Saved From Hitler, Then He Out-Built the Rockefellers: The Paul Reichmann Story

Steven Weinstock (00:00) At the height of his career, one family controlled roughly 8% of all the commercial office space in New York City. More than double what the Rockefellers held. They built the tallest skyscraper in Toronto. They built the World Financial Center right next to the original World Trade Center. and then they attempted the single largest.private real estate development on earth. a project so massive it nearly bankrupted them entirely. The man behind nearly all of it wore a full beard, a plain business suit, and a yarmulka every single day of his working life. He closed every construction site he owned all over the worldEvery single Friday at sundown and refused to let work resume until the Sabbath had ended, no matter what it cost him. This is another one of our deep dive episodes here on The Wealth Clock. His name was Paul Reichman. Here's how a devout, intensely private man built, lost, and partially rebuilt one of the largest real estate fortunes in modern history. Paul Reichmann was born in Vienna in 1930, the fifth of six children to Samuel and Renee Reichmann, Orthodox Jews who had moved to Austria from rural Hungary and built a prosperous egg export business. The family survival and everything that came after it came down to a single stroke of unbelievable luck. In March of 1938, on the exact dayNazi Germany annexed Austria, the Reichmann family happened to be out of the country entirely, visiting Paul's grandfather in Hungary, who had just suffered a stroke. If they'd been home in Vienna that day, their story almost certainly ends there. Instead, the family fled from Hungary through Paris, then to Tangier, then to Morocco, staying just ahead of the war spreading across Europe.Piecing together a survival plan on the move rather than following any prepared route, before eventually making their way to Canada in the nineteen fifties. Paul, for his part, didn't rush straight into business once the family reached safety. In nineteen forty-nine, he devoted himself entirely to studying the Talmud, first in England and then in Israel, years spent almost entirely away from commerce.At an age when most young men were already building careers. It was in Israel in nineteen fifty-two that he met Leah Feldman, who became his wife in nineteen fifty-five. Religious study wasn't a phase he grew out of on his way to becoming a businessman. It stayed the actual center of his life.Even after he became one of the richest men in the world. The family's business started modestly. Older brother Edward founded Olympia Flooring and Tile in Montreal, and Paul, along with brothers Albert, Lewis, and Ralph, joined him in Canada. The company relocated to Toronto, and by 1958, it had become the springboard for something much larger: Olympia and York.The real estate development firm that would carry the Reichsmann name into the history books. Paul quickly became the strategic force behind the company. While Albert handled construction and administration, over the next 15 years, they built close to 100 buildings across the Toronto area, including First Canadian Place, which became the tallest skyscraper in the entire city. They didn't stop at Toronto.They acquired English Property Corporation, one of the largest developers in Britain, a deal that would later give them the platform to attempt something truly enormous. Olympia and York expanded into New York, where their signature achievement was the World Financial Center, a cluster of towers built directly beside the original World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, a project that required assembling capital.and cooperation at a scale most developers never attempt even once in a career. by 1990, at the absolute peak of their empire, the Reichmann family controlled roughly 8% of all commercial office space in New York City, more than twice as much as their closest competitor, the Rockefeller family, a name that had defined New York real estate for generationsBefore the Reichmanns ever arrived. Their combined wealth was estimated at $13 billion, making them at that moment the fourth richest family anywhere in the world. An almost unbelievable outcome for a family that had escaped Europe with essentially nothing decades earlier. And then, with that scale and that success behind him, Paul Reichmann decided to attempt something even larger.In London's Docklands,a rundown stretch of former shipping wharves east of the city center that most developers considered worthless. He began construction on Canary Wharf, a plan for 24 office towers that would become, at the time, the largest single real estate development anywhere on the planet. Canary Wharf was, by every account, a genuine gamble, not a calculated certainty.Reichmann pushed the project forward even as economic conditions worsened and the buildings sat largely empty. One biographer who spent years researching the family described Paul as someone who seemed, at that point in his career, almost convinced of his own infallibility. A man who never drew a real line on his own ambition. That bet didn't pay off in time. In nineteen ninety-two, Olympia and York collapsed into bankruptcy.Carrying roughly $20 billion in debt, one of the largest corporate bankruptcies the world had ever seen. the family that had once outowned Rockefellers in New York now watched their entire empire fall apart in London.Years later, Reichman reflected on the collapse with startling honesty, suggesting that never having been proven wrong before had quietly built character flaws into him. Flaws that eventually caused the very mistakes that brought the company down. Reichman didn't disappear after the bankruptcy. In nineteen ninety-five, he assembled a new investor group, including Saudi royal investor Prince Al-Walid Bintalal.And repurchased Canary Wharf outright for one point six billion dollars, forming a new entity called Canary Wharf Group. The development that had once nearly destroyed him slow slowly transformed into one of London's most important financial districts. In 2004, Reichman bought a controlling stake in Canary Wharf a second time, by then a project widely considered essential to London's entire financial structure.Before finally giving it up for good in 2009. The family's fortune never returned to its 1990 peak, but it did recover. Reaching an estimated $2.3 billion by 2018, Paul Reichmann died in Toronto in October of 2013 at 83 years old. Through all of it, the rise, the collapse, and the comeback, Reichmann's religious observance never bent to the demands of the business.Every Olympia York construction site in every city closed completely for the Sabbath and for Jewish holidays. With the company paying overtime for Sunday labor to make up the difference, Reichman himself lived modestly for a man of his wealth, known for flying coach class even as a billionaire, and his one real personal indulgence was collecting rare and valuable Jewish religious texts.The family gave enormously as well, reportedly donating up to fifty million dollars a year to different schools, different yeshivas, different synagogues, and hospitals around the world. Support that continued through both the boom years and the bankruptcy years alike. So what do you take from a story like Paul Reichmann's? First, a long, unbroken streak of being right can quietly become dangerous.Reifman's own later reflection on Canary Wharf is worth sitting with. Years of correct decisions had convinced him he couldn't be wrong. And that conviction is exactly what let him push a bet past the point it could still be controlled. Second, the values you hold on to during the good years are the ones that actually get tested during the bad ones. Reifman didn't relax his religious observance when the company was thriving.And he didn't abandon it when the company collapsed either. That consistency, more than the money itself, is arguably the most impressive part of his entire story. Third,Third, and this is the one worth remembering, a collapse doesn't have to be the final chapter. Reichmann didn't just walk away from Canary Wharf after nineteen ninety two, he came back for it twice, and helped turn it into exactly what he'd originally envisioned, just years later than he had originally planned, and at a real personal cost along the way. That's Paul Reichmann saved from the Holocaust by a single stroke of luck.an Orthodox Jew who built an empire that briefly outowned the Rockefellers, gambled it all on the largest real estate development in the world, lost it, and then improbably came back for it anyway. Next time you hear about a real estate deal described as the biggest ever attempted, remember, sometimes the person behind it is the same person closing every job site.From sundown on Friday till sundown on Saturday without exception. If you enjoyed this one, comment the word awesome so I know you made it to the end, and let me know who you want me to dig into next. This has been the Wealth Clock Podcast. I'm Steven Weinstock. I'll see you next time.