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WitHout reCourse: Harvey, tHe real estate laWyer
become the head of the Real Estate Department at Skadden Arps, a hugely powerful firm in New York and elsewhere; Susan Rahm, a young associate who went on to be the head of the real estate department at Kaye Scholer, also a big New York firm; and Steve Senie, who left Mar- shall Bratter to teach at Michigan and who thereafter became my partner at Rosenman. Oh yes, I went on to become the head of the Rosenman real estate department many years later, but that is yet another story.
After the transaction with Sharp and Greene gelled, I also got the experience of negotiating with Mitsubishi International, the largest trading company in Japan, to obtain additional equity financing through another very complicated transaction; negotiating with a potential pension fund lender, which was represented by the late and not-so- lamented law firm LeBoeuf Lamb; and then, when that also failed, flying out to Los Angeles to be met at the plane by a Bentley driven by someone who I came to believe was a broker whose job it was to launder mob money. Finally, I had the experience of the acrimony surrounding our own “dropping of the project,” which involved our ritualistic (for legal reasons) offer to give the project back to Sharp and Greene, encumbered at the time by many millions of dollars in unpaid real estate taxes, when the project succumbed to the same problems that then infected the rest of the New York real estate market, and could not secure the necessary financing. Sharp and Greene rejected the offer, as expected, and the holder of the existing mortgage, Bankers Trust Company, ended up with it.
Give My Regards . . . (Two)
Fade out and now fade in about eight years later. Times Square was still in horrible shape. So the administration of New York City’s then mayor, Edward Koch, approached Portman, hoping that the time was right for his Times Square hotel to be built and thereby begin the revitalization of that key area in the City. Portman told Mayor Koch that he was delighted to try again, and on the same site, provided that the transaction
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