![]() Crown came in quietly, with limited exposure. The deal showed a divide in how the two camps did their business: Kushner, who was then a 26-year-old scion, seemingly bought the tower in a ploy to raise his public profile it started bleeding money almost immediately. ![]() Partnering with the Carlyle Group, the firm bought the old tenants, including Brooks Brothers, out of their lease and reworked the space for a new Uniqlo flagship. Chera’s Crown was brought in to help develop the retail concern. But Chera’s most public entanglement with the Trump extended universe came in the form of 666 Fifth Avenue - a seemingly cursed skyscraper purchased by Jared Kushner’s company just before the 2008 financial crisis for $1.8 billion, a record-setting price at the time. The two men met in the 1980s, almost inevitably. Many of Chera’s most prized properties were located on Fifth Avenue, on the few blocks surrounding Trump Tower. At various points, his firm, Crown Acquisitions, held an interest in the city’s top shopping destinations, from the big Hollister at Broadway and Houston to the bigger Forever 21 in Times Square. In an age of “shoppertainment,” his own specialty was repositioning retail - renovating an old store to better attract the next hot megatenant. Chera had a talent for uniting these three parties. Buying a skyscraper is a team effort investors, lenders and tenants must come together, often before any paperwork is signed. His empire grew through collaboration as much as competition, by partnering with the other dynasties of the Syrian-Jewish business community. Over the course of the next four decades, Chera quietly established himself as a key player in Manhattan real estate. When all the dust finally settled, Chera and his fellow investors walked away with Herald Center, the retail complex across from the flagship Macy’s store, which soon became Manhattan’s first Toys “R” Us. He first appeared in the Times Real Estate section as one participant in a skirmish over four skyscrapers previously owned by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the kleptocratic ex-dictator and first lady of the Philippines. While Trump began immediately to raise the stakes - rebranding as the Trump Organization and diving headfirst into mountains of debt to buy A-list properties in Manhattan - Chera would wait until 1989 to make his entree into inner-borough holdings. Chera got his start about a decade later, using income from his family’s department stores to buy a few retail buildings in Downtown Brooklyn. ![]() Trump entered real estate in 1968, backed by untaxed gifts of family money and his father’s already-vast empire of apartment buildings. Quietly strategic and private about his fortunes, he was in many ways Trump’s foil. Coming from a president whose inner self is so deeply intertwined with its media reflection, the question seemed to offer a rare glimpse at something primal - but what did it mean, if anything at all? Stanley Chera, the New York real estate mogul, who died of Covid-19 in April, was only reluctantly a public figure. Shortly after his Covid diagnosis - fever spiking, hooked up to an oxygen tank - Donald Trump reportedly wondered aloud to an aide, “Am I going out like Stan Chera?” Like so many things the president has said, the line felt instantly like a catchphrase: the slick choice of “going out” instead of “dying,” the zeroing in on one old New York friend as the face of a massive global pandemic. ![]() The New York real estate mogul was, in some ways, a foil to Trump - and was on the president’s mind as he went to Walter Reed. ![]()
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