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

by Gross, Michael

  Weill and Rybolovlev, Schecter’s apartments, their tenants, and the outlandish price he hoped to sell them forV all kept the eyes of the world on Fifteen Central Park West, but some stories remained below the radar. Someone was once led from the building in handcuffs by the FBI, claims a member of the building staff. Who that was isn’t known, but it wasn’t the perp who robbed Bob Diamond’s apartment. That crime occurred while Diamond still had his big job at Barclays, which had just taken over Lehman Brothers’ investment bank and capital-markets units for the distress price of $250 million. Diamond hadn’t moved in yet, but some of his possessions were already there. Presumably, his security detail was watching him and not his stuff when the theft occurred.

  Residents of Fifteen carry electronic fobs that allow them to take the elevators from floor to floor. But those movements can be tracked by the security staff and its cameras. The only way to avoid being seen was to take one of the staircases that run behind the elevator cores. It’s not known why the son of a neighbor in the tower decided to climb those stairs one day, only that he was on a break from a good school, and his parents were away when he did. “He takes the back stairs up a few flights to Diamond’s apartment, it’s open, there are no locks,” says one of several people who tell the story. “He takes a painting and leaves it in his parents’ apartment. Diamond discovers the painting is missing.”

  Diamond’s security team was called, but it was the building’s security staff that figured out what had happened and who’d done it from electronic records of fire doors opening; there were then no cameras on the back stairs. The thief “was confronted and he fessed up,” says a onetime building employee. “Diamond was a real sport about it,” adds someone at Brown Harris Stevens. It should probably come as no surprise that no charges were filed and the story of the incident has heretofore not left the building. “That kid got very lucky,” says a renter who heard what happened.

  A high potential for scandal exists wherever money, power, and ego collide, so even if some stories get hushed up, Fifteen Central Park West will likely be a petri dish, incubating unseemly activities, for years to come. So far, though, it has mostly served its function as a fortress protecting its owner-inhabitants, even when infamy has knocked on their doors.

  “Misfortune has stalked New Silk Route Partners from birth,” Businessworld, an Indian publication, wrote late in 2011, before cataloging the series of mishaps that plagued the Mumbai-based private equity firm since its founding, four years earlier, with plans to invest $1.4 billion in India and Asia. The worst of those mishaps came when one of its cofounders, Rajat Gupta, the former CEO of McKinsey & Co., and a member of the boards of Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble, was charged by the SEC with insider trading and later found guilty of four counts of securities fraud for sharing confidential information with Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group hedge fund. Rajaratnam received a sentence of eleven years in prison. In October 2012, Gupta, too, would be ordered to jail, in his case for two years with another year on supervised release, and fined $5 million. One of his cofounders at New Silk Route was Parag Saxena, who bought Fifteen’s apartment 29C from the tragic radiologists Arie and Doreen Liebeskind.

  After earning an MBA from Wharton, the Indian-born Saxena joined Citicorp in 1983; he ran a division that later evolved into a venture capital firm that invested in biotechnology as well as such companies as Costco, Starbucks, and Staples. Suddenly, with Gupta’s arrest, Saxena found himself calling his investors and partners, assuring them that Gupta wasn’t actually active at New Silk Route and that ten other partners would ensure business continued as usual. “This had nothing to do with Silk Route,” Saxena told anyone who would listen. He also predicted his friend would be exonerated.

  He wasn’t and, even before Gupta’s conviction, his arrest raked up muck from Saxena’s and New Silk Route’s past. The Washington Post reminded its readers of the payment, in 1994, of a $250,000 fine to settle civil claims that Saxena bought discounted stock in companies before they went public and improperly touted them to clients of his investment firm, that another of New Silk Route’s investors was fined $2.7 million and forfeited profits to settle charges that he’d sold shares in Citigroup in advance of an announcement of a subsidiary’s losses, and that Rajaratnam himself was a New Silk Route investor. “You’re an eagle,” a friend of Gupta’s had told him, warning him away from the New Silk Route team, “so why do you want to be with these chickens who can’t fly? You’ll get the chicken flu.”

  Parag Saxena isn’t the only financier at 15CPW whose firm is associated with bad behavior. Though he still lives cheek by jowl with several Goldman partners, Raj Sethi no longer works there. He quit in spring 2012, when about twenty Goldman commodities traders exited the firm within a few months. Their departures were blamed on tightened regulations; many went to less regulated hedge funds. Sethi chose to join SAC Capital, where another Fifteen owner, Derek Cribbs, already worked. Soon, eight former SAC traders would be charged with criminal insider trading, and after a six-year investigation of the hedge fund, SAC was indicted on criminal charges in the summer of 2013, when it was described by the federal government as a “veritable magnet of market cheaters.” That November, it agreed to plead guilty, pay a record total of $1.8 billion penalty, and stop managing money for outside investors. Its assets under management had already shrunk from $14 billion to $9 billion as investors fled.

  Jay Glenn Goldman, who occupies the $6.6 million apartment 5C, has also seen his hedge fund, J. Goldman & Co., linked to the investigation of SAC, in its case regarding Cougar Biotechnology, run by his neighbor Dr. Arie Belldegrun and backed by Lindsay Rosenwald. But those vague accusations, denied by the trader involved, and Jay Goldman’s own links to SAC’s founder and namesake, Steven A. Cohen, who has spoken of their friendship in a sworn deposition, may be the least of Jay Goldman’s troubles. Early in 2013, he was sued for giving his sixteen-year-old son the keys to his Land Rover just after Hurricane Sandy; the teen crashed into a tree near their weekend home on Long Island, leaving a passenger a quadriplegic. News stories on the lawsuit noted that Goldman had also recently been hit with a $21,000 tax lien.

  And then there’s Piofrancesco Borghetti, owner of both an Italian cosmetics company and Fifteen’s $10 million apartment 32C. After he was charged with fraudulent bankruptcy and embezzling €19 million from his company, he listed his apartment for $27.7 million in 2012. When it failed to sell after more than six months, he took it off the market and listed it as a rental, asking $45,000 a month. Maybe he needed the cash to pay his lawyers.

  Clearly, both Fifteen and its owners will remain in the news. All might do well, then, to look at the story of another renter at Fifteen, its only resident convicted felon, Adam Weitsman, whose life thus far offers up the promise of redemption, even though Weitsman would never be allowed to live in a stuffy co-op.

  Weitsman was the renter in apartment 26C whom Alex Rodriguez was unable to dislodge. “Hopefully, I’m a good tenant,” he says sheepishly. “I pay my rent on time.” But the stocky, muscular young man with a beard, short hair, gravel voice, a tattoo of his daughter’s name in Hebrew running up his left arm, and a face with some wear on it, also has a story unlike any other at 15CPW.

  Weitsman comes from Owego, New York, where his grandfather and his father ran a scrap-metal business. A self-described “nerdy, comic-book kid,” he left college without graduating and moved to Greenwich Village, sharing a two-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue with five roommates and working at an art gallery. He’d been fond of American stoneware, which was made near Owego, since he’d been a youngster. He was thrilled to have “an unimportant job I pretended was important,” he says, working in the art world.

  A few years later, when his gallery decided to off-load some of its lesser holdings, Weitsman offered to sell them and opened a gallery of his own in a storefront in Manhattan’s West Village. But when his father fell ill and asked for help, he dutifully returned to Owego and
“ended up staying,” he says. His father soon sold the family firm, but Adam started a new one, this time shredding metal, with loans and a job-creation grant. “I got destroyed,” he says. “I couldn’t get the equipment to work. I used up my credit lines. Then I got into trouble.”

  Out of money, he began kiting checks, running them through two banks for a year before he got caught when one of the banks was sold and the buyer, conducting due diligence, “saw unusual activity and called the FBI,” he recalls. Neither bank actually lost any money, and both wrote the judge on his behalf, but when he refused to snitch on the bankers, he continues, he faced a jail sentence. “I was guilty,” he says. “I was totally stupid. It wasn’t the banks’ fault so I took the jail [time]. It was in every paper and it was the age of the Internet, so it doesn’t stay local. I lost my reputation.” He also lost nine months of his life, spent in the Federal Correctional Facility at Otisville. “All my swagger got taken away.”

  Fortunately, in the six years between the crime and his imprisonment, he’d fallen in love with an aspiring fashion model and gotten married (after he told her his situation), so she ran the business until he won early release for good behavior. By the end of 2006, he was back at work and making enough money to buy back his father’s company. By then, too, he’d started cruising real estate websites, looking at Manhattan apartments again, “and I started reading about Fifteen,” he says. First, he rented a rear-facing, sixth-floor apartment from a St. Louis doctor who’d bought it as an investment. Two years later, he rented 26C and was allowed to remain when the shipping heiress Ruth McLoughlin bought it.

  “The rent has gone up dramatically,” Weitsman says. “It’s just astronomical. But we have no debt. I never wanted to go back to a bank.” He hasn’t left Owego, where he still owns a small house in town and a large lake house for weekends. But he wants to stay at Fifteen, too. “The staff treats you really special,” he says. “They’re friendly and not fake friendly. I expected something different. I love it here.” But if his fortunes take another turn, he says, he’ll still be fine. “When I was younger, stuff was important,” Weitsman says. “Now, we’re content, the three of us. Stuff is just props. The core is us. If I can’t afford this tomorrow, it won’t change anything.”

  Though atypical, Weitsman’s fall and rise is quintessentially American. So, too, is the tale told by Gillian Sorensen, widow of Theodore, who was John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s special counsel, adviser, and speechwriter, although, when asked which of the late president’s words he’d written, he would sometimes reply, “Ask not.”

  Sorensen spent the rest of his working life as an international lawyer and, for most of that time, lived with Gillian at the Century, “with Lincoln Center out the back door and Central Park out the front,” she says. In 2001, though, Sorensen suffered a stroke and lost most of his eyesight, some of his mobility, “but thank God not speech or memory.” An ongoing conversation about moving to a new home—Ted longed to live in a building with a swimming pool—went on hold at that point “and we stayed where we were,” Gillian says.

  A few years later, though, she “heard something was happening” next door at the Mayflower and the Zeckendorfs were involved. “That was interesting to me,” she continues, because she works as a senior adviser at the United Nations Foundation and knew the boys’ mother, Guri Lie, who lived nearby. “One day I ran into her and said, ‘Is it true?’ She connected me to them.” Gillian was invited to visit the Broadway office and see the plans. “They mentioned Stern, and I have a great interest in design and note and remember good buildings. It was very important to me that [Fifteen] was being built in harmony with Central Park West, so I spent several hours studying the floor plans and began to zero in on what would work for us.” The pool was vital, but she also noted that the building had no steps, “which was very important so Ted would be safe.”

  She still had to talk her husband into moving. The $10.75 million apartment 9C “was a reach for us,” she admits, “and a leap of faith. We bought when it was a hole in the ground. But it was not accidental. I’d studied. I knew. And he began to feel comfortable and eventually agreed it was the best investment we ever made.”

  Once they were able to move, Ted would swim five days a week, thirty laps in an hour, almost until his death at eighty-two in fall 2010, after another stroke. A plaque on the wall of Fifteen’s gym honors him as the pool’s most loyal swimmer. And his widow plans to stay. “They thought of everything here, they really did,” she says. “I love the space and especially the light. It really is home.”

  Fifteen is home to people of all kinds, all creeds, colors, and nationalities, all coexisting in a world where conflict is sadly the norm. Sobhi and Wafaa el-Debs aren’t the only Middle Easterners sharing Fifteen’s paradise with its many Israelis and Jews. Adam Weitsman’s first landlord was the Pakistani-born doctor Shakeel Ahmed. “It completely makes sense,” thinks Dr. Ahmed. “Money brings us together. Common interests bring us together. Everyone wants the same level of affluence and comfort.” Even a member of an Arab ruling family is in residence. As a son of Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al-Qasimi III, the ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed al-Qasimi is a crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. He and his wife are “the nicest people,” says a building employee. Though they only visit for a month a year, they make an impression, wandering in and out in jeans and sweaters. “When you think of a prince, you think bodyguards,” says the staffer. “Nope. None.” Their two children, though also nice, are spoiled, the staffer adds. “They pull up to FAO Schwarz and say, ‘Fill up the car.’ ”

  Though political cartoonist Ranan Lurie is a seventh-generation Israeli and claims membership in the oldest family in the world, the royal house of King David, he also has a family history of living in peace with Arabs; his grandfather spent most of his life in Egypt and was a leader of its Ashkenazi Jews, he says, “because he came with money.” Lurie sits on a white leather chair. His living room is decorated with white orchids. He has neat white hair, a white beard, white jeans, white sneakers.

  No doubt, some Islamists would be uneasy living under the same roof as Lurie. He grew up in Tel Aviv and dropped out of private school to join the Irgun, the Jewish paramilitary organization, in what was then still Palestine at age fourteen. Wounded fighting for Israel’s independence in the 1948 Battle of Haifa, he drew his first cartoon with a bandaged hand while recovering, emerged to train as a fighter pilot, but washed out for low flying. Three days later, he was made an intelligence officer. Years later, Major Lurie commanded five hundred men in the Six-Day War pitting Israel against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.

  He continued cartooning all along. Ten years after his debut in Life, the magazine offered him a month at the Waldorf-Astoria in exchange for two drawings a week—and he became a full-time cartoonist. There was no family money; it had vanished when his grandfather died. “But I can promise you one thing, we had a tremendous name,” he says. He got a newspaper syndication deal. “It’s a lot of money,” he says, which he invested in real estate. He first rented in the Westchester suburb Scarsdale, then bought in Stamford, Connecticut, and traded up to Greenwich. He, wife, Tamar, and their three kids all became US citizens in 1974 “at Life’s encouragement,” he continues. Tamar became a real estate broker in 1985.

  The day their youngest was accepted at Stanford, the Luries decided to return to Manhattan, but instead, he spent the next few years traveling and drawing for publications around the world. Finally, he returned to New York as an animation cartoonist for a PBS news show—and bought an apartment at Trump Tower. “A clever move investment-wise,” he says. “Big apartments appeal to people who don’t count dimes.” Then he bought another and combined them. He spent a little over $2 million and eventually sold them for $6.3 million. Then he bought two more and only recently sold those for $9 million. In the meantime, he bought a unit at Time Warner in 2005, a $2.9 million two-bedroom apartment he uses as an office and archive. Leaving the building, he saw truc
ks across the street and, without a pause, ended up in Fifteen’s sales office. The three-dimensional model of the building and its environs caught his eye, he thinks, because he’d been a skydiver and saw “the huge area this building commanded.”

  Prospective buyers could ask the sales staff to illuminate an apartment. Lurie asked to see the highest one available in the D-line. “I felt like a wolf circling where I was going to eat. I said, ‘How much?’ ” It was $11.3 million. “I am ready to buy it on condition that a handshake will be sufficient,” Lurie said. “I don’t want to wait.” Arthur Zeckendorf was standing nearby “and gave the nod.” Lurie knew exactly what he wanted to do with the apartment; as soon he took possession, he knocked out all the walls in the public rooms, replaced them with glass, and widened the foyer. Now, anyone walking through his front door is hit in the face with a 290-degree view of Manhattan.