Never Enough

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Authors: Joe McGinniss
MBA from Harvard, and since 1982 president/CEO of Louis Berger Group of East Orange. Louis Berger was an international engineering firm that had designed everything from Burma’s Mandalay Road and the Bangkok International Airport to the Trans-Amazon Highway, the East Pakistan Road in Bangladesh, and the Stockholm subway system, to name but a few. Louis Berger Group made Bill Kissel’s Synfax look like a high school chemistry experiment, and Derish Wolff’s wealth made Bill’s look like chump change. Bill’s envy and resentment were predictable. He was a man to whom wealth and worth were synonymous. And Hayley didn’t even have to say anything. The look in her eye said it all: my father’s is bigger than yours.
    A new front opened in the intramural war in 1994 when Andrew borrowed $500,000 from Rob to launch his own real estate company, which would focus, he said, on buying small apartment buildings in what he called “under the radar” neighborhoods in Bayonne, Hoboken, and Jersey City. He called the company Hanrock: “h” for Hayley, “a” for Andrew, “n” for Nancy, “r” for Rob, and the “ock” at the end to make “rock,” which would show that the company was rock solid. To Nancy, who often referred to Andrew as a “lizard,” the only “rock” in Hanrock was the one he’d crawled out from under. “You give half a million to your slumlord brother, while I have to go without a nanny,” she groused to Rob.
    Andrew had been working for W&M Properties, a midtown real estate firm that according to The New York Times specialized in “identifying and acquiring distressed but potentially profitable properties and renovating them in a style that attracts first-class tenants.” There was no shortage of “distressed” properties in Jersey City. The trick would be to make them profitable.
    But Andrew had another trick. In 1992, he and Hayley had bought a one-bedroom condo at 200 East Seventy-fourth Street. Within three years, he became treasurer of the co-op board. He viewed the position as a license to steal. Starting in January 1996, he regularly wired funds from the building’s reserve account into personal and corporate accounts of his own. His early success as an embezzler made him both edgier and more arrogant than he had been.
    Meanwhile, Hayley manufactured excuses to avoid socializing with Nancy and Rob. “I hate it when she comes here,” she told Andrew. “She walks around the whole apartment, pricing everything I’ve just bought.” At the same time, Nancy complained to Rob, “Their house at Stratton is twice as expensive as ours.”
    Bill remained the catalytic agent. He and the lady friend from Florida who’d been living with him since soon after his wife had died would arrive for a holiday dinner. Invariably, Andrew and Hayley would be the hosts, because Nancy simply wouldn’t do it. Just as invariably, within the first five minutes, Bill would make a caustic remark. He’d say something snide or belittling, then take a drink into an adjacent room and close the door behind him. Neither Nancy nor Hayley could understand his behavior: why the need to hurt and humiliate? Andrew and Rob were not perplexed. They’d never known him to be any other way.
    The two brothers reacted as they had since childhood. Rob gamely endured it, while Andrew replied with bitter insults of his own as soon as they all sat down to dinner. For Andrew, the difference was that alcohol and cocaine now dulled his feelings and sharpened his tongue.
    Little sister Jane opted out of the wasp’s nest as soon as possible by marrying a gentile and moving west. Rob and Nancy and three-year-old Isabel and a second child, six-month-old Zoe, left for Hong Kong in June 1997. Nancy was looking forward to a surge in Rob’s earnings and to the opulent lifestyle described by Goldman Sachs wives who’d returned from their tours of duty in Hong Kong. Rob was looking forward to these also, but equally to having half a

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