Page 634 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
COREA, anchor, juice, out pad, take a chapter, go hard, FAR, pref, the ups, sand- wich, mezz, and so on, and my favorite, useful life, each delivered with a suitable number of quips and war stories. I had continued that practice when I was at the RTC and delighted in telling my mostly non-Jewish staff how to properly use the technique of dreydling their adversary— delaying him by spinning him in circles—or how to apply the most descriptive phrase available for becoming a bankrupt—going mechula.
Although the partners in the department were not required to attend the instructional meetings that I held when I became the chair- man, many did, and I like to believe that they were not primarily motivated by the fact that a free breakfast was served. The best attendee, it turns out, was Donald Siskind. He and I had been legal adversaries in the early seventies when Portman took his first swipe at improving Times Square, had clashed in the early eighties after I had played an active role in bringing about the merger with Marshall Brat- ter’s real estate department, and had been at silent odds with me (at least according to Joe Getraer) in the mid-nineties, when it came to the question of my return to the firm. Well, through being the most experienced attorneys in Real Estate, through working together on a couple of matters where Donald had turned to me as, essentially, a check on his judgment, through reminiscing, through giving and tak- ing at the weekly meetings, and through having a common enemy (firm management), Donald and I, to the astonishment of many, became fast friends. He yearned for the Tuesday meetings and was an active and very constructive contributor.
I recall two meetings in particular. In October 2006, Tishman Speyer and BlackRock acquired a vast complex of apartment buildings on the east side of Manhattan known as Stuyvesant Town–Peter Coo- per Village for $5.4 billion, in what was the largest residential acquisition in New York’s history. The theory of the acquisition was that the new owners would ultimately convert the then rent-stabilized apartments to market-rate rentals. We spent one hour discussing what I believed to be the looming litigations and what the projections for the purchase must have looked like. We concluded, presciently, that there was no realistic
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