Larry Silverstein and the Bernard Mendik-Vornado Realty Connection
December 1, 2010
it's difficult for many to see the wood for the trees when it comes to 9/11. So much horror, so much information, so many conspiracy theories, so much fear by those that don't want to be seen to buy into the theories, or even look at the evidence presented in case they are seen as a "traitor'' and we all know that famous Bushwellian comment, that has been drilled into the American psyche, to the point it has been as affective as a national lobotomy; "'you are either with us or with the terrorists''. It doesn't give one much room to move or make an informed opinion does it?
So, with all the fear and paranoia of being seen as a ''traitor'' or even "'terrorist'' by taser toting Home Land Security, most prefer to just "'ignore'' the evidence. Muslim goes hand in hand with terrorism, Jew goes hand in hand with Israel, or does it? Much has been said about the use of the term "'Jewish'' with regard to the 9/11 insurance article about Mr Laurence Silverstein, multi Billionaire owner of the 99 year lease to the second biggest crime scene of all time, The World trade centre. (the first being Auschwitz-Birkenau). Some even say using the term "'Jewish'' in context, is somehow anti-Semitic! Yet why are people so much less sensitive when the term "'Muslim'' is used whenever speaking of "'the terrorists''?
But in all fairness to be clear, one needs to be specific and include "'Islamic fundamentalists'' to the Muslim in the case of Jihadists and Zionist to the Jew or other, that is intent on the total control of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of those lands of the Palestinian peoples. After all, one can't really be a Jihadist unless a Muslim but one can be a Zionist without necessarily being a Jew. But the chances are, if you are a VERY wealthy American Jew you are more than likely to be Zionist! But one needs to remember the Zionist plot to monopolize the holy land is only part of the Endgame to a One World Government controlled by the Bankster elite, with a pretext that the Jews are the chosen people and that Palestine or Israel, as the Zionists prefer to call it, is exclusively home to the lost tribe of Israel the Jews. I should add here, before I return to the core of this commentary on Laurence Silverstein and gang, that Jews and Muslims have lived in peace for hundreds of years before the Zionist plot to dominate Palestine and the endless propaganda created to create hatred between the two communities is merely that, propaganda. But what is the objective of this propaganda? What is it's purpose? and how does one plan this New World Order Endgame with the complete support of the western world?
Let's start by looking at a hypothesis, for example; how could one go about taking away civil power from the people in the west without a fight? Even better, in a way where the public literally "'hand over'' that power voluntarily? To start with, if I were mastermind and puppet-master of the "'Endgame'' I would imagine we need a scapegoat and none better than the muslims, as they have so much to offer. After all, it is mainly within the Arab lands where the greatest riches and largest pools of petroleum resources lie, plus the largest poppy fields! So we have decided the Muslim Arabs are the initial candidates for scapegoats. Then we need to get everyone to mistrust and hate the scapegoat Muslims, not just the crazed ignorant fundamentalist Muslim that truly believes that after they have blown themselves and many innocents up, they will spend the rest of time in paradise drinking honey out of the cleavages of singing virgins. No, for a plan like this to work, we have to hate ALL muslims, men women and children. We can take some great tips from Hitler; he did exactly this when he made scapegoats of the Jews and Gypsies. A good start is to lock them up in a big concentration camp, we can do that in Gaza and starve and leave them with no sanitary conditions no clean water, no work, no freedom, nothing! And we don't let them come out unless we say so.
To keep them feeling utterly hopeless, we need to hound, harass and humiliate them, shooting the odd child and woman in the back when going to the shops is good, make them MAD! Make them hate us! Make them so mad they will do anything to get revenge, make them crazy and then we'll groom and recruit those crazies through our own "'agents'' that are infiltrated within the "'islamic cause'' Then we finance and groom our mad crazy Jihadists to pull off false flag ops for us! Wow! This could work. We could pull off shocking murderous operations on civilians and blame it all on the "'Jihadist terrorists'', just as we did with the 1954 "'Operation Susannah'' the 1985 hijacking of The Archille Lauro, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, (the list is long and truly impressive). Not only that, we need to do some really big scary horrific stuff so everyone hands over their civil liberties in the name of security. Slicing off the head of an American Jewish journalist on camera would be amazingly powerful, that will scare the pants off them! Imagine that on American TV! Fear is the key, the public should be reminded constantly that we are all under "'threat'' from the nasty "'terrorists''. Then We'll set up 'off shore' detention camps and invent plots and cells that we can blame on innocent men going about their daily business, till we come in the night, cross- border and kidnap and drag them off to the detention camp.
Here we will use lots of grisly torture and threaten that we will do equally nasty things to their women and children so they confess to something they have never done. Oh, no trial, no access to legal process, of course not, it's got to be under wraps, can't have the bastards coming up with alibi's and evidence of their innocence. Great Plan! We had better do away with Habeas Corpus though! Oh, of course we already did that, great! We could dominate the entire Arab world and loot all the resources and after smashing the place up, we'll send in our own companies to "'rebuild''. All our rebuild contracts paid for by the dumb taxpayer! We are clever, yeah, who's going to stop us? We have the perfect excuse that we have to go in and "'get them'' we'll tell everyone, "'we need to stop dictatorships'' and "'we need to spread democracy to these murderous unlawful regimes that don't respect human rights and who give refuge to the terrorists'', yeah! that works, if half of the American public are dumb enough to believe that the Federal Reserve is a governmental institution and that Kennedy was shot by a lone gunman they'll believe anything!, They don't even know what democracy really means do they? After all, we whacked democracy years ago and buried it with the Patriot Act! But to continue to do this, we need to keep it amongst ourselves, yeah! Just our very close friends and those that do big favours for us. Hmm, what about our friend Larry Silverstein?
Mr Larry Silverstein is a man that can only be well connected. Born in Brooklyn, to poor middle-class Russian-Jewish parents during the depression, Larry still grew up doing all the things boys from better families do. Larry was taught to play the piano by his classical pianist father Harry and read lots and lots of good books. Larry attended the New York High School of Music and Art. But Larry's father realised that music and books don't make big bucks in Brooklyn, so he turned his hand to being a property broker, renting scruffy loft spaces in the rag district of Brooklyn. What Larry's parents lacked in pennies, they more than made up for in ambition. Larry's family although still relatively poor, surviving on rental commissions, managed to get Larry through NYU. Larry, after graduating from NYU with a new sense of business acumen, went to work full time for his father. Larry though, had bigger plans than his father and told Harry that being a middle man and just taking commission, was not where the money was, to make money letting, one really needed to own the lofts. In 1957, they established Silverstein Properties, as Harry G. Silverstein & Sons, and bought their first building, in Manhattan. Larry set about getting friends and family to invest money in him to buy and renovate scruffy lofts and cheap buildings in run down areas of New York. Now the Silverstein's could command some decent rents and real income through sales. What Larry lacked in development know how, he made up in zealous salesman traits saying
"You've got to believe it to sell'' "You've got to sell with a passion."
In 1956 Larry married Klara, who he had met at Jewish summer camp. The family struggled to start with and Klara used her paltry $3,200 salary as a teacher to help the family get through those early years. The family joke is that Klara was the original Silverstein breadwinner.
Around this time, Larry's best friend |Bernard Mendik, a later New York law School graduate, married Larry's sister Annette and became part of the Silverstein family business. The three men Harry, Larry and Bernard then set their sights on becoming the most powerful real estate developers of New York. When Harry Silverstein died in 1966, Bernard Mendik and Silverstein's son Larry formed Silverstein & Mendik.
Larry and Klara went on to have three children the eldest Sharon, although Harvard educated, then married and became a home-maker but the two younger children, Lisa and Roger went on to work for their father and still work for Silverstein properties today.
Silverstein's first big break came when he bought 11 west 42nd street near Bryant Park, before it was renovated to what it is today. He then built at 42nd west of Eleventh Avenue, and in lower Manhattan at 120 Broadway, a 1.8 million-square-foot giant occupying a full square block, steps from Wall Street. By the eighty's, Silverstein was a multi- millionaire and controlled more than 10 million square feet of Manhattan residential and commercial property.
By the time Silverstein set his sights on the WTC, his brother-in-law Bernard Mendik had split from Silverstein after divorcing Larry's sister. With the divorce, also came the split of the Silverstein Mendik business partnership. Mendik was now running his own property company, The Mendik Company. At the time of the split with Silverstein, Mendik cited disagreements with Silverstein over real estate strategies, with Mendik wanting to buy buildings while Silverstein wanted to build. It is said things were "'not good'' between Larry and Bernard at the time of their split and it was also said that "'Larry and Bernard had a messy falling-out after Mr. Mendik divorced Mr. Silverstein's sister Annette'' Mendik, who went on to be a very successful lawyer and property developer in his own right after splitting from Silverstein was well liked and did much for charity.
Both men went their own ways till April 1997, when Bernard Mendik, ex brother in law of Silverstein folded his company holdings into the Vornado Realty Trust, a real estate investment trust with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. It was said at the time of the negotiations ''The combination, of Vornado with the Mendik Company's 40-year experience in the ownership and operation of office properties is expected to create a powerhouse that will be an active player in the city market.''
It was written by Lois Weiss in The Real Estate weekly in March 1997
"In one of the most interesting transactions this year, developer/owner Bernard Mendik has agreed to swap his city real estate portfolio to become part of the Vornado Realty Trust. The transaction is valued at $654 million in a combination of cash, stock and debt,'
Mendik was at the time very close to forming his own REIT when Michael D. Fascitelli the former investment banker from Goldman Sachs who had been lured to Vornado Realty, convinced Mendik to join forces with Vornado. Mendik became Vornado's co-chairman. But later resigned in October 1998 to "'look after his personal investments''. Mendik was quoted as saying he was "'stifled'' by corporate bureaucracy, but he still remained a major stockholder in Vornado after his resignation. Vornado Realty just happens to be the very same company which was Silverstein's competitor and beat Silverstein in the initial bid to the port authority for the WTC.
Mendik, through his great success and power in the city, become a very close friend to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So much of a trusted friend, that Mendik was hand-picked by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to head a business group that provides sanitation, security and other services around Grand Central Terminal. But rifts were caused between the men when Mendik had his own ideas about how to do things and made changes to the board of directors, much to the utter outrage of Giuliani. At the time, Mendik was quoted as saying '' the new group would be free of political interference''
There is no doubt that by the year 2000 Bernard Mendik, former best friend, founding business partner and brother-in-law of Silverstein was now not only a equal major player like Silverstein, but a powerful voice in the property world, in his tenth year as Chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York and certainly Silverstein's toughest competitor.
On February the 15th 2001 Vornado's bid for the WTC, outbid Silverstein Properties $3.2billion bid by over 50 million dollars. It has been said that at some point between the end of March and mid April 2001 Vornado "'suddenly changed their minds'' and "suddenly pulled out'' There have been various reasons given for this, but there is nothing to verify either version.
On April the 26th 2001 Larry Silverstein put in his final bid for the WTC, only four weeks later Bernard Mendik was dead! On July the 24th 2001 Silverstein's offer which was 50 million dollars less than Vornado's was formally accepted and closed.
Bernard Mendik, major shareholder of Vornado Realty died on the 28th May 2001 after being taken "'suddenly'' ill. Only weeks after Vornado "'suddenly pulled out'' after the winning bid that beat Silverstein for the WTC. The official verdict was "'heart attack'' Although heart attack is often un unpredicted health emergency, many of his friends find this hard to believe, as Mendik was as far as they could tell ''a very fit and health conscious man'' in fact, Mendik had even played his regular game of tennis the very day of his death. He had also had regular checkups by the best doctors that money could buy. It was later said that the heart attack was the result of "'a blood disorder''. He had just turned 72. Whatever the cause of Mendik's demise one thing is certain, the withdrawal of Vornado's bid and the death of Mendik left the way clear for ''Lucky Larry'' Silverstein, to accomplish his multi million dollar dream.
Footnote:
''Mendik at the time of his death was in his tenth year as Chairman of the
Real Estate Board of New York. As chairman of the Real Estate Board of New
York (REBNY), Mendik and the organization lobbied successfully to eliminate
the onerous "Cuomo" tax on capital gains that took ten cents on each dollar,
and obtained the passage of state legislation that reduced the 3 percent
transfer taxes on properties that were merely being exchanged for stock and
not cash'' courtesy.