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CoMinG HoMe?
managed to call me virtually every thirty minutes, irrespective of the time or place. I finally put my foot down, made a courageous stand, and told him never to call me while The Sopranos was on TV. So, of course, the very next evening, he called me while The Sopranos was on TV. Kathy took the call, and I asked her to tell Haskin that I had refused to talk to him until the show ended. Pretty brave, huh?
Haskin, a rock-rib conservative, was also a truly charitable human being: One evening, when he and I were going to a dinner meeting with prospective investors, there was a very insistent beggar standing next to the door to the restaurant. An annoyance? No problem. Without the slightest hesitation or embarrassment, Haskin turned to me and dealt with the problem with panache and generosity: “Give the man five dol- lars,” said he. Which I did. Oh, the life of the big-time attorney!
When Haskin, truly the most annoying client for whom I ever worked, wasn’t bothering me, I did manage to do some positive things: In addition to being in charge of a multitude of the usual acquisitions, financings, securitizations, family real estate dispute resolutions, sale- leasebacks, and the cooperative conversion of a building on Fifth Avenue, I represented the New York State Housing Finance Agency in the settlement of a cluster of litigations surrounding the financing and construction of Co-op City, the largest single residential develop- ment in the United States (15,372 affordable housing units sitting in the Bronx and looming over the Hutchinson River Parkway), with the result that the agency offered to make me its general counsel (even though, as I told you, I had not exactly excelled in Professor Farns- worth’s Municipal Problems course); Playwrights Horizons, a nonprofit theater organization that supports the development of con- temporary American playwrights and composers, in the development of its new theater at 416 West 42nd Street; and the Museum of Mod- ern Art, in its 630,000-square-foot expansion, which required, among other things, an elaborate, negotiated reworking of its real estate rela- tionship with the separately owned Museum Tower, the fifty-two-story condominium building that MoMA both surrounds and forms a phys- ical part of.
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