Page 522 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
short order, I located and hired Denise Langer, a young woman who would deal principally with problems relating to “unsolds,” apartments that were still held by Coronet after a conversion had been effected (and would, you will recall, hang the moniker “le Harv” on me), and Allen Rothman, an experienced real estate lawyer, approximately my age, who would leave his firm to become my assistant general counsel. I liked and got along very well with both of them. (In fact, when I actually returned to Rosenman eleven years later, I again hired Denise, initially to help out when a client of mine was converting a building on Fifth Avenue.) In addition, I hired two paralegals, who became quite popular.
But the lawyers and the paralegals were not the people at Coronet with whom I spent the most time. There were four key people, all on the business side, with whom I did.
First and absolutely foremost was Norman, who knew everything that was going on and to whom everyone paid total obeisance. He was the primary deal initiator, the ultimate decision maker on matters of moment (and seemingly trivial matters as well), and as tough a man as I have ever seen. Norman could gracefully and patiently negotiate a very compli- cated sale transaction with a buyer for months, but, if there was what he believed to be a point at which he would go no further, he would say, politely but firmly, “The property is no longer on the market,” and hang up. I was sitting with him once when he did this, and I couldn’t believe that he could so easily walk away after so much effort. He looked at me and said that it was just another deal, that there will be hundreds of oth- ers, and that he never looked back. And he meant it. He had the same ability when it came to people. If he wanted someone to be gone, he could sever a relationship that had lasted for years with one sentence and no remorse. In the first six months, I saw at least four such termina- tions, and there were many more to come. Nevertheless, I liked Norman.
Then there was Arthur, a well-dressed, relatively attractive guy who was essentially Norman’s chief operating officer on the co-op side. His training had been in working with a big general contractor, and one could hear that in his voice (he and Guterman got along famously). You could also tell that by observing that he would become most animated
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