The brown and red brick house on Summit Road in Elizabeth, New Jersey, had one bedroom for Joe and Rae, one for the girls, and one for the boys. Charlie and Murray’s room was small, divided up, as were their roles: Murray was the oldest son, the smarter one, the protector; Charlie was younger, and scrappier. They tussled, as American boys do, yet they got along. Yiddish was their first language.
It was a modest house, on a small lot, purchased in 1956 for $20,625, closely abutting the next house over. Elizabeth was one of the towns in New Jersey where Jews could live in those days. It had been so since the 1930s, when Summit Road was not dissimilar from the fictional Summit Avenue where Philip Roth set his novel The Plot Against America. In the counterfactual historical fiction, President Charles Lindbergh makes an alliance with Adolf Hitler, slowly tightening a noose around American Jews, Roth’s fictional family included. Summit Avenue, as Roth described it, “rises a hundred feet above the level of the tidal salt marsh . . . and the deep bay due east of the airport that bends around the oil tanks of the Bayonne peninsula and merges there with New York Bay to flow past the Statue of Liberty.”1
As in The Plot Against America, Jews in 1950s Elizabeth were not welcome in the rest of Union County. When restrictions fell in the late 1960s, the Kushners transplanted themselves, moving to a big white brick house in Hillside where each Kushner teenager could have their own bedroom.
At home, Joe chain-smoked, wore wife-beater undershirts, and insisted on certain rules. If someone with jeans or long hair entered his home, he would kick them out. Rae would entertain, cooking large quantities of meat and soup. The children were close. Their family home was a hub of activity. It smelled like burnt potatonik, a giant latke fried in chicken fat, a recipe Rae had made as a teenager before the war and brought with her from Poland. The Holocaust was never far away, but rarely discussed. For a while, Rae said, she couldn’t talk about it. She wanted to establish a normal life and leave the horrors of the Holocaust behind.2 Gradually, as the children matured, Joe and Rae began to share their stories.
As the boys grew into their teens, they talked business with Joe, in Yiddish, but he was rarely home; they competed for his attention. Joe drove the new network of roads in New Jersey, overseeing his growing empire of suburban garden apartments, working from his car, checking on the construction, the maintenance, the management. He would buy up empty lots, almost always with partners, keeping his debt low, then build and sell dozens of homes on those lots for $50,000 or $60,000, $73,000 by the 1970s, the prices tracking the decades.3
Linda, the oldest, married young. Murray grew more distant from his younger siblings, Charlie and Esther, who were just fifteen months apart. Charlie and Esther grew tighter. Joe conveyed an ethos: the siblings were to take care of each other, the boys should watch over the girls.
Before Nixon resigned, Joe and Rae sent Murray to the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude, and then to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He studied at the London School of Economics, where he met Jack Kagan, who had crawled through the tunnel from the Novogrudok ghetto with Rae and Lisa and Naum. Charlie attended New York University in the years after Watergate.
Murray married his first wife, Ruth Dunietz, at the New York Hilton in June 1974, while he was still in law school. Ruth was from a large, wealthy, observant family. She’d gone to Boston University and worked in an ad agency.4 Within months of Murray’s marriage, though three years younger than Murray and still an undergraduate at NYU, Charlie was married as well, to Seryl Stadtmauer, a Modern Orthodox Jew who had gone to Stern College for Women, a branch of Yeshiva University. In February 1979, while Charlie was matriculated at both the NYU Stern School of Business and Hofstra Law School, Seryl gave birth to their oldest child, Dara.
In 1979, a few months before fifty-two Americans were held hostage in Iran, Charlie graduated from Hofstra Law and NYU Business, wanting to be neither a lawyer nor an accountant. But he took a job in accounting at Price Waterhouse, at the newly opened, triangle-topped Citicorp building in midtown. He hated it. After about a year, he walked into a New Jersey real estate law firm and sat down with one of the firm’s partners. The partner told Charlie he had no job for a new associate. But by the time the men stood up, Charlie Kushner had talked his way into a job at the law firm.
Unlike his father, Charlie was not, at first, a builder. His specialty was spotting real estate parcels, acquiring them, obtaining necessary approvals to develop the land, and selling them. To do so, Charlie needed other people’s money—financial partners, willing to invest. One of the lawyers in Charlie’s firm introduced him to George Gellert, already a successful food importer, accustomed to profits of pennies on the dollar. Charlie and Gellert invested in a sod farm near Princeton and got approvals to build. When they sold it a few months later, they doubled their money, clearing over $10 million. The two became lifelong business partners. Charlie was soon making so much money on his deals, the law firm made him a partner.
On January 10, 1981—ten days before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated—Seryl gave birth to a son, Jared. The couple soon took title to a lot on Fawn Drive in Livingston, New Jersey, on February 27, 1981,5 down the street from Murray, and close to Esther and Linda.
Their families were all growing by then: Esther and her husband Billy had a daughter, Jessica, and a son of their own, Jacob, born nine days after Jared. Linda and her husband Murray Laulicht had four daughters. Murray Kushner’s first wife, Ruth, had died of breast cancer at age twenty-nine, but had first given birth to two sons, Jonathan and Aryeh. In 1982, Murray remarried, to Lee Serwitz, a divorcee with two children of her own: Marc and Melissa. All the cousins were raised together. Rae and Joe did not approve of Lee, however, who was glamorous and free-spirited and liable to get her nails done on Shabbat. Also, she was not Ruth.
Livingston, New Jersey, population 28,000, had become a town of conspicuous consumption. “Everybody was trying to impress everyone else with what they had. They had to have the best,” one former town official said in an interview. The median income was well above the national average. Housing prices were increasing at more than two times the rate of inflation.6 Charlie owned a large house on a large lot. Down the hill, in a small home on a small lot, a young high school boy, captain of the baseball team, was getting involved in politics: Chris Christie.
The 1980s were a good time to be investing; markets were rising. There was a bicoastal real estate frenzy; the average home price in the northeast in 1980 was $69,500. By the end of the decade it had more than doubled.7 “It’s morning again in America,” went Reagan’s reelection television ad, optimistic music swelling as a farmer steers his tractor, a man passes a paperboy on his bike, and a family carries building materials into a suburban home. The ad continued: “With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2,000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years. This afternoon 6,500 young men and women will be married, and with inflation at less than half of what it was just four years ago, they can look forward with confidence to the future.”
As Reagan started his second term, Charlie decided to form Kushner Companies with his father. Charlie acquired Oakwood Village, with some six hundred homes, with the intention to build six hundred more. But before the deal closed, Joe died. He passed during the Jewish High Holy Days of 1985, a wealthy man, his original $5,000 land investment now worth tens of millions of dollars, most of it placed in tax-avoiding trusts he’d set up for his four children. Charlie, distraught, had little experience hiring contractors, or framers, or plumbers. He had started a huge building project, and his father wasn’t around to help him.
Joe’s will divided his properties among his children, subject to the newly reduced estate taxes of Reagan’s 1981 tax bill. Joe specifically wrote Murray’s adopted children out of his will: “It is my intention that the terms ‘issue’ and ‘children’ shall include only natural-born children and natural-born issue, and shall exclude any legally adopted individual and his issue,” the will said.8
Though Charlie and his brother Murray both worked in real estate, the two brothers did not work together. For a while, Murray and Charlie continued on parallel tracks. Murray operated as a standard developer and builder, while Charlie expanded his father’s business model from development to one that relied on acquisition and debt. At one point he was on track to acquire more properties than anyone in New Jersey, ever.9
At the end of the 1980s, the real estate market tilted into recession. Deregulation of banks that began under Carter and continued under Reagan had propped up a lot of shaky debts. When those debts collapsed, many smaller real estate companies went bust. But Charlie had grown his company enough that it survived the shakeout. In 1986, with George Gellert and others, he made his first foray into Manhattan, buying into a partnership that purchased the Puck Building in SoHo for $19 million. The building, named for Puck magazine, is a Gilded Age Romanesque revival. A golden statue of the character Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream adorns the entrance.
In one picture from this era, Murray and Charlie, in black bow ties, stand around Rae, who is wearing a black square-necked dress with slightly puffy sleeves; a dramatic, dazzling necklace frames her neck. Murray and Charlie are both dark-haired; Charlie wears a mustache. The photo accompanies an announcement; they are going to be honored, together, by Morristown, New Jersey’s Rabbinical College of America. Tutored by Rae, both Charlie and Murray donated to Jewish causes: the Kean College Holocaust Resource Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, MetroWest Federation-United Jewish Appeal. One cause, Operation Exodus, resettled Soviet Jews in Israel. When Joe died, the brothers endowed a yeshiva, renaming it the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy.
Nothing is more important for the Jews, Rae had argued, than the survival of the State of Israel. The Holocaust could happen again. “We must have a country of our own,” Rae said—that was the only way to ensure the survival of the Jewish people. She taught her kids to be Zionists, to support Jewish organizations and Israel. On social policy, her views sometimes lined up with Reagan’s. Too many people wanted welfare, she said. “We lived through Hitler, we wanted a piece of bread and water and wanted to build.”10
Charlie became known during these years for his generous gestures: showing up at shivas, sending flowers and letters, and appearing at hospital bedsides when his associates’ children became ill. If people asked him for money to support causes, he wrote checks many times larger than they asked. His temper was volatile: he could berate an employee for a minor infraction, but when her child was sick, he sent them on a private plane to Denver for treatment.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Charlie regularly hosted the ganze mishpacha, the whole family, at his house on Fawn Drive in Livingston. Charlie was the fun one, athletic. At these gatherings the family played basketball and baseball in the backyard. The girls played in the basement. On Shabbat, Charlie’s home was the hub. Rae brought over matzoh ball soup, which she made with a tomato.
At Murray’s son Marc’s bar mitzvah, held at Short Hills Caterers, Rae stood and said, as she did at all her grandchildren’s b’nai mitzvah, “Marc is my favorite grandchild.” Charlie held Marc’s hand and gave a version of the speech that he made at all the gatherings: that they came from a family of Holocaust survivors, they will never forget, they will be forever vigilant, they will watch out for those who would destroy the Jews. They will always transmit the values of family, chesed—kindness, mercy, compassion—and Torah, the values that had been transmitted to them from Rae.
Murray and Charlie set up a new series of formal business partnerships, but there were tensions. Both Kushners were aggressive in business, in a way that made Rae proud. Like the rest of the so-called “Holocaust builders,” the Jewish family dynasties such as the Wilfs, Joe’s first partners, who built the Jersey suburbs, Murray was a private man; he kept his business to himself. Charlie had a much more public profile. He was written up in The Record11 in 1993 as “the main principal in the business started by his father, Joseph.” One of Charlie’s associates bragged: “The family has been able to anticipate population movements and build homes in those locations before people migrated.”
Murray and Charles were both long-distance runners. Charlie ran the Midland 15K run year after year. One year, Charlie came in at 1:22:10.4, and Murray was next, twelve seconds behind Charlie. Charlie tended towards endurance sports, once telling the Star-Ledger, “Kids from Elizabeth didn’t play golf. We didn’t know from golf sticks.”12
During all the simchas and Holocaust commemorations and galas for Jewish and Israeli organizations, Charlie met some Jewish politicians: Robert Abrams, the New York attorney general, who was a relative by marriage; and New Jersey US Senator Frank Lautenberg, a philanthropist himself, who was impressed with Kushner’s charitable giving. Lautenberg likened the Kushner family to the Rockefellers or the Kennedys.13 Following Lautenberg’s example, Charlie and Seryl started to make political donations, too.
Two hundred and fifty dollars. Five hundred dollars. A thousand dollars. Charlie made donations through his children: eleven-year-old Jared, with his occupation listed in federal records as “student,” made two one-thousand-dollar donations to Senator Lautenberg. Three years later, at fourteen, Jared gave another two thousand. In 1996, Rae gave ten thousand dollars to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the soft-money account that supports US senators.14 In the mid-1990s, before a set of IRS and court decisions allowed for huge inflows of money into politics, $10,000 was a substantial sum. The Kushner family donations caught the attention of President Bill Clinton, who called up Charlie and asked to come by his office for a private lunch. The president came for a public event, too, where he was presented with a shofar, a ram’s horn, while paying a visit to the Kushner Companies’ low-slung suburban office building in Florham Park.
“I think we’re closer to a time,” Bill Clinton said in Charlie’s cavernous office as Charlie and his family looked on—“in which we can reach across all the racial, the ethnic, the cultural, the religious lines that divide us, and stand in stark contrast to what is going on in so much of the world today and to the terrible story that Charles told us that had such a wonderful ending—of his family—by being a country that really can embrace all this diversity, celebrate it, respect it, honor it, and say, ‘We’re still bound together as one America.’ ”15 Clinton kissed Rae Kushner, and she told him, post–Monica Lewinsky, to “be careful.” A saucy joke.
This was the period that Charlie started to run through stop signs: He bought a bank but did not properly report its ownership to bank regulators, making representations that were “inconsistent” with the facts.16 He used funds from his real estate partnerships to pay then-former and future Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu $400,000 to make speeches in Livingston.17 He and Netanyahu grew so close that Bibi stayed at the Kushner home on Fawn Drive. And Charlie began donating sizable sums to a New Jersey mayor then considering a run for governor.
Despite all the attention and money Charlie lavished on national politics, in New Jersey, there was and is one real power: the governor. The state executive ultimately oversees permits, contracting, regulation, even law enforcement, by appointing the attorney general. The US senators have modest, indirect sway on key economic decisions: local tax breaks, zoning variances, land use. There is no elected statewide comptroller, no elected attorney general. Even the local sheriffs can be elected with the backing of the political apparatus installed by the governor. The only statewide power position independent of the governor is the US attorney, a figure appointed by the president, usually at the recommendation of the local senators. As a result, the paths to power are few. Aspiring governors can go the route of US attorney, like Chris Christie. They can be very rich, like Tom Kean, Christine Todd Whitman, John Corzine, and Phil Murphy. Or they can find an exceedingly generous patron, which is what Democrat Jim McGreevey did in 1997 when he began his association with Charlie Kushner.
In September of that year, according to reporting by The Record, McGreevey, a state senator and the mayor of Woodbridge, a relatively diverse town, population 100,000, met with Charlie. A day later, five people—all with the last name Kushner, all listing their employer as a Kushner company—donated a total of $10,000. The same day, various Schulders, Laulichts, and Kushner business partners gave at least another $40,000.18
McGreevey narrowly lost the 1997 race to Christine Todd Whitman, but immediately started planning another campaign. Over the course of thirteen days at the end of 1997, Charles Kushner gave a total of $554,000 for this new race. In the next three years, Charlie gave another $140,000 to McGreevey’s soft money account, which paid the salaries of McGreevey’s top advisors, and for McGreevey to travel to Israel, a necessary prerequisite for those seeking major office in New Jersey and New York. Charlie also bought an insurance company from a key McGreevey advisor for over $3 million.19
By this time, Charlie, moving to solidify his role as the center of the family, built an addition for Rae at the house on Fawn Drive. He bought her a Rolls-Royce. She hated it, yet used it to tool around Livingston, driving to visit her children and grandchildren.
None of this was enough. “Charles Kushner is a big fish in the small pond of the New Jersey multifamily real-estate industry” the Wall Street Journal reported in September 2000.20 “His family owns more than $1 billion of apartment buildings and commercial property, a small bank, an insurance concern and a construction business. . . . But Mr. Kushner wants to swim in the ocean, and when real-estate stocks plunged in 1998, he began to make his move.”
Charlie’s ambition was naked: “I would like to be one of the largest owners in the country in the next 10 years,” he told the Journal. In 2000, he was on the cusp of purchasing the WNY Group for $280 million. WNY controlled 8,000 units in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, and Delaware. This would bring the total number of apartments Kushner Companies controlled to over 20,000, up from 4,000 when Joseph had died a decade and a half earlier. But the WNY deal papered over another, larger deal that had gotten away, a $1.3-billion portfolio owned by Berkshire Realty Company, for which Charlie had been ready to put up $100 million in equity from his family trusts. That deal would have been the Kushners’ biggest yet. According to Berkshire’s proxy statement, Charlie had the winning bid, but never supplied the necessary letter of credit. Murray had reined it in.
The-deal-that-never-was became a needle in the eye for both Murray and Charlie.
Around this time, the Kushners built a new campus for the school named for his father, less than a mile from his office, and just a few miles from his home. It sits on a hill, adorned with a dome that looks like a tourist photo of Jerusalem, with three flags out front, one American, one Israeli, and one that says JKHA. Giant Trump-sized letters announce to drivers on the suburban road below, past the grassy lawn and tiered parking lots, that this is the JOSEPH KUSHNER HEBREW ACADEMY. At the center of the school there is a “Holocaust garden.” Itzhak Perlman once performed at the school.
While Jared was in high school the students were tracked; classmates in the highest-level classes could not recall ever being in a class with Jared. Charlie, who did not go to Harvard, pledged $2.5 million to the Ivy League school in 1998, the year before Jared graduated from high school. Jared got in.21
On Fawn Drive, things had been getting rougher. Charlie started insisting that everyone adhere strictly to religious rules. He began to drink heavily, and when he did, he could be verbally abusive. Like Joseph before him, he would not allow any of the younger generation in his house to wear jeans—dungarees, he called them. He insisted on formal dress for Shabbat. Infractions incurred a tongue-lashing bordering on bullying. He became more and more disapproving of Murray’s second wife, Lee.
In business, Charlie and Murray became suspicious of each other, each accusing the “other of taking more than his fair share out of their common businesses,” according to a later court opinion.22 Murray accused Charlie of misappropriating their partnership funds by using partnership money to pay for charitable contributions and political campaigns and personal items. In 2000, $186,000 went to organizations including Charlie’s synagogue, the Suburban Torah Center; a consulting firm researching the comeback prospects of then-former Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu received $10,000; $25,384 went to private-school tuition for the children of Kushner Companies employees; $7,027 to “holiday alcohol”; more money bought Yankees, Mets, and Nets season tickets. The practice of using corporate money for personal and political reasons was discussed openly at the family business’s regular Tuesday morning meetings. Charlie used a phrase to describe it: “losing a bill.”23
“It didn’t matter,” Charlie said, “because it was all family.”
To Murray, and to Esther, it mattered.
Murray and Charlie started to have flare-ups. Rae intervened, or prevailed on Linda’s husband to be the peacemaker. But, thanks to Joe, Murray Kushner and Charlie Kushner’s business interests were inextricably intertwined. If Charlie was breaking the law, Murray, who, like Charlie, was a lawyer, an officer of the court, could be liable, too. Esther was the youngest, and a woman, the person with the least power in the family. She wanted to stand up for what was right. Her husband Billy, who worked for Charlie, had an inside view of what was going on at Kushner Companies. So did Bob Yontef, Charlie’s accountant.
For Passover 1999, Rae gathered the entire family at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach, Florida, an arc of high-rise of white concrete embracing multiple pools and decks and palm trees. They had spent Passovers this way for over a decade. Rae would pay for the whole family, and they would rent a row of adjoining rooms, more than a dozen cousins bouncing on the beds, running from room to room, clutching the twenty-dollar bills that Rae had given each of them for the arcade, hanging out on the balconies together and by the pools as they grew into their teens.
By April 1999, Murray was simmering at Charlie; at the political contributions to Bill Clinton, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Jim McGreevey; at the personal expenditures that had been paid without Murray’s consent out of their joint partnership accounts and in violation of tax and campaign finance laws. And Charlie was simmering because he felt Murray’s caution had blown the multimillion-dollar deal with Berkshire.
At the Fontainebleau that spring, Charlie told Murray that maybe they couldn’t do business together.24 And Murray angrily responded, according to court papers Charlie later filed, “If we can’t be partners, we can’t be brothers!”25 Charlie told Murray that Murray didn’t appreciate all the ways Charlie had elevated the family’s business, its prestige, its cachet. Lee joined the fray. Of her son, Marc, at whose bar mitzvah he’d extolled the value of family and chesed, Charlie said: “You think your son got into Penn? I got him in!”
Lee took her family and left. The Murray Kushners did not return to the Fontainebleau.
At work, according to a complaint filed by his former accountant, Charlie became more strident, even to his sister. “Esther was verbally abused by Charles in front of the entire office and left his employ,” accountant Bob Yontef said in a court filing.26 Around this time, Esther’s husband, Billy, stopped working for Charlie. (Charlie denied Yontef’s allegations, and countersued. The suits were privately settled.)
Passover at the Fontainebleau got worse. Charlie was even more belligerent. The Passover seder is the celebration of the Exodus of the Jews, the escape from slavery, the passage out of Egypt through the Mitzrayim, the narrow place, through which they must cross before they get to the promised land. It is resonant for all Jews, more so for Rae, whose passage through a narrow tunnel had given rise to this enormous brood.
The Fontainebleau seders were formal affairs: suits and ties for the men and boys, blazers and skirts for the women and girls. Forty people or so sitting around a square of four long tables, with wine and matzoh, bitter herbs and shank bone, salt water and sweet haroset, each item reminding Jews of the bitterness of slavery, of the agony of the struggle for liberation, the sweetness of freedom.
But Charlie began drinking, and lobbing insults, still feeling slighted by Murray’s claims against him, and his perception that his sister Esther and her husband Billy were siding with Murray. Murray and his family were not there, but Charlie was set to boil. He began to hurl obscenity-laden abuse at Esther’s children—his nieces and his nephew, Jacob—who had grown up like a brother to Jared. At one point he said, “You’re so pious. Go on, Billy, and tell your kids how pious you are.”
Billy, the adults knew, many associates in New Jersey knew, had a weakness. He’d had an affair with one of Charlie’s employees, in the office where they all worked. Esther knew.
“You’re a fucking putz!” Charlie yelled. “How can you be so rude?”
“They’re not worth it,” Jared said. “They’re not worth fighting about.”
This was the last time the Schulders celebrated Passover with Charlie Kushner’s family.