Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 43

RENOATLARG BUSINESS We Licked Nagging Problem Of Richard Nixon Troubled Properties Catch Minskoff Eye DEVELOPER from Page A41 huge he said last spring declining to elaborate Thinking big about somebody disaster is what Minskoff does best time to do business is sometimes in the worst he said an attitude akin to Baron Nathan reputed assertion that the time to buy is when blood is running in the streets In 1976 the real estate market in Manhattan was horrible as wondered if corporations wou tinue moving out of a dty beset by garbage strikes and the threat of bankruptcy Minskoff approached Paul Reichmann the key player in a family of Toronto-based real estate developers operating as Olympia York and argued that the city would recover and that there was money to be made buying a portfolio of so-so office buildings being offered at distress-sale prices He told the Reichmanns that as leases in the buildings came up for renewal they would be rewritten at rapidly rising rates The Reichmanns bought eight buildings paying about $50 million in cash and assuming nearly $300 million in mortgages Minskoff was quickly proven right and the Reichmanns became billionaires was one of the all-time great purchases of US real recounted one industry veteran Then Minskoff scouted Battery Park City the publicly owned site on landfill near the World Trade Center where development plans were stalled Minskoff helped the Reichmanns craft a winning proposal to quickly erect Die four office towers now known as the World Financial Center He doggedly pursued tenants for the center working on some of the biggest and most complex office transactions in history said John Cushman IH president of Cushman Realty Corp In deals with Merrill lynch and American Express Olympia ft York agreed to buy their old buildings if they would move into the new financial center Outside of New York Minskoff helped Olympia ft York develop projects in eight other ILS cities Those transactions enriched Minskoff In 1981 he persuaded the Reichmanns to let him buy 15 percent of their UJS holdings for $10 million with money borrowed from Olympia ft York Cash distributions from the properties helped him quickly pay off the debt To top it off he left the Reichmanns in 1986 when they began slowing down their US development meaning he cashed out before the Reichmanns lost their empire by mortgaging it to finance a huge London development that failed Minskoff talk about how much money he made Court records from a dispute with a former partner suggest he made more than $40 million pretax when he left Olympia ft York He was one of only two outsiders the intensely private family let in as owners He got the stake one observer recalled The repeated redemption of Richard Nixon has become a process with a curious life of its own proceeding against odds that suggest he was a figure somehow contradictory of everything we know about him It began I suppose with his triumphant election as vice president in 1952 following an early career in which his unoriginal opportunistic red-baiting and his slush fund scandal would seemed to have condemned him to a destiny as one of the marginal political figures of the "150 There followed its (for the presidency in 1960 and the Cel lr-nia governorship 1962) but by 1968 there was Nixon ascendant again the leader of the free world From the subsequent depths of Watergate in 1974 there arose in the following 20 years the myth of the flawed but wise Nixon assiduously promoted by his will-ingness to give anyone H6I10 free counsel by his books and by his own perverse sense of contrition expressed best perhaps in his abject apologies for all the cussing and profanity he was recorded spewing from the oval office The cult of the redeemed Nixon was fully celebrated at his funeral in tearful eulogies as sincere as Bob and as pretentious as Henry But there closely followed the publication of the Haldeman diaries which it seemed effectively blew out of the water for all time the notion that Nixon was anything but a caricature of mendacity Against the shrieking banality of the Nixon in the diaries Dr suggestion that Nixon was an took on the laughable ripeness a great manipulator having his little joke on history At some point both his tormentors and his apologists are simply going to have to give up on Nixon and let him rest How much peace can there be on the other hand for somebody who excelled in nothing so much as the tridr of having extraordinarily good hick and still proceeded to make an utter mess out of his life not in the quiet ways most of us do but on the stage of history But not before the United States Postal Service has another go at elevating this man to the pedestal that so ill serves him like a Styrofoam god set in a plinth of gold Yes going to issue a stamp honoring Nixon This is an act fraught with problems not the least of which is that it could provoke the Willie Sutton Society or the Aaron Burr League to demand equal philatelic recognition It brought a protest this week from Rep William Clay chairman of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee who wondered at logic of honoring this disgraced His indignation might have made sense back when the postage stamps of the United States were regarded as adhesive symbols of the dignity of a great nation Maybe now that they are issuing stamps honoring Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and marketing them like baseball cards it much matter who they put on a stamp Not that Marilyn and Elvis ever lied to Congress obstructed justice or perverted the constitution and laws to effect the ruin of their enemies I understand they are delaying issue of the stamp until right after the pending portal rate increase takes place sometime next year No surprise the new math The managers of our corporatized postal service apparently have decided that charging more tor a Nixon stamp will somehow offset this cheapening of the mails NmdarAka Ua IBM building purchased by Minskoff and other investors through "his normal persistent He had learned to work for his standing in the New York real estate business early on- His father Leo the eldest son of patriarch Sam split from his brothers and left town Edward Minskoff grew up in Washington DC in Westchester and in a New Jersey boarding school When he was a teenager his father moved to Southern California and began developing real estate Minskoff attended Michigan State University close to his mother who had moved to Detroit Then he went to UCLA took graduate courses in real estate and helped manage the construction of two apartment buildings for his father He left for New York in 1967 to become a leasing broker for Cushman ft Wakefield He then turned down his offer of a job If the offer had carried the potential to become an owner he might have considered it was in my late 20s and unless I was going to be a principal in that company and maybe run it someday I had no interest in going Minskoff said like to be in After two years of leasing at Cushman Minskoff went to Lehman Brothers to learn who was investing in real estate and how to structure financing Cushman and Lehman were stepping-stones and no he said Minskoff was one of the founding members several years ago of the Atlantic Golf Club in the Hamptons where he has a home The club was started because waiting periods for membership at three other mqjor clubs were several years long To have a club of their own the first 100 members including Minskoff some financiers and investment bankers put up $100000 each are few people who know more than Eddie said one former business partner Ed needed to know someone he found a way to know them When Ed would spend his weekends as a golfer he made sure he was playing witii the right New Stock Listings New stock and mutual fluid tables debut this week in the Business section made the type larger and easier to read also added more information with different data in the left-hand column each day To make room the stocks of some smaller companies and funds were dropped If you don't see your stock well try to find room for it by the end of the week Call us from 10 am to 2 pun In New York call (212) 251-6600 on Long Island can (516) 843-2800 1.