The Art of The Deal

The third possibility is that Holiday may eventually offer to buy back my shares, at a premium, simply to get rid of me.

If you do foreclose, I'll personally bring a lawsuit for murder against you and your bank, on the grounds that you harassed Mrs. Hill's husband to his death.

I'm pretty sure Charlie Goldstein is from the Bronx, but he's a very pompous guy and has a tendency to act like royalty, so I call him Sir Charles.

Nicholas Ribis, a New Jersey attorney who handled the licensing of both my Atlantic City casinos, calls to say he's about to leave for Sydney, Australia, to pursue a deal I'm considering.

I meet with the contractors in charge of building my 2700-space parking garage and transportation center across the street from Trump Plaza on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City.

"What do you think", I ask him, "about just selling out Holiday shares right now, taking a profit, and the rethinking a takeover bid after I get licensed?"

I'll say this much: I wouldn't bet against her.

Cadillac, it turns out, is interested in cooperating in the production of a new superstretch limousine that would be named the Trump Golden Series.

He says that if the city had tried to undertake the current renovation by itself, "we would now be awaiting Board of Estimate approval for what Donald Trump has already done."

On the other hand, I don't want to rule out anything.

He happens to be a very charming guy--wonderful looking, wonderfully dressed, with one of those great Texas drawls that make you feel very comfortable

Still, I figure it's not a bad way to promote Trump Tower--on national television, in a miniseries that runs during sweeps week and is virtually guaranteed to get huge national ratings.

I also point out that as a practical matter, Cuomo is going to win re-election by a landslide, and that it's a lot better to side with a winner than a loser.

I walk over to the Wollman Rink, to watch the pouring of the concrete.

I don't know if the reason was his Germanic style, or the fact that he is based in Chicago rather than New York, or just that he's a little too slick.

Ivana and I have been invited, by John Cardinal O'Connor, to have dinner at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
He's one of Lee Iacocca's best friends, and he's the person who recommended to the cardinal that he meet with me to discuss real estate and get to know each other better.

I'm going to be building when everyone else has gone bust.

John D'Alessio, the construction manager on my triplex in Trump Tower, comes by to discuss the progress.

"Tell me the truth," Letterman says after a few minutes of bantering.

Sometimes I settle for less than I sought, but in most cases I still end up with what I want.

Somewhere out there are a few men with more innate talent at golf than Jack Nicklaus, or women with greater ability at tennis than Chris Evert or Martina Navratilova, but they will never lift a club or swing a racket and therefore will never find out how great they could have been.

THey're obsessive, they're driven, they're single-minded and sometimes they're almost maniacal, but it's all channeled into their work.

I lost time, but I also kept my exposure much lower.

Instead, I switched to my second option and began promoting the site as ideal for a convention center.

In my opinion, they mostly write to impress each other, and they're just as swayed by fashions as anyone else.

My leverage came from confirming an impression they were already predisposed to believe.

I also point out that buildings like Trump Tower have helped spark New York's renaissance.

You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole.

All he has to show for his efforts is a rusting half-built frame and tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues and squandered carrying costs.

I learned about toughness in a very tough business, I learned about motivating people, and I learned about competence and efficiency: get in, get it done, get it done right, and get out.

My father's mother, Elizabeth, went to work as a seamstress to support her three children.

They were gobbled up as fast as he could build them.

Perhaps because my father never got a college degree himself, he continued to view people who had one with a respect that bordere on awe.

I'd throw water balloons, shoot spitballs, and make a ruckus in the schoolyard and at birthday parties.

Every morning at six, he'd be there at the site and he would just pound and pound and pound.

In 1949, when I was just three years old, my father began building Shore Haven Apartments, the first of several large apartment complexes that eventually made him one of the biggest landlords in New York's outer boroughs.

You had no choice but to pinch pennies, and there was no room for any luxuries.

In college, while my friends were reading the comics and the sports pages of newspapers, I was reading the listings of FHA foreclosures.

They would just destroy the apartments and wreak havoc on the property.

The next thing we did was rip out the cheap, horrible aluminum front doors on the apartments and put up beautiful colonial white doors.

It turned out that Irving had done all sorts of con jobs and swindles, and he'd often been in trouble with the law.

He was Jewish, an older man who'd been in a concentration camp in Poland.

I put the job up for sale, and almost immediately we got an offer.

But, as I said, the REITs were hot to trot, and they couldn't make deals fast enough.

Some were vain, some were crazy, some were wild, and many of them were phonies.

I liked that and so then I said, "I'm just not built that way. I'd rather fight than fold, because as soon as you fold once, you get the reputation of being a folder."

He felt that to the average person, being gay was almost synonymous with being a wimp.

One of the pieces of property that had always fascinated me was the huge abandoned railyard along the Hudson River beginning at 59th Street and extending all the way up to 72nd Street.

Even on the tough side streets, like West 84th, there were magnificent old brownstones only a few steps away from Central Park.

He's almost a throwback to the nineteenth century as a promoter.

Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.

But there was scarcely an approving peep from the politicians.

Its namesake wasn't thrilled.

Instead, the city and state decided to oversee the job--and the result was perhaps the most horrendous construction delays and cost overruns in the history of the building business.

Even if the convention center is ultimately a success, it can never earn back all the money that was unnecessarily squandered to build it.

The brick facade of the Commodore was absolutely filthy, and the lobby was so dingy it looked like a welfare hotel.

My idea, from the beginning, was to build a new skin directly over the brick--bronze, if it could be done economically, or glass.

He can be fun-loving when he's relaxed, but mostly he's tough and sharp, and he plays very close to the vest.

On May 4, 1975, we called a joint press conference and announced that we'd agree, as partners, to purchase, gut, and fully renovate the Commodore--assuming we could get financing and tax abatement.

We gave this guy every argument in the world, and after listening, he didn't flinch and he didn't move.

The whole arrangement was subject to approval by the city's Board of Estimate, which met to consider it for the first time in late December 1975.

But while other hotel owners were great at carping, not one of them made an alternative offer to the Commodore.

I could have saved millions and millions of dollars just by refurbishing the old Commodore rather than creating a brand-new building.

What he did was the perfect ploy, because he got what he wanted not by fighting but by being positive and friendly and solicitous.

What they had in common was brilliance, but where Jay keeps very much to himself, A.N. was extremely effusive and outgoing, almost a teddy bear.

It was not an auspicious start, my meeting with Franklin Jarman.

I was trying to get the Grand Hyatt of the ground, and I was still fighting for my convention center site, and nothing had yet gelled.

That's often the situation in New York real estate, but in this case I was dealing with an exceptionally prestigious, visible unusually difficult, and very carefully scrutinized.

I'd seen him at parties, and he was a man with impeccable manners, perfect white hair, beautifully tailored suits, and an imperial style.

Walter Hoving was just a totally honorable, totally classy man.

One reason I'd felt Brooklyn and my father's business was to escape rent control, and so from the start Leonard and I had an affinity.

In addition, he gave me control over the disposition of the land when the hotel's lease comes up in approximately twenty-five years.

But now the rumors were circulating, and I had a seller who was balking.

Specifically, the total square footage of a building can be no more than a certain multiple of the square footage of the building lot.

But the way I figured it, even if the atrium wasn't terribly successful, the bonus I'd get for building it--several extra floors in my residential tower--would more than make up for its cost.

It was hideous: a thin little four-sided box going straight up eighty stories, cantilevering over Tiffany's.

As soon as that happened, politicians had a knee-jerk reaction: they latched on to the cause.

The commission said it would have preferred a masonry facade for Trump Tower, as more compatible with neighboring buildings, but added that they didn't insist, in light of the fact that I would be providing "extraordinary public amenities."

Finally, we came upon something called Breccia Perniche, a rare marble in a color none of us had ever seen before--an exquisite blend of rose, peach, and pink that literally took our breath away.

I would have made the windows all the way from floor to ceiling, but I was told that unless there is at least some base below a window, some people get vertigo.

As prince Charles walked into Lincoln Center for a concert one evening, hundreds of protestors stood outside, hissing and screaming and throwing bottles.

What can you say about a guy who goes around selling nuclear technology to the highest bidder? It's the lowest anyone can stoop.

Originally, I decided to take one of the three penthouse triplexes on the top floors--about 12,000 square feet in all--for my family.

But it turned out that while a wealthy woman might pay thousands of dollars for a piece of jewelry or an evening gown at a shop next door, she was not willing to shell out $3,000 for a pair of Loewe's leather pants, no matter how soft and buttery they might feel.

I called Koch and told him I thought the ruling was unfair, that I wasn't about to give up, and that the city was going to waste a huge amount of money litigating a case I'd eventually win.

I tried to explain that one of the key reasons for the success of the atrium is that is was so impeccably well-run.

I've never had any great moral problems with gambling because most of the objections seem hypocritical to me.

Sure enough, the referendum passed in November 1976 and was signed into law by the middle of 1977.

In addition, the site was directly alongside the convention center, the largest space available for conventions and major entertainment--and a potential funnel into any casino built next door.

Image spending $300 million or $400 million on a gleaming, glamorous new facility--but building it around a rotting five-room shack.

Rather than trying to purchase the pieces outright, I sought very long leases with options to purchase at a later date.

The director tried to walk a tightrope. "Well, we'll do our best," he said, "but it may take a year."

Hearings for other companies had sometimes dragged on for six to eight weeks.

Nonetheless, I decided to play a little coy.

Two things intrigued me immediately about Holiday Inns.

After all, I thought, what the hell did I know about running a huge casino-hotel anyway?

But under the agreement I finally made to buy out Holiday's share, I am precluded from saying anything in detail about those conflicts.

By relieving me of personal financial liability, it assured I'd sleep better at night.

I assume arbitrageurs were buying up the stock, figuring that either I'd make a move for control, or someone else would.

To the contrary, I watched with some dismay the progress of construction.

Hungry to start recouping its investment as soon as possible, Hilton began construction at the same time it filed for a gaming license.

As one of the commissioners who voted against licensing Hilton put it later, "The corporation apparently didn't get religion until it was pounding on the pearly gates of licensure."

There are times when you have to be aggressive, but there are also times when your best strategy is to lie back.

Conrad's Will had specified that if for any reason the foundation was unable to accept his stock bequest, Barron had the right to purchase the stock at its market value as of 1979.

Wynn grew up in his father's bingo parlor, the son of a compulsive gambler.

Barron, by this time, was almost rabid in his hatred of New Jersey and particularly Atlantic City.

In return for a percentage of the total offering, they would guarantee to find buyers for the bonds at a specified price.

On the other hand, I was eager to resolve the matter amicably.

She has systematically hired the best people in Atlantic City at all levels--from croupiers to hosts to her top executives.

The way to derive the most value from the site, I believed, was to knock down both buildings and to construct in their place one huge, beautiful modern luxury condominium tower.

I soon came to understand a simple axiom: the lower the rent, the bigger the apartment, and the better the loccation, the harder people will fight to keep what they have.

Fashion designer Arnold Scaasi, for example, has a six-room duplex facing the park, for which he is paying $985 a month--about what it costs to rent a one-room studio at market rates.

Of course, he also had something very valuable to protect: a beautiful two-bedroom parkview apartment for which he paid a very modest rent.

Then they hire thugs to come in with sledgehammers and smash up the boiler, rip out the stairways, and create floods by cutting holes in pipes.

In another situation, we failed to give a tenant sufficient legal notice of an impending eviction proceeding.

They even ended their letters with the same phrase: "Donald Trump is a modern-day Scrooge."

At the time I purchased the buildings on Central Park South, the style in skyscrapers was still very much the sleek, highly modern glass tower.

Several times they made deals with other buyers, presumably for what they were seeking, only to have the agreements unravel before closing.

In December 1986, the appellate division of the state supreme court unanimously upheld the lower court's ruling.

At the same time, the new construction gave the building several advantages over most older ones: new plumbing, smooth walls, modern wiring, fast elevators--and, of course, huge Thermopane windows.

For less than $6 million, contingent on the league's continuing--compared with the $70 million an NFL franchise might cost--I was able to purchase a professional football team in one of the greatest areas in the world.

If the suit went to a jury and we were awarded reasonable damages--particularly given the fact that any damage award is trebled in an antitrust case--we'd have the financial base we needed.

Herschel was obviously one, but in football, the team rises or falls on the quarterback.

Porter bluntly outlined a multipart plan for declaring total war on our league, by employing numerous anticompetitive strategies.

To me, that was preposterous.

Flutie made his debut on February 24, in an away game against the Birmingham Stallions.

What followed was a tirade.

Myerson pressed, and Rozelle got flustered.

What really happened at the meeting is that Rozelle tried to woo me, plain and simple.

Now, after reading about this latest debacle, I called Henry again and repeated my offer.

Almost nothing gets them as outraged as a boondoggle that victimizes average citizens.

The other option, which had been used in hundreds of skating rinks for decades, was a brine system, in which salt water is circulated through the pipes.

The result was that the pouring of all concrete--including the concrete meant to form the rink's base--was held up nine months while a debate over the sidewalk raged on.

It proved unable to sustain pressure for long enough to create ice because it turned out that there were leaks in the pipes beneath the concrete slab.

They hadn't the faintest idea what it entailed.

On September 11, a convoy of cement trucks arrived and we began to continuous pour that lasted ten hours.

A crew of perhaps a half dozen men came, among them a park horticulturist to supervise the job.

The Daily News, noting one particularly snide comment Stern made, snapped back in an editorial.

I don't deny that these laws put a crimp on the city, but I believe a far bigger problem is leadership.

At the time, as I've said, the city was on the verge of bankruptcy, and the West Side was hardly considered a great place to live.

The city, eager to get all it could in return for approving the project, asked Macri for concession after concession.

He still didn't seem fazed.

As it turned out, Macri retained his dream of proceeding with the project, and several months later he called and asked me to let him rescind his letter of intent.

I also envisioned a huge retail shopping promenade on the ground level, along the riverfront in front of the buildings.

He was a bit of a dandy personally, a very good promoter, and he'd gotten very good notices for some very daring work.

It gave the project an instant mystique.

It irritates me that critics, who've neither designed nor built anything themselves, are given carte blanche to express their views in the pages of major publications, whereas the targets of their criticism are almost never offered space to respond.

Adding several thousand more hardly represents development run amok.

Finally, the study found that any added vehicular congestion in the area--a major concern among some critics--could be eased by improvements in local subways and the addition of a jitney service, which I'd already proposed.

We had our differences, but I quickly discovered that Alex had far grander instincts than many people realized, and we got along better professionally than most people assumed we would.

The project must work its way through the city approval process, where anything from bureaucratic inertia to political cowardice can kill it.

Bally responded by adopting poison pill provisions aimed at thwarting any attempt at a hostile takeover.

In a short period of time, operating in a glutted market for condominiums in southern Florida, we sold or sale/leased nearly fifty units and managed to turn a bankrupt operation into a big success story.

I heard later that Davis was incensed by my remark, but I can't say I felt bad.

I decided against setting up a separate fund to buy distressed real estate, using money raised from outside investors.