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CroWninG aCHieveMent: Harvey, tHe General Counsel
and every investor or investor group (many of which came out of the law firms that represented Coronet) sued Norman personally. Litiga- tions with Norman went on for years before he settled them. He somehow took the few remaining assets; sublet the rosewood, stainless steel, and glass offices to the point where they became, in Denise Langer’s words, “a rabbit warren”; and managed to stay in some form of business, with a new general counsel (who was soon terminated) and with Fred, but without Allen, without Arthur, without Stuart, without his Management Department, and without probably 90 percent of his nonfamily employees. Mitchell Gordon stayed, of course, but even Warner Norton left.
A few years after all of this happened, Stuart provided me with cop- ies of court documents that he had obtained, documents that related to the activities of IFC years before. They were documents that, had I seen them four years earlier, would have deterred me from working with Norman Dansker in the first place. It seems that IFC had started a num- ber of partnerships that went into the business of making real estate loans. Their borrowers were much like those that we dealt with at Coro- net, and their loans had a very familiar shape: Each provided for a large portion of the moneys to be held in a reserve to pay monthly interest, sometimes for as much as six months. Thus, investors would be looking at financial statements that showed loans to be current when the interest was not coming from the property itself or the borrower. Sound familiar?
Post Postscript
In March 1992, in virtually my first week in my new job in Washington, I received a call from the law firm representing Coronet Capital Com- pany’s trustee in bankruptcy. They wished my testimony and said that they would subpoena me if necessary. I knew that, given the politics at the Resolution Trust Corporation (see Chapter Twenty-Nine), which clearly did not sympathize with those who defaulted on loans held by them, testifying in that proceeding might not be the best thing for me
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