Page 518 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
see, it turned out that Norman was not impervious to the forces that brought Guterman back to earth.
Before that, however, it was quite a ride, one that I would learn much from. We should, therefore, return to my lunch at Shun Lee with Arthur Beckerman to see how I ended up being responsible, albeit indi- rectly and secretly, for hundreds of sermons delivered at the services conducted on the first day of Rosh Hashanah in 1986 and then for hun- dreds of other, more complicated, transactions, all before the real estate market and other factors combined to change my career once again.
Compounding My Interest
As I said earlier, I was having my free meal thanks to Flora’s advice and connections. She had represented Norman Dansker from time to time over the years, and he had confided to her that he was on the threshold of a vast expansion, both in size and in scope, and that he needed a “high-caliber” general counsel to replace the person who was then hold- ing the position. Flora liked Norman, who, she said, was brilliant (some actually credited him with the invention of the wraparound mortgage), extremely tough as a businessman, charming as a person, and, despite what I might hear, honest as the day is long.
Despite what I might hear? Well, it seems that Norman had been in residence for about two years at Allenwood, a federal penitentiary located in Pennsylvania. The crime? Attempting, in the early seventies, to bribe the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, in order to obtain a zoning variance so that IFC could build an apartment complex on the Pali- sades. The mayor, unbeknownst to the Dansker delegate who carried the initial cash payment of $100,000 of the promised $500,000, was the only honest public official in New Jersey at the time (and perhaps since) and had been wearing a wire, courtesy of the FBI. I forget the name of the representative who ended up bunking with Norman at Allenwood, but you shouldn’t, because he will reappear near the end of this story. Let’s call him what he was: the “Fort Lee Bag Man.”
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