“As Vicky Ward’s hard-hitting book shows, Russia is only a part of the story.”

“A dishy, skeptical portrait of Jared Kushner, the naive, overleveraged, and conflict-mired developer’s son who has Donald Trump’s ear. A tail of greed, incompetence, desperation, and felonious behavior. A handy primer on a troublesome Trump in-law.”

“Vicky Ward has produced a damning depiction, a lethal amalgam of Page Six-like dish and firsthand investigative reporting.”

“Kushner Inc. serves its readers exactly what they are craving. … [H]elplessly fun to devour.”

“Kushner, Inc. is a burn book with page numbers.”

The housewife tycoon too busy to name her baby

THE LIAR’S BALL

PUBLISHED: 17:01 EST, 15 January 2015 | UPDATED: 17:01 EST, 15 January 2015

Compared with the ancient palaces and cathedrals of Europe and Asia, the story of the General Motors building — a 1960s office block in the heart of Manhattan — has hardly begun.

Yet in its 50-year lifetime, as Vicky Ward describes in her grippingly readable account of its history, the GM building has witnessed as much human greed, arrogance, high drama and tragedy as any elegant Venetian palazzo or fortified Scottish castle.

It all began in 1964, when the property developer Max (later Lord) Rayne snapped up the Savoy-Plaza hotel on Fifth Avenue.

Together with his trusted colleague, Cecilia Benattar, a 32-year-old Mancunian with the negotiating skills of a pit-bull terrier, Rayne eventually purchased the entire block, evicted the various tenants and persuaded General Motors that this would become the most prestigious office building in New York.

The former editor Daily Mail editor, Sir David English, then a New York correspondent, wrote that in closing the deal with GM, Benattar, the ‘houswife tycoon’, had pulled off the ‘business shock of the year’.

The architect Edward Durell Stone, who designed the British Embassy in India and the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC, won the commission to build the 50-storey white marble tower on the Savoy-Plaza site.

Despite protests from New Yorkers, including the economist J. K. Galbraith, who complained that ‘Americans spend $5 billion a year visiting the historic shrines of Europe, and then spend the same amount tearing down their own’, tenants flocked to the new building.

Cecilia Benattar was so busy wheeling and dealing that in 1969 she gave birth to her fourth child on a Friday and returned to the office the following Monday. For the next six months she continued to be preoccupied with leasing, and the infant remained nameless. ‘No one,’ Ward observes, ‘was much surprised’ (the baby was eventually named Judith).

There was a popular saying: ‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the country’. But as the Arab oil crisis of 1974 and the recession of the early 1980s struck, the reverse proved also to be true. GM’s fortunes began to slide, and with them, the fortunes of its iconic building, which began to look distinctly neglected.

An unlikely saviour appeared in the person of financier Disque D. Deane who, in the rogues’ gallery of unlovable characters that populate Ward’s narrative, is the most unappealing. He kept a stuffed wolf in his office to remind himself that it was a dog-eat-dog world, and his treatment of his wife — whom he divorced with a miserable settlement after 39 years of marriage — and of his four children, whom he used to interrogate about compound interest over breakfast and beat if they got the answer wrong, was startlingly brutal.

Having bailed out GM to the tune of $500 million, Deane went into business with Donald Trump (who recalled Deane as ‘the meanest, angriest human being I’ve ever met’).

Trump cleaned up the white marble walls, put in new granite floors, and emblazoned his name on the front of the building in 4ft-high brass letters. But in 2001, when he had the chance to buy the entire building for $995 million, he hesitated.

Characteristically, he claimed a victory: ‘I don’t like talking about the GM Building, because I’d rather not have lost it, but I did make money on it,’ he said.

Trump’s loss was developer Harry Macklowe’s gain. An intriguing mixture of high culture and low cunning, Macklowe enjoyed the company of writers, artists and performers, but he was also infamous for a 1985 scandal in which he demolished four large buildings with the gas still turned on. It was only by chance that no one was killed.

Macklowe persuaded Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, to open a flagship store sited in a glass cube in front of the GM building.

It opened in 2006 and was an instant success. But hubris — the tragic quality at the heart of so many epic downfalls — did for Macklowe.

Convinced that he could pull off an even bigger coup, he closed a $7 billion deal in just nine days. It was the biggest leveraged buy-out in history, but in 2008, it cost him the GM building.

Now in the vast property portfolio of the media baron Mort Zuckerman, a new chapter of its story is beginning.

And given the frenzies of desire that the GM building excites among the guests at the ‘Liar’s Ball’ (as the Real Estate Board of New York affectionately dubs its annual gala), the next 50 years seem certain to be a thrillingly bumpy ride.

Reason not the need

The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons.

THE property business, goes an industry proverb, is “a circle of men holding a revolver to each other’s heads”. And, all too often, to their own, as Vicky Ward illustrates in her colourful history of America’s most fought-over office block: the 50-floor General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

Built for the carmaker’s bosses in the mid-1960s—when what was good for the company was said to be good for America—the white-marble tower was never New York’s tallest or most beautiful skyscraper. But something about it drove the property tycoons nuts. Their pursuit of it was often sordid, and the sums they were willing to risk irrational. One mogul compares the building to “the girl you keep asking to the prom but says no. And each time you ask she gets more expensive.”

Ms Ward, whose breakthrough book was “The Devil’s Casino”, about the fall of Lehman Brothers, has fun with the obsessive, hubristic cast of characters who have scrapped over the building (though the scene is at times too crowded with names and personal details). Among them are Donald Trump, the industry’s master of self-promotion, who was the first to push rents over the magic figure of $100 per square foot; Disque Deane, a uniquely unpleasant financier who broke bottles over heads and divorced his wife in Bermuda to avoid having to pay her a fair share of his wealth; and Cecilia Benattar, the “housewife tycoon”, who was so wrapped up in dealmaking that it took her six months to name her first child.

As they hustle, in some cases taking on vast debts to secure the prize (you can’t buy a $50m building until you first find $5,000, according to another industry joke), these bigwigs do plenty of dangerous gambling, double-crossing and, of course, suing. The most financially reckless of them all was Harry Macklowe, a local developer who, after many years of trying, got his hands on the block in 2003 for a record $1.4 billion, only to lose it five years later because he had posted it as collateral for loans for the spectacularly ill-advised purchase of seven other buildings.

One of Mr Macklowe’s better decisions was to sign a deal with Apple. Its flagship store, located under a giant glass cube in the plaza, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. Today the skyscraper is associated more with mobile devices than with motor vehicles. Owned by a rival developer and Chinese and Brazilian interests, it is worth more than twice what Mr Macklowe paid for it a decade ago. Reflecting on his lost prize, the only thing he seems sure of is that “Business turns. Business always turns.”

Inside the List

By GREGORY COWLES

Published: April 1, 2010

MARRIED TO MONEY: “The Devil’s Casino,” Vicky Ward’s book about the rise and fall of the banking giant Lehman Brothers, jumps onto the hardcover nonfiction list this week at No. 14. An excerpt in the April issue of Vanity Fair has raised eyebrows for its intimate account of employees’ marriages. “For all the senior-executive wives,” Ward writes, “there were ‘unwritten rules.’ If you were married to a Lehmanite, you belonged to the firm.” She goes on to quote one desperate housewife: “As a Lehman wife, you raised your kids by yourself. You had your babies by yourself in the hospital. And then you were supposed to be happy and pretty and smiling when there was an event, and you really would have liked to strangle somebody.”

Vicky Ward

This column will appear in print in the April 11, 2010 issue of the Book Review. On the Web, the best-seller lists and the “Inside the List” column are available one week early.

One fan of “The Devil’s Casino” is Don Imus, who has talked it up lately on his “Imus in the Morning” radio and TV show. “There is more juicy, salacious, icky stuff in this book than you can put in five books,” he said last month. “I kind of like all the icky stuff in it, . . . all of the stuff going on with the wives and that. And sex and drugs.” Later in the same program, he asked the business journalist Stuart Varney if he was familiar with Ward.

“Somebody just said you are obsessed with her,” Varney said.

“No. No. No. No. I’m not obsessed with her at all,” Imus replied. “I’m begging you to read this. It reads like an intellectual Jackie Collins novel.”

VETERAN’S DAY: It may have taken Karl Marlantes three decades to find a publisher for “Matterhorn,” the Vietnam War novel that Sebastian Junger reviewed on our cover, but it didn’t take even three weeks for the book to become a best seller: it enters the hardcover fiction list this week at No. 7.

Marlantes went to Yale and Oxford (where he was a Rhodes scholar) before shipping out to Vietnam with the Marine Corps. The recipient of a Bronze Star and the Navy Cross, he told The Seattle Times recently that he had started writing the novel in the 1970s, in response to a group of war protesters who yelled obscenities at him when he returned home: “I thought, You don’t know who I am. I wanted people to hear our side of the story. . . . We’re just normal people here; we just had a different kind of luck.”

Early reviews have been enthusiastic. Junger called it “one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war,” while in The Washington Pos, David Masiel said it “makes even the toughest war stories seem a little pale by comparison.”

NOTES: “Bite Me,” Christopher Moore’s third novel about young San Francisco vampires, enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 5, one spot ahead of Seth Grahame-Smith’s supernatural history, “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

Rebecca Skloot’s medical biography, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” is still on the hardcover nonfiction list, at No. 8. That means that Rebecca and her father, Floyd Skloot, are appearing in the same issue of the Book Review: Floyd reviews Jon McGregor’s novel “Even the Dogs” in our April 11 issue. “My mother would have lost her mind,” he said in an e-mail message.

The 10 best credit crunch books

Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street by Andrew Ross Sorkin

Based on more than 500 hours of interviews with more than 200 people, this is a doorstopper account of the crisis, told from the point of view of the Wall Street protagonists. If you want to peek through the keyhole at Park Avenue apartments and sleek black Lexus cars, this is the book for you. Sorkin is long on the inside story of the financial titans, giving a fly-on-the-wall view of key meetings and showdowns, but short on the reforms needed to cut them down to size.

Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream… by Gillian Tett

An elegant and expert account by the UK’s most prescient financial journalist of how bankers at JP Morgan invented the credit derivatives that were perverted into instruments of mass destruction. FT writer Tett, who has a doctorate in social anthropology, is fascinating on how an elite banking “tribe” gained so much power over the rest of society. Readers will have to decide for themselves whether she lets off JP Morgan too lightly.

House of Cards: How Wall Street’s Gamblers Broke Capitalism by William D Cohan

A masterly portrayal of Jimmy Cayne, the bridge-addicted, spliff-smoking boss of Bear Stearns. This account of the 10 days leading to the collapse of the bank is brilliant on the technicalities, and even better on the psychology of the flawed banker/gamblers. Cayne wasn’t the only unorthodox character at the helm of Bear: his predecessor, Ace Greenberg, used an alter ego to harangue staff, and made charitable donations to studiers of dwarfism as well as providers of free Viagra for men who couldn’t afford it.

The Devil’s Casino: Friendship, Betrayal and the High-Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothersby Vicky Ward

A terrific tale of the weird and not‑so‑wonderful world of Lehman Brothers: the personalities, the bonuses, and best of all the backstabbing politics of the Louboutin-shod bankers’ Wags. The now-vilified former CEO, Richard Fuld , is portrayed not just as the aggressive “Gorilla” of Wall Street lore but as a human sponge who absorbed the attributes of smarter colleagues to the point of stealing their entire personality.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

The Canadian writer (above) has taken an erudite look at how the concept of debt is embedded in religion, morality, the law and literature. Her dissection of the complex social relationship between debtor and creditor is masterly, showing how notions of indebtedness go beyond the financial sphere and inform our sense of fairness, obligation and revenge. She draws heavily on literary sources from Goethe’s Faust to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and makes much of notions of debt in the Christian tradition.

A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks

A novelist’s view of how the amorality of financiers such as the main character, odious hedge fund manager John Veals, infects the rest of society. Faulks’s characters live in hermetically sealed, unreal worlds: a young female tube driver is addicted to a fictional version of Second Life, a devout Muslim youth succumbs to the warped logic of Islamic terrorism, and a TV show has mentally disturbed inmates competing to win treatment. Short-selling is rife, not just in the form of Veals’s depraved scheme to bring down a bank, but also in a cynical book reviewer’s trashing of his rivals.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis

In the 1980s, Michael Lewis proved himself a master-chronicler of Wall Street with Liar’s Poker, which laid bare the machismo and excess at Salomon Brothers. More than 20 years on, his sequel shows how little was learned. The twist in this tale is that it is told from the point of view of the “winners” – the handful of men who made huge sums by betting correctly on a meltdown. An unputdownable book, but it’s uncomfortable to identify with people who became indecently rich because their predictions of misery proved right.

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Trollope’s masterpiece, first published in 1875, is not, of course, about the current financial crisis, but its examination of how hopes of easy money can corrupt individuals and sections of society remains relevant today. The appearance of luxury living wipes out moral questioning, and society is vulnerable to the machinations of financial fraudsters because it has lost its sense of values. It is all too easy to imagine the “Great Financier”, Augustus Melmotte (played on TV by David Suchet in 2001 , above), a shadowy, egotistical and tyrannical swindler, at the top of a contemporary investment bank.

Crisis Economics by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm

Crises are not exceptional, but an intrinsic part of capitalism, according to “Dr Doom” Roubini (he prefers to be called Dr Realist), who predicted the banking meltdown and the sovereign debt crisis. Roubini and his co-author walk the reader through past crises, the causes of the current one, the radical remedies needed and the risks ahead if policymakers shirk reform. This is a highly persuasive attack on the neo-conservative ideology that allowed a lightly regulated finance sector to bring the global economy to the brink of ruin. An informative – and terrifying – tome.

Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy by Joseph Stiglitz

Stiglitz, formerly chief economist at the World Bank, is another of the rare dissident voices who did not share the belief in unfettered markets that set the stage for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. He mounts a devastating attack on the financial sector and the politicians and regulators who allowed it to run amok. He argues persuasively that we have so far failed to fix the problem: instead, “we called in the plumbers who installed the plumbing”. The banking industry is still calling the shots.

Legends of the Fall

By GRAHAM BOWLEY JUNE 25, 2010

The fall of Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old firm bankrupted by its hubris and perilous mortgage bets, was one of the defining episodes of the 2008 financial crisis. Its chief executive, Richard S. Fuld Jr., became overnight, in the words of Vicky Ward, “a poster boy for the naked avarice of Wall Street.”

But Dick Fuld is only a shadowy presence in “The Devil’s Casino”; instead, in reporting on the tumultuous demise of Lehman Brothers, Ward has decided to concentrate on four friends who operated just below Fuld in the Lehman hierarchy.

These four — nicknamed the Ponderosa Boys, after the 1960s television show “Bonanza” — carpooled into Manhattan and treadmilled together at the gym. It was their friendship that built a kind of golden era for the firm in the 1980s and ’90s. Eventually, however, it was the Ponderosa Boys’ betrayals and infighting that weakened the bank; Lehman was unable to cope when catastrophe struck.

Ward’s hero is T. Christopher Pettit. A Vietnam veteran, “a prince of a man,” he would become Fuld’s second in command, corralling the Lehman troops for his remote boss, fighting to preserve the firm’s name and culture, until even he was spoiled by success and money. Pettit died in 1997, and Ward’s description of the funeral is telling: “Many of the Lehman people . . . went back to the city in their separate limos, back to their separate intrigues. Some left Pettit in the ground that day; some never forgot him.”

Joseph M. Gregory — “a man as nervous as he was voluble, lithe, with long hair, huge glasses and rope bracelets” — comes across as the villain here. He would climb to become president in 2004. In Ward’s telling, Gregory culled able staff members, blocked successors to Fuld and promoted his own favorites as he beat the drum for greater risk-taking.

“The Devil’s Casino,” well researched, chatty, lively, sets itself up as a successor to “Greed and Glory on Wall Street,” Ken Auletta’s 1986 book about Lehman. But the clichés of business articles are too frequent here: standing ovations on the trading floor, the rich wife’s shoe collection and so on. There are too many names and points of view. One wishes Ward, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, had stuck with her hero, Pettit, and told his story alone. But then that would have ignored the financial crisis, which serves as Gregory’s delicious comeuppance.

Still, as she charts the rivalries of life on Wall Street, Ward entertains with rich detail: the rough-edged Fuld taking elocution lessons and copying the nail-clipping habits of a smoother senior whose job he desires; Henry Kissinger at a board meeting, stirring his iced tea with a pencil.

Ward shows that more than two decades ago, Lehman was developing dodgy habits that would cause trouble later. For example, it used a secret cash cushion known as “Dick’s reserve” to polish its results at the end of each quarter.

The book skillfully depicts the lives lived in the background of great clashing events. And it also hints at what Wall Street has become since the crisis, at the apparent dominance of two survivors, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase.

Ward ends the story before this year’s revelations of the accounting sleight of hand that helped Lehman conceal $50 billion in debt from investors right at the end of its life. Since then have come charges against Goldman Sachs over the products it was selling during the subprime boom. In one wacky final scene, though, Ward contacts Pettit’s spirit, who talks ominously of “creative accounting.” It’s as if her hero, even from the grave, were suggesting we all have more to learn about who exactly did what during those crazy years Ward charts so well.

THE DEVIL’S CASINO

Friendship, Betrayal, and the High-Stakes Games Played Inside Lehman Brothers

By Vicky Ward

Illustrated. 270 pp. John Wiley & Sons. $27.95