Page 440 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
acquisition by Karp’s company at my first real closing, the property, having previously changed hands, had been rechristened “Le Havre,” presumably to give it some aura of sophistication and undoubtedly because the new owner thought the two gargantuan letters too expen- sive to remove. Sometime in early 1985, about thirteen years after my closing, an entity called Coronet Properties purchased Le Havre in order to convert its rental apartments to co-ops. It turns out that Nor- man Dansker, whose company, IFC, had supplied much of the money to enable Karp’s company to make the purchase that I had just witnessed, controlled Coronet. And it also turns out that about fourteen years after my supposed one-hour closing, I became general counsel to Dansker and Coronet (see Chapter Twenty-Seven).
Soon after I became general counsel at Coronet, I hired an attorney named Denise Langer to help with the co-op conversion, among other things. Denise rewarded me by spending the next two decades or so referring to me, affectionately, if not entirely respectfully, as “le Harv.”
Give My Regards . . . (One)
During the next decade, I moved from observing from the corner of the table to being in the thick of things and became steeped in the ins and outs of virtually every type of transaction that a real estate lawyer could hope to encounter. I (meaning, of course, I, acting on behalf of clients) bought, sold, leased, subleased, developed, subdivided, invested in, formed partnerships and made all manner of agreements with respect to—and financed by every known means—every type of property that you can think of, including, of all things, Conrail tracks in Manhattan, the first major videotape (what’s that?) factory in the United States (in Dothan, Alabama, then the “Peanut Capital of the World”), and a facil- ity for the duty-free import and distribution of very expensive and equally ugly glass figurines (what my mother would call “tchotchkes”), as to which I spent one week in Miami with two non-English-speaking officers of Lladro Exportadora, S.A., a Spanish corporation, negotiating
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