Chapter 6: The Jungle of Newark
Updated: Jun 3
A few months after Baby Yayi was born the renovation work was done and we moved back into our West Orange house on Hooper Avenue. Actually it wasn’t done, but we felt it was good enough for us to move back in. And like a shoemaker that doesn’t fix his own shoes, I never totally finished it, even until we moved to Monsey, NY five years later.
Charlene’s mother used to call it a “gilded shithole” because parts were finished in very traditional, formal fashion, with crown moldings, marble, and heavy drapes, and a back extension was left unrenovated and basically closed off. And even the finished parts had many “punchlist items” that were never completed. She already didn’t like me for stealing her daughter Charlene from their hometown and I certainly didn’t help the situation with how I took care of our house.
But Charlene was content with our house. She certainly never complained about it. Which was probably because of her desire to make it and in general everything work. She never wanted to be a burden, in fact she said those words often, “I don’t want to be a burden”. And although a lot of my neglect was due to my emotional disconnection, a part of it was just not thinking it was important because she didn’t say it was. Things probably would have gone differently if Charlene would have pushed back a little.
But that was not her way. Charlene was always accepting, always understanding, always grateful, and never demanding. Charlene was so focused on peace and happiness, so grateful and unentitled, so loyal to me, and us as a team, wanting to contribute to our success, that she just went along with most everything. Unless it affected her babies in which case she made her desires clearly known, but still in the nicest of ways.
But like all behaviors that are primarily positive, and coming from positive traits and a good place, those behaviors can sometimes go a little too far. And Charlene definitely went a little too far. Because Charlene’s weakest, negative part was also engaged, her vulnerable little girl grouping of traits, people pleasing, agreeableness, need for acceptance, and fear of rule breaking and judgment. (Even the weakest, negative part of her psyche was sweet and just too much of a good thing rather than something ugly. Charlene had no dark, mean or ugly traits that I ever witnessed).
Charlene’s combination of traits made it easy to take advantage of her in a relationship context. I wasn’t trying to, I wasn’t manipulative or malicious, but I was inconsiderate and immature. And I had very little control over my emotions and negative feelings, letting them, and my unconscious programming, dictate large parts of my behavior and existence.
So I took advantage of Charlene and did not appreciate and value what I had. Don’t get me wrong. I took extremely good care of her and the baby and my marital responsibilities but was not as emotionally invested and involved as I should have been. I was programmed to be a good provider, but emotional involvement with our new family was something I was going to have to learn on my own.
But Charlene was happy because she had her baby. She was so wrapped up in her motherhood, it was like she was in a bubble. Bubble-wrapped. She would take Yali to the beautiful park down the block from our house every day, walking around the pond to the playground where they would spend hours together having fun. There was a flock of around 50 geese that lived by the pond that were all terrified of Charlene.
One day Yali had been walking to the playground a few feet in front of Charlene and got a little too close to a mother goose and her babies. Goosey Loosey started hissing and came at Yali very aggressively and nipped at her. Yali started crying and Charlene started running towards them. When Loosey saw Charlene coming at her she took off running into the center of her flock but Charlene just kept on coming, (that’s Charlene), laser focused on the one goose.
Charlene grabbed Loosey by the neck while completely surrounded by, and in the center of the entire flock of geese. She squeezed Loosey’s long neck tightly with her hand, while shaking her violently, and got right up in Loosey’s face, screaming “don’t you ever come at my baby again”. All this time Loosey’s head is flopping from side to side with her tongue hanging out, and the 49 other geese are staring astonished at the spectacle, honking like they were in midtown traffic.
Charlene finished screaming and then threw Loosey away from her like she was a sack of garbage. Charlene spoke their language and those geese never forgot it. Forever after they would all go running when they saw Charlene and Yali coming.
Charlene had an uncanny way of communicating with her babies. So naturally and effortlessly. The way animal mommies communicate with their babies. Charlene understood her babies instinctively and deeply, as she did all of nature in general. Because she was so connected to her own nature and the world around her. When she wanted to teach Yali about "stranger danger" she took her to the park and had her approach baby squirrels, chipmunks and rabbits, saying things to Yali like, “go play with that baby bunny over there”.
Every time Yali got a little close to one of the babies they would run away. After a few attempts Yali started crying and complaining that they were all running away. Charlene said to her, “you know why they’re all running away? Because their mommy’s told them - no talking to strangers”!
Charlene didn’t give Yali a lecture, imparting human wisdom in a pontificating way. Charlene showed Yali the law of nature, from the natural world around her, the way an animal mommy would, showing Yali that even baby bunnies were smart enough to stay away from strangers.
Charlene's involvement with nature and appreciation and understanding of animals was way deeper even than her very extensive involvement with horses and riding. She cared for all sorts of domesticated and barn animals over the years, lambs, pigs, chickens, ducks, keeping some even as pets. And countless dogs and cats.
The last cat we had before making Aliya, a really sweet cat named Oreo, we got because Charlene had fostered him and his siblings from the day they were born. A woman had dropped off these brand new kittens at the shelter that were just born to her pet cat hours earlier. The shelter begged her to keep the kittens with their mother, for even a short time, every day at that age being critical. But she refused.
There were very few people the shelter could call that had the ability and desire to nurse brand-new baby kittens that small. Charlene was one of them. Charlene bottle fed each one while they were resting in her hand. They were so tiny, each would only fill up half her hand. Charlene did this for a couple of months, teaching her own babies, Yali and Sruli, (Ari wasn’t born yet), all the while.
Teaching them how to care for animals but more so teaching them how to love and be compassionate to God’s creatures. Watching Charlene so gently teaching her own little babies to take care of these tiny creatures; watching them holding the tiny bottles and baby kittens with her, so excited to help, was like watching an angel of heaven, a divine manifestation of kindness and love.
When the kittens were old enough to be adopted Charlene gave them back to the shelter but decided to keep Oreo because he was unnaturally gentle and sweet (for a cat) from a day old. Charlene thought he might be retarded. She also felt he would be a good fit with our family and as usual she was right.
Her involvement with animals wasn’t just with the domesticated kind. Wildlife too. Charlene would hunt deer as a teenager with friends. And then field dress and process the deer into meat. And they would go out on a lake at night in a little rowboat and shine a flashlight into the reeds near the shoreline to pick up the flashing eyes of alligators. When the eyes were very close together they knew it was a baby alligator.
Charlene and her friends would keep the flashlight trained on its eyes, hypnotizing the baby, and they would slowly row up to it. They would then grab it and bring it in the rowboat, playing with the baby alligator for a little while before putting it back. Sometimes they would put it in the bathtub of an abandoned house near the lakeshore that they used as a clubhouse. They'd play with it there for a couple of days and then return it to the spot they took it from.
Reminding me of my own childhood roaming the Catskill woods hunting and trapping wildlife from my forest clubhouse base - although her not worrying about the mommy alligator…that’s another level of crazy, and way more physically fearless than I ever was.
And Charlene was totally physically fearless, doing things like jumping off the top of her very high (ten feet or more) water slide into her swimming pool as a young girl of eleven. And jumping horses! In this picture she's at least 12 feet in the air, no helmet, on a 2,000 pound animal. Her horse himself is jumping around 6 feet, grand prix level, (he's many feet above outdoor garbage cans that are around 4 feet tall).
Whereas I was pretty chicken when it came to physical activities, and would never do anything remotely like that. I distinctly remember the single scariest moment of my life. I was six or seven at the time. I was standing on some rocks at the Neversink river’s edge catching tadpoles and mini fish in these little pools when I heard a rattlesnake rattle immediately behind me to the left. That rattling sound, when it’s close and unexpected like that, your bones vibrate and feel it. If death had a sound that was it.
I froze. I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe, my heart didn’t beat. After around 15 seconds of not being bitten, I slowly moved my eyes to the left and saw parts of its speckled body between the rocks as it moved away. I started breathing after it was gone and then started crying and running for my life. I don’t know what happened with my bucket of tadpoles and fish but I never went back there.
The year before we made Aliya, we took a two week family trip to Israel. One day a “naturalist-type” tour guide, the religious zionist version of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, took us jeep-ing through the Judean Desert mountains and to a bedouin encampment. As we were standing in a bedouin tent, there was a desert lizard on the wall next to us. Sruli, who was 9 at the time, says to Charlene, “hey mom check out that lizard”. Charlene asks him “do you want to hold it”? Zionist Steve says “they’re very fast you can’t catch them”.
Charlene just stood there for a minute next to the lizard, looking away, and then without moving her head, shot out her hand and grabbed it. The Judean Crocodile Hunter's jaw dropped, dumbfounded; this rich, pretty, (very pretty), American lady with manicured nails and a bunch of kids had just done something he thought was impossible! And she made it look easy, not making a big deal of it, just nonchalantly handing the lizard to Miles. The thing is, none of us were at all surprised Charlene caught that lizard.
At the last home we lived in before making Aliya, on Timber Trail in Monsey, NY, wild squirrels would eat from Charlene’s hand in her garden like she was Disney’s Snow White. We had a 2-acre property which Charlene, the Jewish Martha Stewart, had turned into a woodsy park and cottage garden paradise. She spent hours outside daily watering and caring for the garden and the property.
So she spent a lot of time in proximity with these squirrels and would offer them food. First by throwing it to them and then step-by-step closer until the squirrels were her “buddies” as she called them, and would come up to her for food. They would watch her as she did yoga on our front lawn, when the kids didn't scare them off. (Another thing she was expert in, even giving lessons to friends when they asked - and me).
Just a couple of years ago Charlene took a short family trip with her sister Sandy to the beach in South Carolina. And as they were sitting on a deck a chicken was sitting on the top of Charlene’s chair. And Charlene started talking to it, sounding remarkably chicken-like, and they were totally comfortable together, Charlene and that street chicken. Charlene calling it “her buddy” like the squirrels on Timber Trail.
Yali had an amazing shelf lined toy room, super organized, every doll and toy having its own place and see-through container. As if Charlene had hired one of those closet organizer consultants. But the Jewish Martha Stewart would never need to. Charlene was always buying Yali expensive toys because we had hundreds of thousands of Amex points through my business and I would redeem some of them and get her gift cards which she used for the purpose.
Charlene would play with Yali on the floor for hours. Just like the video I saw of Miles, I’ve recently seen a video of Charlene and Baby Yayi. When I look at these videos now and see Charlene’s divinely feminine, maternal nature I melt. How loving and connected and oh so sweet. Interacting at Yali’s level, not talking down to her but having a conversation with her. Understanding what was going on in Yali’s head and heart through her noises and expressions and communicating with her at that level.
Yali had a little closet in her toy room with every Disney princess dress, bought on their countless trips to Disney together. Yali loved to dress up in her princess dresses and very often would have her little friends from school come over to all dress as princesses. Charlene would put makeup on them and they would sit and have tea in their princess dresses. And Charlene would tell all of them how beautiful they were. They loved it.
How I wish I was more mature back then, more full of wisdom, more consciously aware, to appreciate the precious treasure I had. But my emotions were engaged elsewhere. I had a paradisical garden at home but chose the jungle outside. And I don't only mean metaphorically, I mean the literal jungle, as you're about to see.
During these years I was single-mindedly focused on empire building. I was flipping houses at a mind boggling rate. We had a major operation, constantly buying and selling, with usually around twenty or more houses in revolving inventory. We would purchase, renovate, market and sell, like an assembly line, each step taking time but going through the process.
The average house would be in inventory from purchase to sale around four months.
The best deals would move much quicker and some stuck around a little longer but these houses were like milk. They definitely had a limited shelf life for us. If a house sat six months in inventory there would be alarm bells.
And I was constantly looking for the next deal because I was a deal junkie, never happy unless I was chasing something. But also because I had to feed the beast. We had a big operation because we did everything in-house. Purchasing, renovating, marketing, mortgage financing, closing, we were a one-stop-shop. We ran our own construction crews and we were the single biggest customer of two Home Depots, the ones in Bloomfield and Newark, where our crews would go to the pro desk every morning for their materials needed for the day.
My risk tolerance and wildness was recklessly high, always pushing the envelope. I remember once renovating a house before I even owned it. I was in contract to purchase a bank-owned foreclosure in Newark and had an excellent buyer that was approved for a mortgage and wanted the house. I figured if I renovated the house before closing I could save the cash required to purchase the house until the last minute, and sell the freshly renovated house immediately after closing with the bank, dramatically reducing my cost of capital for that deal.
It wasn’t the only time I had done some work to a house before actually closing. But it was the first (and only) time I renovated an entire house before closing. And what do you know, there was a problem with the bank’s foreclosure and they couldn’t provide a clear title. They would have to start over with the foreclosure process. And I had $40,000 worth of renovation work tied up in a bank-owned vacant house that I would never be able to close on.
I acted as my own real estate attorney for our side although I was not an attorney. (In fact I never went to college or secular high school either although I did attend Talmudical College for eight years, and in my early years read everything I could get my hands on). Most times we didn’t even purchase title insurance because I examined my own title searches and was expert on the risks involved. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, if I felt a property needed title insurance, and was looking to purchase it, I wouldn’t have been willing to sell myself that title insurance.
Homebuyers needed their own attorney for their mortgage closing so most of the time I gave them one I was affiliated with. I never stopped them from bringing their own, but usually they just didn’t have or know anyone. Ironically, when buyers brought their own attorney, those were more crooked and damaging to them than the ones I recommended. Because I cared about my buyers and wanted them to succeed, so I found them lawyers that would take care of them while not hassling me too much. Whereas the lawyers they hired themselves just treated them like suckers to be taken advantage of.
I remember a lawyer for one of our buyers (once I left house flipping and became a new construction builder all of our buyers had their own lawyers and realtors) once asking me why he couldn’t find me listed in the NJ Lawyers Diary, a giant red book newly issued every year with every licensed lawyer in NJ listed, as well as information on every court, clerk’s office, and state resource relevant to a lawyer in NJ. Every lawyer in NJ (and me) had this book on their desk. When I explained to him that I wasn’t an attorney, he just couldn’t wrap his head around me functioning in this way without legal training.
But the truth is I had so much experience with crazy deals, and mortgage and real estate closings that I was a better real estate attorney, at least as it related to my industry niche, than not only him but 99% of NJ real estate lawyers. I was also an expert on Newark zoning laws with my architect once calling me for my opinion on what could be built on a complicated, triangular shaped lot on a street corner that straddled two separate zoning districts and that would need multiple variances.
There were certain deals that only I could have (or would have) done. Deals that were a combination of crazy and requiring very specialized expertise in esoteric real estate aspects like title, environmental, and zoning. For example, a foreclosure realtor once called me with a deal that he himself said he knew only one person he could call.
A woman came to him with a four story warehouse in Newark that her brother used to operate as a paint factory. He was now dying of Parkinson’s, (from all the chemicals) and had some dementia, and she had a dubious looking power of attorney. Although there was no mortgage on the property, he owed the city $68,000 in back taxes and they had gone through a tax foreclosure and tax sale. It was now 8 days into the 10 day right of rescission, after which time the city would own the building outright.
The biggest problem wasn’t the back taxes, or many title issues, (with zero possibility of title insurance), or possibly fake power of attorney, or even that we had to pay the city $68,000 in less than 48 hours or else the city would own the property. The biggest problem was what was sitting in the warehouse.
100 rusty, corroded, unmarked 50-gallon metal drums full of old, gunky, and very ugly looking chemicals and solvents. As is expected of a state well-known for its toxic “superfund sites”, the anti-dumping laws for toxic chemicals in New Jersey were super strict, with automatic prison sentences, so nobody in their right mind would even consider that path.
If the chemicals in these drums were especially toxic it could be millions of dollars to properly dispose of. I called my environmental guy for an emergency consultation and he immediately met me at the warehouse. And said there was no way of knowing what exactly was in the drums and what it would cost to dispose of unless we had each drum tested. It was a months-long process and required a ton of paperwork with the state tracking each sample from each drum.
The way the law worked, putting a name on the property’s title, even a corporate name, would make the principals of the corporation personally liable for the cleanup. And there was no way me or anyone else was putting a name anywhere close to this title without knowing exactly what was in these drums.
So we took a power-of-attorney signed quit-claim deed from the sister and held it temporarily without recording it at the county so our name would not be connected legally to the property in any way. But at least I had the signed paper in my hand for when I was willing to put our name on the property. The deal I made with the sister was that I would pay her 20% of any profit I made selling the building after paying all my costs. (I wasn’t about to pay her anything up-front for a property that might have zero value).
We then paid off the $68,000 tax lien as if we were the existing owner, killing the tax foreclosure on the last day of the 10 day right of rescission, but leaving the property in its existing ownership as far as the city was concerned.
We then tested all the drums, taking approximately three months for all the results and documentation. At the end of the day it cost around $150,000 to properly dispose of the drums, with full documentation, at which time we recorded the deed that we had signed three months earlier. We then sold the building to a persian family that was in the carpet business who used it to store their stock.
We made a fortune on this one deal. Pity I didn’t own it myself because I didn’t want to risk the $68,000. Which would have been completely lost money if the cost of the chemical clean-up was over $750,000. I had two partners put up $34,000 each for the taxes, which was the main risk. Plus half of the remediation costs each, once we knew the cost and we decided to clean it up and not walk away. And we split the profit three ways.
Working so many deals at once was exhausting but if I ran low on inventory I would have construction crews not working. And if I didn’t buy a lot I wouldn’t be the first call of the best foreclosure realtors. I was close with quite a few. And some were on the payroll in various ways.
One of them was a big boozer and Jets fan who had season tickets. Once a year he and I and my business partner at the time would go to a game, tailgate for three hours before-hand getting shitfaced, spray paint our faces green and white, and scream our asses off. It was pretty wild. (The fact that I was a Giants fan at the time was immaterial. Different conference).
One of the best deals I ever did was with this realtor. It was right at the time I was transitioning from being a house flipper to a new home builder. And right when buildable lots in Newark were getting valuable (around 2003), before the foreclosure bank asset managers were fully aware of this market. Because they didn’t deal with buildable lots, they foreclosed on old houses.
My realtor friend had a 3-family house in Newark on an oversized lot. The oversized lot didn’t add any value as far as the asset manager was concerned. It was common to have oversized lots in Newark and they never sold for more compared to a similar house on a regular sized lot. But this particular deal was different. Because my realtor friend knew I could split off the empty piece into two separate buildable lots.
The realtor called me ecstatic because he knew I was actively gobbling up every buildable lot I could find at this time. He offered me the deal at the full asking price of the one old house with no premium at all for the two buildable lots attached to it. Repaying me with this one deal ten times for all the free renovation work I had done in his house (kitchen, bathrooms, siding, windows…) as payment for his sending things my way. And we signed that contract before anyone else in Newark even knew it was on the market and could make another offer.
I transitioned to new construction by 2003 because house flipping at scale just didn’t work. At least in the ghetto where I was doing it and the way I was doing it. There were countless problems and we were working with the bottom of the barrel, in terms of quality of housing stock and renovation required, investors, buyers, contractors, lawyers, financing options, everyone and everything in the mix. No matter how many deals I did I was continually surprised at the levels of dirtiness, corruption and incompetence from all parties.
And the craziness. I can write multiple books on all the crazy stories, (and maybe one day I will). Every single house and deal was another story. Finding dead bodies in basements. Simultaneously selling two houses to a drug dealer while he was in prison, for his two baby mommas (who were unaware of each other). I was a legend in Newark, and very well known to the local pharmaceutical business community. I had a reputation for caring for and dealing honestly with my buyers and was trusted. He called me from a payphone in prison to set up the deal and describe the houses he was looking for.
Both baby mommas had good credit and stable income, one was a teacher and one was a nurse, (like a tailor that remembers his customers by suit size rather than name, I can’t remember any of their names but can instantly recall their credit ratings and documentable income sources). The dealer had down payment money for the two houses delivered to me in a paper bag by an associate.
Drug dealers all trusted me. Because they sized me up and realized I wasn’t going to steal from them. Another time I had bought a redevelopment parcel in Belleville, New Jersey, a blue collar Italian town immediately north of Newark. It included some vacant land, and an old factory we were going to tear down, to build new houses.
Plus a couple of existing two-family houses, all of it on one big tax lot. After going through the subdivision work with the city to put each buildable parcel and existing house on its own tax lot I went to talk to the tenants in the two-family houses telling them I was now going to sell those houses “as-is”.
There was an old lady living on the first floor of one of the houses. These were old, very shabby houses and she must have been living there for many decades. She asked me how much I wanted for the house. I had seen enough wild things to never judge a book by its cover so I took the conversation seriously. I told her what I would ask if I listed the house with a realtor. She then asked me how much I wanted from her as a cash buyer. I thought she meant quickly and direct, without a realtor, and I answered $160,000.
She said “okay hold on”, got up and walked out of the room, returning a few minutes later with $160,000 in cash which she handed to me. 16 rubber-banded bundles of $10,000 in hundreds. I was shocked. She didn’t know me other than the once or twice she had seen me at the property in the course of our development work. But I didn’t argue, I said thank you, took the money, and walked out. After counting it.
I then went to the office, prepared a one-dollar, quit-claim deed for her (in this case neither of us had a lawyer and neither of us wanted to put a price on the deed), and filed it with the county, bringing her a filed copy. Without title insurance…
When I brought her the filed copy we sat and talked for a while (I hadn’t wanted to talk when she handed me the money, I wanted to get the hell out of there before she changed her mind). Turns out she owned a thriving chain of tobacco shops with a serious marijuana business on the side. She said talking to me the first time she knew she could trust me.
A source for many of the crazy stories was one of my contractors, “Rodney” (name changed), who also ran a ratty boxing club in Newark. It made Rocky’s gym in the first movie look like a state of the art high-end sports facility. Rodney’s claim to fame was that he had been Sugar Ray Leonard’s sparring partner.
He had these crackheads living in his basement, all of them former olympic contenders and golden glove boxers in the military. It was super sad. At night they would go out and steal building materials for him from vacant houses in lieu of paying him for the right to live in his underground hellhole. Things like boilers (very pricey when bought new, and very heavy-I always wondered how those skinny, unhealthy crackheads were able to lug those heavy boilers out of basements), replacement windows, appliances, cabinets, copper pipe….
One morning Rodney called me with the news that he had thirty five brand new replacement windows to sell me (I was one of his primary buyers because I was fixing up more houses than anybody else and had a constant need for this material. I also had more material stolen from me than anybody else in Newark). I told him to come on over. What I didn’t tell him was that I had just received a call from another one of my contractors that one of our houses was hit the night before and we had lost 35 brand new replacement windows.
My usual deal with Rodney was simple. For new-quality replacement windows I would pay him 50% of my factory purchase price (which at the time was between $120-$140 depending on size). So Rodney would walk away with $60-$70 per window. A nice payday. When Rodney drove up I asked him what he would do if they were my windows stolen from one of my houses. He started laughing and said he’d give them back to me for free but that they weren’t mine.
I told him to bring one down from the truck. My factory supplier used to stick a barcode sticker with his customer name on every window within the jamb. You wouldn’t see this sticker unless you slid the window up in the jamb and looked at the bottom of the inside. I slid the window up and there it was, my company name in black and white. Rodney looks down at the label, and then looks up at me with this dumb “you caught me” smile on his face, and says “I’m going to lose money if I give them to you for free”. We made a deal for me to pay him half of the usual 50% so I gave him $30-$35 per window to “cover his costs”. I figured it was worth it for me to remain his first phone call.
In this environment, and with these players, anything more than twenty houses in inventory was impossible. And even twenty was way too much. If I had been more selective and kept my inventory to half of this I would have doubled my profitability. Making the same money with half the investment, a quarter of the work, and a tenth of the stress. But it wasn’t about the money for me. It was about the action, the chase, the empire building.
New construction on the other hand was great. I could have fifty or sixty buildable lots in inventory in various stages of construction/development with very low stress and surprises or problems. Although we were our own general contractor and had in-house teams for all sitework and other components of the job, (something very few other developers did), we used sub-contractors that were all professional tradespeople for the “trades” parts of the construction. Masonry, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, siding.
Theft became almost a non-issue for me because it was easier to secure new construction and the new construction materials we used were not as useful to the Newark rehab market where most of the stolen material went. I was the acknowledged industry expert and trend-setter in securing (and breaking into) vacant properties. I was the first to use “pex” water piping because there was minimal copper to steal. Two companies that both made metal security covers for vacant house windows even went to court fighting over which would get to keep me as a customer because everyone in Newark followed my lead!
And we were able to schedule our house assembly line like a machine with hard deliverable dates. From purchase to closing, we had a vacant buildable lot to finished house built and sold in 120 days. Like clockwork. No surprises. A lot of the Newark bureaucracy had to be compensated to keep this swiss train running on time. Not paid to do anything crooked, but to just do their jobs quickly and professionally as it related to my projects.
I had “same day service”, where we filed a construction permit application at 8am and had the permit in hand by 4pm that day. Whereas other developers would wait sometimes six months for construction permits and have to file multiple times because the city building department was always “losing” their applications. There was a rule in New Jersey that a construction permit application had to be either approved or denied within thirty days, with an explanation letter if denied. The way the lazy Building Department would get around this rule was to lose the application.
I felt like a king. I was a VIP at City Hall. I was driving fancy cars, wearing fancy suits, going daily from closing to closing. On two calls at any given moment. I was invincible. Until the day I was robbed and carjacked at gunpoint.
It was dusk. I pulled up in my suit and Audi A8 to look at a development property on Delavan Avenue, in north Newark, at the dead end by the train tracks. I was on the phone with my architect talking about the property when two teenage hood rats with guns walked up to me. One all the way up to me, with his gun held up sideways and right in my face. The other stopped ten feet away with his gun hanging down.
Not as scary as the rattlesnake because they both had do-rags covering the lower part of their faces. I realized if they were planning on killing me they wouldn’t have bothered to cover their faces, and that if I stayed cool I might get out of there. A carjacking victim had just been killed in Newark a few days earlier so my outlook was a bit optimistic but I wasn’t about to give it up.
The one with the gun in my face says “get on the ground”. I answered him “dude I have four kids” (this was before Ari was born and Sruli was just a baby). He said ”shut up” so I did and got on the ground. When I told the story to a good friend of mine, a black woman that lived in Newark, (the paralegal of one of my lawyers who worked daily on many of my closings), she told me that she didn’t think they had bullets, (it was pretty common for these gangbangers to not carry bullets because the legal penalty was much higher if they were caught with a gun with bullets).
She said that I thought I was helping myself by telling them I had kids and appealing to their empathy. And what they saw and heard was a rich white jew concerned about his rich white jewish kids, whereas their own fathers never gave a shit about them, if they even knew who they were. She said this comment would have enraged them and if they had bullets they definitely would have shot me. As the Psalms say, God protects the foolish.
As I was face down on the ground in the mud, the one in my face put the gun on the back of my head right on the bone where the knot of the tefillin goes. I can still feel it. And all I was thinking about was who would take care of my wife and kids. How would they survive, who would marry my kids off. How would Charlene live and take care of herself and the kids. I didn’t have a lot of cash, because basically everything I had was tied up in property. A lot of property, with very convoluted corporate structures, purpose-designed to be a black box to anyone looking.
I knew without a doubt while lying there with the gun pressed to my head that my unscrupulous business partner would rob my wife blind. Charlene was as innocent and trusting as he was devious and greedy. I just couldn’t believe my life would end this way. I felt I had so much still to accomplish with my life and couldn’t believe it might all end any second with a flash and then nothingness.
Gangbanger 1 started going through my pockets taking my wallet and the five dollars in cash I had. When he saw I only had five bucks he said “that’s it?”. I answered “I have a lot of money in the bank, we can go to the ATM”. I just wanted to get out of the dead end at the train tracks, thinking that any other location would be a step in the right direction. He said “no, stay down”. And then they walked away, jumped in my car and took off.
Boy was I shook up. I stood up after a minute and started trembling uncontrollably. And couldn’t look my business partner in the face after this, knowing with certainty what he was capable of, even though he actually did nothing.
Looking back it’s obvious now how much I loved Charlene and the kids even then when I was emotionally disconnected. Because they were my only concern and thought at that moment where I was facing death. But my thoughts were all related to how they would be provided for, my love having taken the form that I was most comfortable with, and programmed for, being a good provider, and not really anything emotional.
Unfortunately this loud warning from God to clean up my act was not recognized. Even with the gun pressed into the bone on the back of my head, the place of the tefillin strap knot. The knot is placed on that spot specifically to “bind” our lower lizard brain which is located in that region, to the frontal lobe, where the forehead meets the top of the head, the seat of our higher level reasoning, where the tefillin box with the Bible scroll inside rests.
Although I did “learn” a few things from this episode, they were all tactical, nothing lifestyle-altering or value-changing. First, that I needed to get rid of my then business partner, which I did shortly thereafter by buying him out of our jointly-held properties. Second, I needed a lot of life insurance, which I immediately bought.
I learned nothing significant from this episode and did nothing to change my lifestyle or values. I kept going full-speed in the same direction, in fact speeding up. I even bought that property on Delavan and built three 3-family houses on the parcel! Completely ignoring my own trauma that took place there, to prove to myself that it didn’t matter. Plus, I really needed the inventory.
For me to change substantively would require more than a message at gunpoint from God. It would require a real estate crash and personal financial collapse that was still a few years off.
I was living in the Jungle and thought I was a king.
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