https://nymag.com/intelligencer/arti...t-runners.html
Eleven rivals. Countless billions. One prize: the right to build a casino in the heart of New York.
By Noah Shachtman
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Jay-Z is pushing to get it. Nas wants a piece. The owner of the Mets is spending a fortune to win. A subsidiary of the Yankees is trying, too. Manhattan’s biggest commercial landlord is all-in. The Hudson Yards crew wants it, and so does the man behind Coney Island. A former police commissioner is wrapped up in this. And a former governor. And Eric Adams’s closest confidant. And the guy who owns Donald Trump’s old golf course. And the head of a private intelligence firm.
What they’re all after is a downstate New York casino license — “a license to print money, literally,” as one insider close to several of the bidders puts it.
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New Yorkers may be used to grandiosity, to shrugging at a new skyscraper like it’s another foothill in a mountain chain. The casino deal is different. The opportunity is so gargantuan that the bidders are promising, almost as add-ons, to spend billions to solve some of the city’s most challenging engineering feats and to build concert halls, apartment towers, science centers, public schools, parks, even a museum of democracy. These are projects that would ordinarily merit headlines all on their own. In this contest, they’re mere loss leaders. A license to operate a casino in or directly outside New York City is worth almost any investment. “Even one of these bids would be one of the biggest land-use battles in the history of New York, and we’ve got five right here in Manhattan,” says Mark Levine, the borough president.
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Then there’s the plan in Midtown East. It first got attention with a rendering that showed a gigantic Ferris wheel next door to (and nearly the size of) the United Nations, the centerpiece of a resort with a 1,200-room hotel, two towers of apartment buildings, and four acres of park. Big fortunes will attract over-the-top ideas, sometimes even a bit of magical thinking, but this seemed like something out of a Bond movie or maybe Austin Powers. The entrepreneur behind it is certainly colorful enough.
Stefan Soloviev, who inherited his father Sheldon Solow’s multibillion-dollar real-estate portfolio, is nearly 50 years old but dresses like a 16-year-old skater. He has at least 20 children. (“The number isn’t important,” he once told Business Insider.)
He is the 26th-biggest landowner in the United States, and his holdings include the Colorado Pacific Railroad, a 5,000-head cattle ranch in New Mexico, and a rhodium mine in Nevada. For 17 years, his family has been sitting on the largest plot of undeveloped land in Manhattan — six and a half acres along the East River. He’s wanted to build something there; the casino opportunity has him thinking mega.
Soloviev has delegated oversight of the casino to Michael Hershman, a longtime family adviser. He keeps an office at 9 West 57th Street, the sloping skyscraper that is the headquarters of Soloviev’s empire, with an appointment-only gallery of Giacomettis and Calders in the lobby.
Hershman, 78, greets me on the 30th floor, before a king-of-the-world view of Central Park, and emphasizes that his bid has changed to be more subtle. Five hundred affordable-housing units are in, the Ferris wheel is out, and the casino itself is underground.“You’re not even gonna know it’s there,” he says. Other elements include a 35,000-square-foot wellness center and a Museum of Freedom and Democracy complete with pieces of the Berlin Wall.
Hershman says he’s met with the U.N. and assured them that a casino would not pose a security concern. “My background is intelligence,” he says. He adds that he and a consultancy he runs have “been involved in investigations that have brought down, I think, five world leaders,” including Ferdinand Marcos, Rajiv Gandhi, and Richard Nixon.
The real-estate trade publication The Real Deal once Photoshopped him in a trench coat and holding a magnifying glass for a profile, noting that he “took a bullet infiltrating the Palestine Liberation Organization.” He’s a co-founder of the anticorruption outfit Transparency International; in a few days, he’s scheduled to give an award to Russian dissident Alexei Navalny’s daughter.
Other developers think Soloviev and Hershman have zero shot, in large part because they are not signing up the political hired guns that every other bidder views as essential. Both Cohen and Resorts World have enlisted the lobbying shop Moonshot Strategies, which raised $7 million for Adams’s 2021 campaign.
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“Dude, I’m strange,” Hershman says, leaning forward. “We don’t make political contributions. I’m going to win this fucker on merit, and if I don’t win it on merit, I’ll be able to sleep well at night. Now, am I being naïve? Being a New Yorker, I know how New York works. But I’m not going to play the game. Not going to do it.”
Besides, Hershman has a backup plan. While he — like all of the big bidders — insists that the casino has to be the “economic engine” that powers their wildly ambitious developments, it’s only true up to a point. Hershman and Soloviev already have approval to build three residential towers, an office building, and a slightly smaller park on the site. Hershman says that if they don’t win the casino, he’d need tax breaks to build the affordable units. But the towers would still go up.
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