Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump

297 Pages·2016·2.02 MB·English

by  Vicky Ward

Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page

Thank you for buying this
St. Martin’s Press ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other
great reads, sign up for our newsletters.

Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use
only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright
infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you
are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher
at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
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