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CroWninG aCHieveMent: Harvey, tHe General Counsel
that had financed most of the cost of the acquisition of Le Havre at the first marathon closing that I had ever attended), directed—that Gerry get his money but that Coronet be protected. I was a bit intimidated. Guterman looked and acted as if he could crush me if the impulse struck him. Notwithstanding his extensive Old Master collection (which some considered to be evidence that he was a parvenu struggling to gain respectability), he sounded like he was straight from the streets when he spoke, especially when he was angered or wished to threaten his adver- sary. He was, however, for the most part, grudgingly polite to the new kid on the block, with only one threatening outburst and table pounding that I can recall. After all, we had the money, and he needed it. Also, he had really no risk when it came to Norman Dansker, to whom he was, as people invariably told me, “like a son.”
Mr. Guterman, a protégé of Norman’s, had made his fame and for- tune by converting thousands of apartment houses from rental buildings to buildings that were owned “cooperatively” (“co-ops”); he had thereby enabled himself to sell individual apartment units to residents and out- siders for amounts that, when added together, well exceeded the prices that he could get if he were to sell the buildings intact. Guterman’s bill- board ads in Queens, through which he drummed up co-op sales, said, “Every Man a King!” He certainly thought that he was, and for the moment he was right. He was riding the crest of a very strong market.
Norman, through Coronet, was in the co-op conversion business as well, although generally with higher-end properties, borrowing enor- mous amounts of money to acquire, fix up, manage, convert, and sell apartment buildings (apartment unit by apartment unit). Not only was Norman in that business, he was involved in both sides of it. Here, Nor- man was the lender and was securing the $600,000 loan to Guterman with unsold condominium units in Gerry’s Parc Vendome, a huge apart- ment complex on West 57th Street in Manhattan. (There are significant differences between condominium and co-op units, which are not rele- vant in this context.)
Four years or so later, the market caught up with Guterman, and he lost a substantial portion of his properties. Unfortunately, as we shall
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