Lawyerly Lairs: A Federal Prosecutor's $25 Million Apartment

Government work doesn't pay particularly well. So how can a federal prosecutor afford to live in a $25 million apartment?

You know a building is special when it has its own Wikipedia entry:

[A] luxury residential housing cooperative in Manhattan, New York City. The twelve-story, limestone-faced building [sits] on a site once occupied by the 1893 residence of James A. Burden, which had been designed by R. H. Robertson. The apartment block, built in 1916, was the first apartment building to replace a private mansion on Fifth Avenue above 59th Street. It was converted to a cooperative in 1955. J. E. R. Carpenter was the architect; he would be called upon to design many of the luxury apartment buildings that gave a new scale to Fifth Avenue in the ‘teens and twenties of the 20th century. The building won him the 1916 gold medal of the American Institute of Architects.

As noted by Wikipedia, the building has 12 floors — meaning that Boaz and Tali Weinstein are on top, quite literally. They paid $25.5 million for apartment 12W, the precious penthouse once owned by the late copper heiress Huguette Clark, according to the New York Post (via Curbed).

The Weinsteins were approved by the building’s infamously stringent co-op board — “which loved [Boaz],” in the words of a Post source, who went on to describe the Weinsteins as “a lovely family — a lovely, rich family.”

The former owner of Boaz and Tali Weinstein’s new place — reclusive heiress Huguette Clark, proud possessor of a “spooky doll collection” — also owned two apartments on the building’s eighth floor. The prime minister of Qatar, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, wanted to buy the units for $31.5 million and combine them. But he got rejected by the co-op board.

SCOTUS clerk > Prime Minister of Qatar. Aww yeah.

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(Yes, we know — Boaz Weinstein’s fortune probably played a bigger role in getting the Weinsteins approved by the co-op board than Tali Weinstein’s impeccable legal pedigree. And the prime minister of Qatar’s board application was apparently frustrated by worries about “his massive entourage and diplomatic immunity,” as well as concerns over how the owner of the combined units would own too large a chunk of co-op shares. But let’s just pretend that the rest of the world worships Supreme Court clerks as much as we do, okay?)

The building as a whole is wonderful. Boaz and Tali Weinstein’s apartment, not so much — at least in its current state….

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