously, Elena’s lawyer gave a series of interviews to press her case. “Mrs. R [as he called her] wants to be sure there are sufficient assets” to cover an eventual divorce settlement, said David Newman of Day Pitney. He added that any settlement would have to include a number “with a b,” for billions. He was talking to the press, he said, because “litigation is leverage to ultimately negotiate something. If people think he’s doing things in a questionable manner, it gets attention. People don’t like you looking in their underwear.” Finally, he scoffed at the notion that Rybolovlev deserved privacy: “Private people don’t buy trophy properties.”

  After months of silence, Rybolovlev finally shot back at his wife and chose the New York Times to give his side of the story. Less than a month after Elena sued in New York, one of his Swiss lawyers, Tetiana Bersheda, gave an interview to Alexei Barrionuevo, the Times’s latest real estate columnist, for a story on Russians trying to get money out of their homeland by buying trophy real estate. She told the reporter Rybolovlev’s story, spinning it to show that his asset machinations were set in motion by a desire to keep them out of reach of the Russian authorities—not his wife.

  Though the Times didn’t attribute its statement on the ownership of the penthouse, which came at the conclusion of a long page-one story, the source seemed to be Bersheda. Ekaterina had “bought the condominium with cash” from “a trust set up to benefit her and future children,” the paper reported. Then it quoted Bersheda: “She hopes to be able to stay in the apartment between September and December, when she expects to be finishing a liberal arts degree from Harvard University Extension School. She has been attending most of her classes online.”

  The next day, Barrionuevo had another story on Rybolovlev, this one headlined “Divorce, Oligarch-Style.” It repeated the claim that Ekaterina would use the apartment, while noting that changes to the house in Palm Beach had been put on hold until the litigation was settled. Now, Bersheda maintained Rybolovlev was engaged in “succession planning,” not trying to hide assets. “He was not a model husband,” allowed Sergey Chernitsyn, a Rybolovlev spokesman who’d previously done PR for another oligarch, Mikhail Prokhorov, at his Norilsk Nickel company. “Mr. Rybolovlev never denied his infidelities, but the wife knew about it for many years and passively accepted it.”

  After that, silence suddenly descended. “Unfortunately, because of the state of current litigation, the lawyers are advising us not to answer questions at this particular moment,” B. J. Cooper, another spokesman, said by e-mail in August 2012. (Cooper works for APCO Worldwide, a damage-control PR firm best known for defending the tobacco industry in the 1990s.) No further news of the Rybolovlev divorce surfaced for many months thereafter, though in Russian circles in Manhattan, it was whispered that Elena Rybolovleva might be a pawn of her husband’s powerful Russian enemies. Regardless, between September and Dece
mber 2012, when Bersheda had said Ekaterina Rybolovleva would use her apartment, the lights in the disputed penthouse rarely came on. But then, as her father’s lawyer had told the Times, she preferred spending time in Monaco, where she could be close to her horses. Finally, Christmas week 2012, the whole place blazed with light for several evenings.

  Then it went dark again.

  Rybolovlev’s purchase of Sandy Weill’s penthouse caught Leroy Schecter’s attention. Safely tucked away in Miami Beach, Schecter had almost sold out in 2010 to a Russian composer named Igor Krutoy, who offered about $45 million but ultimately decided he wanted a finished space and went to the Plaza, instead, where he paid $48 million, setting a new condo price record in Manhattan. “Nobody wanted two apartments,” says broker Emily Beare. “They wanted the work done or they wanted the A-line.” But Schecter insisted the units be sold together or not at all. “He finally realized he had to combine them, took them off the market, and waited for the [combination] moratorium to end.” He would file plans in February 2012 and start work that June. In the meantime, Schecter monitored the Manhattan real estate market, waiting for the perfect moment to relist the apartments. It didn’t take long to come.

  “Suddenly,” says Beare, “you started seeing more foreign money looking for a safe place. It wasn’t real estate as real estate. It was real estate as a commodity.” Europe seemed on the brink of economic collapse, and elections in Greece and France threw a harsh light on divisions within the Euro zone. The London real estate market was “on fire,” says Beare, and New York’s suddenly looked “like it’s for free in comparison.” So shortly after his renovation began, Schecter decided it was time to list his 15CPW apartments again—this time at a price calculated to attract attention, $95 million.

  “It was just a number, not a value,” Realtor Beare says vaguely. It bore little relationship to what real estate pros call comps, sales of comparable apartments in the same or similar neighborhoods. In truth, the comps were two in number, Weill’s sale, which “validated everything,” says Beare, and a $100 million listing that came on the market two days before Schecter’s of an octagonal-shaped, eight-thousand-square-foot penthouse at the long-troubled CitySpire, a few blocks south. Though that price was clearly a publicity ploy, unlikely to be attained, Fifteen’s aura likely convinced Schecter that he could, in fact, make a 258 percent gain on his initial $26.5 million investment in his two apartments. “That’s the number he wanted, so we put it on the market to see what happens,” says Beare. Cleverly, the eighty-five-year-old Schecter linked the sale to his plan to give 90 percent of his wealth away to charity in an interview with Barbanel of the Wall Street Journal, saying he wanted the proceeds to be used to alleviate poverty in the New York area. “He has an eye for property and always focused on buying the best so his foundation could do a lot of good,” Beare says. He was following Sandy Weill’s lead again.