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CroWninG aCHieveMent: Harvey, tHe General Counsel
value to consulate employees, some of whom were probably KGB, who would live near their facilities in Riverdale.
On the Coronet Capital side, we had to form the partnership; deal with necessary licensure; raise the capital from numerous investors, among them groups of partners from at least five law firms (to whom, as you would expect, Norman directed the legal work15); negotiate lines of credit with three banks (all of which failed in the real estate slump that would start in or around 1989); and, of course, negotiate, draft, and sign documents evidencing and securing loans. The borrowers were, to say the least, not triple-A-rated. In fact, if Z were a rating, most of them would have qualified. (Norman was known as a “hard money lender,” which meant that borrowers paid many “points” for the loans that would then bear huge interest rates, which would float in accordance with increases, never decreases, in the prime rate. Thus, before each loan would be committed, it was necessary to calculate whether the maxi- mum allowable legal rate of effective interest would be exceeded if the agreed-upon terms were implemented, a calculation that is not as easy as it sounds.) So we made loans to some very colorful people: among others, Guterman; Leonard Spodek, the so-called “Dracula Landlord”; Brett Lurie, a very young man who, in the end, was convicted of fraud in his management of co-ops that he had converted; and John DeLo- rean, formerly an executive at General Motors and developer of the spectacular, but unmarketable, eponymous, gull-winged stainless steel car (in a project that went bankrupt), come to mind.
In addition to the work of Coronet Properties and Coronet Capital, there was the attempt to acquire a federally chartered bank in Buffalo, New York, a transaction that probably failed because of Norman’s ear- lier conviction but did result in my getting to see Niagara Falls. Norman shrugged it off (both the loss and the Falls).
We also had extensive dealings with Arthur Cohen, a brilliant and ruthless man who was one of the most famous real estate investors in
15. Unlike most clients with whom I had dealt over the years, Norman thought that most con- flicts of interest were a good thing, something that he could work to his advantage. He was right.
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