Page 528 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
New York City, a man who liked to “squeeze” a deal for the sheer plea- sure of it. Famously the first Jewish director of Citibank, he had taken over Coreast Bank in Virginia, one of the banks from which Norman borrowed—which Cohen used as his own pocketbook. Some potential deals with him included partners who were familiar to me from my transaction that involved Battery Park City, a transaction that, you may recall, involved some questionable people. Not only did I get to learn a lot watching Norman in action, I learned a lot watching Arthur Cohen as well. When it came to real players in the real estate game, between Peter Jay Sharp and Jerome L. Green (see Chapter Twenty-Five), and now, Norman Dansker and Arthur Cohen, I believe that I saw all that there was to see and learned most of what there was to learn.
To all appearances, everything at Coronet was going swimmingly. About one year after I started, we moved the offices to a far more mod- ern mid-block building, between East 58th Street and East 59th Street, and Park and Third Avenues, where we doubled the square footage that we occupied. In the executive portion of the offices everything was rose- wood, stainless steel, and glass. It was a fitting projection of Norman’s personality, however: both sides of it. Every executive, save Norman, was in a fully glassed-in office, without the slightest privacy, whereas Norman, who was showing not just an excessively controlling streak but, arguably, a paranoid one as well, had a battleship-size, private, walled office where he held court and worked his phones. One enduring image that I have is that of a locksmith who must have spent about one solid month working to make a thirty-foot wall of Norman’s rosewood files safe from the potentially prying eyes of others.
What I took to be Norman’s obsession with secrecy was evident early on. In my first year, Norman became aware of a memorandum that I had distributed to the finance, insurance, management, and corporate officers telling them what the various roles would be in connection with a new major transaction. Norman told me to pull the memo and never to distribute such a document again; he clearly did not want anyone knowing more than that person needed to know. Obviously, I complied. It was, as you would imagine, an unsettling experience.
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