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Why (as in yaverbaum)
and daughter were also on the payroll. They never appeared but did sign FedExed documents as officers.
I managed to work very well with Norman, Arthur, Stuart, and even Fred; and the first few years were exhilarating. I felt as if I were in a bat- ting cage, charged with hitting every fastball and curveball solidly, and stopping any ball from reaching the screen behind me, all while the pitches were coming in every two seconds. There was an enormous number of transactions and questions with which I had to deal each day. And I just loved the action.
On the Coronet Properties side, among a myriad of other transac- tions and questions to be resolved, there were further acquisitions; there were financings of whole properties; there were financings of unsold shares (each co-op that Coronet had yet to sell was represented by a “proprietary lease” and shares in the cooperative corporation that owned the building; these would be pledged to a bank, usually the holder of the underlying mortgage); there were borrowings secured by “seller financ- ing” instruments (groups of notes, co-op stock, leases, and security agreements that were acquired by Coronet, as the sponsor, when co-op apartments were sold to the public for both cash and a note); there were litigations to be overseen; there was the overseeing of offering state- ments to be drafted and cleared by the attorney general in advance of conversions (particularly Sky View’s); there were sales of pools of “unsolds”; there were investigations of Wall Street’s bid to “securitize” most of the foregoing types of assets with what was then a totally new financing tool (the one that brought down Wall Street and much of the rest of the universe in the great financial crisis of 2008); and there were the conversion closings themselves, Sky View being the biggest and most important. (That closing resulted in a huge party, and my meeting Charles Evans Hughes’s great-granddaughter. It was therefore a very unusual event on two scores.)
The most unusual transaction? Over a period of three months or so, I negotiated with the Russian consulate in New York to take about thirty Sky View apartments out from under the strictures of rent control (which required a court order) so that we could lease them at fair rental
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