Page 536 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
just tenacity but great skill as well, and it poses challenges to the intel- lect and hones the lawyer’s skills.
No, I would have stayed to help deal with the problems (and did work with the bankruptcy lawyer when a reorganization of Coronet Capital was in contemplation—in fact, it was I who told the supposed expert that we had more leverage with the banks than he thought, as I believed, correctly, that the banks were not, as he thought, secured cred- itors—and, hence, had much less leverage in negotiations than our outside counsel believed).
Over time, however, my thrill of working for Norman and experi- encing his brilliance, his charm, and his will gave way to my concerns about his coldheartedness, his extraordinary need to control, his para- noia, the possibility that all was not well, and the chance that improper things were happening or would happen, improper things that I might be seen as having abetted.
After I left, Norman was in fact indicted by New York State for actions that he allegedly took in connection with the co-ops. Fred, who should have been called as a witness before the grand jury, was not. As far as I was concerned, if Norman was to be indicted, Fred should have been as well, but, while Norman may have done some inappropriate things on behalf of Coronet Properties, to my knowledge, nothing that was done was criminal. The indictment read nonsensically, and it had nothing to do with what I had known about the operations of the com- pany. The jury must have felt similarly. Norman was acquitted.
A huge number of the unsold units ultimately ended up in the hands of lenders, and all three of the banks that had been the primary lenders for Norman’s operations—Ensign Bank (a client, as it happened, of Rosenman), New York Bank for Savings, and Arthur Cohen’s bank, Coreast—failed. Those banks were hardly alone. Well over one thou- sand FDIC-insured banks and FSLIC-insured savings and loans failed as well, as did many thousands of real estate developers. (That, as we shall see, led to the next and, to me, the best step in my career.)
On the Coronet Capital side of things, there was a complete fail- ure. All of the loans that Coronet Capital made were, or became, bad,
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