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

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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.

In 1985, Charlie hired Seryl’s brother, Richard Stadtmauer, who would become his right hand at Kushner Companies. Richard was even more religious than his sister. Every afternoon in the office, either Richard or Charlie would gather up a minyan, a quorum of ten men who would pray aloud.

Hiring relatives and friends—members of the Livingston shul (synagogue) and the Hebrew Academy—became a typical Charlie practice, one that occasionally backfired. He hired his brother-in-law William (Billy) Schulder—Esther’s husband—only to discover him having sex on the conference room table with the office bookkeeper and chief financial officer, Marci Plotkin. (Plotkin said this was an outright lie.) Charlie fired Schulder and Plotkin, a ferociously hard worker, but kept her close (and quiet) by getting her a job at Schonbraun, Safris, McCann, Bekritsky & Co., the accounting firm Kushner Companies used. Of course, the knowledge of what had happened gave him leverage over both of them. Viewed one way, hiring your friends and family is an act of generosity. But it also meant Charlie held ownership over all his extended relatives and neighbors, which meant he could treat them however he pleased. And he did.

In his business life, he relied heavily on a different sort of leverage—borrowed money—and he got lucky in that the market swung mostly upward then. By the 1990s, there was not much he could not afford. Charlie probably acquired more apartment properties in New Jersey than anyone ever had and anybody ever will, said Hammer. That’s not to say he owned more apartments than anybody ever had or will, but he acquired more.… He has no risk aversion. Other developers get rich by sitting on properties; it’s a safer way to make money, but it was not fast enough for Charlie.

Though Charlie lived for over twenty years in the house his father built for him, he liked to show his wealth. Unlike his siblings, who lived low-key lives, he had a chauffeur; all four of his children—Jared, Dara, Nicole, and Josh—had tutors; and the family had a beautiful beach house in Elberon, New Jersey, where they would host a huge annual summer party. Jared, Charlie’s eldest son, was perceived as a likable, well-mannered kid, not outstandingly bright, but not stupid, and serious, unlike his brother Josh, who had a lightness about him. Perhaps because he was the youngest of the fifteen Kushner grandchildren, all the cousins doted on Josh. Nicole was the hardest worker, Dara the most religious. Yet Jared was unquestionably his father’s favorite, and also the one who would be groomed to fulfill his father’s dynastic ambitions. What those ambitions were, exactly, was not entirely clear to the extended Kushner clan. They just knew that Charlie was insatiable, and that money and its trappings were not enough. I want to be the most powerful Jew in America, Charlie once told a business associate.

Given those aspirations, it seems inevitable that Charlie got involved in politics, since real estate is so dependent on federal and municipal tax breaks, but there was also his personal ambition to consider. At the time, everyone thought he wanted to be a senator, said one of his relatives. But for a long time, according to Hammer, Charlie simply made political donations, mostly to Democrats: New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli, New York senator Chuck Schumer, and later, New York senator Hillary Clinton.

Charlie’s most significant foray into politics came in the mid-nineties, after he met a candidate for New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevey, with whom he developed an intense friendship, spending days at a time with McGreevey at the Jersey Shore. The entrance of McGreevey into his life would bring out a side of Charlie that was much less appealing than the honey-voiced man who hosted his neighbors’ bar mitzvahs in one of his fancy buildings and was the joyful center of every celebration. As ambition unhinged him, a darker side of Charlie emerged. Behind his back, people would start to call him Jekyll and Hyde.

CHAPTER TWO

The Tuesday Beatings

"It was almost like Grisham’s book The Firm when I first got there. It all seemed great, and within three months, I remember coming home and saying to my wife, ‘I got into something that I can’t deal with and I’ve got to get out.’"

—FORMER KUSHNER COMPANIES EMPLOYEE

As Jared Kushner grew into his teens, attending the Frisch School, a co-ed, Modern Orthodox yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, where he was an average student—ranked in the third track of five in his grade—his father aggressively built an empire for his firstborn to inherit. It was a pedestrian colossus: tens of thousands of so-called garden apartments, multifamily buildings surrounded by landscaping, mostly in New Jersey, but the income from them was enough to turn Charlie Kushner into someone whose money and approval were sought by local politicians. He was now a New Jersey power broker.

The logic behind Charlie’s largesse was fairly simple, according to a Kushner family member. "[Charlie] had a messianic complex. It was his father who delivered us from Poland, and [Charlie] was going to deliver us to Manhattan. He’s going to get us out of New Jersey and onto the Forbes 500 list. But to do that … you’ve gotta buy [Governor] Jim McGreevey." (In November 2001, McGreevey had won the gubernatorial election, with a friendly push from Charlie and his pals.)

Charlie was now an autocrat whose reign sometimes felt like a noose to the relatives, friends, employees, and even fellow synagogue members who came to be in his debt. His role as family patriarch meant his relatives were not to question his aggressive methods of social advancement. He was nicknamed the Dapper Don or Don Corleone, partly because of his natty suits and perfectly coiffed hair, but the nickname was also appropriate, some felt, given Charlie’s Godfather-like approach to running both his business and his personal life. Business was life. Life was business. Take Marci Plotkin, for example, the accountant Charlie had fired for having an affair with his brother-in-law. Even though she was now at the accounting firm of SSMB, Kushner Companies still paid her annual bonuses of between fifteen and twenty-five thousand dollars, and reimbursed Plotkin for the cost of her son’s private school tuition, which was disguised to the IRS as a legal expense. Charlie wasn’t just being nice; he needed her cooperation. Beginning in the mid 1990s, at Charlie’s direction, according to legal records, the company began to commit financial fraud to fund his growing social, political, and financial ambitions.

As is common in real estate firms, each of the entities Charlie owned was its own LLC. And each LLC was owned by a partnership, a combination of Charlie and backers. All of the LLCs passed down by Joe Kushner were, per the instructions of his will, equally divided among Charlie and his three siblings, and their respective children’s trusts. But Charlie set up a management company, Westminster Management, and made himself the manager of all the buildings. Initially, his siblings thought this was a good thing.

Charlie viewed his increasingly public profile as public service. But his lust for the limelight brought some large bills. He invited politicians to speak (often for a large fee) in an assortment of venues, ranging from his office to his home, off-site conferences, and his synagogue. (He even invited the entire New Jersey political leadership to attend a Kushner baby’s bris.) A speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, cost as much as one hundred thousand dollars, and Charlie paid him to speak in New Jersey four times.

Rather than pay out of his own pocket for his many political and charitable contributions, Charlie—or senior executives in the firm, at Charlie’s direction—took LLC money, without preapproval from the partners in the LLC, to cover these costs. None of the Kushner Companies partners were informed of how their money was being spent. Not Charlie’s business partners, his friends, or even his siblings, children, nieces, and nephews. Nor did they know that neither the internal nor external ledgers presented the true numbers for each of the LLCs. If Charlie was short of cash on one project, he borrowed from the bank account of another. That wasn’t the only fudging that went on. According to court documents, there was euphemistic language used at the weekly Tuesday meetings, also called cash meetings, held at Charlie’s home early in the morning. The phrase losing a bill—as in, How do we lose this bill?—meant finding a way to turn an expense from one project into a capital deduction from elsewhere.

Personal expenses were also lost and submitted as capital business expenses from whichever LLC Richard Stadtmauer and an executive vice president, Scott Zecher, picked. Those ranged from Charlie’s home improvements to vacations, New Jersey Nets tickets, Super Bowl packages, even the alcohol Charlie and Seryl Kushner bought for holiday celebrations. A contribution from Charlie to Harvard