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The Liar's Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World's Toughest Tycoons

ISBN: 978-1-118-29531-1
256 pages
December 2014
US $29.95 Add to Cart

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Business & Finance


October 20, 2014
Hoboken, NJ

Vicky Ward's The Liar's Ball Tells The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons

Just below Central Park on New York’s exclusive Fifth Avenue stands the iconic General Motors Building, a gleaming 50-story white marble tower and the most expensive office building in the United States.

One of the few structures in New York to occupy an entire block, it’s perhaps best known as home to Apple’s equally iconic flagship store.  In the fifty years since it was designed, the GM Building has brought out the best and the worst in New York’s real estate royalty, and led more than a few of them to ruin.

And as bestselling author and former Vanity Fair contributing editor Vicky Ward relates, the story of the GM Building is about much more than simple real estate.  Her new book, The Liar’s Ball, is the shocking exposé of how brilliant and audacious real estate tycoons lie, cheat, bluff, and bully their way into some of the world’s biggest deals.  In over 200 interviews, Ward got a rare look into the world of these vain and powerful men chasing their profits and schemes and dreams.  They are inspired, but they are also careless, unregulated, and dangerous.

The Liar’s Ball is full of extraordinary stories of extraordinary people: Cecilia Benattar, the “housewife tycoon,” a “petite pit bull” of an executive who didn’t know where, precisely, Times Square was but out-negotiated everyone; property developer Lord Max Rayne; broker Rita Jenrette, who once posed naked for Playboy and who now resides in a castello outside Rome as the Principessa Boncompagni Ludovisi; the surprisingly charming hustler who grabbed the prized building and then let it slip through his fingers in a family drama that makes Shakespeare’s King Lear look like Father of the Year, and others, including:    

  • Edward “Eddie” Garofolo, owner of the construction company that in dark of night demolished buildings to make way for the Hotel Macklowe, without permits and with the gas left on (it was a miracle no one died);
  • Harry Macklowe, whose “magic trick” at two in the morning, improving a Steve Jobs’ design, created the most famous retail store in the world, making Apple $1 million a day its first year in the building;
  • One GM building owner, Disque D. Deane, who smashed a bottle of wine over the head of a member of Merrill Lynch’s founding family;
  • Boss Tweed—the first of the site’s developers—who stole an estimated $200 million ($4 billion today) from New York City taxpayers.

The book features some of the world’s most reckless–and arguably ruthless–businessmen, not least Donald Trump, one-time owner for five years of the GM Building.  His surname adorned the building in four-foot letters until they disappeared overnight when Harry Macklowe bought it for $1.4 billion, a record that stood until recently.

The Liar’s Ball: the Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoonsis a story of naked, unregulated capitalism. It’s a tale of brilliant and enormously ambitious billionaires fighting bare-knuckled to get what they want.   It’s a story of deals worth billions done on the golf course rather than the board room or worked out on the back of a napkin, of rigged bids and offloaded debts, of personal fortunes made and lost, and of marriages destroyed.

With property prices soaring on both sides of the Atlantic, the emerging “poor door” debate for luxury high-rises paired with affordable housing, and Manhattan condos serving foreigners like new Swiss bank accounts—“stash pads” where they can hide their money, The Liar’s Ball is truly a parable for our times.

Following the success of Ward’s New York Times bestseller, The Devil’s Casino, about the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, The Liar’s Ball is another astonishing and utterly compelling real-life tale of just how far these people would go to get the money, power, and attention they so desperately craved.