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One of New York’s most secretive real estate families is now at war with itself. In November, several members of the Goldman family, heirs to Sol Goldman and Soril Management’s real estate portfolio, announced that Goldman’s de facto head, Goldman’s youngest daughter and Solil co-founder, The company sued its chairman, Jane Goldman. The lawsuit is shaping up to be a real-life succession battle, with Jane sidelining other family members after her brother Alan died last year, and the number of buildings that once included Chrysler and Cartier buildings. He has been accused of mismanagement of billions of dollars worth of assets. .Plaintiff, Jane’s sister Amy Goldman Fowler and her late brother’s three children blatantly touted the company’s value while Jane exercised ironclad control over the family’s stock holdings and even secretly monitored employees. He claims that he is defrauding them of money. circuit tv. Her “deep-seated sense of entitlement is matched only by her paranoia,” they claim in the lawsuit.
The family has kept a low profile since the late 1980s, when they were the city’s largest landowners. Rather than develop buildings, Sol Goldman, who named the company after himself and his wife Lillian, collects ground rent from trophy buildings like the Stanhope Hotel and buys rental properties. , focused on building large land agglomerations. “The key is not to sell anything,” Goldman said. forbes “Every time I sell, I’m sorry.” Despite the turmoil of the 1970s, when the Chrysler Building was foreclosed, the family still owns significant land worth billions across Manhattan, including large swaths of Midtown.
After Sol’s death in 1987, no flashy family drama was stirred up for years, but the family remained silent for decades. That was until the latest lawsuit brought them back into the spotlight. So who are the Goldman family, what do they own, and what are they fighting over?
What is this new lawsuit about? Jane’s sister Amy and nephew Stephen Gurney-Goldman claim Jane usurped power after Alan died last year, The Real Deal reported. They say the company will be jointly operated by all four branches of the family.
The lawsuit also alleges that Jane was responsible for undervaluing the family’s real estate portfolio in an attempt to buy the family’s stock for less than it was worth. After years of wrangling over control of the company’s 250 properties, the family devised a stock buyback program that “could be converted into cash by selling the shares back to the family company,” according to The Real Deal. However, the value of the stock is determined by an appraiser, who also works for Soril. Other heirs dispute the fact that the portfolio, originally valued at $2.6 billion, was reduced by $500 million after a series of adjustments.
The lawsuit also accuses Jane of being a micromanager and “spending his days watching live footage of the company’s employees through high-tech surveillance systems similar to those on casino floors,” according to The Real Deal. .
Naturally, Jane objects to this. “It is unfortunate that the plaintiffs have resorted to sensational and unsubstantiated claims in their campaign to extract an unfair advantage for themselves,” her attorney Jason Silnik said in a statement to The Real Deal.
What is the history of the company? In 1939, Sol Goldman, the 17-year-old son of a Brooklyn grocer, used the $5,000 he had saved from his bar mitzvah and neighborhood jobs to buy out his father’s failing grocery store. . After squeezing the profits from the store, he began buying up foreclosed buildings for $5,000 each, and teamed up with a childhood friend to build buildings throughout Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan in the 1950s, according to a 1980s article in the magazine. built an empire in 60s. The company’s holdings, a web hidden under an LLC, were so notoriously secretive that in 1972 a German artist created a landmark work that mapped all 350 of Goldman’s assets. Created.
The Goldmans enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, living in Manhattan hotel suites and taking ferries between the city and their Long Island mansion in two Rolls-Royces, but Sol was the notoriously cheap patriarch. It is said that new york. (Once, during a reconciliation dinner with his wife Lillian, he allegedly overruled her when she tried to order fresh raspberries for dessert because the meal came with a free cookie.)
The company went into financial trouble in the 1970s when real estate values plummeted and the company was unable to repay many of its mortgage debts, but bounced back in the 1980s when asset values recovered. The building is now worth more than his $2 billion and includes the land below the Gramercy Park Hotel and the midtown block that includes the Olympic Tower, the Cartier mansion, and the Peninsula Hotel. forbes.
Who is the rest of the family? Sol and Lillian met in 1941 and were married seven months later. They had four children: Alan, Diane, Amy and Jane.Lillian said new york According to the magazine, Sol had a harsh attitude towards her only son Alan – “Sol didn’t like boys,” she said – and her partner complained about the quality of Alan’s work. As a result, Sol reportedly kicked Alan out of the business. Alan eventually returned to the family business, but it was Jane who emerged as his successor before his father died. “Jane decided he knew how to do things better than anyone else,” Lillian said. new york In the 1980s.
This isn’t your first succession battle, right? When Sol died in 1987, Sol and Lillian had been divorced several times. Lillian’s children have filed suit against her, arguing that because Lillian abandoned her father, she is not entitled to the one-third of her estate that she was promised in a recently made agreement. tried to remove it from her will. But they have spent years arguing that the agreement is valid because otherwise Lilian could have been entitled to half of the portfolio. At the time, the dispute over the family’s assets made national headlines. (Adding to the drama, Alan’s estranged daughters from his first marriage also sued to get their fair share.) Its value is estimated at $1 billion to $2 billion, and it has been It became the richest property ever to be contested in court. It dwarfs Johnson & Johnson’s $500 million fortune by several orders of magnitude. Lillian’s one-third agreement was ultimately upheld, but when she died in 2002, her estate was divided among her four children. forbes.
In 1989, Alan’s estranged daughter Cindy told a Los Angeles newspaper. times That money was always used to control people in the family. As the paper put it, that meant “if they behaved, they were handed out; if they didn’t, they were taken away.”
What has happened since then? After that battle, almost nothing is known about the family.Jane reportedly gave her final interview to The Real Deal In 2008 she said: It gives me a glimpse into the bigger picture of who my father was and what he accomplished. ” The family continues to earn most of their income from renting apartments and land, and they have not made any flashy purchases or sales in recent years, so they have hardly been in the news. until now.