when Macklowe said he was going after the GM Building, Horowitz knew immediately whom to call. He began with the bank he was closest to: Deutsche Bank. “Harry very rarely, if ever, spoke to a lender. It was always through me,” he says.
Harry Macklowe and Rob Horowitz did everything together. They golfed most Fridays, they drank, they dined, and they went away on trips, including to Las Vegas. They kept each other's secrets. On December 18, 2002, Macklowe wrote Horowitz a letter, telling him, “You are a great friend, a great supporter, and I love you.”
What really bonded the two men was money. As Macklowe got richer, so did Horowitz. By 2002, Horowitz had made $50 million in fees. “Harry was extraordinarily loyal to me,” he says. “We trusted each other emphatically. We never questioned anything either one of us did. We looked out for each other's interests.
“He once said to me, ‘Rob, don't tell me what you think I want to hear. Tell me what you think.’ Harry and I had disagreements over a number of financings, a number of strategies, but he wants [an honest opinion].”
The way the duo worked was very efficient. Horowitz would visit Macklowe in his office. Macklowe talked; sometimes his son, Billy, would be there, sometimes not. Horowitz scribbled notes with a ballpoint pen on A4 paper. These sheets were usually all that were needed for Horowitz to call the banks and lawyers to draw up the paperwork for deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Macklowe also trusted Horowitz because he knew Horowitz had served other real estate titans well, especially Donald Trump, with whom Harry occasionally golfed and lunched.
Horowitz had started working for Trump in 1996. Trump always let Horowitz breeze into his office without checking in with his vice president and assistant, Rhona Graff. (Macklowe didn't want quite such a loose arrangement. Before walking into Macklowe's office, Horowitz needed to check in with Harry's petite vice president and assistant, Liliana Coriasco, a doppelganger for Audrey Hepburn. Horowitz sometimes joked that this was because no one ever quite knew “what might be going on in Harry's office.”)
Trump was very open with Horowitz. Horowitz knew, for example, that Trump kept his office the way it had been for years – cluttered with piles of papers and photographs and magazine covers of himself on the walls – because he was superstitious and didn't think he should move anything.
If Trump received a letter that amused him, or read an article he found particularly interesting, he often took out a black marker pen and scrawled, editor-like, “ROB H,” and popped the document in the mail for his broker to peruse.
When Trump's daughter Ivanka told her father she intended to convert to Judaism and marry real estate scion Jared Kushner, Trump turned to Horowitz. “How rich is he?”
Horowitz replied, “He's very successful and a good guy. Don't worry about it, Donald.”
To which Trump replied, “Then he has my blessing.”
Horowitz liked Trump immensely but he loved Macklowe. He loved his humor, his elegance, his generosity. It was also extremely “helpful” and not coincidental that Macklowe had the loyalty and trust of Rob Horowitz's closest friend – and client – Eric Schwartz, the U.S. head of real estate at Deutsche Bank, one of the biggest lenders in the world. It didn't hurt that Schwartz and Sorin were longtime friends. Schwartz, Macklowe, and the two Robs often played golf together. Horowitz sometimes jokingly describes the foursome as a truncated version of Ocean's Eleven.
But the friendship was complicated, hierarchical. Sorin explains the way it worked as follows: “Rob Horowitz is very good at what he does. He is Harry's confidant and he is Deutsche Bank's confidant… Everybody knows that Rob's playing both these roles, but.. it's often easier to negotiate through someone [that way]. Both sides can use Rob as a conduit to negotiate without having to face each other directly. When you're in a relationship as a lender and a borrower, everybody wants to be buddy-buddy.”
Schwartz, a former lawyer and Moody's Investors Service analyst, liked working with Macklowe and the Robs. He believed he always understood where they were coming from and where they were aiming. He liked that Macklowe developed only in a market the bank felt he truly understood: New York City.
But most important from Schwartz's perspective, Macklowe always offered his business to Deutsche Bank first. “Harry is a serial entrepreneur,” Schwartz says. “He needs a lot of people around him who are loyal – that's how entrepreneurs work.”
For Macklowe, earning Schwartz's trust was crucial. He was the conduit to the rest of the bank's real estate team: they included Jon Vaccaro, Deutsche Bank's Global Head of Commercial Real Estate; Justin Kennedy, a Stanford University graduate and son of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy; and Tobin “Toby” Cobb, the son of an ambassador.
But when Horowitz called Schwartz about the GM Building, he was surprised to learn that his friends at Deutsche Bank had a conflict and couldn't back Macklowe. They were backing Vornado Realty Trust, the massive public REIT founded and run by Macklowe's friend, helicopter co-owner – and nemesis – Steven “Steve” Roth.
In some ways this was understandable.
Vornado was a public company with a market capitalization of more than $5 billion. Given the amount of debt that would need to be raised for this deal, Vornado was a far more credible bidder than a solo developer like Macklowe. But there was also another, more human factor. Vornado held a card that, for Deutsche Bank, would always trump Macklowe. His name was Michael “Mike” D. Fascitelli.
Fascitelli was a good-looking, fit Italian-American who had grown up in a “rough” neighborhood in Rhode Island. He was irreverent and irrepressible. Until 1996 he'd run the real estate department at Goldman Sachs, where he had trained, among others, Justin Kennedy and Toby Cobb. They adored him. He still used the vernacular of his youth and computed complex figures faster than most people can make a call on their iPhone. He had few pretensions. He called things exactly – and hilariously – as he saw them.
In 1996, Steve Roth realized he needed a second in command, someone with credibility, leadership, and charisma – and he had seen these qualities in Fascitelli. Roth paid Fascitelli $50 million to run Vornado as its president.
Since then, it was no secret that Fascitelli kept trying – and trying – to buy the GM Building. The files of paperwork representing the countless hours he spent on the structure took up the most shelf space in his office. “She's like the girl you keep asking to the prom but says no,” he joked. “And each time you ask, she gets more expensive.”
Her price was what worried him in 2003. He told Eric Schwartz he wanted Deutsche Bank to finance Vornado's bid – but he wouldn't pay “stupid money.” If Harry Macklowe was prepared to “blow us all out of the water,” let him – and Fascitelli would try to come at the building through a back door. That's how this game worked.
Meanwhile, Harry Macklowe needed to figure out how to claim his prize with a lender other than Deutsche Bank.
Robert “Rob” Verrone was in Harry Macklowe's office with Rob Horowitz in the summer of 2003 when Macklowe said: “I'm going to bid for the GM Building. Will you lend us the money?”
This was the moment Verrone had been angling for since being promoted, in 2001, to run Wachovia's loans department. His eagerness to establish Wachovia as a major lender in real estate circles had earned him the sobriquet “Large Loan” Verrone.
Verrone was not a member of the Fascitelli-trained club that filled the
