8

ICARUS

The summer of 2000, Al Gore, vice president of the United States, arrived in Livingston with his motorcade. He didn’t want to stop at Charlie’s office, and asked aides why he had to. He was told, it’s part of the package. If the vice president wanted to go to the fundraiser on Fawn Drive, he had to go to 26 Columbia Turnpike first. So he did.

But that summer, as the Gore-Lieberman ticket was running against Bush-Cheney, Charles Kushner was more focused on a race that would be run the next year, in which Jim McGreevey would run for governor of New Jersey.

The Kushner-backed Committee for Working Families paid for Jim McGreevey’s travel to Israel on a Metrowest-United Jewish Appeal tour. There, McGreevey met Golan Cipel, a young communications aide to the mayor of Rishon LeZion, a small city outside Tel Aviv. McGreevey was smitten. He offered Cipel a job on his campaign.

Not long after, McGreevey formally announced his candidacy, with the endorsement of Charles Kushner, who praised how McGreevey’s “energy, his vision, and his heart were committed to running for Governor.”¹ Kushner’s statement was a signal that McGreevey would have the money to compete in the expensive media markets of New York and Philadelphia, whose television stations beam into New Jersey. By this time, Charles Kushner was already a donor to both Hillary Clinton, who was running for the US Senate in New York, and Senator Robert Torricelli of New Jersey.

That year, the National Conference for Community and Justice, a group founded in 1927 to fight anti-Catholic bigotry that later expanded to address “all issues of social justice including race, class, gender equity, sexual orientation and the rights of people with different abilities,” named Charlie Kushner “The Humanitarian of the Year.”² Charlie gave a one-million-dollar contribution to the Democratic National Committee, a gift that, at the turn of the century, was more than ostentatious. Kushner donations to Democrats had now exceeded $3 million, matching the amount that Enron contributed to President George W. Bush.³

Around this time, Charlie got himself introduced to the incoming president of New York University, John Sexton, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Charlie “wanted to do a significant philanthropic gesture,” one of the people said. “We all understand the desire to move into the glitterati, the chattering class of the oligarchy of New York.” There was no better way to do this than to serve on the board of NYU. Charlie talked about a donation of $10 million. He offered space in the Puck Building to the university for significantly reduced rent. At one point, he offered to give the building entirely to NYU, but the deal fell apart because Charlie wanted to overvalue the contribution by tens of millions of dollars in a press release. Still, Charlie got a seat on the NYU Board of Trustees. The law school has a Seryl and Charles Kushner Student Lounge and there’s a “Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science.”

In September 2001, at the height of the McGreevey campaign for governor, the World Trade Center towers were attacked. Thousands were incinerated in the blast or crushed in the collapse, or died jumping from windows. The New York City mayoral race was upended as the towers descended to a pile of rubble, and ash filled the streets, which smelled of burning for months. The Friday after the attacks, rain drenched the city. President George W. Bush climbed a pile of rubble and spoke, barely audible, through a bullhorn. “I can’t hear you!” a worker shouted. “I can hear you!” Bush yelled back, megaphone to mouth. “The rest of the world hears you! And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!”

In November, Charlie’s candidate for New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevey, sailed to an election victory. One of McGreevey’s first acts upon taking office was to name Charlie to the board of the powerful, sprawling Port Authority of New York and New Jersey—which controlled the World Trade Center site—with the intention of making him chairman. If approved, Charles Kushner would lead the Port Authority during one of the most critical periods in its history, as it oversaw the rebuilding.

Later, McGreevey wrote, “All my financial contributors were vying for payback. . . . You can’t take large sums of money from people without making them specific and personal promises in return. People weren’t shy about saying what they expected for their ‘investments’—board appointments to the Sports Authority or the New Jersey Economic Development Authority, for example, which were coveted not just for their prestige but because they offered control over tremendously potent economic engines, with discretionary budgets in the tens of millions. The plum was the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; directors there controlled a multibillion-dollar budget.” But McGreevey maintained that Kushner’s appointment was all good government. “Kushner refused my appointment three times before finally accepting,” McGreevey wrote.⁴

The chairmanship would give Charlie two things he very much wanted: actual power, and the ability to draw attention in New York. To accompany this, Charlie needed a premier apartment. He bought a co-op at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-Seventh Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, priced at $5.4 million. He now had a prestige job, an apartment at a location with cachet, a seat on the board of NYU, and a son at Harvard.

At 26 Columbia Turnpike, things got worse. The accountant, Bob Yontef, was noting spending irregularities: Super Bowl packages, play-off tickets, landscaping bills, political contributions charged inappropriately to Kushner real estate partnerships that included Charlie and his siblings and all of their children. “Most of these substantial contributions—well into millions of dollars per year—were made mostly in Charles’ name even though the funds came from the Entities,” Yontef said in a sworn statement attached to the employment lawsuit he later filed in federal court.

“In thinking about everything that went on at the Kushner Companies, I became more and more upset,” Yontef wrote. “I began to tell Esther how Charles was making massive political and charitable donations from the Entities and the other ways he was misallocating and misappropriating the funds of the Entities in which she and her family were partners.” Yontef gave Murray some samples of the documents “which demonstrate these wrongdoings.”⁵ Murray filed his own suit against Charlie in state court in Hudson County, claiming that Charlie was siphoning money from the real estate partnerships.⁶

In Trenton, Jim McGreevey made another appointment, a fateful one: he elevated Golan Cipel, the communications aide he had met in Israel, to advise him on New Jersey’s homeland security efforts, and blurted out the arrangement in a meeting with The Record’s editorial board. To reporters on staff, the appointment instantly seemed odd; aside from five years in the Israeli Defense Forces and stints as a communications aide for the Israeli consulate in New York and the mayor of a city in Israel, Cipel had few credentials. Journalists from The Record began investigating Cipel. They found he had a job at a PR company when he moved from Israel, and that his visa was sponsored by that company. They traced the corporate ownership through a network of limited liability companies, and found that the PR firm belonged to Charlie Kushner.⁷ “Cipel’s ascent occurred without routine background checks or any kind of official announcement from the governor’s office, standard procedure for high officials in state government,” The Record reported. “I didn’t feel that kind of check was necessary,” McGreevey told them. “He’s a super-bright and supercompetent individual who brings a great wealth of knowledge on security. . . . He’s someone who thinks with a different set of eyes.” Months after 9/11, the rubble from the World Trade Center site not yet removed, Cipel, as a foreign national, couldn’t get the necessary security clearance. Prompted by the connection to McGreevey, The Record began to take a closer and closer look at Charles Kushner’s LLCs and real estate partnerships.⁸

In May of 2002, Charlie received a legal notice from the Federal Election Commission, telling him that “the Office of the General Counsel recommends that the Commission find reason to believe that Kushner Companies, Charles Kushner as Chairman” had violated campaign finance law, including by “directing subordinates to plan, organize, or carry out a fundraising project as a part of their work responsibilities using corporate resources.”⁹

Since 1976, campaign finance laws had been guided by the US Supreme Court decision Buckley v. Valeo. Contributions, the Court ruled in Buckley, could be limited, because unlimited contributions were likely to corrupt the democratic process. But the Court said expenditures could not be limited, because that would violate the First Amendment freedom of speech of donors. Individual donors—like Charles Kushner—who could “bundle” contributions became more and more important. But it had to be done according to a strict set of rules.

The FEC report delineated at least eight laws that it believed Kushner and his company had broken. It named business associates, his family, and his children, including Jared, then attending Harvard. In a routine audit, the legal notice said, auditors from the FEC found forty checks in the same handwriting, all but one with the same date, most even with the same typo, identifying the fundraiser to whom the checks were directed as “Japoch” rather than “Sapoch.” The actions, the auditors said, violated a well-known overarching principle of campaign finance law; that corporations cannot contribute to federal campaigns, and that individuals cannot use different names to multiply the amount of money that they can otherwise legally donate. Without that, campaign finance limits would be meaningless.

One of things Charlie did, the FEC said, was to make contributions in the name of his family members and business partners without notifying them. Forty-one thousand dollars in contributions were attributed to Jared Kushner, who had just turned twenty-one.¹⁰

That summer, Charlie confronted Yontef, the accountant, about his turning over information to his siblings. According to an affidavit Yontef swore out on June 25, ninety minutes after the confrontation happened, Charlie said to him: “Why did you do this? You just ruined me. I am going to ruin your life. You made a big mistake. Get out of here and never come back into my Company again.”¹¹

In September 2002, Charlie’s lawyers filed his response to the FEC’s investigation. His lawyers first gave some biographical data. “The late Joseph Kushner was a Holocaust survivor who emigrated to the United States in 1949, became a construction worker, and in the post-war 1950s began developing real estate,” the lawyers wrote, by way of introduction. They argued that Charles Kushner had not violated any laws against corporate contributions to federal elections because “ ‘The Kushner Companies, Inc.’ is not an operating corporation. ‘Kushner Companies’ is a name used for public marketing purposes only. The Kushner Companies, Inc. was originally incorporated in 1988 as a New Jersey corporation. However, its corporate charter was declared void by the State of New Jersey in 1995. The charter was not reinstated until April of 2001. Accordingly, in 1999, when the contributions at issue were made, Kushner Companies was not a legal entity.”¹² Charles Kushner had not filed certain legal documents with the state, his lawyers argued: therefore, technically, no laws against corporate contributions had been broken.

Charlie’s overarching claim was that his partnership agreements with his siblings vested in him the authority to make political donations on their behalf. “Charles Kushner’s activity, both charitable and political, has raised his name and reputation in the broader real estate community as a prominent real estate developer and an individual who dedicates his success to the well-being of his community,” his lawyers wrote. “Charles Kushner and the Partnerships did not have this recognition ten years ago. Because the various Partnerships are identified with Charles Kushner, the properties developed, administered and maintained by these Partnerships have become some of the most desirable and profitable properties in the Northeast community. Thus, Charles Kushner’s reputation and the charitable and political contributions made by the various Partnerships have been beneficial to each of the partners.”¹³ All of these donations and expenses were making the whole family money, Charlie and his lawyers were arguing. His siblings should be grateful.

They were not.

In November of 2002, Esther filed a declaration with the FEC. She told the regulatory agency that political contributions had been made in her name without her knowledge. Her lawyers had already informed the FEC that in the summer of 2001, two years after the contributions had been made, a Kushner employee had contacted her, asking for her retroactive approval. “Over the next several weeks,” the lawyers wrote, “Esther received significant financial pressure to execute the letters. At the same time, Esther was under substantial emotional strain. As a result of this pressure, Esther signed the attribution letters on her own behalf and on behalf of her children as well, believing that doing so was appropriate” based on the Kushner employee’s representations. Jessica, Jacob, and Ruth Schulder, then twenty-four, twenty-one, and twenty, signed declarations too.¹⁴

Murray filed his own declaration, asserting that Charlie had made contributions in his name without his foreknowledge or approval, “I, Murray Kushner, declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct,” Murray wrote at the bottom of the statement, still on file in an obscure corner of the FEC website.

At the Port Authority, things were also going badly. The New York Observer was paying attention, and not in a good way. As a member of the Port Authority board, Charlie was able to vote on budgets, contracts, and proposals before the bistate agency. But as reporter Tom McGeveran wrote, Charlie had personal financial interests that could conflict with the agency’s public interest. According to one article, Charlie had invested in a $165-million real estate partnership for the Monmouth Mall with a developer who was making a bid for the tower atop the Port Authority Bus Terminal.¹⁵ While serving on the board of the Port Authority, which was involved in a large-scale operation to dig up dredge spoils from deep in the New York Harbor, Charlie had also entered into negotiations to do a real estate development in the Meadowlands with a company looking to use those same dredge spoils in a construction project, according to another report.¹⁶ At each turn, Charlie promised to recuse himself, but at the Port Authority, where the board exerts enormous control, recusals are widely understood to be a ruse.

 

To join the Port Authority board, Charlie needed the approval of the state senate, and specifically of Senator William Gormley—the one against whom Trump had fought when Gormley supported a tunnel for a rival casino owner, and who then became the beneficiary of Trump’s own fundraising efforts. Gormley was a Republican, and the chairman of a powerful state senate committee, and Charles Kushner was one of the most important Democrats in New Jersey. Gormley started to examine Charlie’s ownership of NorCrown Bank—state law said bank owners can’t make political contributions to candidates for state office. Charlie’s lawyers said that NorCrown was owned by a trust, in which Charlie didn’t have a majority interest. Gormley wanted Kushner to come and testify about the bank ownership. At a wedding for a top Jim McGreevey aide, Charlie confronted Gormley, telling him he would not come testify in front of Gormley’s fucking committee.

While Charlie was under scrutiny in New Jersey, the Port Authority board was preoccupied with an enormous project, selecting the design for the World Trade Center site. On February 26, 2003, as reporters staked out board members to discern which architect would design the master plan, Charlie withdrew his nomination for board chair. It was the day before Rae’s eightieth birthday. In the frenzy of news coverage over the World Trade Center site’s master plan, Charlie’s retreat hardly made news. But one person did notice. The US attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie.

 

Chris Christie was only a year into his position, a political creature positioning himself as a corruption fighter, a Bush fundraiser who placed himself ostensibly outside of the world of politics. The law firm Murray hired was led by Herb Stern, who Christie had sometimes looked to for advice. And Christie caught wind of Murray’s lawsuit, Kushner v. Kushner. Prosecutors often find the seeds of criminal probes in civil litigation, but the Kushner suit, directed as it was at Democratic Governor Jim McGreevey’s chief financial patron, was irresistible. Precisely as Charlie Kushner was resigning from the Port Authority, Christie’s office was launching a grand jury investigation.

Christie was brash and plainspoken, definitively a Jersey boy and not an Ivy League grad (he went to the University of Delaware and Seton Hall Law School). While many politicians hire trainers to stay in shape for the cameras, Christie embraced his overweight physique. It gave the impression he was on the people’s side. He was a fat guy who would fight the fat cats.

The Kushner case was a paper case; it involved the tedious prosecutorial work of using corporate records, the murky trails left in interlocking LLC ledgers, to make out the crime of tax evasion. It is illegal to cheat the US Treasury by using nondeductible expenses—charitable contributions, political donations, personal entertainment expenses—to reduce business income, and thereby, taxes. This is what Charlie had done. Christie’s team also had an eye on the FEC campaign finance investigation, and on the FDIC’s investigation of Charlie’s ownership of his bank. Kushner’s entire business empire seemed rife with irregularities.

Charlie fought back. He hired an aggressive team of New Jersey lawyers. The lawyers worked to discredit Bob Yontef and Billy and Esther Schulder, making “regular efforts” to demonstrate that Esther, Billy, and Yontef were “inciting the federal investigation and were generally untrustworthy.”¹⁷ Charlie made an audio recording of Billy, with the goal of showing that Billy had obstructed justice in Murray’s civil suit.

None of this worked to dissuade Christie from his criminal probe. Christie’s team became increasingly convinced that Charlie had engaged in a massive tax fraud. Members of the New Jersey bar noticed what they saw as Christie’s unusual, personal interest in this case. Often, in white-collar cases, a team of lawyers working for the defendant—ex-prosecutors, frequently—persuade prosecutors that the crimes they are investigating are not serious, that no one was really hurt, and subtly, that they won’t be worth the trouble. When this tactic didn’t work, Charlie Kushner took matters into his own hands.

Charlie met a running buddy, an East Orange police captain on the verge of retirement named Jimmy O’Toole, and offered Jimmy an unusual gig. Jimmy was a high school grad, without many post-retirement job prospects. In his large office, Kushner seemed to be offering a brass ring to O’Toole: a six-figure private security job. But first, Charlie had a one-off task for him. Sitting at his desk, he passed O’Toole an accordion file stuffed with cash. Charlie suggested that Jimmy and his brother Tommy O’Toole, a Utica, New York–based private investigator, hire a prostitute to have sex with Billy, secretly videotape the tryst, and use the tape to “cause problems and personal difficulties” for Billy. Charlie promised to pay them $25,000 for their efforts. But for the next three months, the scheme stalled as Jimmy and Tommy could not find a prostitute to do the job.

Jimmy, still working as an on-duty cop, had been raised a strict Irish Catholic, an altar boy. He decided to call it quits. He took the accordion file with the cash back to 26 Columbia Turnpike. Charlie wouldn’t take no for an answer. He handed Jimmy a phone number. “I want you to call this number and say you’re a friend of John’s,” Charlie told Jimmy. It was a phone number for a Manhattan prostitute named Susanna, “a high-priced, European-born call girl on Manhattan’s Upper East Side,” as Christie described her in his book, Let Me Finish. Jimmy called Susanna. He said he was settling a family dispute. He told her not to worry—it wasn’t blackmail. Susanna said she trusted him. He was a friend of John’s.

As the charging documents laid out: “In or about November 2003, in New York City, defendant CHARLES KUSHNER personally recruited a woman (W1) known by defendant CHARLES KUSHNER to be a call girl—to seduce and have sex with CW2 on videotape. Defendant CHARLES KUSHNER told W1 that he would pay her approximately $7,000 to $10,000 if she would have sex with CW2 on videotape. Defendant CHARLES KUSHNER further told W1 that he wanted to make the videotape so that he could have leverage over CW2.”¹⁸ W1 or “woman 1” is the prostitute; CW2, or “cooperating witness 2,” is Billy.

The next month, during a snowstorm, Susanna traveled from Manhattan to the Red Bull motel in Bridgewater and checked into a room that the O’Toole brothers had secretly wired with a hidden camera. She’d been told that Billy frequently ate at the Time to Eat Diner, which was a short drive from the Red Bull and from Murray’s real estate offices, where Billy was by then working.

The Time to Eat is a classic New Jersey diner: blue leatherette counter stools, red leatherette booths, a menu that goes on for pages offering enormous plates of eggs and potatoes, triple-decker sandwiches, and gooey Italian specialties. When Billy walked out, Susanna approached and asked him for a ride back to her motel, telling him her car had broken down. She invited him in, but that day he said no. She gave him her number. Jimmy and Tommy drove her back to Manhattan as the snow kept piling up. The next morning, early, they brought her back to the Red Bull. She waited. Billy called. He drove over to the motel, where the secret video camera recorded their activities.

Tommy O’Toole retrieved the tape and drove it over to the Kushner Companies headquarters in Florham Park, about thirty minutes away. Charlie and Richard Stadtmauer—Seryl’s brother—covered up the walls of the Kushner Companies conference room with paper, and laughed as they watched the tape of Billy and the prostitute having sex. In the words of the criminal complaint, Charlie “expressed satisfaction with” the video to Tommy.¹⁹ Charlie then asked Tommy to make copies of the tape, with the woman’s face pixelated, and to make 8 1/2-by-11 still photos from the video. For a while, Charlie did nothing with them.

Charlie tried the same entrapment plot on Bob Yontef, but Yontef did not take the bait.

Charlie’s lawyers continued to mount an aggressive defense. Charlie refused to comply with subpoenas for documents, and ordered his accountants to refuse as well. Prosecutors were getting more and more suspicious. In mid-December, the day of the Kushner Companies’ Hanukkah party, federal agents executed a raid at Kushner headquarters, seizing boxes of ledgers and documents.

The next month, Murray and Charlie settled their civil suit in Hudson county. The Star Ledger wrote up the settlement: “Ultimately, they went to court to trade allegations of betrayal, deceit and corporate espionage in an extraordinary public airing of dirty laundry. It was the most acrimonious family quarrel ever in the cloistered world of New Jersey’s ultra-rich and powerful.”²⁰

Settling a civil suit is a classic tactic for defendants who want a corresponding criminal case to go away. But Christie did not let go. He was making a campaign finance and tax evasion case in an era when the laws were becoming more and more lax, at a time when his own party was hastening their demise.

 

In 2001 and again in 2003, George W. Bush continued the Reagan tradition and cut taxes for the wealthy. By one analysis, the wealthiest households received an average tax cut of $50,000 a year, increasing their post-tax income by almost 7 percent.²¹ Meanwhile, the poorest households saw only a 1 percent increase. The “tax cuts are not simply a matter of returning unneeded or unused funds to taxpayers, but rather a choice to require other, future taxpayers to cover the long-term deficit, which the tax cut significantly exacerbates,” the Brookings Institution wrote.²²

On March 31, 2004, just before Passover, Rae died at the Mount Sinai hospital in Miami Beach after a long bout with Parkinson’s. She had outlasted her mother and brother and sister in Nazi-occupied Poland, crawled through a narrow tunnel, and survived a Polish winter in the forest. She had walked across borders as a refugee, and bent the visa rules to gain entry into the United States. She had given birth to four children who gave her fifteen grandchildren, anchored a family business, and outlived her husband from the shtetl by twenty years. She’d met a president and vice president of the United States of America and once lit candles in the US Capitol to commemorate the Holocaust, testament to her will that no one should ever forget what happened under the Nazis.

Rae left her considerable estate to be divided up among her four children, and all her grandchildren, including the adopted ones. By then, the tax laws had made it easier and easier to pass along her wealth, untaxed, to her heirs. She left “ONE MILLION ($1,000,000) DOLLARS divided into four shares” to the children of each of her children, but the true value of her estate went far beyond that. That number was not made public in the will.²³

Rae’s funeral was held at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy. Two thousand people came. At the shiva, guests noticed the strain: Murray and Esther staying to one side, Charlie and Linda to another. Charlie and Murray were supposed to be co-executors of Rae’s estate. They filed papers with the court, turning over that function to their sisters.

After Rae died, with Christie’s prosecutors circling, Charlie became unmoored. On May 7, prosecutors sent out a series of letters notifying potential targets of a grand jury probe. Christie’s office was “locking in” testimony. This is typically the final stage of a criminal investigation, the last step after prosecutors have collected and analyzed documents and before they file charges.

On May 8, Charlie reached out to Jimmy O’Toole and asked him to meet the next day, Mother’s Day, his first without Rae. Charlie’s directions were precise: Jimmy was to have four separate packages of the VHS video of Billy having sex with the prostitute, her face pixelated, and the 8 1/2-by-11 stills, mailed to his sister from Canada, timed to arrive on the eve of the engagement party of Jacob Schulder, Esther’s son, then twenty-three, almost exactly Jared’s age. There should be one package for Esther, and one each for Jacob, Jessica, and Ruth, close in age to Charlie’s own daughters Dara and Nicole, who had all celebrated simchas at the house on Fawn Drive, vacationed together in Florida, attended each other’s bar and bat mitzvahs. Jimmy refused to send the video to the kids. He “convinced defendant CHARLES KUSHNER that he should not send the video to the children of CW1 and CW2,” the charging documents noted.²⁴

When Esther saw what was in the package, she quailed. Then she called her lawyer. Jacob and his fiancée’s celebration went on as planned. It was a beautiful day for an engagement party.

Not long after, Esther and Billy drove over to the US Attorney’s Office in Newark, in a brutalist plaza of grey rock, dominated by a sculpture of an enormous blindfolded head—and handed the VHS and the envelope with the still photos to federal agents. Emotions ran high.

Outwardly, Charlie pursued business as usual. Israeli newspapers considered him a serious bidder for the Israel Discount Bank. Owning a bank in Israel had been a longtime professional dream of Charlie’s. He was expected any day to submit a letter of intent, for a takeover that would have to be overseen by Kushner’s friend and recipient of Kushner’s largesse: Finance Minister Bibi Netanyahu, once again rising in Israeli politics.²⁵

Charlie never made the bid.

The next month, the legal consequences began rolling in. There was a Federal Election Commission fine at the end of June, penalizing Charles Kushner and forty real estate partnerships he controlled a sum of $508,900, one of the largest fines in the commission’s history. According to the FEC press release, “The FEC investigation found that the Kushner partnerships violated Commission partnership contribution regulations by failing to obtain the agreement of the partners to whom the contributions were attributed. Charles Kushner . . . selected the political committees that would receive contributions and determined the aggregate amount of these contributions. He signed the contribution checks and directed management personnel of Kushner Companies to forward the checks on Kushner Companies’ letterhead to the recipient committees.”²⁶

On July 13, a sultry midsummer day, twenty-three-year-old Jared, on his way to his summer internship at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, got a call from his brother Josh, an incoming freshman at Harvard. Charlie had not shown up at the Tuesday morning Kushner Companies meeting, an inviolable tradition. Jared called his father, who told him he was about to be arrested. “For what?” Jared said, as he later related it to Gabriel Sherman in New York Magazine. “Is it because of the tape? I thought your lawyers knew about that. I thought it’s not illegal.”²⁷

It was illegal. Charlie turned himself over to federal authorities in Newark, where he was placed in leg irons and handcuffs, his belt and tie removed, leaving the collar of his blue-and-white-checked button-down shirt hanging slightly open.²⁸ Kushner posted a $5-million bond secured by his homes in Livingston and Long Branch, and was ordered to surrender his passport and to wear an electronic bracelet. He was charged with witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and promoting interstate prostitution under the Mann Act, a statute that no one in the District of New Jersey could ever remember invoking. (It was later used to investigate the governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.)

Chris Christie announced the charges in the muted, sober tones of a prosecutor, flanked by investigators from the FBI and the IRS and the US Attorney’s Office.²⁹ He said Charlie had hired prostitutes “to entice witnesses who were cooperating with the federal investigation into engaging in sex acts with those prostitutes and to have those sex acts then videotaped” to discourage the witnesses from testifying. As Christie detailed it, Charlie paid $25,000 for the successful enticement, and $12,000 for the unsuccessful one, against Bob Yontef, the accountant.

“This office sent out target letters to a number of associates of Mr. Kushner’s,” Christie said, and “two days after those target letters were received, Mr. Kushner instructed his co-conspirators to mail the videotape to the cooperating witness’s wife—she was also a cooperating witness.” Christie noted, pointedly, that Kushner had to be talked out of sending it to the potential “witnesses’ children.”

“This Department of Justice, and this United States Attorney’s Office with our partners at the FBI will not tolerate the obstruction of federal grand jury investigations,” Christie said, his voice level. He added, “There is nothing, nothing more sacrosanct in our rule of law than the integrity of the federal grand jury investigative process. When people under investigation decide to take the law into their own hands, to obstruct justice, to attempt to impede the rule of law, it is our obligation to act swiftly and surely to end the obstruction.”³⁰

The reporters jamming into the conference room on the seventh floor of Newark’s federal building lobbed Christie with questions, but he kept cool, his voice only sharpening when he berated the assembled journalists for dwelling on Governor McGreevey, who was not named in the criminal complaint. But then, Christie was asked a question that made the corners of his mouth turn up, a smile he could not suppress.

“Will the tape ever be made public?”

“I have no idea,” Christie said, trying to maintain control of his lips. “I assume that if there were a trial in this case that that is something that would be considered.”

As Charlie moved through the courthouse that day, appearing before a judge, his face was frozen, locked. His lawyer, Ben Brafman, was livid. “Charles Kushner is one of the most successful, well-respected business leaders in America and one of the greatest philanthropists of this century,” Brafman said. “The charges in this case are entirely baseless. When this matter is resolved in court, he’ll be completely exonerated.”

But over the next month, it became clear to Charles Kushner and his team that Christie had more cards to play against him. It wasn’t a coincidence that Charlie had told Jimmy O’Toole to call Susanna and tell her he was a “friend of John’s.” Prosecutors had learned that for years, Charlie had been living a double life, using the pseudonym “John Hess,” to travel to Manhattan and avail himself of Susanna’s services, according to seven people with knowledge of Charlie’s activities. To tell the story of how Charlie ensnared his brother-in-law in a web of sex and vengeance—that is, to gain a conviction at trial on the witness-tampering charges—prosecutors would need Susanna’s testimony, as well as that of the woman who had tried and failed to catch Bob Yontef in a similar plot. They were prepared to put both of them on the stand. They were prepared to let the world know about “John Hess.”

In his book, Christie alluded to his own knowledge. “I’m burdened with facts about your father that even you don’t know, that I can never tell you, because if I did I would break the law,” Christie said he later told Jared Kushner.³¹ In an interview, Brafman said, “All of this was drilled down by me and my investigator fifteen years ago, and there was zero evidence to suggest any of that to be truthful.”³² But New Jersey journalists were unearthing Charlie’s exact relationship to Susanna; they already had her cell phone number. Charlie and his lawyers decided to avoid the embarrassment of a trial. They took a plea deal. In an email, Brafman said, “Mr. Kushner recognized the poor, isolated judgement that led to his arrest and his decision to quickly plead guilty and accept responsibility for his conduct was made to address these allegations and then move on with his life as quickly as possible.”³³

There was one last power play. Charlie had been set to plead guilty to an additional charge of conspiracy, but at six in the morning, his lawyers showed up at Chris Christie’s house in Mendham while Christie was still in bed, and convinced him over bowls of Cheerios that if he wanted his plea deal that day, he would have to drop the conspiracy charges, which implicated Seryl’s brother. Christie ultimately agreed, lest he lose the whole deal. The plea deal was finalized a few hours before Charlie appeared in court.³⁴

On August 18, Charles Kushner pleaded guilty to sixteen counts of tax fraud, one of witness tampering, and one of lying to the FEC. Among the crimes to which he pleaded guilty was using three partnership entities to pay a total of $13,768 for “an individual’s private school tuition expense.”³⁵ That same year, Charlie had given $250,000 to Harvard. That latter amount was legally deductible from Charlie’s personal taxes.

All of this was indeed sensational news, but less so because five days earlier, something even more spectacular had happened. Governor Jim McGreevey, recently married, father of a toddler, went on live television to declare, “I am a gay American.” He had been having sex with Golan Cipel, the man he had appointed to be his national security advisor. At the time, he was the highest-level politician in America to say he was gay. Then he offered his resignation. “I am also here today because, shamefully, I engaged in an adult consensual affair with another man, which violates my bonds of matrimony,” the governor said. “It was wrong. It was foolish. It was inexcusable.”

For Charlie, the criminal case was not the final legal consequence. The repercussions continued, more quietly. In February, he and the trust through which his family owned NorCrown Bank, were assessed the unusually steep fine of $12.5 million to settle allegations of lying to bank regulators and for setting up the trust without getting approval from the FDIC.³⁶

 

More than six hundred people wrote letters for the defense to give to the federal judge in advance of Charlie’s sentencing: employees who were grateful for his tutelage; mothers whose sick children he had helped; business partners who had worked successfully with him for years; people with multiple sclerosis to whose cause Charlie had donated. Leaders of Jewish and Holocaust remembrance groups, rabbis, educators, politicians he’d supported, including Bob Abrams, Robert Torricelli, and Cory Booker. This bulging file of letters was not kept, according to clerks, pursuant to judicial discretion.

In the end, Charlie served just over a year in prison. His legal team had researched which prisons offered accommodations for Orthodox Jews, and the best odds of allowing early release for inmates with alcoholism, a benefit for which Charlie Kushner successfully applied. The prison was in Alabama. After serving his year, Charlie was sent to a halfway house in Newark, from where he resumed his business dealings.

In the coming years, six associates would also be convicted for their roles in Charlie’s tax evasion scheme, including Seryl’s brother, Richard Stadtmauer, who was sentenced after trial to three years in prison. Most of the others received no prison time.

Upon his release from prison, Charlie sat down with the Real Deal, a New York–based real estate industry magazine in which he began, once again, to build his own image. “My parents were poor immigrants when they came to this country. My mom didn’t really speak English, so when the nurse, who happened to be African-American, asked what my name was going to be, my mother answered with a Yiddish name, Chanon. I was named after her brother, who was killed in the Holocaust. The nurse said they don’t name children like that in America. The nurse named me Charles. Chanon is the Hebrew name I kept.”³⁷

Chanon, Charlie’s namesake, had been a leader of the group that carved out the tunnel out of Novogrudok. He had been shot by the Nazis, but not before his cohorts had strangled a Jewish teen they feared might collaborate with the guards. The Nazis often offered Jews small perks to inform on their fellow ghetto residents, as a means of keeping control, Rae once explained.³⁸ The residents, on the verge of escape, could not take the risk. For Charles Kushner, nothing was worse than what he saw as collaboration.

“If you had to start all over again, what would you do differently?” Charlie Kushner was asked in the November 2007 Real Deal interview.³⁹ “I don’t think I would change much,” Charlie replied. “I probably would have heeded my father’s advice not to take my brother in as a business partner, which my father always urged me to do.”

Had he reached any resolution with his sister and her husband?

“I mean, it’s a family tragedy what happened. I believe that God and my parents in heaven forgive me for what I did, which was wrong. I don’t believe God and my parents will ever forgive my brother and sister for instigating a criminal investigation and being cheerleaders for the government and putting their brother in jail because of jealousy, hatred and spite. On my worst day in prison, I wouldn’t trade places with my brother and sister, and yet I know what I did was wrong.”

No one who lived through this story, and especially not Charlie, or Jared, or Chris Christie, would ever leave it behind.