On a warm May afternoon in 2014, when he was thirty-three years old, the owner of a New York newspaper, already having negotiated ten billion dollars in real estate deals, Jared Kushner received an honorary degree from Hofstra University. The degree was a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa. His father, Charles Kushner, had graduated from Hofstra Law School thirty-five years prior and subsequently donated enough money that the university installed him on its board of trustees, renamed the law school building Kushner Hall, and established the Joseph Kushner Distinguished Professorship in Civil Liberties Law.
“I want to dedicate this speech . . . to my dad,” Jared Kushner said. “Growing up, my father told me about his experience on the day of his graduation and how his father, who was an immigrant and a Holocaust survivor, pulled him aside under a tree and said, ‘You know, son, as I learned in my life, you know, I saw with the Nazis—they took everything from me. They took my family, they took my money, but nobody can ever take away your education.’ And I think that’s a lesson that obviously is very important for all of you today.” In Kushner’s Jersey accent “today” came out as “t’da-eey.”
“We grew up with a very hard-working mentality in our family, the immigrant mentality really went its way down,” he continued. “And my father was always working, and if we wanted to spend time with my dad we’d go to work with him. So, from when I was four years old, a lot my friends were going to football games with their dads on Sundays, I’d be in the back of his car with him going to construction sites and job sites.”1 Jared liked to tell this story and told it often. “I’d be in the back of my dad’s car with my pair of mini construction boots,” was how he described it in a 2009 interview.2
Real estate, he said at Hofstra, “really got into my blood.”
Born on January 10, 1981, Jared Corey Kushner was the firstborn son of devout Modern Orthodox Jews, in a religion with strict gender roles. Nine days later, on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, Charlie’s younger sister Esther also gave birth to a son, Jacob Schulder. When they were born, Iran had not yet released its American hostages, Reagan had not yet declared government the enemy. In New Jersey, a smiling Joseph Kushner, in his late fifties, posed for a photo with his two grandsons, baby Jared and baby Jacob, on his knees.
The enormous house in Livingston, New Jersey, where Jared lived as a child, stood on a quiet suburban street behind a thatch of trees and a stone wall surrounded by elegant landscaping. The house, which would eventually grow to comprise eighteen rooms and seven thousand square feet, contained an enormous glass atrium and a floor-to-ceiling fireplace.3 When Jared was born, Chris Christie and David Wildstein had recently graduated from Livingston High School.
When Jared was one, his uncle Murray, widowed with two young boys, remarried Lee Warshow Serwitz and adopted her two young children. Until he left for Harvard, Jared lived around the corner from four cousins, the children of Murray and Lee Kushner—Jonathan, Aryeh, Marc, and Melissa—and a ten-minute drive from his other cousins, Jessica, Jacob, and Ruth, the children of Esther and Billy Schulder. Linda’s children were older, but they all spent Shabbat together, walked to synagogue on Saturdays, attended the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy together. Their sports jerseys said “Kushner” on the front and “Kushner” on the back.
By the time Jared was thirteen both he and his father, Charlie, were feeling the siren pull of Manhattan, where Rudy Giuliani had just been elected mayor. Jared’s black-tie bar mitzvah was held at a midtown Manhattan hotel. Hundreds of people attended, including members of the New York Giants football team. A central part of the bar mitzvah is reading a portion of the Torah. Jared’s portion was Beshalach, the part of the Exodus story where God parts the Red Sea for the Israelites and then allows the waters to flood the pursuing Egyptian army.
Afterwards, Rae Kushner was proud. “Jared is my favorite grandchild,” she said at the reception. A week later, Jacob Schulder’s bar mitzvah was held in New Jersey, also black tie, but with no members of the New York Giants in attendance. “Jacob is my favorite grandchild,” Rae said.
For high school, both boys attended the prestige school for Modern Orthodox children: The Frisch School in Paramus, a thirty-minute drive from Livingston. Frisch was highly regimented. Students were put into tracks: “H” was the lowest, “K” was honors, “L” was highest honors. In a class of a little over one hundred, students were keenly aware of the rankings. Jared claims he was in honors classes and AP classes, but in interviews, people in the K or L classes could not recall ever sharing classes with him.
Jared was tall in high school; tall for a Jew, classmates said. He played basketball all four years, he was popular with girls, in the way a Modern Orthodox boy can be. Sometimes he would slip into Manhattan to socialize with high schoolers from Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school on the Upper East Side. Jared was polite to a degree that some of the people who knew him in high school called “performative,” especially around his father. The Frisch School stressed derech eretz, or acting decorously and with respect, particularly towards parents, elders, and teachers. Modern Orthodox boys had rules to observe, and Jared observed them: the food he ate, the clothes he wore, which prayers he said at which time of day. At one get-together with his cousins, before the family blew apart, Jared was pictured wearing a white button-down shirt and tie; everyone else is wearing sweaters.
According to federal records, eleven-year-old Jared was already making political contributions: two thousand dollars to Senator Frank Lautenberg, twelve hundred and fifty to New York Attorney General Bob Abrams, who was running for US Senate from New York. In 1997, Jared (misspelled “Gared” in The Record) was photographed with his cousin Jacob, sophomores by then, when Senator Robert Toricelli visited their school.4 By the time he’d graduated from Frisch, Jared Kushner, “student,” had made thirteen thousand dollars in political contributions,5 as orchestrated by his father.6
At Frisch, the politics were distinctly Zionist. Palestinians were “Arabs.” There was no discussion of the legitimacy of their land claims. Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, was presented as an evil, one-dimensional caricature. When Jared was a teen, once and future Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu was paid by Charles Kushner’s bank to speak at Charlie’s office. Jared was tapped to introduce him. Bibi was out of power at the time but planning a comeback, cultivating ties with wealthy Americans who could help his campaign. Netanyahu, the story goes, stayed on Fawn Drive that night, playing basketball with Jared in the driveway.
In 1998, during the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Israel, Jared Kushner joined “The March of the Living,” an annual trip to Israel and Poland founded by two Israeli benefactors. The trip included a two-mile march, with Israeli flags, from one concentration camp to another: Auschwitz to Birkenau. Joel Katz, Jared’s trip leader, described Kushner to the Forward as “a quiet, down-to-earth, intellectual teen already ‘extremely steeped in Holocaust education and yiddishkeit’ or Jewishness. ‘He was understanding the severity of our journey, the commitment he had to his family and his legacy.’ ”7
In the fall, there were college applications to fill out. At Frisch, the students and the teachers were acutely status-conscious, strivers. It was understood that at a school like Frisch, only a few students would get into each Ivy League school, only one or two would get into Harvard. Typically, to keep their acceptance rates high, schools like Frisch maintain their prestige by constricting the number of students that apply to each of the top schools. You had to be at least a Level K to be eligible to apply to Harvard, the thinking went—and yet, Jared got in. Other kids, who had achieved more, in more difficult classes, did not. They thought Jared had taken their spot. As the investigative journalist Daniel Golden wrote years later in his book The Price of Admission, “Jared was not in the school’s highest academic track in all courses, and his test scores were below Ivy League standards.” A former Frisch official told Golden, “There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it.”8
The Harvard class of 2003 had at the time the lowest admission rate in school’s history.9 But Charles Kushner had circumvented that hurdle. In 1998, the year before Jared applied, Charlie pledged $2.5 million to Harvard, which named Charlie and Seryl to its Committee on University Resources. For good measure, Charlie called Senator Frank Lautenberg, to whom he’d been making tens of thousands of dollars in political donations beginning in the early nineties, and asked him to prevail upon Senator Ted Kennedy to call Harvard on Kushner’s behalf. (Kennedy denied any memory of this to Golden.) Charlie, through his attention-getting donation, had scored a double victory: his son got a coveted slot at Harvard, and he was able to write off the cost as a charitable contribution. Legal records filed with the Federal Election Commission show Charlie began to make the payments only after Jared matriculated.10
Before he left for college, Jared hosted a graduation beach party at his family mansion in Long Branch, a grand stucco home with a terracotta-tiled roof, rounded balconies, and a forbidding wall separating it from the beach. Because Orthodox boys and girls weren’t supposed to dance together, he also hosted an unofficial “prom” at the Puck Building. He was leaving New Jersey behind.
At Harvard, classmates viewed Jared as affable, nice. He wore preppy clothes, played junior varsity squash, was tapped to join an exclusive Harvard “final club,” The Fly.11 He also became an instant mogul. “I bought my first few buildings: call it a bad idea with follow through.” Jared said later. “Whatever it was I saw a good opportunity and I went for it.”12 It was, actually, an opportunity created and backed by his father, an intergenerational transfer of wealth obscured by a pleasing family story.
In November 2000, when Jared Kushner was a sophomore at Harvard, records show that a series of Kushner-related companies purchased $5,250,000 worth of properties in Somerville, a small city abutting Cambridge. A few months later, Jared’s limited liability companies received $9 million in credit from Citicorp. The paperwork was signed by Richard Stadtmauer, Jared’s mother’s brother, who at the time worked for Charlie in a role described by associates as “consigliere.” The next year, a Charlie Kushner LLC signed on as the mortgager, borrowing another $1,050,000 for his son’s real estate education, this time from Bear Stearns.13
Jared bought, renovated, and managed apartments during the school year, riding back and forth from his Harvard dorm in the cab of his contractor’s Dodge pickup. Jared once described the contractor as “a six foot five Guatemalan guy.” In a moment of self-awareness, Jared recalled in his Hofstra speech how he would tell the contractor, “ ‘We’re going too slow, this work’s not good enough, you’re too expensive’—and then I’d sheepishly ask him if he’d give me a ride back to my dorm.”14 Eventually, Jared got a Range Rover so he could drive himself.
From Harvard, Jared negotiated rents, fielded complaints about uncollected trash, smells, pests, and in one case, lack of heat for a whole season. The Boston Globe reported that on one occasion he told a set of tenants that he’d be renovating their apartment while they lived in it. When they asked for a month’s rent as consideration, Jared counter-offered $100. They rejected it, and the work was cancelled. As the Globe reported, Jared “managed 40 apartment units across a run-down but rising Somerville market. He converted another 16 units into condominiums that he would sell individually. And his efforts paid off—the properties he bought for $8.3 million sold four years later for $13 million.”15
Jared’s Somerville investment, his first foray in the family line of work, came as the family, and family business, were coming under increasing strain. By 2002, as he finished his junior year, Jared had already been subpoenaed by the Federal Election Commission in its investigation of illegal donations; his uncle had sued his father for stealing; and Jared had already denounced his cousins at the family seder at Fontainebleau, saying of Esther’s children—Jessica, Ruth, and Jacob, who’d grown up like a twin brother—“they’re not worth fighting about.”
At Harvard, Jared implanted himself in an institution that offered community in exchange for strict adherence to a set of religious rules: Chabad, the evangelical branch of Orthodox Judaism. Jared gave eighteen thousand dollars to the Harvard Chabad.16 “It’s very, very rare that college students contribute on any level,” E. Hirschy Zarchi, the rabbi of Harvard Chabad, later told the Harvard Crimson. Zarchi, whom the Crimson described as a “close friend” of Jared’s, also said: “He was almost like a partner [to Chabad]. . . . He was a great friend. At a very young age, he brought a certain wisdom and strategic thinking about building an enterprise.”17
In his senior year at Harvard, Jared Kushner was given the honor of speaking at the unveiling of a new Chabad center on campus. Jared stepped to the podium that day looking extremely young, his cheeks pink and soft, like he had barely started to shave. His syntax was clunky. “Going away to college or graduate school can be a time when young adults begin to challenge the teachings of their past while setting the course for their futures,” he said. “People are encouraged to find personal significance and meaning in whatever it is that one is looking for.” He quoted Margaret Thatcher. He said a-day-jes, for “adages.”18
In his time in school, Jared sometimes flew home on the shuttle from Boston to New York. In the shuttle lounge, there were stacks of free newspapers, including a salmon-colored news weekly, the New York Observer. The Observer obsessively covered the inside workings of New York’s key industries: real estate, politics, finance, entertainment, media. “The Rudy Team has ’04 Dream: Bush-Giuliani” was one headline at the end of Jared’s junior year. There was a cover story about the casual use of the F-word gaining currency in polite society.19 An article about “power seders” caught Jared’s eye.20
After graduating from Harvard in 2003, Jared Kushner was twenty-two and about to make more than five million dollars from selling real estate in Massachusetts. Later that summer he moved to the Manhattan neighborhood of NoHo, near Greenwich Village, to begin a double degree program in business and law at New York University, to which Charlie had given three million tax-deductible dollars. That same month, Jared’s father asked an East Orange cop to hire a prostitute to ensnare Jared’s uncle.
In July of the next year, while interning for the Manhattan DA, Jared learned of his father’s arrest. Jared took a cab to Newark, and his plan—to finish law school and business school and work in a nonprofit—was permanently derailed. “My first year in law school I had a little bit of a set-back,” he later said to the Hofstra Law grads, “which forced me at that point to get into the family business . . . sooner than I would have liked to.”21
Jared’s father had sent the videotape of his uncle Billy with the prostitute to his aunt Esther on the eve of his cousin Jacob’s engagement party. Charlie had wanted to send it to Jacob, too. Jared’s relationship with his one-week-younger cousin was over.
In April 2005, Charlie Kushner began his federal prison term in Alabama. Most weekends, throughout law school, Jared flew down to visit him, sometimes on the private plane of Howard Jonas, a Jewish businessman and a partner of Charlie’s who founded the tech company IDT. In prison, Charlie ate cottage cheese, bought his own sneakers. He gave Jared a wallet that he made while behind bars.
A family narrative of resentment was nurtured during these trips. “His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office, and they took it to the government,” Jared later told New York magazine. “Siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing. He gave them interests in the business for nothing. All he did was put the tape together and send it. Was it the right thing to do? At the end of the day, it was a function of saying ‘You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.’ ”22
As the years went on, Jared’s views set. Christie “tried to destroy my father,” Jared later said, as described by Christie in his book Let Me Finish. “There was a dispute inside the family,” Christie quoted Jared as saying. “My father made those people rich, and they did nothing,” Jared said. “They just benefited from my father’s hard work. And those are the people who turned him in. It wasn’t fair.” And then, the crescendo. “This was a family matter,” Jared said, “a matter to be handled by the family or by the rabbis”—not prosecutors.23
In 2006, Jared Kushner had a year to go at The Stern School of Business and New York University School of Law. He became increasingly involved in the family business, while also interning at a start-up private equity firm.24 Jared noticed that the New York Observer was for sale, and at age twenty-five, called up the paper’s owner, Arthur Carter, whom, he later said, “I had met a few times through my father.” Carter put him off; he was already negotiating with a group that included actor Robert De Niro.
Founded in 1987, the paper fostered a generation of journalists willing to, as editor Peter Kaplan put it, “get up inside the pipes” of the wealthy and powerful, to expose their foibles, their New York-i-ness, and sometimes, their corruption. There was a running cast of characters: Rudy Giuliani and Tina Brown; Martin Scorsese and Rupert Murdoch; Alfonse D’Amato and Michael Bloomberg; Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Candace Bushnell’s character “Mr. Big” was invented on the pages of the New York Observer, which launched the column Sex and the City.
By 2006, Arthur Carter, a real estate magnate himself, was tiring of the business. Publishing was never a sure way to make money in New York, although it was almost always a way to have influence. De Niro’s group had been circling and circling, asking detailed questions about everything down to the postage bill, but had not committed to sustain the paper if it didn’t start making money in three years.
Jared kept wooing Carter and, equally as important, the Observer’s visionary editor, Peter Kaplan. Himself a Jew from New Jersey who had gone to Harvard, Kaplan had thick, greying hair and tortoise-shell glasses. A loosened tie typically held together his button-down shirt as he sat behind his messy desk, stacked high with newspapers, his own and others.
Jared was charming, solicitous. Carter and Kaplan were wary that De Niro’s bid was a prelude to a shutdown. Kaplan knew the history of the Kushner family; he was editor when the series of stories uncovered Charlie’s conflicts of interest at the Port Authority and helped end Charlie’s bid for the chairmanship of the bistate agency. Colleagues warned him that “the family was no good,” but Kaplan thought that Jared was young, malleable, someone he could shape and mentor. The De Niro bid wasn’t closing and the future of the paper was in doubt. Kaplan backed Jared.
Jared met with Carter at his apartment and, to counteract his own youth, brought along one of his father’s lawyers, who was grey-haired and bow-tied. Jared was deferential, loving almost, about the Observer, promising to be the caretaker of an institution, committing to preserve Carter's vision. He clicked through a PowerPoint presentation showing how “I can improve circulation, I can improve ad sales, I can make this thing great, I can make it hip, I can do this.” Later Jared would admit, “I didn’t know what I was talking about, I’d never done any of these things before.”25
Then, in a display of chutzpah, before any terms had been worked out, Jared wrote out a check for ten million dollars. Carter was impressed. He sent Jared a term sheet, which Jared worked on through the night. In the morning he called his boss at the private equity firm where he was interning and told him he had to quit because he’d bought a newspaper.26
The following Monday, the New York Times published pieces on the sale by the legendary media columnist David Carr and the longtime political reporter Katherine Q. Seelye. “I love my father,” Jared Kushner told Seelye, “but I have worked to develop a separate and distinct identity in different projects I have worked on. The only difference is that this is far more public.” Thinking optimistically, but betraying his anxiety by raising the subject, Kaplan told Seelye that “Mr. Kushner had no agenda,” adding, “he told me that he will not interfere with the paper, that editorially, the paper is ours.”27
Almost immediately, this proved false. Jared had promised to retain staff and seek advice from Arthur Carter. He soon shut that off. Jared criticized the previous version of the paper as too long and too boring and too dry, “unbearable to read.”28 He was heard boasting in the newsroom that he hadn’t really read the paper in the past, other than picking it up in the shuttle lounge at the airport, that he didn’t read books, that he didn’t read magazines, that he barely read journalism at all, only the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, both owned by one of his mentors, Rupert Murdoch. To the newspaper’s staff it was clear he cared deeply about Israel and the right-leaning politics of its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, but that few other topics stirred his passions. Jared pressed for shorter articles, more churn, more clicks.
Kaplan told people he was being pushed to assign a story on Chris Christie—whose star had risen since he sent Jared’s father to prison—that Jared wanted a “hit job.” Though Jared denies this, those words would be bruited about Kushner Companies and the Observer offices for many years. “Hit job” is a textbook example of malice, and not a phrase that most editors or publishers typically use when assigning stories. It’s a political phrase, imported into the Observer to describe an article Jared apparently desired, on the person he believed had destroyed his family.
Kaplan resisted. “Jared’s killing me,” he told associates. “There was a constant grinding lack of understanding of what a publisher’s role was, of journalism and journalism ethics,” said an Observer staffer who was there at the time. Jared questioned why the Observer had to pay for a restaurant critic’s meals, wanting to know why the critic couldn’t be comped, saying he had a friend from Harvard who could do the job.
In those early days, Jared also ran his company’s business out of the Observer’s offices. It was hard to see where one concern began and the other ended. Jared took more and more cues from Rupert Murdoch. He increasingly followed Murdoch’s model of using his publications to achieve a set of political and business aims. On Mondays, Jared discussed his social interactions with Rupert and his wife, Wendi Murdoch, with Observer colleagues.
Kushner and Kaplan fought about budgets and editorial control; for Jared, the Harvard grad with the JD and the MBA, getting the paper to live within its means was an existential play. “I knew that the paper needed big changes and it had to start with the product, which had become dull from the uncertainty and lack of direction surrounding the business,” he said later.29 From Jared’s perspective, Kaplan’s editing style meant they couldn’t print the paper on time, couldn’t get into the Starbucks stores that had promised to carry it. Kaplan’s vision, as Jared saw it, would inevitably lead to a well-crafted enterprise that no one would see. “The paper had become stuck, in the sense that the articles were way too long, it wasn’t visually stimulating, and I thought that people today are more responsive to shorter, easier pieces like they get on the Internet,” Jared said.30 He saw himself as a disrupter; his very ignorance of the industry gave him the ability, in his view, to be clear-eyed about what needed to be done. “When I was 25 years old and I bought a newspaper with no experience in media, I came into a group of people who were very ingrained in the ways that they did their business and I noticed that the industry was changing very rapidly and for me it was very important to drive change.”31
One of those changes was to acquire PoliticsNJ, a website widely read and followed by New Jersey’s power elite, owned and run by an anonymous blogger with the pseudonym “Wally Edge,” who collected emails and phone numbers and tips. Statehouse power brokers lived in fear and awe of “Edge,” and almost all of them fed to him, including the young and ambitious prosecutor Chris Christie. “Wally Edge” was a nod to Walter Edge, an advertising magnate, publisher, and banker, who as governor and US senator from New Jersey had dominated the state’s GOP for half a century.
“Wally Edge” was actually David Wildstein, a hefty man with close-cropped dark hair from Livingston, New Jersey. Wildstein had begun his career as a Republican Party activist at age twelve. By the year 2000, when he formed PoliticsNJ—under a pseudonym to obscure the fact that a political activist was running a news website—Wildstein had already, as a twenty-one-year-old campaign volunteer, stolen Senator Frank Lautenberg’s suit jacket, leaving him in his shirtsleeves for a public debate, and, while mayor of Livingston, thrown out nominating petitions to thwart a candidate in local elections. There were maybe ten people who knew that Wally Edge was Wildstein, a blogger whose output was “fairly harsh, very blunt, very direct . . . going directly at people and challenging candidates,” as Wildstein later put it.32
Jared Kushner, in elementary school when Wildstein was mayor of Livingston, was drawn to PoliticsNJ’s style, to the political currency it could give him, as owner. He wanted to take the model national. It was only after he’d made an approach that “Wally Edge” revealed himself as David Wildstein. Wildstein became executive vice president of the Observer Media Group. The blog’s name was tweaked to PolitickerNJ, and spun out to seventeen state-specific sites, including PolitickerNV and PolitickerNH, but Jared soon closed nine of them. Only PolitickerNJ ultimately survived.
Most of the Observer staff still didn’t know David Wildstein was Wally Edge. In conversations at the Observer offices, he made no mention of his inside knowledge of New Jersey politics. Wildstein held his post at the Observer for three years, until 2010, when he left Jared’s employ to work for his father’s nemesis: Chris Christie, then the newly elected governor of New Jersey. Christie named Wildstein the Director of Interstate Capital Projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a post from which Wildstein insisted billions of dollars in government resources be spent in ways that bolstered the reelection campaign of Governor Christie, including masterminding the Bridgegate scandal. Though Jared never forgave Wildstein for going to work for Christie, after Wildstein was forced out for his Bridgegate role, Jared offered him his old job back at the Observer. “For what it’s worth,” Jared Kushner wrote, referring to the politically motivated lane closures on the George Washington Bridge, “I thought the move you pulled was kind of badass.”33
A few months before Jared closed the deal on the Observer, in the spring of 2006, Charlie Kushner was released from prison in Alabama to a halfway house in Newark. At 7:45 in the morning, men in work boots and blue jeans poured out of “a gritty collection of dormitories squatting near the tracks that cut through the industrial remains of Newark’s South Ward,” as Jeff Pillets described it in The Record. The men, former prison inmates, were headed to “mostly minimum-wage jobs as cooks and busboys and day laborers. Many stop just for a second to light a cigarette as they rush to catch the bus,” Pillets wrote. “Into the scene comes a deep blue Cadillac DeVille, whose white-haired chauffeur steps out on the sidewalk long enough to pull on his sport coat, brush out the wrinkles and make a brief cellphone call. Almost an hour later, another former inmate, dressed in a navy blue blazer and pressed dress slacks emerges from a building with bars on the windows and steps into the Cadillac, which whisks him to downtown Newark. This man then spends his day working on real estate deals and lunching at the Savoy Grill, a restaurant frequented by federal judges and politically connected lawyers.”34
While residing at the halfway house, Charlie Kushner was arranging two enormous real estate transactions that, if timed to land in the same calendar year, could save him an enormous amount of money. Under section 1031 of the Internal Revenue code, one may avoid paying capital gains taxes on a sold property if one reinvests the money in new property within the year. Charlie was looking to sell off much of his suburban real estate empire, more than seventeen thousand units. He was simultaneously hiring a broker to find him a building “in the one- to two-billion-dollar range,” as a person involved in the deal later described it. This is not the way one usually buys a building; most often, a buyer has a location and size in mind, not a specific price. The specific price, a record one in Manhattan at the time, was a tell: the Kushners wanted to be noticed.
Soon, Kushner Companies began to negotiate to purchase 666 Fifth Avenue, a tall aluminum-clad tower just blocks from Trump Tower, for $1.8 billion. The building had been erected in 1957, its blocky stippled silver exterior projecting power and strength, its interior lobby, with undulating ceiling art and a floor-to-ceiling silver “waterfall” sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, connoting Manhattan sophistication. By the time Kushner Companies purchased the building, it was hard for people working with the company to see where Charlie ended and Jared began: the two operated as one. The Kushners’ desire to enter the Manhattan market in a splashy way, to purchase their own “Tiffany location,” was palpable.
In 2007, on January 10, Jared’s birthday, the Kushners closed on the sale. Charlie, a convicted felon, wasn’t able to sign the mortgage documents. Instead they were signed by Jared and a Jersey billionaire, the food entrepreneur and long-time Kushner business partner and family friend George Gellert, who had profited so handsomely on an early deal with Charlie, flipping sod farms in Princeton. There was a closing party at The Modern restaurant overlooking the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art. The participants (almost all men) were given cufflinks designed to resemble the distinctive aluminum cladding on the outside of 666 Fifth Avenue. A last-minute glitch in the financing had led Charlie to wire the money in multiple increments to Tishman-Speyer, the building’s seller. The broker chided Charlie for acting “like pikers from Jersey.” But the money went through. At the party at the Modern, Charlie was heard to say, “Am I still a piker from New Jersey?”
Piker or not, his first name was not on the building documents—Jared’s was. In January 2007, at twenty-six, the younger Kushner owned a building valued at almost two billion dollars and the New York Observer publishing group.
Three months after he bought 666 Fifth Avenue, Jared Kushner hosted an event with Peter Kaplan to officially present the New York Observer’s website relaunch. It was held at the Four Seasons, the chic mid-century haunt of the rich and powerful designed by Philip Johnson and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, characterized by sweeping windows and dramatic light fixtures. The power lunch had been invented at the Four Seasons, which was described in the New York Times as a place where “powerful people eat in order to be seen with other powerful people.”35 On April 18, 2007, many powerful people showed up to herald the arrival of the Kushners in New York: former New Yorker editor Tina Brown was there, as was Tom Wolfe, the novelist, and New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams. Members of old real estate families of New York, the Tisches and the Rudins, joined the city council speaker, Christine Quinn, and the police commissioner, Ray Kelly, along with old Kushner family friends like George Gellert and Rosemary Vrablic, the Kushner’s personal banker. Jim McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey, was there, with his partner, Mark O’Donnell. Also there: Ivanka Trump, photographed on Jared Kushner’s arm.36
The Kushners had formed their real estate empire in New Jersey. To some Manhattan real estate families, that meant they were not rich or smart enough to make it in New York. These were the people “that looked down their nose at Donald Trump, dismissed the Kushners as hicks,” one person who attended Jared Kushner’s party at the Four Seasons said in an interview. “To them he could now say, ‘We’ve arrived.’ ”