The New Kings of New York

There's a story behind every eye-popping apartment sale, every audacious new development, and each real estate transaction in New York City. And many of those stories involve the uber-wealthy behaving badly-- the blood sport that is New York real estate is rife with billion-dollar feuds. THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK: Renegades, Moguls, Gamblers and the Remaking of the World's Most Famous Skyline charts the extraordinary transformation of America's greatest city from a near-bankrupt urban combat zone into the land of Billionaires' Row and Hudson Yards--a luxury playground for the global 1 percent--and provides an inside look at the bombastic personalities behind the biggest real estate deals of this century.

The first two decades of the 21st century were a giddy, hyperbolic era of dizzying highs and deep, dark lows. The headlines told the story: the world's biggest (and most disastrous) real estate transaction, the largest private development in U. S. history, the largest condo conversion in the history of the world, a commercial real estate nuclear winter, a $200 million penthouse sale, the world's most expensive office skyscraper, the tallest condo ever built. And then there was the pandemic of 2020: 95 percent of Manhattan's office space sat empty amid a pandemic, retail stores were boarded up, and restaurants went belly-up. Yet somehow, New York, and its world-famous real estate market, rose again.

Written by award-winning journalist Adam Piore and brought to you by the country's most authoritative real estate publication, The Real Deal, THE NEW KINGS OF NEW YORK offers a behind-the-scenes picture of what it's like to operate at the highest levels of the industry, and what it took to pull off skyline-transforming deals. Featuring never-before-reported accounts from the larger-than-life characters at the top of the real estate food chain, it's a tale of hubris, greed and city-defining vision.

The drama includes stories of property moguls who get scammed by Malaysian embezzlers, come to actual blows over deals gone bad, and make backroom pacts with Russian oligarchs on their way to putting up towers that kiss the sky. It is a book about the history of the city, the dawn of New York real estate's second gilded age, the opportunists who sought to exploit it, and the adventures they had along the way.