The Worst Deal Of Your Life Will Always Catch You By Surprise
Throughout my career, I’ve kiboshed deals for all sorts of reasons. Once I was in contract to buy a building from someone who didn’t actually own it! ‘Dead deal’ costs like these are tacitly baked into the price of doing business. In the near term, these small failures feel frustrating — wasteful of both time and money. Over the course of a decade or two, though, they become both stories to laugh about and the foundation to becoming a mature investor.
But my most recent dead deal ended in a viscerally painful way, when the underwriting abruptly turned personal, and I left fearing for my safety. Weeks later, it remains raw, and ugly, and not fully processed. I feel compelled to share the story, in hopes that others can draw meaning from it.
In May, I toured a plot of land in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. My friend had asked me to help underwrite a potential joint venture partner for a real estate development in one of the most beautiful areas of the United States. Here’s a picture from my site tour:
As I walked through the fields, woodchucks and butterflies and starlings and lilac were abundant. We were shaded by ancient oak trees — I told the owner that the land evoked my imagination of Colonial America. I felt anticipatory excitement, envisioning visits over the coming seasons to facilitate the development.
The landowner was not a real estate professional. His primary business was processing lumber. It was my task to explain how a real estate relationship could work, and during our walk I outlined for him a general framework for the joint venture: the owner would contribute his land and the developer would coordinate the equity and debt financings, and manage all zoning, permitting, construction, certification, and leasing matters. As our tour concluded, I said we should find a place to sit and talk numbers.
The owner took me to a shed on the property where he’d constructed a small office. We walked in and he sat behind his desk and I sat across from him and opened my notebook. My eye was immediately drawn above the owner’s left shoulder, to the office’s only piece of decoration. It was unmistakable and unbelievable.
The wall’s single ornament was a framed Nazi flag.
In a span of about fifteen seconds I experienced four distinct waves of feeling. The first was incredulity: “is that what I think it is?”; the second was denial, that there must be some sort of reasonable explanation, that maybe his great-grandfather was a Marine and the flag was a souvenir from Berlin in 1945; the third feeling was one of somatic dislocation, a sense of time slowing down and my speech becoming disjointed, as I was about to spike my friend’s deal; and the fourth was a defensive fear as I sussed out how to act in the moment with someone who, at best, exhibits profoundly impaired judgement, and at worst, was inclined to inflict upon me physical harm.
I said, “I gotta go.” He said, “OK.”
I asked, “Do you know why?” He said, “No.”
I pointed, “What is that on the wall?”
He looked surprised, and said, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. It’s not like that, it’s for historical reasons.”
I said, “I can’t work with you,” and got up to leave.
As we walked out, I said, “If it’s historical, why not an American flag, or a US Army helmet?” He didn’t respond.
I said, “Do you want to hear my story?”
“No.”
I said, “My family was murdered in Europe and my grandparents came to this country as refugees. Why would you show that?”
He repeated, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.” I wished him the best of luck and walked to my car. I drove maybe 500 feet, and pulled over to the side of the road, unsteady from layered pangs of disgust, rage, and shame.
Was he sorry that I was upset, or sorry that the land deal was dead? Sorry that his secret beliefs were revealed, or sorry that his character was being grossly misinterpreted? Was he just sorry for himself that he engaged in a friendly walk around his land with a Jew?
Maybe his apology was a metonym for an expression of pity for my malignant genome.
I talked to a friend later who said, “You know how it is when you get away from the cities — maybe he just didn’t think he’d ever bring a Jew or an Arab or a Black person into his office.” This is, of course, worse — it echoes the fear of every American minority that there are swaths of closet Nazis, and that only social disapproval alongside a functioning judicial system keeping pogroms at bay. And then I recalled the owner apologizing for the mess in his shed, since he’d had a party there the night before. His guests, I guess, implicitly endorsed the decor.
It all hit me where I’m most sensitive: I felt I was made a fool of. A fool for believing that good behavior in my life could serve as a shield. A fool for thinking that if I achieved some modicum of professional success, that I could skate by as a regular American. But there’s no escape. For many people whom I’ll never meet, and some whom I will, I am just another venomous Jew to be extinguished.
I feel extraordinarily blessed to be an inheritor of my grandparents’ legacy. Their courage to rebuild their lives in the new world after unimaginable trauma never ceases to move me. Their decades of sacrifice and hard work made it possible for my mother, and through her, for me, to flourish in our lives. And their unparalleled love and affection for their children and grandchildren, conveyed through warm embraces, cooking, and sage words, formed my emotional core. The embodied demons that chased them from their homes in Europe have not disappeared, and without doubt they will continue to haunt Jews from generation to generation. So as a juxtaposition to those horrors, I’ll end this story with a picture of the objects of some craven landowner’s enmity, my grandparents Moishe (d. 1990) and Sima Schwarzman (d. 2004). May their memory continue to be a blessing to the world.
Evan Goldfine is the CFO of Zuul Kitchens, and a licensed real estate broker in New York.