Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption

305 Pages·2019·1.83 MB·English

by  Vicky Ward

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For my newly adopted country, the United States of America

PROLOGUE

America’s Prince and Princess

January 20, 2017

On almost any other Friday night, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner would
have been at home with their three children, celebrating Shabbat. But this
Friday night was different: the couple had received a rabbinical dispensation
to attend the inaugural balls in Washington, D.C.

This night was also different for them because Donald Trump—Ivanka’s

father and Jared’s father-in-law—was celebrating being sworn in as President
of the United States. And the whole world knew that his daughter and son-in-
law were his most trusted advisers, ambassadors, and coconspirators. They
were an attractive couple—extremely wealthy and, now, extraordinarily
powerful.

Ivanka looked like Cinderella, her blond hair in a loose updo that drew

attention to her diamond drop earrings and the low neckline of a crystal-
encrusted champagne evening gown by designer Carolina Herrera. After only
a few minutes of watching Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, shuffle
awkwardly about the podium at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center
for their first dance as president and First Lady, Ivanka and her husband
swept onto the stage, deftly deflecting attention from Donald Trump’s clumsy
moves, as she had so often done over the past twenty years. The crowd roared
in approval, and the couple waved to their rapturous admirers. They were
now America’s prince and princess.

A mile or so away, Jared’s father, Charlie Kushner, and his mother, Seryl
Kushner, were celebrating Shabbat with the rest of the Kushner family in
D.C.’s Trump International Hotel. As the sun set, the family and some of
their friends—forty or so people—had gathered in a meeting room on the
hotel’s lower level to pray. At the dinner that followed, Charlie turned nasty
toward Jared’s brother, Josh Kushner, a tall, dark-haired thirty-three-year-old.

“Josh, we expect you to do the right thing,” Charlie told his youngest son,

according to one source. “The person you are with is not the right person.”

Josh absorbed his father’s abuse in silence. Everyone there knew that

Charlie was talking about Josh’s long relationship with Victoria’s Secret
model Karlie Kloss. According to multiple sources, Charlie and Seryl
believed Kloss was an unsuitable match for their son, and not only because
she wasn’t Jewish. (Jared had supported his parents on this point.) If any of
Charlie’s friends dared suggest that this seemed harsh, and even hypocritical,
given how the couple had eventually welcomed Ivanka, a convert, into their
family, Charlie and Seryl strongly disagreed. Ivanka, they explained, was
different. She was a Trump. She was also, like Jared, real estate royalty. And
she’d attended an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania. Kloss
grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and hadn’t even
been to college when she and Josh began dating.

That evening, Charlie kept needling Josh about his girlfriend, even after

family friends joined the group. Josh’s close friend, oil heir Michael “Mikey”
Hess, stood up and performed the opening number from Hamilton, a rap
song: “How does a bastard, orphan son of a whore and a Scotsman dropped
in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by Providence
impoverished in squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” Rupert
Murdoch’s ex-wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, dressed in a yellow and white
floral dress, read a passage from a Jewish prayer book.

After dinner, many of the attendees went upstairs to join investment

banker Aryeh Bourkoff at his table in the main atrium, where other prominent
guests, such as Greg Maffei, president and CEO of Liberty Media, and Beau
Ferrari, then an executive vice president at Univision, also stopped by.

As the clock ticked toward midnight, hotel guests returned from the many

inaugural balls and waited for champagne corks to pop and balloons to drop

from the ceiling in the hotel’s atrium. Among them were Baltimore real estate
heir Reed Cordish and his wife, Maggie, both friends of Jared and Ivanka,
and both hired to work in Trump’s administration. And in came Trump’s pick
for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and his fiancée, Louise Linton, along
with Mnuchin’s brother, Alan, and his wife, Alessandra.

Everyone seemed elated, especially Charlie. The Kushners, it seemed,

would finally get the recognition Charlie felt they had long deserved. Maybe,
thanks to the ascension of Jared and Ivanka into the White House, Charlie
would even get a presidential pardon and exorcise the demons from his past.
It was truly an auspicious night for the Kushners. “The family was kissing,”
recalled one person who was there that night. “Everyone was happy.”
Anything seemed possible for the Kushners on this evening, perhaps even
forgiveness for the family’s many sins.

CHAPTER ONE

Rules Are Dangerous

“A lot of these children who are brought up with a survivor mode,
where the parents had survived, they don’t trust a lot of people.”

—ALAN HAMMER, FAMILY FRIEND AND FORMER COLLEAGUE OF CHARLIE KUSHNER

In 1949, Jared Kushner’s grandparents, Joseph and Rae Kushner, arrived by
ship in New York City, along with their infant daughter, Linda. After fleeing
Poland and spending three years in a refugee camp in Italy, the Kushners
were finally about to begin their new lives in America. Yet the scars the
couple bore from World War II were visible in every aspect of their lives—
and would also be seen in the lives of their children and grandchildren.
“Everything we did was against the relief of the Holocaust,” one family
member explained. “Surviving, growing, getting rich, power, politics … this
was all to spite the Nazis, to spite what they did to us.”

What the Nazis did to Rae and Joseph Kushner is a familiar but harrowing

story, one Rae, a striking, dark-haired woman with brown eyes, recounted
matter-of-factly in 1982 in a long interview with sociologist Sidney Langer at
the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University. Rae, who died in 2004,
was born in 1923 in the small Polish town of Novogrudok. Her father was a
successful furrier, but in the 1930s, her relatively comfortable existence was
shattered by the escalation of anti-Semitism in Poland. About half of her
town was Jewish, and with the ascent of the Nazis in Germany, some of
them, including her family, wanted to escape to British-controlled Palestine.
But because of byzantine laws, it was difficult for them to leave Europe, and

by the time German and Soviet troops invaded Poland in 1939, at the start of
World War II, the Kushners were trapped. “The doors of the world were
closed to us,” Rae said.

In 1941, after the German army pushed Soviet troops out of Poland, the

Nazis forced Rae and her family into a walled-off ghetto, where roughly
thirty thousand Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David. She soon
realized the Nazis were systematically destroying the Jews. “The doctors,
lawyers, and teachers were murdered in the beginning. The Germans were
afraid that the intellectuals would organize a rebellion.” The next victims
were the elderly and sick and even the children, as the Nazis only wanted
Jews who could work. In 1943, Rae’s mother and one of her sisters were shot
dead. “We couldn’t hide anyone. There was no time,” Rae said. “The
Germans threw the bodies into a grave that was a half mile from the ghetto.
We saw it with our own eyes.”

Rae, along with her father, brother, and another sister, teamed up with

other Jews and began to dig a tunnel out of the ghetto, hoping to reach a
nearby forest. The chances of escape were minuscule, but they reasoned it
was far better to die together, trying. “We had heard there were Jews in the
woods who were not starving,” Rae recalled. “We could not imagine how
you could live through the winter in the woods with the snow and the cold
and the wet weather, but we decided that anything was better than staying
here and waiting for a bullet.”

But they did make it. Most of them. As they emerged from the tunnel,

Rae’s brother was separated from the family. His glasses had broken and he
apparently got lost in the chaos as they all fled into the woods. Rae never saw
him again, but she, her sister, and her father found the group of Jews they’d
heard about, maybe a thousand of them, hiding in makeshift bunkers dug into
the ground. Among them was Joseph Berkowitz, a young man near Rae’s age
whom she had known before the war, when he lived in a small village near
hers. The two became a couple.

After hiding for nine months, the forest dwellers were all able to go home

when the Soviet military reoccupied Poland. They returned to a ghost town.
“You cannot imagine what it felt like to go over to the grave where my
mother was buried, to the other graves where four thousand innocent men and

children were buried,” Rae said. “I fainted twice.”

In May 1945, Germany surrendered to the Soviets and the Allied forces,

but the Kushners’ struggles were far from over. Unable to buy or sell goods
under Soviet law, they pretended to be Greek and migrated on foot, aiming
for a displaced persons camp in Italy where they’d heard Jews could apply
for visas. They walked all night and slept all day as they trekked through
Czechoslovakia, Austria, and then to Budapest, where Rae and Joe got
married. (Joe took Rae’s last name, because he came from a poor family, and
her name was more respected.) The couple spent three years in the Italian
camp, where Rae gave birth to Linda, before they finally got visas to the U.S.

Joe and Rae rented a room in Brooklyn, New York, where they had three
more children, Murray, Esther, and Charles. Joe honed his carpentry skills
and began, with an assortment of Jewish partners, to construct apartment
buildings in New Jersey. The young family moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Joe grew so prolific that the Kushners became one of a handful of immigrant
Jewish families referred to as the “Holocaust builders” of the New Jersey
suburbs. These survivors transformed agricultural land into thriving suburban
communities and were also known for their generous donations to Jewish
causes.

Yet even as the Kushners grew prosperous—in the 1970s, they hired a

housemaid—their home was not filled with much laughter. “Our children
lived a little bit of our lives,” Rae said. “I don’t know if it is so healthy for
them, because our kids are more serious than American children. It is
unbelievable we had the strength to survive such a fire. Nobody believed that
we would ever get married, have children, and grandchildren. When a
European has a simcha [a wedding], we all rejoice. We live our lost youth
through our children. We had no youth, our early years were spent hiding.
Our middle years were spent rebuilding.”

Joe was a strict, sometimes brutal father. One oft-told story is that he took the

son of a pipe layer who’d come asking about payment for his father out to a
construction site in the middle of a rainstorm. While standing in the
downpour, the young man made some comment about this being the most
miserable experience of his life, which set Joe off. “Let me tell you what a
miserable night really is,” he said, and launched into harrowing stories of his
wartime nightmare. Joe could be even harder on his children. When young
Charlie bought a guitar, Joe reportedly smashed it, saying there was no time
for such a trivial activity as playing music.

His professional reputation was mixed. A 1980 series in The Times of

Trenton noted that some of the Kushner-owned construction projects
“brought criticism and lawsuits over allegedly faulty construction or
inadequate upkeep of apartments.” Some of the buildings in one development
were lopsided. In another, the grading was off, so backyards flooded when it
rained.

Joe was a traditional but not fully observant Jew, and his children—

Linda, Murray, Esther, and Charlie—were allowed to watch TV after Shabbat
dinner. But if their friends showed up dressed in jeans, he would react
harshly. “He’d just kick you the fuck out of his house,” recalled someone
who knew Joe well. Family was Joe’s priority. His most rewarding
achievement, he said, was building each of his adult children’s houses. They
were mansions in their day, designed by a well-known New Jersey architect,
and were close to each other—and close to him. The girls were minutes apart
in West Orange, while the boys were in Livingston. As they grew wealthier
and their family expanded, Joe and Rae loved taking the family away for
Passovers and commandeering the largest table in the hotel restaurant.

The flip side of that tight familial bond was a deep mistrust of outsiders,

not only non-Jews, but also assimilated or secular Jews. Joe and Rae’s
wartime experience created a sense of exceptionalism that was both good and
bad, according to one Kushner, who talked to me on the strict promise of
anonymity for fear of reprisal from a family known to be as punitive as it is
private. The family mantra is “Think like an immigrant, act like an
immigrant,” this person said. “But what does that mean?”

“The Kushners’ experience was unusual in the sense that … they were

fighters,” explained Jewish scholar and historian Michael Berenbaum, who

knew Rae. Their “experience was not a passive victimization, but an active
attack on the enemy, and thwarting the enemy.… You didn’t survive being a
[fighter] without being tough as nails.” A person in that situation grew up
being taught that rules are for other people. “You don’t wait for the Nazis to
come liquidate you. You build a fucking tunnel and get out of the ghetto.…
You don’t wait for the bastards at Harvard to let you in. You make it yourself
into Harvard,” the family member said. According to Berenbaum, the
Kushners would have not been alone among Holocaust survivors in feeling
this way. For those people, he explained, “rules are dangerous.”

The Kushners displayed the same mind-set at home. Joe encouraged a

rivalry between Charlie and his brother, Murray. He wanted them to excel,
and being hard on them was the only way he knew to bring this about. For a
long while, it seemed that Murray, the eldest and most intellectual of the
children, according to family lore, was ahead in that race. Murray got into the
University of Pennsylvania and then attended law school there, while Charlie
went to NYU and then earned his law degree at Hofstra. (The girls’ education
was considered less critical by their parents; what mattered was that they
married well.)

Despite the high regard Joe held for academic achievement, he was

increasingly drawn to his outgoing, charismatic younger son, who so
blatantly, feverishly wanted to outstrip his older brother and be his father’s
favorite, and, one day, assume his position as head of the family. A tragic
event helped him achieve that goal, in a roundabout way. In 1980, Murray’s
wife, Ruth, died of breast cancer. The couple had two small children, and
Susan Hammer, a housewife who carpooled with the Kushners to and from
their children’s school in Livingston, tearfully described to her husband,
Alan, the sadness of the family’s situation. “Charlie had really no
appreciation for what Murray was going through in his life,” Alan Hammer
said.

Murray then met Lee Serwitz, who was also recently widowed, and they

married in the early 1980s. She already had a son and a daughter who had
been born two weeks after her father died. But unlike Murray’s first wife, Lee
was not particularly religious. She was a secular Jew from a working-class
family, and the Kushners looked down on her even as they taught her how to

observe Shabbat. That disdain would contribute to Charlie’s rise in the family
hierarchy.

In his romantic life, Charlie went in the opposite direction. Seryl

Stadtmauer was a beautiful brunette from an Orthodox family in the Far
Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, New York. She and Charlie had met in
their teens. When they married, Charlie became more observant to appease
both his wife and his skeptical father-in-law. “It’ll be a lot easier for me to
change than to ask you to change,” he told Seryl, so he stopped watching TV
on Shabbat and practiced a moderate form of Orthodoxy. (Charlie’s family
still keeps a kosher home, and when they go out to dinner, they might order
fish, but never shellfish.)

Seryl remained the more religious of the two, and it became evident she

found her sister-in-law’s relaxed attitude toward her faith vexing. Lee had no
idea how to keep a kosher household, for example, so Seryl, who lived closer
to her than any of the others in the family, would pop over to educate her.
Despite this, or maybe because of it, the two women never got on. “Seryl was
just really fucking mean,” one person who is close to Lee said. At first, Lee
tried to brush her ignorance off as a joke. She would tell her friends that
when Seryl said to her, “Shavua tov”—Hebrew for “have a good week”—
Lee responded, as if Seryl had sneezed, “Bless you.” But the underlying
friction was anything but funny. In fact, it would be the wedge that would
help split the brothers.

Joe had made his antipathy to Murray’s remarriage very plain by standing

with his arms folded throughout the wedding ceremony. He stopped working
with Murray shortly before sending him to West Orange with a business
associate, Eugene Schenkman, to build suburban apartments.

With Murray pushed aside, Charlie created an infrastructure for his

father’s budding development business, which until that point had been a
one-man shop. Joe had had many partners, and his efforts to drum up
business had been done from pay phones and out of the back of his Cadillac.
Charlie had been introduced to a successful local processed-food importer
named George Gellert, who wanted to invest in real estate. Gellert said he
would take a piece of nearly all of Charlie’s real estate projects.

In 1985, Charlie found office space, put a name on the door, Kushner

Companies, and created a management firm for the disparate structures built
and owned by his father. As Charlie acquired more and more office space—
and took on more and more debt—he moved from a little basement office
into two floors in Florham Park, New Jersey, described by someone who
visited as “the Shangri-La of power offices.” The windows were huge and the
surfaces on the executive floor were either gleaming wood or marble. Senior
executives had their names stenciled on parking spots outside. Joe never got
to see the new headquarters; he died at sixty-two, just months after he and
Charlie started the company.

Charlie was now the head of the family. Throughout the 1980s, his

household was the hub of all weekend activity for the local New Jersey
Jewish community, partly because there were now so many Kushners. Each
of Joe and Rae’s children had had four children, except for Esther, who had
three, so there was always something to celebrate: a birthday, a bar mitzvah, a
graduation, an engagement, a wedding, a newborn … “When I first met
Charlie … every weekend, it was somebody’s wedding or bar mitzvah or
something,” said their friend Alan Hammer. “We were out all the time.”
After Charlie bought the Puck Building, a landmark in Manhattan’s SoHo
neighborhood, in 1980, he turned the ground floor into an event space, the
preferred venue for his friends’ children’s bar mitzvahs and other family
parties. His voice was soft and nasal, and his charisma drew in all his siblings
and nieces and nephews. “He was the cool one,” one family member recalled.
“He was very lovable and very charismatic. We all wanted to hang out at his
house on weekends.”

The town of Livingston had not yet become a Jewish enclave when

Charlie and Seryl moved there in the early 1980s, in part because there was
no interstate to the town until 1973. But as he got richer, Charlie almost
single-handedly transformed the town. He turned an industrial building into
the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy and Rae Kushner Yeshiva High
School. He built the local mikvah—Jewish ritual baths—and named it after
Seryl’s grandmother Chana. (It is still run by one of his daughters.) “He
created the Orthodox community in Livingston, in my opinion,” said
Hammer, who added that back then, “[Charlie] wasn’t that flawed. He was
doing everything right. He really was a model citizen.”