The Gift That Keeps On Giving In the fall of 1998, twenty-five years ago, my long-time friend and partner, Bruce had an idea. A group of us had invested with Bruce in a company founded and run by two of his friends a year or so earlier, and now that our firm was selling itself to the big German bank Deutsche Bank, most of us were thinking about our next act. To put it into…
Still Skating on Thin Ice As some of you know by now, I spent six years working on building the New York Wheel on New York Harbor. There are lots of stories about those times that involved figuring out how to finance and refinance this massive attraction, working through significant partnership wrangles, seeking and getting approvals from the City and the Borough of Staten Island not to mention every imaginable agency in between (Federal, State…
Cashing the Check For my many years in senior management on Wall Street, friends would regularly tell me that I was too nice for Wall Street. That was a polite way of saying that I was a pussy and refused to treat people harshly. Don’t get me wrong, I have had to downstaff thousands of people over the years, but I also always gave people the benefit of the doubt and tried never to take…
Russian Garden It’s a crisp Saturday morning in late October and I have nothing on my agenda today before going with Kim to a Halloween party this evening. For that party, I will be dressing up as I have several years past as a Russian. This is less a political statement on my part than it is an attempt to make sense out of keeping a large Russian fur hat that I acquired 35 years…
In the Still of Autumn Is it just me or has everything sort of gone quiet all of a sudden? I know the world is on the precipice primarily because of the Israel/Hamas/Gaza situation as Israel pauses before making a ground incursion into Gaza. I know that the fighting Ukraine continues, but that Ukrainian fighters are infiltrating Crimea and sending more an more drones to attack Russian positions in Eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself.…
What’s Up With Ping Pong? When I was a kid of about five years old, we lived in Costa Rica, which meant that many of the standard American games and conventions were missing from our daily lives. We had bikes and simple toys, but we would do crazy things that the local kids did for fun like dragging a dead snake behind a bicycle. I don’t really remember whether my mother remembered to bring things…
Truth or Consequences For almost fifty years, America listened or watched a show that was designed to make average people do crazy things if they did not properly answer some obscure trivia question. It was called Truth or Consequences in both the radio and TV incarnations. Just to be sure that their plans for zaniness did not get derailed, the producers layered their questions so that they were always more complex and impossible to answer…
The Family Jewels Among all the other issues we face these days, there remains one underlying issue that always manages to bubble up when the going gets tough. This may be just my own sensibilities, but it has to do with guns. Just to review the facts, there are supposedly 393 million privately owned guns in America. There are about 260 million adults (people over 18 years old), so that would seem like 1.5 guns…
Bagel Run In my family there is a legend that goes back to my days of owning a house in the Hamptons (technically in the town of Quiogue, which means “little clam” in the language of the native Montaukett tribe). I owned that house from 1989 until 2003 and used it as my weekend respite where I would take my children for our time together. We spent time in the pool, we built a treehouse…
Little Maxie Back in 2012 (hard to believe that was 11 years ago!) I was just starting work on the New York Wheel project. That seems like a lifetime ago at this point, but then I was living with Kim at our South Street Seaport condo and as of late July, I was on payroll as the CEO of New York Wheel, which had offices at 19 State Street, a curved glass high rise building…