The House That Guns Built

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Laura Trevelyan is very British. Her grandfather George was one of the most prominent British historians of the twentieth century. Wallington, her family estate in Northumberland, belongs to the British National Trust. Her great, great, great grandfather Sir Charles was immortalized in a Northern Irish song bitterly called “Trevelyan’s Corn,” because in the 1840s he was in charge of famine relief. In 2006 she wrote a memoir about her ancestors. Its title: A Very British Family: The Trevelyans and Their World.

So you would expect the longtime BBC correspondent to have been upset when her husband, James Goldston, the president of ABC News, informed her that in order to accept his current job, they’d have to leave Britain and move to New York. Instead, Laura immediately phoned a cousin and asked which part of New York City she should live in. (Answer: Brooklyn). The reason for her lack of discomfort was that despite her very British name, heritage, and accent, she has a second lineage every bit as intrinsic to American culture as the Trevelyans are to Britain. That lineage, and the intrigues of her colorful American forebears, are the subjects of her second book, The Winchester: The Gun That Built An American Dynasty, out this month.

Laura’s great, great grandfather Oliver invented the Winchester Repeating Rifle, which, as all students of American history know, is The Gun That Won the West. Its creation meant that the Winchesters—originally farming stock from outside Boston—became very, very rich. Nevertheless, when Laura’s grandfather Humphrey Trevelyan, a Cambridge academic, proposed to Laura’s grandmother, his relatives let him know that they considered the Winchesters “trade.”

As a boy, Laura’s father and his family would traverse the Atlantic in the QE2 to the stay at “the Big House,” a mansion on Johnson’s Point in the Connecticut Shoreline town of Branford. Built to be near the Winchester factory in New Haven, the Big House rested on smooth blue-grey rock jutting into the Long Island Sound, creating incredible views but also danger. “My father was there during Hurricane Gloria in 1956,” says Laura. “Everybody had to go into the basement with candles while the hurricane raged and windows smashed.”

Now the Big House is gone, knocked down in the 1960s so that Laura’s grandmother and her four siblings could build their own houses. However, much of the estate remains intact, as do many of the family’s idiosyncratic traditions. For example, Laura tells me as we walk the land one April morning, as a teenager she watched her great aunts, who were “fond of tennis, family, and cocktail hour,” firing tennis balls with an ancient elephant gun at trespassers. (Even now, only family members are allowed to cross a footbridge leading across an inlet to the estate.)

Even now, only family members are allowed to cross a footbridge leading across an inlet to the estate.

Trevelyan, 47, is now an anchor for BBC World News America. She, Goldston, and their three sons live in Brooklyn Heights during the week and on weekends transfer to what used to be the Johnson’s Point caretaker’s cottage. (The two-bedroom cottage is charmingly, if precariously, perched at water’s edge in a flood zone.) It was while staying at the cottage that Laura found much of the inspiration for her book, which she wrote on the train to and from Washington, D.C., where BBC World News America is recorded.

She shows me a glimpse of family life, past and present. In the boathouse a large red “war canoe” hangs upside down, since all Winchester women were given war canoes when they married. There is also a great winch for launching yachts, one of which was so magnificent the U.S. Navy commandeered it during World War II to patrol for u-boats.

We walk past a pretty walled-off rose garden planted by Laura’s great grandmother, Susan Bennett. One of the most interesting parts of The Winchester is the story of the business’s decline, which took place during the First World War, and which Susan and her husband had the misfortune to preside over. “You’d think that war would be good for gun companies,” says Laura, “but in fact they went into huge debt to expand. The contract prices of the rifles didn’t reflect what making them actually cost, so this scheme was hatched to make household products bearing the Winchester name, with the slogan “as good as a gun.”

It was a disaster, and Winchester Bennett, Susan’s husband, seemed to crack under the pressure, checking into a psychiatric hospital. He would be the last family member at the helm of the firm. His marriage with Susan is one of the book’s most intriguing mysteries. A prolific writer and sought-after beauty, Susan “cried” when her parents forced her to marry “Win.” “She never says how she feels about him,” says Laura. “So you can only guess.” Probably she suffered in silence, finding solace in her rose garden.

Perhaps the most famous Winchester is Sarah, who spent 38 years building the architecturally crazy “Mystery House” in San Jose, California, after being driven mad, according to legend, by the deaths of her child and husband. Laura argues that Sarah was quite rational, actually, which is why she donated a large chunk of her fortune to Yale instead of less-deserving nephews and nieces, who received carefully-limited income from trusts. She built the eccentrically large rambling house, Laura believes, “because she could.”

Laura’s grandmother Molly was another deeply unhappy Winchester woman, transplanted from America to “windy Cambridge” by her husband Humphrey (who was involved in intelligence work at Bletchley Park during the war), whereupon she found herself alone with five children, unable to return home. “Molly wrote letters all morning each day, describing what she missed about Johnson’s Point—the lobster cookouts, playing tennis,” says Laura. While her husband fought against the Nazis, Molly was a pacifist who spoke disapprovingly of the family’s “gun money.”

Yet nothing overcame her passion for Johnson’s Point—which she passed on to her granddaughter. “It’s a sanctuary,” says Laura. “You are so close to the water you can hear it. Johnson’s Point is why I was comfortable when James was offered the job. There was a life here that I could be part of, that I wouldn’t have to create. I think of my grandmother being born in the Big House, scrambling over the rocks just like my children. I just feel enormously lucky.”

 

How a Russian Collector Changed the Course of Modern Art

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On a bright St. Petersburg evening this past spring, as the pale Russian sun glittered on the Neva River, Mikhael Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum, stood up at a dinner attended by curators and art critics at Menshikov Palace. Raising his glass, Piotrovsky asked the guests—many of whom had own around the globe to be at the dinner—to toast the most expensive art show in history, a blockbuster among blockbusters headed from Russia to the West.

The artworks—130 Impressionist and Modernist masterpieces, including some of the greatest works ever created by artists such as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh—are stupefying to behold. Billed almost too modestly as “Icons of Modern Art,” the show pays tribute to a private collection so magisterial it occupies entire wings at two separate museums, the Hermitage and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow.

When the four-month-long exhibition opens on October 22 at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the private art museum and cultural center designed by Frank Gehry, major heads of state are likely to attend, not least the presidents of Russia and France. Among other draws: the chance to see cornerstones of Western culture, including many of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings and Matisse’s The Dance (arguably his most recognizable work), that have spent much of their existence out of sight to the West.

“This is is a historic event that will have people coming from all over the world, something we are not likely to see again for a while,” says Jean-Paul Claverie, an adviser to Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France and the chairman and CEO of the multinational luxury conglomerate LVMH, which is financing the show.

“I can’t stress how in infrequently we see a show of this magnitude,” says Evan Beard, national art services executive for U.S. Trust and an adviser to many private collectors. He calls the collection “so staggeringly valuable that it’s almost hard to conceive.” But what may be even more astonishing is the story behind it, a tale of incomprehensible loss and redemption visited upon perhaps the greatest art collector the world has ever known.

That figure is Sergei Shchukin, a Moscow textile magnate who in 1890 began visiting the salons of Paris, where he developed a taste for Impressionist art. One of Russia’s richest men (but not a member of its old-guard aristocracy), Shchukin bought Lilac of Argenteuil, his first of 13 paintings by Claude Monet, just before his 44th birthday. Over the next few years he would add major works by Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, and van Gogh, which represented a decadent avant-garde to turn-of-the-century Moscow—a city undergoing headlong industrialization, with the simultaneous rise of a new moneyed elite.

What the paintings really represented, according to Shchukin’s grandson André-Marc Delocque-Fourcaud, the 74-year-old former director of various museums in France, was “the taste of wealthy bourgeoisie: nice, trendy, not revolutionary.” As a prominent businessman—the sort of figure who today would own a hedge fund and purchase art at Gagosian—Shchukin bought art to impress other businessmen and “show you are a big man,” says Delocque-Fourcaud.

“Shchukin was a prominent businessman—the sort of figure who today would own a hedge fund and purchase art at Gagosioan.”

“There was a strange, artificial, hothouse atmosphere in Russia at the turn of the century, a sense of forced growth and impending metamorphosis,” writes Shchukin’s biographer, Beverly Whitney Kean. “It was a single leap from feudalism to the industrialism of the 20th century, and the process was jarring, unsettling the traditions of centuries of isolation and undermining a rigidly stratified social structure.” In this setting a “collector’s fever” began to grip the new moneyed class.

Soon after buying his first paintings, the handsome, urbane Shchukin—whose creation of an international textile empire had depended on his visual acuity—was introduced to the arrestingly exotic works of Gauguin, “as alien as moon rocks,” according to Kean. At the time, not only conservative Russians but the art establishment in Europe failed to appreciate Gauguin’s vivid Fauvist style, but Shchukin, who was known in the business world for shrewdness and daring, saw something (“If a picture gives you a psychological shock, buy it,” he would later say), and his method of collecting began to change. Instead of pursuing art for status or prestige (or financial incentives, as so many collectors do today), Shchukin—who belonged to a puritanical sect of the Russian Orthodox church and led an ascetic lifestyle—viewed collecting as a challenge from God.

“You have been given the eye,” Delocque-Fourcaud explains to me. Tragically, the grandson adds, “there is a price for that.”

In Moscow, 1905 was a year of riots and bombings, a harbinger of the Russian Revolution, and in November the youngest of Shchukin’s three sons simply disappeared. Months later, during the spring thaw, his body was found in the Moscow River, where he had thrown himself, upending the family. Shchukin’s self-therapy for his grief was to change the history of Western culture.

A month after the burial he sought out the 36-year-old poverty-stricken Henri Matisse at his fifth-floor studio on Quai St.-Michel. Ridiculed by the French art establishment as a charlatan, Matisse was in a critical early stage of experimentation. Shchukin bought a still life, Crockery on a Table, and sent it back to Moscow, where he boldly put it on display, inviting mockery or worse. (Viewers had been known to deface Matisse’s work.)

In 1906, Shchukin began hurriedly buying Gauguin, eventually sending 16 of the Primitivist’s most iconic paintings to his mansion in Moscow. Delocque-Fourcaud has no doubt that the suddenly manic collector was building a monument to his dead son, who was thought to have killed himself in despair over Russia’s social turmoil.

More sorrow was to come. On Christmas Eve 1906, Shchukin’s wife Lidya, who was known as one of Moscow’s great beauties, returned from a shopping spree feeling unwell. A week later she was dead of what was termed “a woman’s disease,” according to biographer Kean. Shchukin, says his grandson, rushed out into the subzero Moscow night and knocked on the door of Valentin Serov, Russia’s most acclaimed portraitist, and asked him to paint Lidya in death. Soon Shchukin left Russia and embarked on a pilgrimage to the Monastery of St. Catherine at the base of Mount Sinai.

Traversing the Egyptian desert in a caravan of 20 camels, plagued by insects, heat, and guilt, he found himself transfixed by, as he wrote, “the blue mountains, the sea, the rising of the sun and the sunset” on the Gulf of Aqaba—and, one day, in a revelation, the vivid, colorful paintings of a young monk working in a style similar to that of Matisse. He rushed home to immerse himself in color and art.

On his return to Moscow he received a telegram announcing that his brother Ivan, a profligate socialite living o family funds in Paris, had killed himself. Sergei had cut him off , and Ivan had tried to sell his own art collection, only to be told that many of the works were fake. (In yet another tragic twist, they would turn out to be authentic.) Shchukin sought out Matisse again, commissioning a panel of a woman eating fruit from a bowl, hoping it would brighten the Russian winter like a blast of light. But when, months later, the painting arrived in Moscow, it was the wrong color—Shchukin had requested that the scene be painted in blue, but Matisse had used crimson (creating his beloved Harmony in Red). Unflinchingly, Shchukin wrote the artist that the change pleased him “enormously” and subsequently became his patron, supporting him at the most critical point of his career.

“He wanted art that was a knock in the face,” says Delocque-Fourcaud, and he wanted others to feel it too. us, at considerable risk, he began opening his Moscow home, the magnificent Trubetskoy

Palace, to the public. When a year later he unveiled The Dance and Music, mammoth works now considered Matisse’s greatest masterpieces, there was an uproar. Some thought Shchukin had gone mad, but after debating with the artist whether to halt the commission, he wrote to Matisse, “Allons-y”: Let’s do it.

Matisse repaid his sponsor by introducing him to an up-and-coming Spanish artist, Pablo Picasso, whose darkness initially repelled Shchukin. But the collector soon came around, buying Woman with a Fan, the first of 50 Picassos he would eventually own.

Yet more tragedy was to come. In 1911, on the third anniversary of Lidya’s death, another son killed himself, intensifying Shchukin’s belief that art was the quid pro quo for his suffering.

Shchukin’s ultimate collection is today estimated at $10 billion, making him on paper the most successful collector of all time.

If so, the rewards were handsome. Shchukin’s ultimate collection—256 pieces bought between 1888 and 1917—is today estimated to be worth $10 billion, making him on paper the most successful collector of all time. In all likelihood, however, what was more important to Shchukin was his influence on art history.

“He built the collection during a great inflection point in the history of the art market,” says Evan Beard of U.S. Trust. “During this time, art market control shifted from state-sanctioned institutions like the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris to an independent dealer model. Artists went from being high-end civil servants to avant-garde capitalists like Picasso who realized that lasting in influence came by changing the conversation.

Gallerists like Ambroise Vollard and Paul Durand-Ruel—the Leo Castelli and David Zwirner of the day—targeted a guy like Shchukin, who wanted art as a way to elevate his social status and had the money to do it. It was the beginning of the capitalist art market we know now.”

“Shchukin and a handful of other collectors were far more important in shaping and elevating art than the collectors of today,” says art historian Olivier Berggruen. “Contemporary art is not scandalous in the way the avant-garde was. Shchukin was a great collector of the avant-garde at a moment when the avant- garde was shunned by the establishment.”

“When one goes to Russia,” says Edward Dolman, chairman and CEO of the Phillips auction house, “and sees all those master- pieces lined up on a wall, one is reminded that the heart of so much European culture is actually Russian.”

The Revolution came in 1917, and Shchukin fled to Germany then Switzerland, and finally Paris, where he remained. Unlike many of his piers, who were reduced to poverty, he succeeded in moving assets abroad (including diamonds stuffed in a doll) and maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. He still collected art, buying gloomy works by Raoul Dufy and Henri Le Fauconnier that “reflected a mood of exile,” according to Delocque-Fourcaud (whose mother Irina was the daughter of Shchukin’s second wife, a concert pianist he had married before fleeing Russia). However, he lived quietly and avoided Matisse and Picasso, perhaps out of pride.

His collection stayed behind, inside Trubetskoy Palace, which was renamed the State Museum for Modern Western Art, and held up as an example of “crazy bourgeois tastes,” says Alexey Petukhov, curator of 19th- and 20th-century European and American art at the Pushkin Museum. A sensation, the museum attracted cultural pilgrims from everywhere until the onset of World War II, during which the art was crated and sent east, beyond the Urals. The world’s greatest collection of European modern art was soon no longer welcome, its contents viewed as “cosmopolitan” and dangerously un-socialist. Stalin ordered that the collection be broken up, supposedly threatening to “hang the man who hangs Picasso.”

Thanks, however, to the Hermitage—the wife of the director at the time was a modern art lover—the pieces seen as the most degenerate were rescued, and they ended up in the vast St. Petersburg museum, consigned to the basement with a promise never to be shown. The Impressionist works, meanwhile, were at the Pushkin, also buried in storage. Not until the Khrushchev era were the paintings exhibited—in the case of the Pushkin, in a “small, inaccessible back room,” according to Kean, who was baffled to find the name Sergei Shchukin (who had died in Paris in 1936 at the age of 82) erased from Soviet history.

Some pieces were allowed to travel abroad. In 1970, for the centennial of Matisse’s birth, The Dance and Music (the latter will not be included in the upcoming exhibit because of its poor condition) were shown in Paris for the first time in 60 years, at the Grand Palais. However, their provenance was mysteriously attributed to “a private collection,” outraging Shchukin’s descendants, who threatened to sue any government that borrowed paintings from it, effectively confining the collection to Russia, divided and divorced from its own history, in “complete oblivion of the man…who sacrificed so much, including his own children,” Delocque-Fourcaud says.

The Russian art community knew the story behind the collection and would occasionally reach out to Shchukin’s descendants in the hope of a reconciliation. In 2012, while visiting the Hermitage, Delocque-Fourcaud relented in his legal threats and agreed to support an exhibition in France if it properly highlighted his grandfather’s legacy, not just the individual artworks. But then the real obstacle to showcasing the Shchukin collection reared its head.

Every museum today lives in fear of having prize pieces taken away in lawsuits by people, institutions, or whole countries claiming to be the rightful owners. Both the Pushkin and the Hermitage worried that the other museum, each representing the city claiming to be the true home of the Russian soul, would use a show abroad as an excuse to seize what has become, since the 1980s, hugely popular attractions. (The Shchukin collection at the Hermitage, which includes Matisse’s The Dance and Monet’s Lady in the Garden, occupies more than a dozen rooms.)

The dispute reached the boiling point and became international news in 2012, when the Pushkin’s formidable 91-year-old director, Irina Antonova, confronted Vladimir Putin on live television, challenging him to “redress the injustices of the past against the citizens” and unite the collections—in Moscow, of course. Thanks to the spectacle it caused, the move cost Antonova her job. Her less truculent replacement, Marina Loshak, publicly dropped efforts to permanently reunite the collection, enabling the Paris exhibition to advance. However, Loshak told me she has not given up hope of uniting “a lot” of the collection, if only temporarily, at the Trubetskoy Palace.

With the Russians not at each other’s throats, Delocque-Fourcaud cannily reached out to Anne Baldassari, the eminent former director of Paris’s Picasso Museum. Baldassari was herself a subject of controversy, having been terminated over an alleged dispute with the Picasso family. Now free to tackle the Shchukin dilemma, she told him that exhibiting the entire collection was a “dream—there are more people who dream that than you think. But the problem is the cost. No national museum has the capacity to afford the insurance and transport of pictures of that quality.”

Only the Fondation Louis Vuitton would have the means. Moreover, she argued, the Fondation’s extravagant, Frank Gehry–designed building, which had recently opened, “needed content” to match the soaring architecture. As it happened, Delocque-Fourcaud had once worked with Jean-Paul Claverie— known as Bernard Arnault’s right-hand man—and was able to get an immediate answer from the art-loving mogul: “Allons-y.” LVMH would pay to finally reunite the collection—65 pieces from each museum, including all but a few too-delicate-to-travel masterworks, such as Music—in, as Baldassari put it, the “radically contemporary space” of the Fondation.

” ‘Icons of Modern Art’ will be a historic event,” Claverie later said, emphasizing that Arnault (who declined to comment) intends “to pay tribute to the vision and passion of an extraordinary collector and to highlight the role patrons often play in bringing together the collections of our most important public institutions.” After February the art will return to Russia.

Of course, the parallels between Arnault, who grew a family business into a global powerhouse and later in life became a passionate collector, and Shchukin are not lost on Delocque-Fourcaud. “You are the continuation of Shchukin,” the grandson told Arnault when the two met. Arnault shook his head: “Not yet. It’s too soon to know.”

In Moscow I attempted to visit the Trubetskoy Palace, which was given to the Soviet Department of Defense under Stalin. It looked strangely peaceful on a May afternoon, with sunlight bouncing off the exterior walls. A mysterious mythology still lingers about the building, at least in Moscow. “If you take a photograph you will be arrested,” my companion, a curator at the Pushkin, warned me. Too late—I had already taken one.

Russians may have a different relationship with power and wealth, it occurred to me. They accept the fleeting nature of these things, which is why, perhaps, men like Sergei Shchukin consume so much so fast. They sense how quickly it can disappear. Mikhael Piotrovsky’s opening dinner for the Shchukin show had been held at a branch of the Hermitage, the Menshikov Palace, the grand former home of one Alexander Menshikov, who had risen from humble origins to become a friend of Peter the Great. The palace was considered the nest in St. Petersburg, but Menshikov overreached in trying to marry his daughter to Peter’s grandson, and, just as quickly as he had risen, he was stripped of his palace and the stupendous wealth he had accumulated and exiled to Siberia. at one man could amass and lose so much in one lifetime was astonishing, but when I expressed surprise my guide just shrugged.

“Welcome,” he said, “to Russia.”

 

Jared Kushner’s Second Act


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In the spring of 2011, right around the time Donald Trump was humiliated by Barack Obama during the president’s speech at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, placed a call to Richard Mack. Kushner was thirty years old, a decade and a half younger than Mack, but in many respects the men were peers. They were both scions of prominent real estate families, and in 2009 Mack and his wife had attended Kushner’s wedding, to Ivanka Trump. The two men were also business associates: Mack held some of the debt on 666 Fifth Avenue, a gleaming thirty-nine-story office building in midtown Manhattan for which Kushner had paid a record $1.8 billion in 2007.

Now, four years later, Kushner was calling about the tower, a symbol of immense importance for him and his family. Under the leadership of Jared’s father, Charles, the Kushner Companies had made hundreds of millions of dollars building and buying properties in New Jersey. But in 2004, future Trump surrogate Chris Christie, who was at the time the U. S. Attorney for New Jersey, indicted Charles in federal court on charges that included tax evasion, making false statements about campaign contributions, and hiring a prostitute to retaliate against his brother-in-law. After Charles pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years in prison, Jared, who was just twenty-four, took over the family business. He sold the Kushner holdings in New Jersey and bought 666 Fifth Avenue. The significance of the deal lay not only in its size but in its location. Much as Trump’s renovation of the Grand Hyatt hotel three decades earlier had carried his family’s real estate empire across the East River from Queens, Jared’s purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue, just three blocks from Trump’s own trophy skyscraper, was an unmissable sign of the Kushners’ arrival in Manhattan.

By the time he spoke to Mack in 2011, Jared and his younger brother, Josh, had established a social and business beachhead in New York. Besides running the Kushner Companies, Jared was also the owner of the New York Observer, a once venerable newspaper. Josh had already started Vostu, a profitable social-game developer, and a venture firm called Thrive Capital.

Despite his evident success, however, Jared was in trouble: After the financial crisis led to a downturn in the rental market, the Kushner Companies risked an imminent default on the loans that had financed the firm’s purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue. Jared’s lenders were at his throat, and he stood to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, if not the entire building.

According to a source familiar with the call, Jared appealed to his friendship with Mack—”I am a really good person,” he insisted—and asked him to accept a substantial write-down of the loan.

Mack held firm. He had been unhappy with some aspects of how the Kushners managed the building, and, as he reminded Jared, he had a fiduciary responsibility to his investors.

Jared did not take the news well. According to the source, he began shouting into the phone, “I’ve been working my ass off!”

Mack was unimpressed. “I don’t know who the hell you think you’re talking to,” he said, and hung up the phone.

Jared was just twenty-six when he bought the thirty-nine-story tower at 666 Fifth Avenue for a record $1.8 billion. A subsequent downturn in the market caused him to scramble to preserve control of the building.

Jared was eventually able to preserve his control of the tower by ceding 49.5 percent of the building’s equity to Vornado, a publicly traded real estate investment trust. Mack, who is forty-nine, remained dimly aware that Jared had not forgotten their disagreement, but it was not until this past summer, when Elizabeth Spiers, a former editor of the Observer, wrote on her website about what she called “the Big Dick Mack Story,” that he realized the extent of Jared’s lingering animosity.

Spiers wrote that during her tenure as editor, in 2011 and 2012, Kushner had pushed for a hit piece on Mack. “If the tip he’d given me had checked out, it would have been a good story,” she wrote. “So I agreed to put a reporter on the story.” She gave the assignment to Dan Geiger, the Observer’s real estate beat reporter. Kushner called Geiger and furiously complained that Mack was a “bad fiduciary” who’d moved money around to enrich himself at the expense of his investors. (Kushner declined to comment on the record for this article, but through his publicist he denied that his pursuit of the Mack story was related to the loan on 666 Fifth Avenue.)

Geiger phoned his contacts—as Spiers wrote, he “called everyone within a hundred-mile radius”—and found nothing. He sent Kushner a detailed email outlining what his sources had said.

For a week, Geiger heard nothing. Then Kushner called him and said, as if they had not already spoken, “There’s a guy named Richard Mack, and we’ve got to get this guy.”

Geiger was bewildered. He went to Spiers, who, he says, recognized Kushner’s obsession as the “illicit powder keg” it was. “Jared insisted that it was a reporting problem,” she wrote in the blog post. To humor her boss, Spiers assigned a second reporter to the story. He, too, got nowhere; once again, nothing in the story checked out. But even this was not the end of it. Jared told Spiers to ask one more reporter, who did not work for the Observer, to look into Mack. That reporter was me.

I turned down the assignment, even though I had been friendly with Jared for many years. At the time, I knew him to be bright, charming, and polished, a pious son of a devout Orthodox Jewish family. I had never been exposed to this side of him. As it turns out, however, this side of him exists. Geiger, who now works for Crain’s, has told people that the first thing that came to mind when he found himself embroiled in the vendetta was “This guy is like his dad.”

Over the past year, Jared Kushner’s profile has risen alongside the mind-bending trajectory of his father-in-law’s presidential bid. Though Jared has no previous experience in electoral politics, he has become one of Donald Trump’s chief advisors, and much of the attention he’s received has focused on the many ways in which he’s been useful to the campaign. It was Jared who helped prepare Trump for an appearance before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in March, and Jared who helped broker a truce with Fox News when Trump fought with Megyn Kelly, the network’s star anchor. After Trump fired Corey Lewandowski, his campaign manager, in June, it was reported that Ivanka had demanded Lewandowski’s dismissal for trying to marginalize Jared’s influence. A month later, after Trump tweeted an image of Hillary Clinton and a Star of David set against a backdrop of dollar bills, Jared took to the Observer to defend his father-in-law against charges of anti-Semitism. Most recently, Jared was on hand to help Trump choose Indiana governor Mike Pence as his running mate—over and above, it did not go unnoticed, the great nemesis of the Kushner family, Chris Christie.

There is a sense among Jared’s friends and business associates that he sees the gold-plated vision of a Trump White House as the ultimate step in a carefully plotted ascent to redemption.

And yet for all that Jared has helped Trump, there is a sense among Jared’s friends and business associates that he sees the gold-plated vision of a Trump White House as the ultimate step in a carefully plotted ascent to redemption, one that began when his father’s scandal tarnished the family name. In this respect, it seems more than usually significant that both Kushner brothers have photographs of John F. Kennedy prominently displayed in their offices. Just as Kennedy’s father was forced to yield his ambitions to his sons’ generation after uttering controversial remarks during World War II, so too did the scandal that sent Charles Kushner to prison open the door for his sons—and especially for Jared—to launch their charm offensive on society at a very early age.

Jared, who is thirty-five, and Josh, thirty-one, along with their sisters, Dara, thirty-seven, and Nicole, thirty-three, grew up privileged and sheltered in Livingston, New Jersey. Their paternal grandparents, Joseph and Rae, escaped Poland during the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in 1949. They moved to the suburbs around Newark, where they helped create a tight-knit community of Holocaust survivors known as the Builders. (“My grandfather was a carpenter,” Josh likes to tell people.) The elder Kushners belonged to the Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ, which supported Jewish charities and schools. “That generation were cohorts,” says Andrew Silow-Carroll, the editor in chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the New York–based news service. “They were very collegial.”

Joseph and Rae had four children, two boys and two girls. Charles, who earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from NYU and a law degree from Hofstra, was less academically gifted than his older brother, Murray, who graduated summa cum laude and has a law degree from Penn. But Charles’s drive was remarkable. He took to heart the mantra passed down from one Kushner generation to the next—”Think like an immigrant, act like an immigrant”—which was at once an exhortation to work hard and a warning not to take anything for granted.

When Charles started his own real estate company, he chose his father, not Murray, as his partner. On the rare occasions that Josh and Jared have spoken about the subject in public, they have intimated that this decision exacerbated the tension between Charles and his siblings. In an interview with New York in 2009, Jared suggested that his uncle and aunts owed their good fortune all but entirely to his father, by whom they had been “literally made wealthy for doing nothing.”

Before the scandal, Charles and his pretty dark-haired wife, Seryl, were seen as the standout ambassadors of their Orthodox community. Charles became known as the Dapper Don thanks to the natty tailoring he preferred and to his growing reputation as a New Jersey power broker. As he built his real estate company into an empire worth a reported $2 billion, he contributed significantly to Jewish charitable causes as well as to political campaigns. He supported New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani but tended to favor Democrats, including senators Hillary Rodham Clinton, Charles Schumer, and Jon Corzine. In 2001, he was the largest donor to the successful gubernatorial campaign of Jim McGreevey, a New Jersey Democrat who later appointed him to the board of the influential Port Authority.

Jared attended the Orthodox Frisch School, in Paramus, New Jersey. By some accounts, he worked hard in school, but he was not especially academic. In The Price of Admission, Daniel Golden notes that officials at Frisch were “dismayed” when Jared was accepted to Harvard, since, as one former school official put it, “his GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.” Other students in Jared’s class, the official said, were far more deserving. But Jared had a weapon that his classmates did not: his father. According to Golden, Charles donated $2.5 million to Harvard the year his son applied. Just to be safe, he also donated to Cornell and Princeton.

The disgrace that followed, for Charles and for his family, was profound.

All this lobbying to establish his family in the upper echelons of power was expensive. The scandal that eventually sent Charles to prison began in 2001, when Murray discovered that his brother had used several of the family partnerships to make political contributions without informing his relatives. Murray sued Charles in court, and not long after Chris Christie became the U. S. Attorney for New Jersey, in 2002, he launched a criminal investigation.

As Christie’s case gained traction, Charles attempted to blackmail one of his sisters and her husband to keep them from cooperating as government witnesses. He paid a prostitute $10,000 to have sex with his brother-in-law, and then sent a videotape of the encounter to his sister. The vindictive effort was for naught: In August 2004, in the face of overwhelming evidence that he had evaded taxes, made illegal campaign contributions, and retaliated against a federal witness, Charles pleaded guilty to eighteen felony counts.

The scandal made for a chilling affair, one that was severely at odds with the gracious public-service-oriented persona Charles had cultivated for public view. The disgrace that followed, for Charles and for his family, was profound. “It was very embarrassing,” says Silow-Carroll. The community, he notes, has “a self-image, largely deserved, as philanthropists and Jewish communal lions. They felt that all this nasty stuff sullied that.”

As Charles headed off to Prison in Alabama in 2005, Jared was still working on a joint business and law degree at NYU. Since a convicted felon cannot sign a contract as a fiduciary, he felt that he had no choice other than to take over the family business. In his interview with New York, he acknowledged that his father had made a mistake while at the same time insisting that Charles had been unfairly punished for his crimes. He’s made no secret of the fact that he sees his father, still, as an extraordinary man, and that he believes it his filial duty to put the Kushner name back on top.

In the wake of the scandal, Jared increasingly depended on an expanding network of older male advisors. The demographics of the group—which today includes Rupert Murdoch; Michael Ovitz, the legendary former Hollywood executive; Martin Sorrell, the head of WPP; Marc Holliday, the CEO of SL Green; Joel Cutler, a venture capitalist; Kevin Ryan, an Internet entrepreneur; and Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chancellor—were reflected at Jared’s thirty-fifth birthday party earlier this year. As one guest observed, the median age of the guests at the party, which was held at the top of the Gramercy Park hotel in Manhattan, seemed to be somewhere near seventy.

“None of it’s been him. It’s been his dad.”

The financier Ronald Perelman, who met Jared at a Lubavitch Shabbat service in East Hampton not long after Charles went to prison, recalled recently that the younger Kushner “clearly needed some comforting” after the scandal broke. Perelman invited Jared to pray with him at the synagogue in his home office in New York.

Jared openly blamed the media for his family’s troubles, particularly the Newark Star-Ledger. In 2006, in a somewhat transparent attempt to control the hand that had bitten his father, Jared bought the New York Observer for $10 million. The purchase was strategically intelligent: As a newly minted media mogul, Jared was sought out by New York’s cultural elite, and the Kushner name acquired intellectual clout for the first time.

A year later, Jared sold all of the Kushner properties—mostly residential homes—in New Jersey. He purchased 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for $1.8 billion, at the time a record sum for a building in New York. His father was released from prison in time to stand by Jared’s side for the closing.

Though Charles is no longer the face of the Kushner Companies, he remains omnipresent in the hallways of the firm. Each Tuesday at 8:00 a.m., everyone at the company who is not a secretary gathers in a conference room on the fifteenth floor to discuss acquisitions, financing, and construction. Charles and Jared sit next to each other at the center of a long table, and other family members fan out from there. Josh has not attended the meetings regularly for years, but Seryl often attends, as does Nicole, who recently decided to join the business. (Her husband, Joseph Meyer, is the chief executive of Observer Media.) Under Jared’s leadership, the Kushner Companies has embarked on an impressive streak of acquisitions in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. This summer the firm participated in a $340 million deal for the former headquarters of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of the most coveted parcels of waterfront real estate in Brooklyn. But no one at the Tuesday meeting, and no one who deals with the company from the outside, is allowed to forget who built the firm. When I called one of the Kushners’ underwriters to ask about Jared’s business prowess, he seemed startled. “None of it’s been him,” he said. “It’s been his dad.”

Compared with Charles, whose temper is legendary, Jared has a notably calm demeanor. “He’s calm, he’s smooth and sharp, and he knows how to court people,” says Doug Harmon, a veteran New York broker. Yet there is also an undercurrent of hostility that belies his polite veneer. Jared was described to me as “a little bit bullheaded” and “a little bit of a bully” by one person; another said that when he gets mad, “the loss of composure is the shock because he’s always so completely controlled.”

Five buildings owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses will become part of the larger Brooklyn Tech Triangle. They were sold to Jared Kushner, the Kushner Cos. CEO, and RFR.

Several sources told me that in 2015, Jared tried to thwart a real estate negotiation that involved J. Walter Thompson, a subsidiary of WPP, the advertising conglomerate led by his friend Martin Sorrell. Jared had no financial stake in the matter, but he insisted, following many hours of due diligence, that WPP was headed down the wrong path. After WPP’s board ignored his advice and approved the deal, Jared attended a meeting at the company and told a senior executive at WPP, “You’re the stupidest person I’ve ever met in this business.” (A spokesman for WPP would neither confirm nor deny the incident.)

Then there is Jared’s standoff with Steve Roth, the CEO of Vornado, the $20 billion real estate investment trust that acquired 49.5 percent of 666 Fifth Avenue in 2011. The deal allowed Jared to keep control of the building but valued it at a mere $820 million, a steep decline from its $1.8 billion purchase price. According to the New York Post, Jared believes that the tower should be converted to a retail mall beneath luxury condos, and he is committed to a proposal from the firm of the late Zaha Hadid. Other sources, however, say that Roth believes the building is worth more as office space. Roth, who is seventy-four, and who recently joined Donald Trump’s economic advisory team, did not respond to a request for comment, but he has told people in private that he despises what he sees as Jared’s arrogance. According to several sources, meetings between Vornado and the Kushner Companies regularly become shouting fests, though one source says that most of the screaming is done by Charles Kushner. Meanwhile, the building is stagnating, and its fate is unlikely to be settled until one party buys out the other.

For those involved in the ruthless world of New York real estate, none of this unpleasantness is surprising. But overt aggression has not gone over well in the more sensitive environs of the New York Observer. A source close to Jared says that he did not understand, when he bought the company, how much resistance he would face from the journalists who worked there. In 2007, he appointed Bob Sommer, the Kushner Companies’ publicist, as the newspaper’s president. Sommer was given instructions to “rein in” the paper’s much-revered editor, Peter Kaplan. (Kaplan and Sommer both resigned in 2009; Kaplan died four years later.) At a holiday party for the Observer a few years after he bought the newspaper, Jared implored the staff to redouble its efforts, adding that worse economic times were to come. When Aaron Gell, the editor at the time, took the microphone and thanked everyone for their hard work, the gesture seemed to irritate Jared. (Jared’s publicist says that he liked Gell and cannot recall Gell’s speech or his own.) Ken Kurson, a Kushner family friend—and longtime business columnist for Esquire—is the current editor of the Observer, its fifth in seven years.
It is widely believed that the quality of the journalism in the Observer has declined under Jared’s ownership, but he has had much more success with the Commercial Observer, a real estate spin-off. According to Bill Rudin, a developer, the Commercial Observer has become a “must-read” for developers and brokers, thanks in large part to the paper’s Power 100 list. The list is celebrated at an annual event, complete with trophies, that has been attended by Michael Bloomberg and, of course, Donald Trump. “It’s the closest the industry gets to an elegant Oscars evening,” says Doug Harmon, who shared the 2016 Deal of the Year award. “I bet most look at the list and can’t figure out why they aren’t featured more prominently.” (If so, Richard Mack is not one of them: Though his firm was once number forty-one on the list, it was dropped after his phone call with Jared. Mack knew exactly why. He told the odd employee who fretted about the company’s absence, “We are never going to get on that list—and don’t worry about it.”)

In 2007, Jared started dating Ivanka Trump. The pair became a boldfaced item—their vacations were photographed by paparazzi—and in many ways the relationship seemed perfect. Jared and Ivanka, whom he calls Iva, shared a deep knowledge of real estate, and they were both the children of controversial fathers to whom they were unwaveringly, sometimes blindly, loyal. As Kenneth Pasternak, a friend and business partner of the Kushners’, put it, “You send your kid to Harvard, you network him, and he marries Ivanka Trump. I mean, you couldn’t write that script, right?”

As it happens, however, Jared’s marriage to Ivanka was not a foregone conclusion. The couple have been married for seven years and have three children together, but during the early days of their relationship Seryl Kushner had expressed concern that Ivanka wasn’t Jewish. The couple broke up, and they reunited only after Ivanka agreed to convert to Judaism. Even then, according to Bob Sommer, Charles Kushner remained skeptical. He made Ivanka’s conversion as testing as it could be. “This wasn’t like, ‘Talk to a rabbi, read a couple of paragraphs,’ ” Sommer says. “It was hard and difficult, and it was on Charlie’s terms.”
Ivanka passed the tests, and by 2009 Charles was ready to formally accept her into the Kushner family. At the couple’s wedding, which was held at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, he stood up and, according to multiple sources, gave a toast that drew tears from the assembled guests. A person who attended the wedding recalls the central sentiments of the speech: “Look, everyone thinks she’s great, but being Jewish is just unbelievably important to us, and she’s not Jewish. It’s a problem for me, a genuine problem. Then I watched and got to see she’s in love with my son and it wasn’t what I thought in the beginning. I feel right about it.”

Trump stood up to speak after Charles, and he floundered miserably. According to one guest, he “gave the most pathetic, lame, embarrassing speech I’ve heard in a long time.”

People often talk about the Kushner brothers using similar adjectives: handsome, humble, diligent, polite, intelligent, and so forth. For Josh, however, unlike for Jared, there is no “but” hanging in the air, no comma before a caveat describing a barely perceptible undercurrent. Part of the reason is almost certainly the luck of age: When his father went to prison, Josh was a freshman at Harvard, where the scandal scarcely registered.

While Josh was still an undergraduate, his friend Daniel Kafie introduced him to Mario Schlosser, a German-born engineer who was studying at Harvard Business School. Schlosser had written code for a social network, and the three students decided to take it to market. They raised the money to launch the site, which they called Vostu, but after the company struggled to find an audience, Schlosser and Kushner had a fight about equity and refused to speak to each other for six months. In 2008, Schlosser realized that Vostu might be more successful as an online soccer game. He reconciled with Josh, who was by now at Harvard Business School, and built a new site. After a crashed server and a failed initial launch, the new iteration of Vostu, run out of Brazil, took off. “We started to make real money,” Schlosser says—about $10,000 a day.

Vostu’s success meant that Josh never had to seriously consider joining his brother in the family real estate firm. In 2009, he launched a venture fund called Thrive Capital with around $5 million from a group of individual investors including Joel Cutler, a mentor of Josh’s and the CEO of General Catalyst, a Boston venture-capital firm. It was a good start, but to be taken seriously, Thrive needed institutional money. Cutler soon introduced Josh to Andrew Golden, the president of Princo, Princeton’s endowment fund, which had a reputation for investing in young talent. According to Cutler, Josh and Golden hit it off right away. “There was just this tremendous belief that this young person would be able to attract other brilliant young people and do venture capital the right way.”

Once Princeton was on board, a roster of blue-chip investors quickly followed, including Yale, Duke, Harvard, Memorial Sloane Kettering, the Ford Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. Instagram, the photography app, was an early success for the fund. In April 2012, Thrive joined four other firms in a $50 million funding round for the photo app. A few days later, Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion, a deal that doubled the value of Thrive’s investment. Other investments by the company include Warby Parker, Artsy, Spotify, Zola, Kickstarter, GitHub, and ClassPass.

Starting a game company and running an investment firm were not enough to satisfy Josh’s ambition.

It’s too early to tell whether the hype around Thrive is merely that. Yet Jon Winkelried, the co-CEO of TPG and former president of Goldman Sachs, says that the firm’s recent $700 million fundraising round, which brought Thrive’s total funds under management to $1.5 billion, is “big-boy stuff.” Kevin Ryan says, “If you called a bunch of entrepreneurs and said, ‘Who would you want to invest in your company in New York City?’ I think Union Square Ventures would be number one and I think Thrive would probably be number two already. That’s remarkable.” No one else, he says, has done it so young. “We just haven’t seen that.”

Josh’s ascent has necessitated a slow professional separation from his brother. Though Thrive is headquartered in the Puck Building, which is owned by the Kushner Companies, Jared has stopped making regular visits to his brother’s office. “I think there was a little source of tension with other partners at Thrive who felt like, you know, Jared swooning in and swooning out was not very constructive,” says one person close to the company. “I don’t think they very much liked it.” (Jared’s publicist says that he visits Thrive whenever he’s in the neighborhood, to give his brother “a hug and a kiss.”)

Starting a game company and running an investment firm were not enough to satisfy Josh’s ambition. In 2012, Mario Schlosser told Josh he needed to leave Brazil, and Vostu, to be with his wife, who was a researcher at Columbia University and pregnant with their first child. Schlosser says he blinked in disbelief when Josh suggested they start a health-insurance company. Josh explained that he had gone to the ER after spraining his ankle and had found the documentation required afterward difficult to navigate. He decided that health insurance needed to be made more consumer friendly. The idea, he said, was an online insurance provider that would be prepared for the day when individuals, not corporations and employers, were responsible for purchasing plans. He intended to call it Oscar Health, after his great-grandfather.

The timing was impeccable. Schlosser would later say that he and Josh couldn’t have made the company work without the Affordable Care Act, since the health-care landscape had been too “oligarchized” before the law’s passage. But as soon as the Supreme Court reaffirmed the central provisions of Obamacare, in the summer of 2012, Schlosser and his team were ready. Brian Singerman, a partner in the San Francisco–based Founders Fund, got interested in the company after Michael Ovitz sent him an email saying, “Trust me on this one.”

Josh Kushner has been dating supermodel Karlie Kloss since 2012.

Oscar has so far raised $728 million from investors, including Fidelity, Google Capital, Lakestar, and Khosla Ventures. Recent deals have valued the company at $2.7 billion, though The New York Times has questioned the wisdom of that number. (The Times noted that Oscar loses fifteen cents for every dollar it collects in premiums in New York.) Schlosser says it is still “very early days,” and, not surprisingly, he believes that from a sufficiently broad perspective his company is actually undervalued. “The U. S. health-care market alone is $3 trillion every year. That’s higher than Germany, the UK, Switzerland.”

Between running Thrive and Oscar, Josh Kushner has precious little spare time. “He is known, really, for just working,” says Kevin Ryan. “That’s all he does.” Nevertheless, Josh and Jared recently teamed up to launch an online real estate business called Cadre. The company’s mission is to create efficiency in a market that relies on a host of middlemen, but its prospects are still unclear even to some of its backers.

Schlosser says that Josh’s private life is rarely a subject of conversation. Years ago, at Harvard, Josh calmly explained the circumstances of his father’s scandal and his feelings about it, but in general the partners talk only about professional concerns—the ramifications for Oscar, say, of a Trump or a Clinton administration. Although Schlosser is not above the occasional joke about Jared’s role on the Trump campaign, he says that Josh tends to keep quiet about his personal life. “He has a girlfriend that he could talk about as well, but that is just so much less important.”

The girlfriend is supermodel Karlie Kloss, whom Josh has been dating for four years. According to Kenneth Pasternak, the future of the relationship is all but certainly being discussed by his parents. “They’d like him to settle down,” Pasternak says. No doubt Kloss would have to convert to Judaism, just as Ivanka Trump did. But whatever is in store for the relationship, it seems certain that Josh Kushner will not do anything that does not meet with the approval of his family.

Michael Ovitz says that Jared Kushner long ago made a deal with himself about how to publicly handle a familial bond with Donald Trump, a pact that meant no eye-rolling. “Donald was always controversial, always larger than life,” Ovitz says. “Jared knew that when he decided to marry Ivanka. But to both of them, it was understood that marriage meant loyalty to their in-laws. And incidentally, Jared discovered that he really liked Donald.”

Lately Jared’s liking of the Donald has morphed into something more substantial. Over the last year, Jared seems to have settled into a sort of hero worship, as though he wanted to become his father-in-law. His peers in the real estate industry talk about the stash of red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps that Jared keeps in his office, on the fifteenth floor of 666 Fifth Avenue. As he hands out the hats, he says of Trump’s slogan, “It came right out of his head!”

When Jared’s friends ask whether he endorses Trump’s anti-Muslim sentiments, he says, “You don’t understand what America is.”

Kevin Ryan, who is close with both brothers, breakfasted with Jared in early July. “He is all in,” he says. “He is in it to win.” Earlier this year, as Jared’s involvement in the campaign intensified, he named a president and a head of operations to run the family firm. The Observer has been enlisted as well: In advance of Trump’s appearance at AIPAC, Ken Kurson, the paper’s editor, reviewed the speech, causing an outcry in the newsroom. Despite these efforts, however, some have questioned whether Jared was fully prepared for the rigors and optics of a modern presidential campaign. In August, when several polls suggested that Trump’s chances for victory were cratering, Jared and Ivanka took a vacation. A series of photographs posted to Ivanka’s Instagram account showed the couple sightseeing in Croatia with Wendi Deng Murdoch, Rupert’s ex-wife.

A source close to Jared says that while he does not agree with every sentence that his father-in-law has uttered, he nevertheless thinks that Trump has been an effective candidate and would make a good president. (For his part, Trump said in a statement that “Jared represents the next generation of best-in-class developers and owners. Most importantly, however, he is a wonderful son-in-law, husband to my daughter, and father to my grandchildren.”) When his Jewish friends ask him—and they do—whether, given the history of the persecution of his own religion, Jared really endorses Trump’s anti-Muslim sentiments, he does not miss a beat justifying his father-in-law. “You don’t understand what America is,” he says, “or what American people think.”
Jared is especially proud of an article he wrote for the Observer in July, after his father-in-law’s Star of David tweet. It was a response to an open letter by Dana Schwartz, an entertainment writer for the paper, that had criticized Jared for standing “silent and smiling in the background” while Trump made “repeated accidental winks” to white supremacists. “You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” Schwartz wrote. “Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty.”

In his response, Jared insisted that his father-in-law “is not anti-Semitic and he’s not a racist.” He defended Trump by detailing his grandparents’ harrowing experiences during the Holocaust. “It’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from,” he wrote. “I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”

(Given the contentiousness of the Kushner-family saga, it’s perhaps unsurprising that not all of his relatives appreciated his efforts. Two of his cousins complained on Facebook about his willingness to invoke their grandparents’ suffering to defend Donald Trump. “Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you’ve handled this campaign,” wrote Jacob Schulder, whose father, William, was the target of Charles Kushner’s retaliation in 2003. “Please don’t invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night. It is self-serving and disgusting.”)

Jared’s zealous support for Trump’s presidential campaign can be explained in part by a sense of loyalty that has been trained in him since birth, one way in which he and Ivanka are perfectly matched. Both have been raised in hermetically sealed family units—nearly every day the adult Trump children have lunch with each other in Trump Tower—and taught never to question their parents’ narratives in public, no matter how troubling they may be. When Trump’s anti-immigrant comments caused a number of companies to sever their ties with his properties, Ivanka told a source who commiserated with her about the damage to the Trump brand, “It’s his money. My father’s entire life has been a dream come true. He has to follow this dream.”

But many people who have dealt with Jared in the past suspect that his embrace of Trump’s political posturings carries a strong whiff of pure ambition. “How many people get that close to a presidential race?” asks Michael Fascitelli, Vornado’s former CEO and president. “In the real estate industry? Nobody, right?” And even if Trump were to lose in November by a large margin, he will nevertheless walk away from the election having won the support of a third or more of the American electorate. Whether Trump wins or loses, his son-in-law will almost certainly have a seat at the table. Jared is not one to waste a chance, and it seems unlikely that he will squander the entree into national consciousness that Trump’s campaign has given him.

“How many people get that close to a presidential race?”

Josh Kushner declined to comment on the record for this article; through a spokesman, he said that he loved his brother and did not want to say anything that might embarrass him. Nevertheless, the spokesman also said that Josh is a lifelong Democrat and will not be voting for Donald Trump in November.

Josh’s concern for his brother is no doubt genuine, yet more than one person has noted that he has little incentive to thwart even a distant chance at his family’s redemption. “He may not vote for Donald Trump,” observed a fellow real estate heir who knows the family well. “But will he be objecting to a pardon for his father, which is surely what will happen if Trump gets elected? I think not.”

The total rehabilitation of the Kushner family name would not, of course, mark the first time that money has bent the ordinary path of American justice. In many ways, the painting over of a family stain has become a rite of dynastic passage in the United States. But unlike, say, the family of financier Marc Rich, who secured a presidential pardon in the waning days of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the Kushners have exerted their influence in plain view, and with astonishing speed. None of us knows where it will all end. But Richard Mack has been warned.

How Frank Gehry Is Making an Impact Beyond Architecture

 

In 1971, Frank Gehry, 42 years old and not yet the most famous architect in the world, began volunteering every Saturday at the Westminster School in Venice, partly out of “curiosity” and partly to see how he might help the students. Gehry, now 87, who is as passionate about teaching as he is about his craft, observed children in different grades in order to understand their journey. He says he realized that unless they were exposed to something exciting, not just rote math or literature, by sixth grade “the faucet was off and they were no longer open to ideas.”

So he teamed up with his sister Doreen Nelson, a teacher, and together each Wednesday afternoon they would take children from Westminster out into the streets to build an imaginary city, for which the kids had to bring their hated rulers and protractors. The children loved it, Gehry says. “We were teaching math and other subjects by accident.”

According to the architect, however, the teachers did not love it. “They got jealous,” he says, and they ended the sessions, even though Gehry’s “design-based learning” methods had become the subject of a Jon Boorstin documentary and been written up in Smithsonianmagazine. Gehry learned a valuable lesson, he says, which was that “this couldn’t be done with us being injected into a school. We had to be invited.”

“I’m having fun,” Gehry says. “People have to pull me away from this stuff.”

Forty years later, in 2011, the architect had a fortuitous dinner with his friend Bobby Shriver, the philanthropist and former mayor of Santa Monica, at which he met Shriver’s glamorous wife, Malissa Feruzzi Shriver (pictured top, with Gehry), who was close to the end of a five-year term as chair of the California Arts Council. “I want to do something in arts education,” Gehry told her.

But it had to be big—”Shriver big,” he added jokingly. To illustrate the scale he had in mind, he mentioned that he had recently visited Venezuela, where he had witnessed “El Sistema,” the country’s extraordinary musical education program that involves poor children in the orchestras. “It’s a model for everyone,” Gehry says.

Fortunately, Malissa Shriver knew of an incipient project close to the heart of First Lady Michelle Obama: the Turnaround Arts program, which is targeted at underserved and underperforming elementary schools. In 2011 the program was operative in eight states; Shriver lobbied for California to become the ninth. Gehry himself would put in money, as would the state government and private arts foundations.

In May 2014 the California branch of Turnaround Arts was launched, at a White House ceremony during which President Obama and the first lady spoke. At its outset the program served 10 elementary schools, each of which was assigned an artistic mentor from a group that currently includes Forest Whitaker, Kerry Washington, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tim Robbins, Russell Simmons, and Rashida Jones. Shriver and a staff of three oversee the program from offices at Gehry Partners, in Santa Monica. Metrics, she says, show increased school attendance and better performance. This year the program will take on five more schools.

For himself Gehry chose Hoopa Valley Elementary School, on Indian land in rural northern California. “It interested me because it was an enclosed society,” Gehry says. “It was a chance for me to learn as well as to help.” On his first visit the architect asked to be introduced to at-risk students. “He spends hours talking to them, asking about their lives,” Shriver says.

The children also visit the Gehry offices, where they paint fish sculptures and build cardboard towns, some of which “are just amazingly beautiful,” Gehry says, adding, “if they learn they can create something of value for themselves, they won’t turn back.” He recalls one boy who was initially wary; eventually he was coaxed into cutting up cardboard, and then he “opened like a flower.” He now corresponds with the architect.

THE ARCHITECT AT HOOPA VALLEY ELEMENTARY SCHOOL IN 2015
NICO MARKS

“Frank’s philanthropy is all about personal relationships,” Shriver says. There’s no grand plan or formal announcement; Gehry has simply given to causes that resonate with him, and over time, in parallel with his career, the scope of his involvement has mushroomed. Those causes go way beyond education.

In 1968, Milton Wexler, a Los Angeles psychoanalyst, started the Hereditary Disease Foundation after discovering that his wife had Huntington’s disease, an incurable neurological disorder. “Milton treated artists for free. I was one of them,” says Gehry, crediting Wexler with helping him during a dark period. In 2008 the architect’s daughter Leslie Gehry Brenner died of uterine cancer, at 54; she left her estate to the Hereditary Disease Foundation—a gift Gehry matched dollar for dollar. Moreover, since 2010, Gehry has funded an annual prize of $100,000 for a scientist working on Huntington’s.

Another of Gehry’s friendships is with Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim, who, with the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine, Syria, and other Arab countries. The orchestra performs around the world throughout the year. Barenboim wanted a permanent home, however, and Gehry, whose love of music is well documented, stepped in to help. Next year the Barenboim-Said Akademie‘s rehearsal hall, designed by Gehry, will open in Berlin. “People understand each other better through the arts,” he says.

THE GEHRY-DESIGNED WATTS CAMPUS OF THE CHILDREN’S INSTITUTE INC., IN LOS ANGELES.
COURTESY GEHRY PARTNERS

The list of Gehry’s pro bono works is long. Having witnessed the 1992 L.A. riots, he was moved to design the Watts campus of the Children’s Institute Inc., a center for children traumatized by violence. Also notable is his collaboration with the Los Angeles River Revitalization Corporation, which is devoted to reclaiming the 51-mile waterway. And then there are the homes built in post-Katrina New Orleans, cancer centers in Scotland, scholarships to Yale, and so on, all done with minimal fanfare. “I’m having fun,” Gehry says. “People have to pull me away from this stuff.”

Meanwhile, his protégé at the Hoopa Valley school remains on his mind. On a recent visit to the reservation Gehry was unable to find the boy; the architect asked him to call, and so far he hasn’t. So Gehry is going to call him. “I will pursue this,” he says determinedly. He has spent 40 years wanting to make this kind of difference. Now it’s time to make sure it actually happens.

Why Nicolas Berggruen is Creating an Institute for Geniuses

“Do you see? Do you see?” It’s an unusually cloudy day in Southern California, yet the view from Nicolas Berggruen’s West Hollywood apartment is dramatic. Perched atop the 31-story Sierra Towers, the highest residential building in greater Los Angeles, the open plan loft affords sweeping vistas of the metropolis and beyond. You feel as if you’re floating, and suddenly I understand what lured the enigmatic 54-year-old, once known as “the homeless billionaire,” to settle here after a decade of hotel hopping.

“The light is like nowhere else. I have space to think,” he tells me, adding that he has bought several apartments in the building (he prefers not to disclose the number). Maddeningly, this means that despite his nod to conventional homeownership, he remains a mystery.

And Nicolas is a bona fide mystery. Over the years, whether in Los Angeles, New York, or Paris, I’ve heard any number of frustrated media moguls, politicians, economists, philanthropists, architects, artists, and journalists try to engage him, and it always boils down to: Who is he? “He is very unusual, very unpredictable,” says British financier Lord Jacob Rothschild, who has known Berggruen all his life.

His apartment doesn’t reveal much. There are no chattering employees, books, photographs, or music. The decor is minimalist, the art cool. Only the bed is unusual, due to its collection of very old stuffed toys. When I enter, Nicolas, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans—a ringer for a younger, even slighter Mick Jagger—leaps up from a table strewn with papers and darts over to the floor-to-ceiling windows.

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“See over there,” he says in accented yet precise English, gesturing toward the Santa Monica hills, where the starship-like Getty Center peeks out. Adjacent to the museum property, at one of the highest points in the city, is the place where, it has just been announced, Nicolas will embark on one of the more ambitious projects in the philanthropy world: the construction of a secluded mountaintop campus devoted to sheltering the world’s elite thinkers in a peaceful yet intellectually fervid sanctuary for reflection and dialogue, the so-calledBerggruen Philosophy and Culture Center.

Nicolas refers to the project as a “secular monastery.” Located on a pastoral urban woodland half the size of Central Park, the huge campus will be designed by Pritzker Prize–winning Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, best known for the Tate Modern in London. Nicolas has already launched affiliated fellowship programs with universities all over the world and established a $1 million annual award, the Berggruen Philosophy Prize, that he hopes will recognize the power of ideas, the way the Nobel Peace Prize does with actions, to make us “good or bad humans.” (The first recipient will be announced this fall.)

“Seeing a third of my money disappear overnight made me realize how ephemeral the whole thing is, and how futile it is at the end.”

The eyebrow-raising cost of all this is estimated to be several hundred million dollars, putting Nicolas, if he succeeds, near the Gates, Koch, and Soros orbit of donors. But an intriguing blend of expensive, tasteful, and unusual is Nicolas’s trademark. A French-born German-American, and a polyglot who speaks the languages of all three nations, he made his fortune (currently thought to be around $2 billion) in his thirties—and not, he says, with the help of a trust fund, as has been reported.

Until recently he was conspicuously circumspect about the details of his success, which only fueled speculation, thanks to his eccentric personal life. Fifteen years ago Nicolas sold his homes, cars, and other possessions, claiming they weighed him down aesthetically. (He kept his Gulfstream IV.)

He lived, he would say, out of a paper bag. But his asceticism was at odds with his tendency to show up (invariably accompanied by a startlingly attractive young woman—albeit rarely the same one twice) at every international party and place du jour, whether the Oscars (he used to throw an annual party at Château Marmont), Davos (where he also hosted an A-list gathering), or Art Basel (where he is a bold-faced client).

In recent years he has morphed from a party-hopping investor into a serious-minded plutocrat who hops from the Reichstag to the California governor’s office to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing for private meetings with Xi Jinping. Often he brings one of those stunning young women along, driving some of the people in his orbit mad, which is precisely his intention, I believe.

I am friends with Nicolas and his younger brother Olivier, an art historian, and over the years I’ve noticed in Nicolas what looked like discomfort. At parties he rarely seemed to relax; never would I see him touch alcohol, hit the dance floor, or even smile much at his date. He always seemed to be looking around, searching—but for what? I do remember his excitement when he decided to shift from investing to philanthropy and activism. However, these days something about him is new. Last year, when he told me he was thinking of having children, he seemed calm.

Nicolas had long shown zero interest in being a father—not least because it might entail getting married—but in February he welcomed into the world Alexander Nicolas and Olympia Bettina, born three weeks apart via donor eggs and separate surrogates.

Whence the change of heart? Among other factors, he had been reading Siddhartha, Herman Hesse’s classic 1922 novel of self-discovery, the protagonist of which tries different paths to enlightenment. Nicolas had been a financier, then a reformer. Now, perhaps, it was time to stretch himself a different way.

“Won’t your children need a mother?” I ask.

“Not necessarily,” he replies. “People in L.A. don’t judge.”

Disappointingly, I’m not allowed to see the babies, since their pediatrician has banned visitors and they’re on another floor. I do get to see photos; both infants, wearing T-shirts for the Berggruen Institute, the California think tank Nicolas founded in 2009, already look like their father.

“I feel so much younger,” he says over lunch at his regular table at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “Children give you another life.” At the same time, he says, children bring “vulnerability.” “I put myself in a position where I’m clearly the father and the mother. They are totally dependent on me.”

“To understand Nicolas you have to understand that he is driven by competition with our father.”

Vulnerability is Berggruen’s nemesis. At 14 he was sent by his Jewish father to spend a summer in Catalonia with a Jesuit priest, one Father Gofard, who attempted to teach him “the value of accepting that you are affected by others.” “I understood it, but I couldn’t live it,” says Nicolas, who calls himself “rebellious,” “disruptive,” and “very opinionated” as a child. He distracted himself with girls and afternoon visits to Salvador Dalí, who was living nearby and served him pink champagne.

“To understand Nicolas you have to understand that he is driven by competition with our father,” Olivier tells me. “Our father was a dominating character, and Nicolas wanted independence from him. He doesn’t want to have to lean on anybody.”

What I Learned From Stepping Out of My Vacation Comfort Zone

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Last year, after Christmas, I did something I had never done before but that is very much in vogue with the one percent, according to travel agents. Industry jargon hails it as “soft adventure,” but I prefer to call it “insulated risk.” In a nutshell, I vacationed at a five-star resort in what used to be called the Third World.

The trip occurred serendipitously. I had just spent an entirely risk-free week of tennis and golf at a family resort in the Caribbean, and I was facing the week between Christmas and New Year’s alone. (My significant other was 5,000 miles away, in Hawaii with his adult children.) A girlfriend invited me to join her at Mukul, a luxury resort on the so-called Emerald Coast of Nicaragua. With its open-air restaurants and café tables spread out under a vast thatch palapa, it reminded me of Costa Careyes in Mexico, or what Costa Careyes may have looked like in the 1960s: a wild, raw coast offering intoxicating isolation, before the arrival of mansions and private jets. But Mukul had comfort, too: a golf course, pools, and a spa, as well as the broadest, whitest beach I had ever seen.

I also thought it sounded pretty cool to go on holiday to Nicaragua. I would earn what Klara Glowczewska, T&C‘s travel editor, calls “bragging rights,” which travelers have long coveted, she said. And my limited knowledge of Nicaragua definitely put the country in the braggable category. I had childhood memories of scary-sounding headlines: armed uprisings, volcanoes, malarial rainforests, war, all of which could be safely absorbed from the safety of the palapa, should they still pose a threat.

My only concern was that Bahía Manzanillo, the bay beyond Mukul’s gorgeous white beach, looked on the internet as if it had some very significant surf, so before accepting I called the resort to see if the water was safe, since I love to swim. Oh yes, the receptionist assured me. Now the only impediment was a steady stream of negative commentary from my other half, in Hawaii.

“Why on earth would you go to Nicaragua? There are beaches closer to home. It’s dangerous, it’s baking hot, there are bugs.”

I am not a thrill-seeker. In fact, I am a lifelong sufferer of anxiety. But I am also a bit stubborn and Type A, one of those people who believes that “no” is just the start of a conversation. So “Hawaii,” as we shall call him, had me fired up. I wasn’t hoping to fall into a volcano (I am a mother of young children), but I was hoping for something—just what, I wasn’t sure.

On December 27, I traveled to Miami, whence American Airlines was supposed to fly me to Managua. At boarding time the passengers were told that a stewardess had called in sick, and immediately my anxiety started humming. Was it possible the stewardess just didn’t want to go to Nicaragua? What did she know that I didn’t? Was she really sick? Was it contagious? An hour later a steward clutching a Starbucks cup arrived to claps and cheers, and we were off.

The wild, raw coast offered intoxication isolation, before the arrival of mansions and private jets.

In Managua I transferred to a small propeller plane with peeling leather seats that had clearly seen better days. I tried to relax by looking down at the haze-covered mountains and red dirt roads twisting through jungle. Upon landing I was met by a driver from Mukul who coolly told me that our car, a white SUV, had both air conditioning and WiFi. Some crazy adventure. Suddenly, in front of us a villager walked with his oxen. What a great Instagram, I thought, clicking away, except my phone promptly seemed to stop working. (Ahem, Verizon.) Ha, I thought, fishing out my other cell, an AT&T iPhone, the one I keep for emergencies. This one worked. A bit smugly, I did feel that I was prepared for the developing world.

The gates of Mukul opened to immaculately manicured grounds where, unlike outside, livestock did not roam freely. I was met by my personal concierge, who showed me my accommodations, a charming bungalow with French doors. It was now the end of the day. Too late for a swim? According to the concierge, it was a long walk to the beach, but in 30 minutes I could take a shuttle bus. My Type A instincts kicking in, I grabbed my bikini and goggles and asked the concierge if she could kindly drive me herself (she was, after all, my personal concierge). Not only did she, she handed me a local cell phone on which to call her should I need anything else. I would come to nickname this device the “Bat Phone,” since over the next five days the poor woman was summoned at least as often as the Caped Crusader ever was.

At the beach I raced into the water. It took me 10 minutes to get beyond the surf and the sandbars. When I looked back at the shore, I realized I was farther out than I had thought, and completely alone. The water was black. For the first time ever while swimming at sea, I was slightly frightened. As I fought my way back to land, ducking in and out of crashing waves, I wondered if the receptionist had really meant that it was a swimmer’s beach.

Back at the bungalow I discovered that another friend of mine, fellow T&C contributor Holly Peterson, had been in the space just before me. This meant two things: First, I was in the right place, since Holly has impeccable taste and a great love of adventure, and second, that Mukul’s beach was probably just for surfing, since, unlike me, Holly is a passionate and excellent surfer.

Meanwhile, thanks to the lovely young concierge, various petty grievances seemed to be in the process of being rectified. My friend had lost her luggage, which was now en route from the airport. The bungalow, which had been filthy when we arrived, was now clean. The refrigerator, which had been barren, now contained food and drink. We enjoyed a good dinner under the palapa and said goodnight. Just before I got into bed I told Hawaii he was fussing about nothing.

“Just wait,” he said. “There’ll be something.”

Five minutes later something hit the floor of the bungalow. I switched on a flashlight I had brought from New York and pointed it under the bed. Nothing. So I rolled back under the duvet. There was movement around me and much clattering, and suddenly I too was deposited on the ground. I got up and discovered that one side of the bed had collapsed. (I weigh 108 pounds, incidentally.)

It was after midnight, too late to call the concierge on the Bat Phone, so I slept on the bed’s other side, hoping it would hold up until morning, and anticipated the mockery from Hawaii. But first there was more drama. In the morning my friend’s daughter got stung by a stingray, which apparently Bahía Manzanillo was full of. “You have to shuffle when you’re wading,” we were told, a bit late. Hawaii called as the resort doctor arrived, his mockery turning to genuine alarm. “Do not leave her side,” he said in staccato. And the excitement kept coming: That night on the way home from dinner our golf cart started going slower and slower and finally stopped altogether. We pushed like crazy, got nowhere, and finally left it stranded while we walked home in the dark (not so easy for the young woman with the greenish, swollen foot).

The next night my bed started to shake again. I got up, checked the slats—all was in place—and went back to sleep. In the morning I discovered there had been an earthquake measuring 5.8 on the Richter scale. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Now the calls from Hawaii were becoming more frequent, each one beginning with: “So what has happened now?” Truth be told, we were having a fantastic time. We had nicknames for our wounded cart (Herbie) and our stick shift rental car (Ramona), which I repeatedly stalled driving up hills too slowly. We signed up for surfing lessons and loved them, even though the instructor, a tall Australian, told me he hadn’t seen wipeouts like mine in a long time. I had sizable bruises as evidence, the sight of which, e-mailed to Hawaii, would elicit exasperated sighs. A lifeguard named Juan was now swimming in flippers alongside me when I went into the water. At dinner we got used to the hourlong wait between ordering our food and eating it. I ran into friends from London, who shared their stories of the hotel’s growing pains. “We asked for a tennis pro,” Rachel, a mother of five, told me. (A search had to be conducted and someone driven all the way from Managua.) Holly told me weeks later that she had been stung by a scorpion. On New Year’s Eve the resort threw a beach party, during which they ran out of glasses, a situation the staff resolved by picking up used ones, wiping them off right in front of us, and filling them up again.

When we arrived we’d have minded this sort of service. Now we just laughed and drank from used stemware. The truth was, we’d gotten used to not being in control. My image of Nicaragua turned out to be woefully outdated; the country has had a thriving tourist industry for more than a decade. But there was a lot of well-intentioned, hit-or-miss service. All began to make sense when Mukul’s effervescent general manager told us that his favorite TV show ever was Fantasy Island. Mukul was our Fantasy Island, and it taught us that expensive paradise, unexpectedly, takes the form of chaotic goodwill.

Since I got home I’ve thought often about that trip, and here’s what I’ve decided: It wasn’t in spite of the difficulties and annoyances that I enjoyed it, it was because of them. I asked Lisa Cohen, the ebullient travel agent who had booked my trip at the Caribbean family resort, for her perspective. She said that over the last decade or so, roughly during the technology boom that has filled our lives with so much gadgetry, there has been a rise in demand for trips that take us slightly out of our com- fort zones, maybe because we are now accustomed to, and perhaps bored by, efficiency and order. We actively seek disorder—just not too much.

“People want adventure. They want to go somewhere exotic, but afterward they want to return to the comfort of the Four Seasons,” said Cohen, who works for Valerie Wilson Travel, one of the top corporate travel agencies in the country.

A day in the life of Lisa Cohen, she joked, is not unlike that of a Park Avenue psychiatrist, featuring calls from Fortune 500 CEOs who are abroad and suffering from diarrhea, or who have landed somewhere and the weather isn’t what they expected and realize they’ve packed the wrong clothes. One of her favorite stories is about the time she sent a pair of honeymooners to the Hawaiian island of Lanai and the resort was overrun by mice, so she flew them to a different island. (The couple have since divorced.)

Philip Lategan, the South African owner of the travel company Journey Beyond, told me that visitors to Africa used to want a real safari. “Now it’s really entertainment,” Lategan said. “The resorts are more luxurious than the Peninsula.” Zarafa, a camp on the plains of Botswana, has a better wine cellar than some top hotels in the U.S., he said. Some of his clients bring bodyguards; others have asked to climb Mount Kilimanjaro “and not get dirty.”

“We’ve pulled it off,” Lategan said. “It just takes a lot of money, and 30 porters.” One family he worked with had a phobia of insects, “so we nuked the place” where they were camping.

The real challenge, according to Lategan, is making safaris safe for children, who not long ago were expected to stay home, since a fearful cry or sudden movement can dangerously upset an animal in the wild. Now children get to see cheetahs and hippos from the safety of a covered vehicle. The real obstacle to giving high-end tourists the gentle buzz they want is, as Lategan put it, “idiocy.” He cited an Australian couple so determined to drive rather than fly across the Botswana bush that they spent an unplanned night in the wilderness, having plugged the wrong address into their GPS and ended up at a camp that was full.

India too has benefited from the soft adventure trend, said Raju Singh, the owner of Ventours International Travel. “Delhi Belly is a thing of the past,” he told me, adding that Indian hotels can be as good as if not better than their counterparts in the U.S. But outside? Some of Singh’s clients seemed surprised to run into cows in the street. Others have said to her, “I’d like to come to India but not see any beggars.”

A straw poll among friends tells me that the most rewarding challenge of any trip is relaxing into an uncustomary lack of control. Holly Peterson has surfed in dangerous currents all over the world, and her car once broke down in one of Brazil’s notorious favelas, but the thing she found hardest? Keeping her cool when she was delayed at the Costa Rica–Nicaragua border. She and her posse of young surfers had to disembark from one vehicle, drag their luggage 100 yards, and, clutching 19 passports, stand in a line that included chickens and other livestock. “When that 90-minute drive turns into a six-hour adventure, it’s important for your children to see you stay calm.”

Last year Suzanne Herz, the executive director of publishing at Doubleday, took her 16-year-old son to see chimps in the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania. They began with a two-day safari considerably more basic than they anticipated, after which her son turned to her and said, “Mom, I need to be evacuated to the nearest Four Seasons.” Instead, after flying to Mahale from Arusha, Tanzania, aboard a puddle jumper that kept stopping to deliver provisions to other camps, they arrived exhausted in humid 100-degree weather, hoping to cool off with a swim in clear, inviting Lake Tanganyika—but no, there were crocodiles, the guides told them, which led to a long boat ride to the middle of the lake, where the water was too deep for the crocs. A series of grueling four-hour hikes up a steep mountain followed, only some of which yielded glimpses of chimps (which Herz was unable to enjoy due to her glasses fogging up). “You have no control, you don’t know what’s going to happen, and you can’t always get what you want,” Herz told me. Nevertheless, her son ended up calling it the best trip he’d ever been on.

Travel takes us out of ourselves and opens us to new ideas, new places, and ultimately a more accommodating frame of mind. On the return from Nicaragua, our plane was delayed, and none of us minded in the slightest. Once we got to Miami, however, I was suddenly furious that my phone still didn’t work. (It turned out that Verizon had suspended my account on suspicion of fraud. It also turned out that Verizon’s fraud office is closed on Sundays.) I felt anxiety closing in, which is perhaps why I tried for so long afterward to conjure up those five slightly crazy days in Nicaragua and remember what it was like when the bed shook and the golf cart petered out, and the only possible reaction was to laugh. There was also, of course, the greatest fun of all, which perhaps was what I had been looking for all along, before I even signed up—namely, listening to the perplexed skepticism of Hawaii. He’ll never admit it, but from the barrage of phone calls and questions later on, I’d guess he was just a little jealous.

Inside the Trial All the Billionaires Are Watching

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“What do you see?

That is the opening line in RED, the 2009 play about Mark Rothko written by John Logan. Alfred Molina, playing Rothko memorably on Broadway, opens the 90-minute piece, pointing to one of the painter’s infamous red and black works – or since we are on stage, a replica – and asks: “What do you see?”

That’s my question as I sit off and on in the packed courtroom on the third floor of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse at 40 Center Street in New York, where Judge Paul Gardephe is hearing the month-long civil case of luxury goods magnate (and Sotheby’s chairman) Domenico de Sole, and his wife Eleanore (above) , against Ann Freedman, the former president of the Knoedler Gallery, the oldest art gallery in New York until it abruptly closed in 2011. The de Soles argue that Freedman and Knoedler knowingly sold them a fake Rothko, Untitled 1956, for $8.3 million in 2004. (A Long Island woman, Glafira Rosales, has already pled guilty to peddling Knoedler forty or so fake works created by Queens street artist Pei-Shen Quian, which the gallery then resold at staggering markups.) Meanwhile, a criminal investigation hovers. Rosales has not yet been sentenced, and her co-conspirators, Qian and her boyfriend, Jose Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, as well as Diaz’ brother, await extradition from China and Spain, respectively. At stake, many in the art world believe, is the opaque manner in which dealers and galleries operate, hiding behind the mythology of expensive art created by talented drug addicts and drunkards, many of whom left imperfect records. Dealers are not required to tell customers the identity of sellers, a standard that would never fly in, say, high-end real estate, or any other multimillion-dollar field.

What do you see?

Apparently RED is on the mind of several people in court. As she was leaving court last Wednesday, Eleanor de Sole told journalists she’d seen the play performed in her hometown of Hilton Head, South Carolina. So what is it we currently see in the courtroom?

First we see theater: a real-time, real-life high-stakes drama that transports one into the multi-layered art world, a jigsaw-puzzle of innumerable experts, historians, researchers, conservators, and middlemen all looking for an angle and a cut. (Never again will I listen to any art professional who says, “I’m only interested in art, not the commercial side of the industry.”) Simply put, there is no art without money: the relationship is symbiotic. Christopher Rothko, Mark’s son, has been in court testifying that he has a policy of never authenticating his father’s work. David Anfam, the world’s leading expert on Rothko and author of the Catalogue Raisonne, has said the same thing. Why? Not because they can’t recognize Rothko’s art (Anfam was clear on that) but because too much money is at stake. Rothko told Ann Freedman back in the day he thought the fake Rothko was “beautiful,” but he was not prepared to document that it was also real. The reliance the whole industry places on nebulous-sounding oratory rather than solid documentation is almost comic. No other sophisticated business does transactions based on verbal fairy-tales. The defense, according to Freedman’s lawyer Luke Nikas, plans to show early next week that this “context” – the very real world of fairy tales and no documentation – is crucial to understanding it all.

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So far the testimony has taken us back to the 1990s and 2000s, inside the opulent walls of the high-windowed Knoedler Gallery on 70th and Madison. Founded in 1846, Knoedler was the oldest, most reputable gallery in America. Ann Freedman, 68, sitting tall off to the left as you face Judge Gardephe, is a reedy, grey-haired, bespectacled woman who looks more like a university don than a hard-charging saleswoman; however, it was Freedman who battled her way up from Knoedler’s receptionist to become its president in 1994, earning herself a reputation that commanded respect, yes, but also fear. Peers thought she was sharp-elbowed. Many complained of the abrupt way she replaced her well-liked predecessor Larry Rubin, reportedly changing the succession arrangement he’d set up.

We also learned last week that certain people in the art community didn’t like her way of conducting business. In 1994, which was when Rosales first brought her fake wares to Knoedler, the British-born MoMA curator John Elderfield told Freedman that he didn’t think two Richard Diebenkorn works the gallery was showing were authentic. Phyllis Diebenkorn, the artist’s widow, who was with him, agreed, according to Elderfield; so too did the Diebenkorns’ daughter Gretchen, who testified that the paintings “lack soul.” Elderfield tried to be British and polite about his misgivings, which in hindsight might have been a mistake. Assuming Freedman would withdraw the works, he’d be “dismayed” ten years later to discover she had sold them. Diebenkorn’s wife was outraged. But – and it’s a big but – she never wrote to Freedman or anyone complaining.

Meanwhile, as many have testified, Ann Freedman was extremely successful at finding and selling first-rate contemporary art. Her “brand,” to quote Domenico de Sole (who, one could argue, knows a thing or two about brands given his stewardship of Gucci and now Tom Ford) was impeccable. De Sole told jurors that under her rule, the Knoedler Gallery continued to be thought of in superlatives. It was “the top.”

This was the reason, de Sole told the jury, that he and his wife, Eleanor, a former IBM executive, showed up for an appointment at Knoedler in late 2004. They’d never met Freedman, but they knew her “brand.” They also knew she represented an Irish artist, Sean Scully, whose work they’d recently admired on a friend’s wall. At that point the de Soles collected art but had never spent more than $2 million on a single item. They are rich, yes, but not billionaires. De Sole, a Harvard-trained-lawyer, had “worked hard” to get where he is, he explained.

As it turned out, Freedman told the de Soles in 2004 she did not have a Sean Scully, according to de Sole, so he asked to see the two works she did have in the office, prompting her to unwrap a Jackson Pollock she said was available for over $11 million. There was also the red and black Rothko,Untitled 1956, available for $8.5 million.

While de Sole described the scene, its subject, the painting, was beside him on an easel. It was displayed casually, almost absurdly so given the dramatic “unveiling” being discussed. “Aggressive” was the word de Sole used to describe Freedman’s pitch. She mentioned a Swiss “client” who wanted to sell his paintings discreetly. His father had been the collector. (Earlier that morning in the courtroom, one of Knoedler’s researchers, Melissa De Medeiros, had been forced to admit that although the gallery came up with various “plausible” storylines about who might have advised this client’s father, known as “Mr. X”, Knoedler had no concrete idea who this person was.)

But to the de Soles Ann Freedman gave the impression she not only knew the “client” but that all sorts of experts, including Christopher Rothko and David Anfam, had seen the work and validated it. (Anfam and Rothko both denied this.) “Magnificent” was another word Freedman used. De Sole would ask her to put it all in writing, which she did. Her letter, shown to the jury, clearly says that Knoedler warranted the authenticity of Untitled, 1956.

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De Sole and his wife let the painting, once purchased, go abroad to be viewed at the prestigious Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland, then hung it in their house in South Carolina, where many friends came to view it, said de Sole. It was bought for his daughter Laura, since he and Eleanor have taken trouble to divide up their estate fairly between Laura and another daughter, who “fight,” according to their mother.

But one morning in 2011, after he got out of the shower, de Sole found his wife shaking. She’d read a story in the New York Times saying that another painting, Untitled 1950 by Jackson Pollock, sold to hedge fund manger Pierre LaGrange by Knoedler in 2007 for $17 million, was fake. The provenance – a Swiss collector had supposedly owned it – sounded all too familiar. De Sole would ultimately call Freedman, who stated that Lagrange was wrong. Both his painting and De Sole’s were the real deal. The word “aggressive” was used again.

That was the last time Freedman and de Sole spoke. A criminal investigation began; the Knoedler gallery closed. The truth about Rosales and her scheme would emerge. Freedman, who has not yet testified, will argue that she too was a victim, having bought three works from Rosales too. (At far less of a markup than her customers.) A startled de Sole testified that he had only discovered in court that the “Rothko” he bought from Ann Freedman for $8.3 million had been purchased from Rosales by Freedman for a mere $950,000. He was spluttering as he got that last part out.

How did you feel about the painting once you discovered it was a fake? he was asked. “It was worthless,” he said, adding his wife now cries at night, and finally, “I got a fake painting for $8.3 million and they don’t want to give it back to me.”

And all the while the painting sat there beside him. At some point the lawyers picked it up and took it out – fast. Had it been worth $8.3 million – or more, because a real Rothko by would have appreciated significantly – men in white gloves would have been called. It was now a rough-handled object of scorn.

And there, really, is the puzzle at the heart of all this for people who don’t spend their time pouring over art catalogues or traipsing through galleries. How is it that one moment a painting can be loved and admired, hung on a museum’s walls, and the next it is “worthless,” jostled, bounced about, and cried over? Surely the painting was still the painting.

What do you see?

However this ends, the spectacle of that painting in court is a deconstructive mockery of all the murky pretension, hypocrisy, and greed around it. It’s testament if ever there was that art – and, as a lover of Keats and a believer in truth being beauty and all that suggests, I really hate to say this – has no intrinsic value. The value consists entirely in the perception of where it came from, not what it is.

What do you see?

So what I see in court during this trial is a rapidly expanding global industry that, terrifyingly, has zero regulation, is rife with corruption, price-fixing and self-interest, and is little more than a shady, self-interested cartel based on . . . nothing.

And that’s a depressing spectacle.

Did This Billionaire Get Swindled Out of Millions in an Elaborate Art World Scheme?

HIGH DRAMA IN SUNNY MONACO THIS MORNING, where Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who is the subject of my article for the December/January issue of T&C, was “questioned” by police for an hour and a half, along with his glamorous young lawyer Tetiana Bersheda.

The locals can talk of little else, since in Monaco — population 37,831 — it’s not everyday that the guy who owns the local soccer team (AS Monaco), lives in the principality’s most expensive apartment, and is besties with Prince Albert gets summoned for a q and a by local prosecutors.

The oligarch is dismissing the whole thing as procedural, Bersheda tells me, but Frank Michel, the lawyer who filed charges on behalf of Tania Rappo (close friend-turned-enemy of Rybolovlev) of tampering with police evidence and invasion of privacy tells me it’s serious. “Rybolovlev will be charged,” Michel says, “and then there will be a trial involving one of the most powerful men here. Monaco has never seen the like.”

BERNARD SIDLER

BERNARD SIDLER

Perhaps, but there’s already much about Dmitry Rybolovlev’s story of which we’ve never seen the like.

The billionaire, who is only 48, has in his lifetime faced down murder attempts, a year’s imprisonment in Russia, a divorce (“the world’s most expensive”) so nasty it involved the arrest of his now ex-wife, and now is embroiled in the art scandal of the year, in which he claims he was duped for well over $1 billion by intermediaries he trusted. This is the case that’s riding towards trial in Monte Carlo and in which he’s been accused of evidence manipulation. (He denies this.)

Unsurprisingly (he is a Russian oligarch), he doesn’t speak to the media too often. But for us he made an exception. Below he explains exclusively to T&C how he found himself at the center of so much international controversy:

DMITRY RYBOLOVLEV SELDOM gives interviews. The 49-year-old Russian—one of the richest people in the world, with a net worth estimated at $8.8 billion—is notoriously private, and also notoriously security-conscious, perhaps because back in the 1990s, while building up Uralkali, one of the world’s largest fertilizer companies, he survived a year in a Russian prison and several murder attempts.

To be greeted by a Russian-speaking security team at La Belle Epoque, Rybolovlev’s Monaco residence (reportedly the most expensive apartment in the world, worth $323 million), is not a surprise, then. The three-story penthouse also happens to be the scene of Monaco’s most infamous murder, that of the Lebanese-Brazilian banker Edmond Safra, who was killed in a botched arson attempt by one of his caretakers in 1999. British developers Nick and Christian Candy subsequently renovated the manse to resemble a modern Versailles. My heels click-clack on the marble floors as a pleasant but pale aide-de-camp ushers me into the living room, where Rybolovlev’s young lawyer, Tetiana Bersheda, tall and thin, with diamonds around her neck and wrist, soon comes to fetch me.

“Mr. R would like to meet you in his office,” Bersheda says. “It’s cozier.” We walk down the hall and confront a wooden door without handles. I pause. It slides apart as if we’re in a James Bond movie, and behind it stands Rybolovlev with an unexpectedly warm smile. He’s slim and dressed in a crisp blue-and-white-striped shirt, charcoal pants, and black velvet slippers—a signature Russian touch. “Thank you for coming,” he says. He looks younger than in photographs, and softer, perhaps because he’s not wearing his usual rectangular metal-rimmed spectacles.

The room is oval and intimate. He sits in an armchair, back to flung-open French doors, the yacht-filled harbor of La Condamine beyond. Curiously, since Rybolovlev is the owner of one of the world’s most valuable art collections, not a single work of art is on view. However, books, mainly on business and soccer, line the shelves. When I point out one by Donald Trump, he laughs. “I’ve never read it,” he says. “It was put there by the Candy brothers.” I sit on the sofa close to Bersheda, who is going to translate. Rybolovlev’s trust in the glamorous, brainy 31-year-old lawyer is obvious. They met six years ago in Geneva, where she worked for a law firm that he had retained. He asked her to work for him and she refused, but subsequently she set up her own firm, of which he is now a major client. She and I met last summer at Art Basel, where she gauged whether he should talk to me.

Rybolovlev ultimately invited me to La Belle Epoque because he has a story to tell, or rather explain. For the last year he has been at the center of the most astonishing scandal in the art world in years, an alleged billion-dollar fraud that has dealers, artists, and collectors sweating. At stake may be not just the money of an angry and very powerful man intent on recouping his losses but the thing the art world values more than anything: the freedom to operate in darkness.

Briefly: On New Year’s Eve 2014, Rybolovlev found himself at the Eden Rock St. Bart’s eating with Sandy Heller, a New York art consultant who advises many hedge fund managers. Somewhat obliquely Heller said, “It looks like you bought the Modigliani [we sold].” He was referring to Reclining Nude with Blue Cushion, one of the artist’s most famous canvases, painted in 1917. The painting had belonged to Steven A. Cohen, the founder of SAC Capital Advisors and also one of the richest men in the world.

Until then Rybolovlev, who is known for a certain froideur, had always avoided discussing his art collection, which includes masterpieces by Picasso, Leonardo, Rothko, Gauguin, Matisse, and Rodin. But he had begun to wonder, he says, whether he had been overpaying the man in charge of his acquisitions, and he was beginning to feel a gnawing anxiety familiar to major collectors—namely, that he was not in the driver’s seat of a collection purchased in his name. Art world middlemen—whether private dealers, art advisers, or people seeking a commission for setting up a deal—hold disproportionate power in this incestuous industry, which is largely unregulated and in which enormous deals frequently take place with little paperwork and behind closed doors. Often these middlemen know crucial elements of a deal that their billionaire patrons don’t, such as the selling price of a
painting. (In real estate the equivalent would be if a broker could conceal the sale price of a house—and the size of a commission.)

So, with the help of a girlfriend who speaks better English, the potentate asked Heller, “What price did you sell it for?” The answer: $93 million, $25 million less than Rybolovlev’s trusts had paid for it. Chuckling, Rybolovlev tells me his fellow diners at the Eden Rock “thought I was having a stroke.” Less cheerfully he says it was the worst New Year’s Eve of his life. Within minutes he was on the phone to Bersheda. For years, according to Rybolovlev, he believed he had been paying the middleman who had sold him the Modigliani (above)—as well as 37 other museum-worthy paintings—a commission of 2 percent (in other words, about $2 million for the Modigliani, not $25 million). He was now realizing every collector’s worst fear: He had been fleeced, and the question was, for how long and how much?

A day or so after New Year’s, Rybolovlev asked to meet Heller again. The two men went through the Russian’s entire collection, with Heller giving an estimate of what he believed was each item’s true value. His appraisal would shake the oligarch, and within days Bersheda would file a criminal complaint in Monaco.

A month later the Monte Carlo police arrested one Yves Bouvier, 52, Rybolovlev’s longtime procurer of masterpieces, as Bouvier rang the buzzer at La Belle Epoque. A Geneva businessman described by Vanity Fair’s French edition as “Swiss to the core,” a man who “shuns both the mundane and the extravagant,” Bouvier was well known in art circles as an art transporter and as the owner of mysterious storage facilities known as free ports—not as an art dealer or broker. He had been summoned to Monaco ostensibly to complete a long-delayed deal for his Russian patron, but he wound up in a jail cell instead, facing allegations of fraud and money laundering and the possibility of a long prison sentence.

The police also arrested Tania Rappo, a charismatic Monaco socialite whom officers interrupted in the middle of a massage. Once a member of Rybolovlev’s inner circle, Rappo and her husband Olivier, a retired dentist, had dined with the tycoon and his parents only days before. Now facing charges of money laundering, she would later tell me over dinner how the oligarch had plied her with drink as they chatted in his penthouse.

Both Bouvier and Rappo would deny the charges, hire lawyers, and spend the following months telling their stories to the media. Bouvier’s defense was simple: Yes, he had charged astronomical markups to his client, but, as he told Vanity Fair, “I did not act as intermediary but as the owner [of the art]. I had a right to a profit; it’s the law of busi- ness.” (Bouvier refused to answer questions for this article.)

Rappo’s defense was even simpler: Yes, she had collected commissions from Bouvier on the paintings he had sold to Rybolovlev—an amount Rybolovlev estimates to be $100 million altogether—but she claims not to have sought them, and she says Rybolovlev “never asked.”

“[If ] he would have asked me,” she says, “I would have told him.” The question echoing around the art world is how one of the world’s richest, toughest investors—whose trusts own the penthouse at 15 Central Park West (bought for $88 million in 2012 and occupied by his daughter Ekaterina, a college student at the time); two entire Greek islands (Sparti and Skorpios, famous for hosting Jacqueline Kennedy’s wedding to Aristotle Onassis); the Maison de l’Amitié (a Palm Beach mansion bought from Donald Trump for $95 million, which Rybolovlev reportedly intends to demolish due to mold problems); a $20 million property on Kauai bought from Will Smith; a $100 million yacht; homes in Gstaad, Geneva, Paris, and Monaco; and AS Monaco, the soccer team—could make himself so vulnerable. Was he, like many new billionaires, in such a hurry to build a glittering collection that he failed to “learn art,” as experienced patrons know one must to avoid overpaying? The art market is often described as insider trading conducted by a small but sophisticated network of “experts” who prey upon the naïveté of the nouveau riche. Did Rybolovlev, a famously shrewd and strategic investor, underestimate its ability to confound and deceive? Until now he hadn’t talked.

At our meeting at La Belle Epoque I put it to him: Had he been conned or was he negligent? The answer, he explained, went back to the early 1990s, before he and his family fled Russia. After the fall of communism, Rybolovlev, who originally trained as a cardiologist, switched to finance and became one of the first securities traders in Russia. One of his first moves as a financier was to take a majority stake in Uralkali, the former Soviet fertilizer monopoly, which subsequently increased its productivity five-fold. Boris Yeltsin was president. The economy of Russia was melting down. The rule of law had all but disappeared, and Uralkali’s success made Rybolovlev a target. To protect himself from ambushes he sent a fleet of identical cars with identical license plates registered in his name into Moscow; he also moved Ekaterina and his wife Elena to Geneva.

In 1995 one of Rybolovlev’s business partners was shot and killed in Moscow; Rybolovlev was imprisoned for ordering the hit and spent 11 months in jail. The charges were later dropped, but according to Rybolovlev the experience changed his outlook. He had “risked my life to make a fortune.” He was going to “protect every cent.”

He soon joined Ekaterina and Elena in Geneva. However, in their new home, despite their vast wealth, the Rybolovlevs were isolated. Although Elena eventually learned to speak fluent French, her husband “was always distracted by business. I couldn’t clear my mind,” he says. One of the first friends they made was Tania Rappo, the wife of their dentist, who happened to mention that his wife spoke Russian. (Rappo comes from Bulgaria, where the language is spoken by about a third of the population.)

“We had a sincere friendship,” Rybolovlev says. The two families vacationed together, with the Rybolovlevs often treating the Rappos to trips on private airplanes and their yacht. When Elena gave birth to a second daughter, Tania was asked to be godmother. Meanwhile the Rappos escorted the Rybolovlevs as they began making the rounds, helping them get into an exclusive golf club and chaperoning them to society events. As the Rybolovlevs expanded their real estate empire internationally, Tania Rappo also introduced Rybolovlev to real estate brokers abroad (at his request, she says).

Around 2003 the Rybolovlevs decided to build an art collection—”the best in the world,” Dmitry has been quoted as saying. They had recently moved into a house with light fixtures for art displays, and with the help of Rappo they were making inroads among a Western European elite that spent its considerable wealth on art. Rybolovlev soon settled on his first acquisition: Le Grand Cirque, one of Marc Chagall’s many beloved circus paintings. (The previous owner of the house, who had left the fixtures, owned a Chagall.) He consulted several dealers, and the best price was $8 million, according to Rappo. However, she came up with a way to eliminate the dealers and buy directly from Le Grand Cirque’s owner, lowering the price by more than $2 million—and, pivotally, bringing Rybolovlev into contact with Yves Bouvier.

Over the last decade, economic forces on a global scale have overrun the art world—visibly to all, in the case of the gargantuan bids casually tossed out at the evening sales, but all but imperceptibly (except to a tiny and in-the-know elite) in other areas—and no one has been more at the center of it, or better epitomized its drive for concealment, than the canny Bouvier. In Switzerland a business owned by Bouvier’s family, Natural Le Coultre, is one of the country’s oldest transporters of goods, formerly of all kinds but since the 2000s of fine art exclusively. The shift in strategy was not coincidental. As the Economist and others have pointed out, “collectibles [such as art] have outperformed stocks over the past decade,” aided in part by the world’s string of financial crises. In fact, for some ultra-wealthy individuals art has become the asset of choice, for not only does a Modigliani nude hold or increase its value, it is an easy asset to move or hide.

Over the years Bouvier has shifted his core business from art transportation to building and operating vast, secretive high-tech fortresses used for storing not just artworks but cars, wine, coins, and furniture. Such repositories, known as free ports, have existed for centuries, but until quite recently their primary purpose was to hold raw materials in transit—a shipment of soybeans, say. They were found primarily in transit zones, such as airports and canals, and they usually enjoyed one of the benefits of existence at the jurisdictional margins: tax and duty freedom.

For the collector who sees his 1961 Petrus not as something to drink but as an asset to hoard and potentially sell, Bouvier offered an invaluable service. Items could not only be stored behind the free port’s seven-ton doors, surrounded by laser trip wires and vibration detectors, they could be shown to other collectors there and traded or sold without moving an inch—and taxed only if they left the free port. Perhaps the most attractive aspect of all is that such transactions could take place beyond the prying eyes of a district attorney or a private investigator tracking down assets in a divorce battle. (As a result, many in the art world worry about a tendency for free ports to become “art cemeteries.” The world’s largest free port, at Geneva Airport, is said to hold as much art as the Louvre.)

Chagall’s Le Grand Cirque was stored in the Geneva free port, and Rybolovlev took Rappo with him to view it. Rappo has since said that she remembers that Bouvier appeared in person to greet them and was attentive. Rybolovlev claims to barely recall this. “If he had approached me, I would not have wanted to know him,” he says, citing his habit of shying away from anyone trying to solicit his business.

What happened afterward is important, because whatever their disagreements, Rybolovlev and Bouvier agree that the nature of their relationship—whether Bouvier was an agent working for Rybolovlev on a commission basis or an independent art dealer who bought and sold works for himself, freeing him to charge any markup he liked—was never codified on paper. Rappo says that shortly after their encounter at the Geneva free port, Bouvier called her to ask her to arrange a follow-up meeting.

“I think I can be useful,” Rappo says Bouvier told her. Rybolovlev “jumped,” she says. “He was really very happy.” According to her, the oligarch recognized that Bouvier had some of the best art in the world sitting in his Geneva warehouse. Rybolovlev, for his part, says he scarcely remembers his first meeting with Bouvier, and he took the meeting only because Rappo encouraged him to. He found Bouvier “a regular, likable man,” different from the stereotypical smooth-talking art dealer. And because Rappo, whom he trusted “totally,” had brought them together, Rybolovlev agreed to work with him for, the oligarch claims, a fee of 2 percent—which Bouvier denies, saying that amount was merely for transport and administrative costs.

At first Rybolovlev collected slowly, buying a handful of works, including a Monet water lily painting, Gauguin’s House of Hymns, three Picassos, and three Modiglianis. After 2009, however, the pace quickened. Rybolovlev was no longer interested in decorating his walls with museum pieces, he says, perhaps because the walls themselves were a subject of dispute.

In 2008, Elena Rybolovleva, Dmitry’s wife of 24 years, whom he met on the first day at medical college back in Russia, filed for divorce, citing adultery on an industrial scale, including parties aboard yachts at which Dmitry shared “young conquests with his friends and other oligarchs.” (“He was not a model husband,” a spokesman for Dmitry later told the New York Times. “Mr. Rybolovlev never denied the infidelities, but the wife knew about it for many years and passively accepted it.”) In the wake of what would become an exceptionally acrimonious divorce battle (which included Elena’s being arrested in Cyprus for allegedly stealing a $28 million diamond ring she later proved her ex- husband had given her while they were still married), Dmitry began seeing art as an investment for his daughters’ futures, he says. He subsequently started moving the collection into vaults (trophy works by Matisse, Klimt, Rodin, and Magritte by now had joined the stockpile). The art was owned by trusts, which, Elena complained, were designed to thwart her access to the couple’s fortune in divorce court. The divorce (which, Dmitry confided exclusively to T&C, was finally settled in October for an undisclosed amount) was at one time famous for being the most expensive in the world, after a Geneva judge awarded Elena half of her ex-husband’s fortune, some $4 billion.

Rybolovlev now says he didn’t want his marriage to end—nor, he felt, did Elena. He believes it could have been saved, but Rappo, whom Elena was close to, “pushed her”—his words—not to reconcile, because, he says, Rappo (and Bouvier, with whom he believes Rappo had formed a secret partnership) wanted “the story of my divorce” to cover what he calls Rappo and Bouvier’s unfolding scheme. That alleged plot, which Rappo and Bouvier deny, involved defrauding Rybolovlev—hiding from him the enormous markups on the masterpieces he was acquiring through them—in order to finance an ambitious expansion of Bouvier’s free port empire. And Rybolovlev, even if he found out, would have no choice but to go along.

“They assumed wrongly,” Rybolovlev says, “that because of my divorce my interests would be in line with theirs. They assumed I wouldn’t want to be open about my collection—ever.”

Bouvier’s plans were ambitious indeed. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Obama administration launched an attack on banking secrecy laws around the world, leading to an exodus of foreign cash from Swiss banks and increasing the allure of hoarding Picas- sos inside humidity-controlled vaults. Bouvier announced plans to build the largest, most technologically sophisticated free port ever, in Singapore, where the art protection laws were even more relaxed than Switzerland’s. Not long afterward he announced the construction of another warehouse, in Luxembourg.

Rybolovlev, meanwhile, was only getting richer. In 2007 Uralkali floated on the London Stock Exchange and became the most successful Russian IPO ever. Less than a year later the Putin regime—which is notoriously antagonistic toward Russian oligarchs living abroad, particularly ones whose fortunes derive from buying post-Soviet assets on the cheap—summoned him to a meeting in Moscow,
where Rybolovlev was informed that the Kremlin was reopening a potentially bankrupting investigation into the collapse of a mine belonging to Uralkali. Understanding the government’s interest in his company and that his days of owning it were numbered, Rybolovlev cashed out, leaving his estimated net worth somewhere between $8 billion and $13 billion. He then focused on trolling the world for other investments. In 2010 he moved to Monaco, his trusts buying La Belle Epoque. His trusts also bought a majority stake in the AS Monaco soccer team in 2011. And in 2012 a broker recommended by Rappo sold his trusts the penthouse at 15 Central Park West. Rybolovlev says that Rappo called him as the deal was closing. “I’ve been offered a commission of $100,000,” she told him. “Would you mind if I accepted?”

Tetiana Bersheda warned me that I would find Tania Rappo “captivating.” After I meet her in her lawyer’s office, atop a creaking staircase in a building near the Fairmont Monte Carlo, and later at dinner, accompanied by her husband and her lawyer, at an outdoor French restaurant, I cannot deny it. Dressed casually in a black halter top, jeans, and heels—as well as big pearl earrings—Rappo looks far younger than her years. One of the first things she tells me—then repeats again and again—is that she and Bersheda never got along. Bersheda was always kept away from the art collection, and one senses how much the rivalry between these two women plays a role in the case.

At the restaurant Rappo, who speaks eloquent English as well as French, Russian, and her native Bulgarian, chain-smokes throughout the evening, and although she orders champagne, she scarcely touches it, preferring to talk, talk, and talk. Both her husband, a handsome, quiet man, and her lawyer, “Maître Michel,” occasionally interrupt, telling her, “Tania, no, don’t say that,” but clearly Rappo is not a woman who is told what to do.

Her story, essentially, is that Rybolovlev is using her and Bouvier as pawns. “You cannot understand the story of the art,” she says, waving her cigarette, “unless you understand the story of the divorce.”

Her tale begins, naturally, with a call at four in the morning from Elena in 2008. “Crying like you cannot imagine, she said, ‘Can you please come?’ I say, ‘Is somebody dead?’ She says, ‘No, but please come.’ So at four I wake up, I get my car, I go to the hotel.” There Elena tells her that by accident she came across documents on Dmitry’s computer containing the passport information of various guests visiting the Rybolovlev yacht, including many “girls” and Dmitry’s mistress at the time. This, Rappo says, was the event that triggered the divorce—Elena filed within weeks. (Inciden- tally, aside from advising Elena to consult a lawyer, Rappo denies hastening the breakup. “I tried for about two years to put them together,” she says. It was Dmitry who made reconciliation impossible, she claims: “From the very beginning he said, ‘Tell her she will have nothing.’ “)

For the next few years Rappo’s relationship with Rybolovlev was status quo. It was not a friendship, she says: “I had affection for her. I never had affection for him… He’s a block of ice.” However, she continued to be a liaison between Rybolovlev and Bouvier; and she continued to receive introduction fees from Bouvier, an arrangement for which she says she received around 5 percent whenever a deal closed. She and Elena stopped speaking for a reason Rappo won’t divulge.

Last year, when she found out Elena had been arrested, she says she got nervous; she calls the event a turning point in her relationship with Dmitry. (If so, Rybolovlev says he didn’t notice—Rappo still showed up for events he held.) The arrest had taken place during a visit to Cyprus, where Rybolovlev has considerable financial assets, including at one time a large stake in the country’s biggest bank. Rappo says Rybolovlev told her, “There are three places in the world I can do whatever I want. One is Cyprus, one is Skorpios, and the other is Monaco.” And she claims he had Elena arrested—even though she spent only a short while in custody—to scare her into dropping her lawsuits (filed in several countries) in pursuit of her ex-husband’s money.

“To put the mother of your two children in prison just not to give her money—what kind of person is that?” Rappo says. “This is the style of Mr. Rybolovlev, and that’s exactly what happened to us. He wants to humiliate people and put such stress on them that they give up.” (Rybolovlev brushes all this off and says Elena cannot stand to hear Tania Rappo’s name.) I put it to Rappo: Why would Rybolovlev target her and Bouvier if not for the money he says they owe him?

“There is a saying in French: When you want to get rid of your dog, say it has rabies,” Rappo says. “He wanted to discredit Bouvier.” And as for his putative vendetta against Rappo? She alleges that Rybolovlev and his lawyers have gone after her and not just Bouvier because they “must find a way to link the case to Monaco. The paintings were not sold here.”

At one point I ask Rappo if, knowing Rybolovlev as well as she does, and after all she has gone through, she is ever afraid of him. “Afraid is not the word, but you feel danger,” she replies.

Monaco is tiny—barely three-quarters of a square mile—and densely populated, holding almost 40,000 people inside that area. It was hard to imagine, but a few blocks from the restaurant where I met Rappo was the Rybolovlev penthouse.

“Tania is at the heart of this story,” Rybolovlev tells me when I meet him at La Belle Epoque. “She was a friend, not a business associate. But the friendship was an illusion.”

Rybolovlev says he heard through the grapevine that Rappo had gotten richer, acquiring apartments in Paris, London, and Monaco during the years he had known her. Her explanation, he says, was that she had come into a windfall thanks to her family’s sale of real estate in Bulgaria. Rybolovlev also said she had given money to Bouvier to invest in the Singapore free port (which Rappo denies), and Bouvier had made her a fortune.

But his suspicion was not triggered until Bouvier came to Rybolovlev in 2013 and 2014 to shop two paintings, first Salvator Mundi, a recently discovered Leonardo for which he wanted $127 million, and then No. 6 (Violet, Green and Red), a prized Rothko for which he requested $140 million. Rybolovlev told Bouvier that the family trusts would pay for the Rothko only in installments while Bouvier sold other works, including a Modigliani sculpture Rybolovlev had owned since 2012. Bouvier seemed to have trouble finding a buyer for the Modigliani—or “anything!” Rybolovlev says.

And then Rybolovlev found out about a New York Times article he had missed from months earlier reporting that the Leonardo he had purchased for $127.5 million had been sold not long before for only $75 million to $80 million. The piece also stated that many experts thought the work had been done by an assistant in Leonardo’s studio, not the artist himself.

Rybolovlev says he asked Bouvier about the article directly and Bouvier brushed it off, telling him dealers never give correct sale figures to journalists. He insisted the pieces would sell in time.

Rybolovlev’s suspicion lingered, which is why when Sandy Heller mentioned the Modigliani in St. Bart’s a month later, Rybolovlev asked him how much he had sold it for, something he ordinarily might have been reluctant to ask. (He says Bouvier asked that their transactions be kept confidential for fear that combining art dealing with art storage would be seen as a conflict of interest, a practice the art dealer Larry Gagosian has indeed criticized.) As he sat there stunned in the Eden Rock din- ing room, he says, realizing how much he had overpaid, his first reaction was, “I wanted to call Tania and ask her, ‘Do you know what Yves is doing?’ “

But then, according to Rybolovlev, it struck him that Rappo always seemed to know what Bouvier was doing. Since the very first moment of the relationship, she had been there for nearly every meeting with Bouvier and every viewing in the Geneva free port.

According to Bersheda, the criminal complaint she filed last year was against Bouvier only. Rybolovlev was already hurt and angry, but the serious pain came, he says, when he heard that investigators had found commissions from Bouvier in Rappo’s bank accounts going back to 2004. Rappo knew Rybolovlev to be reserved and wary, he says. He let his guard down around Bouvier because he trusted her. At that point he began to see Rappo, not Bouvier, at the center of the spider’s web. Their falling out has led him to ask what he calls “difficult philosophical questions.” Had it not been for the dentist’s wife he would never have gotten involved with Bouvier.

Rybolovlev says he did not know what was going to happen to Rappo or Bouvier. “I didn’t know the police would arrest them then,” he says in answer to their accusations of a sting at Rybolovlev’s apartment. The police had asked him to act normal, he claims, but “I needed vodka to get through it.” Rappo, he says, was her usual, effervescent self, chattering about the beauty of the Rothko and pressuring Rybolovlev to buy it.

Both Rappo and Bouvier argue that the Monaco prosecution (which is heading toward trial) is in Rybolovlev’s pocket. Rappo has protested that her right to due process was violated. (“You can’t just go and look in the bank accounts of somebody,” she says.) Rybolovlev brushes this off.

The truth, he says, is that he just wanted to hear Rappo say, ” ‘I did it. I’m so sorry.’ I might have forgiven her,” he says. Instead, when they were face to face in the Monaco jail after she had been arrested, he claims she denied everything.

“It’s easy for [Bouvier and Rappo] to paint me as the stereotypical Russian oligarch,” he says. But if he were so interested in hiding his assets from Elena, he says, why would he announce to the world that he had been the victim of a multibillion-dollar scam, in the process letting it be known how much his trusts had overpaid for each of his artworks?

“They underestimated me,” he says.

I ask him if, in the wake of all the misery he claims was inflicted on him by a woman he came to depend on because she spoke Russian, he is thinking of finally learning a new language. Laughing, he says he is trying, but it isn’t going well.

T&C Exclusive: Inside the World’s Most Expensive Divorce

The world’s “most expensive”—and perhaps nastiest—divorce is over.

T&C can exclusively reveal that Dimitry Rybolovlev, the 49-year-old Russian oligarch who made a $9 billion fortune in the fertilizer business, has, after seven long years involving private investigators, battles over  art, multi-million dollar properties—and even an arrest!—been settled “amicably” with all lawsuits dropped. The terms have not been released, but it’s worth mentioning that at one point a Swiss Judge wanted to award Elena Rybolovleva half his fortune, which is what makes this so costly.

That a settlement was coming was revealed exclusively to me in September, during a three-hour interview with the oligarch (in the presence of a translator). Rybolovlev is a taciturn man who rarely gives interviews. But we met at his home in Monaco, the famous triplex penthouse apartment, La Belle Epoque, possibly the world’s most expensive apartment and which also happens to be the infamous crime scene where the late banker Edmond Safra died, locked in a bathroom in 1999. (Rybolovlev, who was not without a sense of humor, told me he had had his priest sprinkle holy water everywhere to get rid of the bad xiu xiu).

We were there to discuss his role at the center of an alleged billion-dollar art fraud, which has recently been water-cooler talk in galleries and auction houses, afraid of what his case might reveal about their shadowy, unregulated industry. Dressed in black velvet slippers, charcoal pants and a blue and white shirt,  Rybolovlev explained how the two stories were entwined, since the people currently facing criminal lawsuits accusing them of illegally enriching themselves as they bought bought art on behalf of his trusts, apparently believed, according to the oligarch, that their greatest ally was his divorce. He says they thought he would stay quiet about the art collection because he wouldn’t want Elena to know what was in it and come after it. “They were wrong. They underestimated me,” he’d later say.

In fact, he said, talking of the divorce, he never really wanted to get divorced at all. (Then again, one must remember he had not had a prenuptial agreement, so financially he had good reason not to.) He had met Elena (whose lawyers did not return calls) back when he was a student cardiologist, before he went into finance and the fertilizer industry and made his fortune. It was never an ordinary marriage with ordinary stresses. In the mid-1990s Russia was in political turmoil post-Perestroika. The success of his fertilizer company, Uralkali, meant he was a target of the government.  He faced death threats and moved Elena to Geneva along with the couple’s eldest daughter Ekaterina; Dmitry subsequently spent almost a year in jail in Russia, allegedly for ordering a hit of one of his business partners. (He would be cleared … but neighbors in Geneva remember Elena having to tell them, in faltering beginner’s French: “He’s in prison for alleged murder.”)

GETTY VALERY HACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

GETTY VALERY HACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

It couldn’t have been easy. Then he got out and commuted between Russia and Geneva. He and Elena had another daughter, Anna, in 2001. Who and what pushed Elena to file for divorce in 2008? For that you’ll need to read my upcoming piece in the December/January issue T&C. She’d accuse him of hiding assets—properties all around the world in trusts—and the case went in and out of courts. Their fight climaxed in a terrible moment last year when Elena was arrested in Cyprus where Dimitry owns a stake in the country’s biggest bank; supposedly she’d stolen a $28 million ring (she would prove he’d given it to her.) It’s hard to think of a divorce where the friction is of a comparable scale. There are those who call this “the Russian way of doing things…”

Yet when I met with Rybolovlev his face softened as he mentioned Elena. He brought up what they agree on; not what they don’t. He told me they were about to settle, though right to the end, sources close to it confided it was touch and go: “A divorce like this is a bit like and M&A deal; it’s not done until it’s done.”

So now it’s over, at least on paper. Anyone who’s been divorced knows that a mix of emotions lingers: relief, bitter-sweet sadness, and also optimism. But I also happen to know the story isn’t over yet for this complicated, reluctantly high-profile family. More news to come.

FOR A LOOK AT WHAT THE WORLD”S MOST EXPENSIVE DIVORCE LOOKS LIKE, SEE HERE JUST SOME OF THE ASSETS BEING FOUGHT OVER:

$88 Million – 15 Central Park West apartment, NYC

$95 Million – Palm Beach mansion bought from Donald Trump, Maison de l’Amitié

$150 Million – Two Greek islands that once belonged to Athina Onassis

$111 Million – “My Anna” yacht

$20 Million – Kauai, Hawaii house purchased from Will Smith

$95 Million – Airbus A319 Jet

$480-800 Million – Art and furniture collection

$138 Million – Gstaad property

$50 Million – Moscow real estate holdings

$24 Million – Paris property

Frank Gehry’s First-Ever Yacht Looks Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen

Last July, at the end of a Friday afternoon, Frank Gehry landed at Barnstable Municipal Airport, on Cape Cod, accompanied by his son Alejandro and his friend Bobby Shriver. The group drove straight to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, and there the architect first saw her, anchored a little offshore.

A crowd had gathered, since, as Gehry says, “Hyannis Port is a real sailing community,” and because Foggy, whose name (based on an acronym for Frank Owen Gehry) had been etched in Gehry’s sloping scrawl onto its stern, is a sloop like no other. Fashioned out of traditional larch wood but accented with titanium and a glass latticework that glimmers like a school of fish, she looked schizophrenic, a hybrid of past and future.

Gehry is an avid yachtsman, and sailing informs much of his most famous work—think of the billowing motif of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, New York’s IAC building, and, most recently, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris. Yet only recently did he undertake his first sailboat design.

TODD EBERLE

TODD EBERLE

“I never had the resources before, and once I did I was busy doing my buildings,” he says. However, in 2008, Gehry found himself mulling the idea of designing a boat. He owns a ­fiberglass-hulled Beneteau First 44.7 (about to be renamed Foggy 1), which he keeps in Marina del Rey, California, and sails on Sunday afternoons, often with the architect Greg Lynn. The wives of both men tend to stay on land. (Lynn even had a boat called Girlfriend.) What if, Gehry wondered, he could design a boat that was both a signature piece and an enticement to his wife Berta?

He mentioned the idea to the developer Richard Cohen. A yachtsman too, Cohen had been wanting to build a large racing boat. After agreeing to work together, the two old friends brought in Germán Frers, an Argentine naval architect known for designing some of the most elegant fast sailboats in the world.

“Don’t let me go too crazy,” Gehry told Frers. “The boat has to work.” As instructed, Frers pushed back on Gehry’s plan for the vessel to have a flat, cabinless deck, which led to the choice of a curved “crown.”

However, when it came to choosing the material for the hull lining, Gehry and Frers drifted apart. Ever concerned with speed, Frers had proposed carbon fiber, the light, brittle material commonly used for racing boats. But Gehry wanted to line the boat with wood, partly because of “boat lore,” partly because he simply loves wood. Frers got a sinking feeling when he heard this, since wood adds weight without function. “I almost gave up hope the project would get done,” he says.

But in 2012, Cohen (who, full disclosure, is my significant other) found a possible compromise: build not just part of the boat with wood but the whole thing. He contacted the Brooklin Boat Yard in Maine, a small operation renowned for its carpentry as well as its engineering. One of its specialties is “cold molding,” a modern process that involves sandwiching wood around a high-tech core and yields lighter, stronger, and more durable craft than traditional planking.

Steve White, 61, the boatyard’s second-generation owner (and a grandson of E.B. White), was excited to work with Frers, but to have a non-boatbuilding architect of ­Gehry’s stature involved was daunting. And then he received ­Gehry’s drawings for the lattice windows on the deck and the stern.

“Bizarre,” was his reaction. In addition to its liberal use of materials like titanium, which few boat engineers have experience with, “there was a story behind every item on the boat—every cleat, doorknob, and showerhead.” And there were concerns that some of the unconventional elements could do more than just slow the yacht down.

“Glass steals a lot of the hull’s strength,” White says, likening Foggy’s windows to “holes in a pipe.” To see if they could withstand wave pressure, he and his team took sample panels to the technology laboratory at the University of Maine in Orono, where they hydraulically flushed the portals until they broke. (The windows turned out to be safe.)

Gehry, aided by his son Sam and a 3-D printer, “had fun” playing with Foggy’s design once he had found, or rather written, the boat’s “language.” “On a boat like this, it’s about romance and romantic encounters,” the architect says. At the heart of that fantasy is the yacht’s saloon, whose soft furnishings include a psychedelically colorful carpet created by Joyce Shin, Gehry’s ­daughter-in-law. It also includes sheepskin coverings for the couches from New Zealand, which turned the space into something between an Austin Powers–style lair and a discotheque.

Bizarre indeed. And yet, after joining Gehry in Hyannis Port and going aboard the sloop, Frers, and later White, had the same reaction. “It works,” both men said with considerable relief.

It also worked the following weekend, when Cohen and a crew tested Foggy in competition. Stripped of binnacles, bowsprit, and any unnecessary weight (even the psychedelic carpet), and fitted with black carbon fiber racing sails, Foggy headed off to ­Martha’s Vineyard and clocked the fastest time in last summer’s running of the 52-mile Round the Island race.

Next, Gehry and Cohen plan to take the boat to Miami, Cuba, and Panama, where Gehry will visit his recently finished Museo de la Biodiversidad, timing the trip to coincide with the historic opening of the Panama Canal’s third set of locks. (It will be a special visit: Berta Gehry is Panamanian, and the Gehrys have yet to visit the much-lauded museum.) Then, after transiting the canal, it will be on to Costa Rica, Baja California (site of another Gehry building), and into the harbor at Marina del Rey, where he plans to race Foggy on Sunday afternoons.

And then?

“We’ll do a spaceship,” Gehry says.