The Liar's Ball. Ward Vicky
with an investment committee… I could be much more nimble than a larger company… I could feint, weave, adapt.”
“Why do I do what I do?” he asked rhetorically one sunny afternoon in his office. “I do it for the money, the drama. And the satisfaction of being right.”
Chapter 2
Alpha Males
You need people who are loyal to you if you are an entrepreneur.
It was time for Harry Macklowe to call the consiglieri —the two advisers he had relied on more than anyone else since the mid-1990s. Both men were called “Rob.”
Robert “Rob” Sorin was a partner at the Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson law firm. He was dark-haired, bespectacled, and polished. He and Macklowe had begun working together when Sorin was a lawyer at the real estate law firm of Robinson, Silverman, Pearce, Aronsohn, and Berman. Macklowe followed him to the broader, more international firm of Fried Frank in 1997. That was a typical Macklowe move. He was fiercely loyal to people, not institutions.
And it was easy to be loyal to someone so talented and useful: Sorin was a rising star. A graduate of Georgetown University, he had made his mark on the New York City market by executing the sale of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)’s New York Coliseum – a 3.43-acre site to the southwest of Central Park – for $337 million. He had accomplished this after a decade of volatile negotiations among the city, the MTA, and Mortimer “Mort” Zuckerman – whose $455 million proposal to develop the site collapsed in 1994.
Macklowe appreciated Sorin's quiet, careful style. Other lawyers, bankers, and brokers knew him, trusted him, and liked dealing with him. He diplomatically described the extreme peaks and troughs of Macklowe's professional life as, simply “interesting.” It also helped that Sorin, aged 45 (in 2003) was younger than Harry but older than his son, William “Billy,” then 35, who had started working for his father soon after graduating from New York University.
When Macklowe told Sorin he was planning to buy the GM Building, Sorin wasn't surprised. He'd have been surprised by anything less audacious. “When he latches his jaws onto something, it's very hard for him to let go. When [the GM Building] became a real opportunity.. he was very, very focused on it,” Sorin recalled.
Sorin sensed Macklowe had been plotting his move on the tower for months. Earlier in the year, Macklowe had asked Sorin to represent him on a deal that had seemed unusual. Macklowe said he would buy the land under the old St. Moritz Hotel on Central Park South (now the Ritz-Carlton). It was a small deal – $125 million – with no opportunity for development. “It wasn't a typical Harry acquisition,” Sorin recalls. “There wasn't a lot of creative opportunity to it.”
Macklowe told Sorin he knew the deal was “flawed.. but” – and this was a crucial “but” – Eastdil was the selling agent. Eastdil, it was known, would, most likely, be the selling agent for the GM Building. Eastdil would want to see a track record from Macklowe before it would take him seriously as a buyer of something as monumental as the GM Building.
“I don't give a shit – let's just close the deal,” Macklowe told Sorin. He explained, “I wanted to have a reputation of being a closer, being honorable, and having done a deal with these guys.”
Sorin understood. He drafted the paperwork and negotiated the deal.
The counterpoint to Sorin's white-shoe persona was a broker named Robert “Rob” Horowitz. The “other Rob” in Harry's stable had played a vital role in every one of Macklowe's deals since 1997, amounting to over $15 billion in transactions.
“Rob,” Macklowe said to the broker, a slight man with shoulder-length dark hair that curls at the ends, “we're buying the GM Building.” There was a brief pause as Horowitz leaned back in his chair. “We need some money.”
Cooper-Horowitz, the brokerage started by Horowitz's father, Barry, did not believe in wasting its fees on office rent. The firm had occupied smoke-filled rooms with aging black vinyl sofas in the Grand Central Terminal station area for 50 years. “We don't bring our clients to meetings here ever,” Rob Horowitz chirps through the gloom and stench. “I don't want to spend a nickel I don't have to.”
“Nobody thought that Harry was going to be the winning bidder – nobody,” says Horowitz. “Because most people thought that the amount of equity that would be required would be too large for just an individual to buy. That's why everybody thought the building was going to be traded to Vornado [a vast public real estate investment trust (REIT)] or to Equity Office Properties [EOP, the largest commercial space owner in the country].”
But when Macklowe said he was going after the GM Building, Horowitz knew immediately whom to call. He began with the bank he was closest to: Deutsche Bank. “Harry very rarely, if ever, spoke to a lender. It was always through me,” he says.
Harry Macklowe and Rob Horowitz did everything together. They golfed most Fridays, they drank, they dined, and they went away on trips, including to Las Vegas. They kept each other's secrets. On December 18, 2002, Macklowe wrote Horowitz a letter, telling him, “You are a great friend, a great supporter, and I love you.”
What really bonded the two men was money. As Macklowe got richer, so did Horowitz. By 2002, Horowitz had made $50 million in fees. “Harry was extraordinarily loyal to me,” he says. “We trusted each other emphatically. We never questioned anything either one of us did. We looked out for each other's interests.
“He once said to me, ‘Rob, don't tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you think.’ Harry and I had disagreements over a number of financings, a number of strategies, but he wants [an honest opinion].”
The way the duo worked was very efficient. Horowitz would visit Macklowe in his office. Macklowe talked; sometimes his son, Billy, would be there, sometimes not. Horowitz scribbled notes with a ballpoint pen on A4 paper. These sheets were usually all that were needed for Horowitz to call the banks and lawyers to draw up the paperwork for deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Macklowe also trusted Horowitz because he knew Horowitz had served other real estate titans well, especially Donald Trump, with whom Harry occasionally golfed and lunched.
Horowitz had started working for Trump in 1996. Trump always let Horowitz breeze into his office without checking in with his vice president and assistant, Rhona Graff. (Macklowe didn't want quite such a loose arrangement. Before walking into Macklowe's office, Horowitz needed to check in with Harry's petite vice president and assistant, Liliana Coriasco, a doppelganger for Audrey Hepburn. Horowitz sometimes joked that this was because no one ever quite knew “what might be going on in Harry's office.”)
Trump was very open with Horowitz. Horowitz knew, for example, that Trump kept his office the way it had been for years – cluttered with piles of papers and photographs and magazine covers of himself on the walls – because he was superstitious and didn't think he should move anything.
If Trump received a letter that amused him, or read an article he found particularly interesting, he often took out a black marker pen and scrawled, editor-like, “ROB H,” and popped the document in the mail for his broker to peruse.
When Trump's daughter Ivanka told her father she intended to convert to Judaism and marry real estate scion Jared Kushner, Trump turned to Horowitz. “How rich is he?”
Horowitz replied, “He's very successful and a good guy. Don't worry about it, Donald.”
To which Trump replied, “Then he has my blessing.”
Horowitz liked Trump immensely but he loved Macklowe. He loved his humor, his elegance, his generosity. It was also extremely “helpful” and not coincidental that Macklowe had the loyalty and trust of Rob Horowitz's closest friend – and client – Eric Schwartz, the U.S. head of real estate at Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest lenders in the world. It didn't hurt that Schwartz and Sorin were longtime friends. Schwartz, Macklowe,