NEW YORK (Reuters) – The New Jersey Nets will be renamed the Brooklyn Nets when the National Basketball Association (NBA) franchise moves across the state line and into a new arena next year, minority owner and rap star Jay-Z said on Monday.
The Nets, who have played in New Jersey since joining the NBA in 1976, are due to move into the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the 2012-2013 season. The arena is under construction.
“From the moment the Barclays Center became a reality, I knew this meant something significant for Brooklyn,” Brooklyn-born Jay-Z told a news conference.
The team had been known as the New York Nets for a few seasons when it played in the defunct American Basketball Association, but now will take on the name of a borough that is part of New York City but maintains its own identity.
(Reporting by Paula Rogo; Editing by Daniel Trotta)
Archive for September, 2011
Sports Team will be called “Brooklyn Nets” after move
September 30, 2011The Mansion Between the Overpasses Mark Settembre’s Mansion
September 5, 2011
Mark Settembre built a warehouse-style “dream” house between busy overpasses.
Richard Perry/The New York Times
From his top floor he can see the Empire State Building and the Hudson River.
Richard Perry/The New York times
The Mansion Between the Overpasses
WEEHAWKEN
MARK SETTEMBRE entered the fourth-floor master bedroom of his new house, gazed out the big round picture window, and gloated.
“Now do you see why I did it?” he said to a couple of visitors. “I know a lot of people are saying: ‘What? Is he crazy?’ But look at that. That’s what I see from my bed.”
Motorists might be excused for wondering whether the owner of this particular house was crazy, situated as it is between overpasses at the edge of Hoboken here.
In the immediate foreground, as Mr. Settembre and his guests looked out the window, there was heavy traffic on the Park Street overpass into Hoboken, traveling so close that some drivers’ profiles were visible. But then, no one looking at that view could ever be focused primarily on traffic.
Beyond the bridge, the Hudson River glittered with ships and sailboats, and two helicopters buzzed around the top of the Empire State Building like bees.
It’s a view that might quiet even the most vociferous skeptics — and skeptics are apparently plenty, judging by the snarky commentary on blogs devoted to Hoboken real estate and land use. “Would you want to live here?” blared a headline over a photo of the house published on the Hoboken411 Web site.
But skeptics are probably also wondering about the issue of “how?”
How did Mr. Settembre, a Hoboken housing developer, go about getting permission to build a 7,500-square-foot house with a seven-car-garage that fills up almost every square inch of a small triangular property at one end of a site long envisioned as a Hoboken park?
“Very sneakily,” said Mr. Settembre, who moved into his warehouse/loft-style, “single-man’s dream” house in June.
He quietly bought the sliver of land, then derelict, from an individual property owner after the city of Hoboken had acquired the rest of the property known as 1600 Park Avenue, parcel by parcel, under pressure from civic groups to increase public open space.
Mr. Settembre is a principal, with Michael C. Sciarra, in the URSA Development Group, which built two high-rise buildings in partnership with the now-bankrupt national firm Tarragon Development, and URSA remains the designated developer for a couple of plots in Hoboken’s northwest redevelopment area.
Last year Mr. Settembre applied for two significant zoning variances — for height and setback requirements — in Weehawken; his lot is just over the border. As is legally required, Weehawken officials said, they sent notice to Hoboken officials inviting comment.
For some reason, Hoboken’s planning officials either ignored the notice, or overlooked it. Michael B. Kates, the current corporation counsel for Hoboken, did not hold that post at the time and said he did not know what had happened.
Mr. Settembre, who took up amateur boxing several years ago in his mid-50s and seems to enjoy fighters’ lingo, said, “We just kept our heads down.”
The approvals were granted.
Then one day in spring 2009, Jim Doyle, a Hoboken lawyer, was jogging beside the Park Avenue Bridge and spotted construction equipment. He called his wife, Leah Healey, who is a founder of Hobokenparks.org, a civic group that had pushed since 2006 for creation of a public park on the large strip of land along the Park Avenue and Willow Street bridges. The land was then serving mainly as a hangout for the homeless.
“It was quite upsetting to us,” Ms. Healey said of the house last week, “because it upsets a holistic plan for open space we have in mind for the whole area, which wraps into Weehawken.”
“In the case of his house,” she added, “the deed was done before anyone in Hoboken was aware. I hope he doesn’t mind having lighted ball fields out his window, because that is what we really need in Hoboken, and that’s the design plan that has support from everybody we talk to.”
Mr. Settembre said he didn’t mind, and might even sponsor a team he could watch from one of his two decks facing west. Since he moved in, he noted, the weedy strip in Hoboken has been capped with dirt, graded, and seeded — and he called it a “nice improvement in my backyard.”
The house does not have its own yard; the southern wall is set three feet from the park land.
“I am a single guy,” he said. “I don’t want to mow the lawn.” Besides, Mr. Settembre said, he has other houses, in Palm Beach, Fla., and Southampton, N.Y.
The son of a bricklayer, he was born in Hoboken, and said he was “carrying cement buckets when I was 8.” Now, he likes socializing with artists and actors in Manhattan (where he also has an apartment).
“I am always a Hoboken guy first, though,” he said. He made it a point to furnish his Weehawken house with work by hometown artists, he said. “Hoboken forever, for me.”
Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
The Survivor Who Saw the Future for Cantor Fitzgerald
September 4, 2011
Michael Falco for The New York TimesHoward W. Lutnick, chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald. His push into electronic trading helped the firm stay in business after 658 of its workers were killed in the terrorist attacks.TEN years and a lifetime ago, Howard W. Lutnick was a prince of Wall Street. Forty years old, and already the head of a powerful financial house, he could peer down on rivals from his office on the 105th floor of One World Trade Center.
Then ― you know the rest.
American Airlines Flight 11 struck Tower One. Three out of every four people who worked in New York City for Mr. Lutnick at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald died that September morning, 658 in all. Among the dead was his younger brother, Gary.
That Howard Lutnick survived was, he concedes, blind luck. Some people died because they happened to be at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Lutnick lived because he happened to be taking his son, Kyle, to his first day of kindergarten.
“I was disgusted,” one widow, whose husband had worked at a Cantor subsidiary, told the television anchor Connie Chung a few weeks later.And so Mr. Lutnick, who ran Cantor Fitzgerald then and, remarkably, still runs it today, became an unusual, and unusually public, 9/11 survivor: the executive who cried on national television and then quickly began making hard-nosed ― some said hard-hearted ― business decisions. Four days after the attack, with the nation stunned and ground zero smoldering, Mr. Lutnick cut off paychecks to the families of his employees, before anyone even knew just how many had died.
And yet, since those dark days, Mr. Lutnick has defied those who said he and Cantor were finished. He has rebuilt his firm, and then some. And many of those who criticized him at the time, notably, spouses and parents of Cantor employees who had died, now say he did the right thing.
Courtesy of Howard LutnickMr. Lutnick and his son, Kyle, on Sept. 11, 2001. They were at Kyle’s school when the towers were hit.By almost any measure, it is a remarkable turnabout. Perhaps more than any other company, Cantor came to symbolize the horrors of Sept. 11. In the number of employees who died, it has no rival. Almost one-fourth of the 2,753 people killed in New York City that morning worked for Mr. Lutnick.
Now 50, he occupies offices in a far lesser skyscraper, a smoked-glass affair in Midtown Manhattan. He sits 103 stories lower than before, on the second floor.
Perched on the credenza near h is desk is a bronze sculpture of a hand, a Rodin that was recovered f rom the wreckage of the towers. It is a vestige of the vast collection that his mentor, Bernie Cantor, amassed over a lifetime. The finish is seared. Several fingers are missing.
The sculpture is a reminder, as if one were needed, of Mr. Lutnick’s improbable journey back.
And it is improbable. Together, Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC Partners, a company he founded after Sept. 11, now employ roughly 5,000 people. That is 2,900 more than Cantor Fitzgerald employed before the attacks. Only 74 remain from the pre-9/11 days.
Mr. Lutnick has slowly rebuilt old businesses and pushed into new ones, including, of all thi ngs, sports betting in Las Vegas.
“I believe in what I call the surfer’s theory,” he says. “You see a really, really big wave. You keep surfing, keep going forward. You just don’t look back.”
He is a tough customer. Orphaned in his teens, he bootstrapped his way to the top of the Wall Street bond business. In their heyday, Cantor brokers occupied a lucrative niche as the main middlemen in the enormous market for United States Treasury securities. Cantor Fitzgerald never had the cachet of, say, Goldman Sachs, and it was in some ways a throwback to the time when sons followed fathers and brothers onto the trading floors, when polish and an Ivy League degree mattered less than some fire in the belly.
There is no sugar-coating the fact that before, and even after, Sept. 11, Mr. Lutnick was widely disliked in the industry. A ruthless competitor even by Wall Street standards, he has made more than a few enemies over the years. In 1996, as Mr. Cantor, his mentor, lay dying, Mr. Lutnick fought with Mr. Cantor’s wife, Iris, for control of Cantor Fitzgerald. She later barred him from the funeral.
Such was Mr. Lutnick’s reputation that in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, some of his rivals actually gloated over Cantor’s devastation. They jumped at the opportunity to put an end to his firm, which pocketed many millions in commissions while enabling the great investment houses to trade bonds in relative anonymity.
“Oh, I would love to put one up their bottom,” a senior executive at ICAP, a big Cantor rival, wrote in an e-mail at the time. The e-mail surfaced after Cantor sued ICAP in London for hiring away one of its brokers after Sept. 11. A judge later ruled that ICAP had broken the rules by hiring that one employee but not others, saying Cantor’s “bullying” behavior had driven the other employees away.
All of which makes Cantor’s rebirth, and the redemption of Mr. Lutnick, all the more remarkable. “We dealt with this by quietly doing everything we said we would do,” he says of the last decade. “The only way to take care of everyone was to have a company.”
Michael Falco for The New York TimesHarry Waizer, a Cantor tax lawyer, survived the attacks, though he was badly burned, and is still at the firm.“WHAT FLOOR?!”
Mr. Lutnick was shouting into the throng pouring out of the blazing World Trade Center on Sept. 11. He had rushed to what would become known as ground zero from a classroom at the Horace Mann School, on the Upper East Side, where he had just dropped off Kyle for kindergarten.
What Mr. Lutnick wanted to know was, what floor had people been on? Sixty-seven? Seventy-nine? The highest number he heard was 91, at least 10 flights below the Cantor offices. Then the north tower began to fall, floor by floor by floor, and Mr. Lutnick ran. He dove under a car, choking on the dirt and dust.
No one on the 101st floor, where Cantor’s headquarters began, had made it out .
Mr. Lutnick spent the next four hours picking through the stunned crowds streaming uptown. As he walked to his home on the Upper East Side, the enormity of what had happened began to sink in.
Michael Falco for The New York TimesA damaged Rodin sculpture, recovered from the ruins, now sits near Howard Lutnick’s desk at Cantor Fitzgerald’s new home.BEFORE Sept. 11, few people outside financial circles had ever heard of Cantor Fitzgerald. Next to the bigger, richer, more famous firms ― the Goldmans and Merrills and Morgans of the world ― Cantor might have seemed a bit player.
But behind the scenes, Cantor was and is a major force in the bond market. There is no central exchange for bonds, nothing akin to, say, the New York Stock Exchange. So, for years, financial companies turned to middlemen like Cantor, firms known as interdealer brokers, to trade bonds without tipping their hands.
In 2001, more than 70 percent of all Treasury securities were traded through Cantor. Today, with the rise of other firms and other pressures, that figure has fallen to roughly 50 percent, although Mr. Lutnick has compensated by expanding into other parts of the financial markets.
Even before the terrorist attacks, he was leading Cantor Fitzgerald into an electronic future to stay co mpetitive and profitable. In 1999, he took public Cantor’s electronic trading subsidiary, eSpeed. Some of his brokers feared that such electronic trading systems would eventually put them out of work.
In fact, Mr. Lutnick’s electronic push helped Cantor stay afloat after Sept. 11. Cantor lost almost all of its brokers, but eSpeed did not need brokers. Without the new trading technology, Cantor might have gone under.
“In a way, eSpeed saved them,” says Richard Repetto, an analyst at Sandler O’Neill, which itself lost 66 employees at the World Trade Center.
So many Cantor brokers were killed that Mr. Lut nick had little choice but to shut many of his trading desks. There s imply were not enough people left to handle the work.
“The show starts on Wall Street at about 7:30 in the morning, when the curtain goes up,” Mr. Lutnick said. That meant that almost all of his brokers were at their desks when Flight 11 hit: “Everyone who made money for the firm was there.”
The numbers tell the story. On Sept. 10, 2001, Cantor employed 2,100 employees worldwide, 960 of them in New York City. On Sept. 12, only 1,422 were left, roughly half of them in London, and 302 in New York.
And so the desks for corporate bonds, mortgage securities and municipal bonds were closed. So were the offices in Paris and London. Cantor was losing a million dollars a day, and that was excluding compensation still being paid to its families.
Unable to reach Mr. Lutnick on Sept. 11, Lee Amaitis, the head of the London office and a close friend, began mapping out a plan. He helped reconfigure Cantor’s trading systems so that trades could be processed through London, rather than New York.
Mr. Lutnick and his remaining employees in New York soon decamped to a windowless computer center in Rochelle Park, N.J. Thanks to eSpeed, Cantor could clear its trades electronically. Forty-seven hours after the planes hit, as the bond market nervously reopened for business, so did Cantor.
“From survival to when we could take a breath was weeks,” Mr. Amaitis said.
For many, Mr. Lutnick would become the public face of a Wall Street besieged.
“Every person who came to work for me in New York, everyone who was at the office, every single one who was there isn’t there anymore,” he told Larry King on CNN on Sept. 19, his voice cracking. “We can’t find them. All of them. Everyone.”
Mr. Lutnick today defends his decision to stop the paychecks of employees who were dead or missing, a step that drew howls at the time. “It was just math,” he says. “We lost all our producers. There simply was no mon ey””
But Mr. Lutnick had already come up with another plan, one that would become one of the most expensive corporate efforts of its kind. Cantor, he promised, would give the families 25 percent of its profits over the next five years. And it would provide health insurance coverage to families for 10 years. Mr. Lutnick asked his sister Edie Lutnick, a lawyer who had been running her practice out of Cantor’s offices, to head a charity to administer the program.
Ms. Lutnick, like Howard, was also lucky to be alive: she was due in the office on Sept. 11, but she went back to bed after a breakfast appointment fell through.
Mr. Lutnick’s plan was met with a wall of skepticism . Cantor, after all, was losing money. Angry families jeered that 25 percent of nothing was nothing.
Then, that October, Cantor sent out more than $45 million in bonus payments, the first of many checks to come.
“After the first checks went out, guess what happened?” Mr. Lutnick asked. “Silence. Because the checks were larger than the salaries we were paying.”
Its ranks depleted, Cantor could not hire fast enough. For the first year, Mr. Lutnick estimated that he signed up 10 new people a week. By the end of 2002, the firm had roughly 750 people in New York.
Cantor is privately held and does not make public all of its financial information. But based on data released by the company and payouts to families, Cantor and eSpeed made about $150 million a year, on average, in the five years after the attacks.
For all its losses and sorrows, Cantor actually had the wind at its back. ESpeed thrived in 2002 and 2003, thanks in part to the nation’s ballooning debt. As the government sold more bonds to finance its deficit, the bond market grew and Cantor had more Treasury securities to trade.
Cantor also continued to rebuild, expanding its investment bank and pushing into new areas like gambling technology.
In 2004, Cantor was essentially running two very different business. It had a stock and bond trading desk and was expanding into investment banking. And it had the broker-driven bond trading operation. This unit had recovered from Sept. 11, but it needed a huge capital commitment to move forward.
Mr. Lutnick and Mr. Amaitis decided to create a new company, BGC Partners, to house the brokers. Cantor would retain the trading desks that handled big stock trades and the investment-banking division.
They gave each company its own management team. The move enabled BGC to raise the money it needed.
To do all of this, Cantor for the first time went into debt, borrowing almost $400 million to expand BGC. Over the next few years, Mr. Amaitis embarked on a dizzying shopping spree, buying a string of interdealer brokers. In 2005 alone, BGC added 1,000 brokers. Then, in April 2008, Cantor merged BGC with eSpeed. The deal, valued at $1.3 billion, paired eSpeed’s trading technology with BGC’s brokers.
Today, Cantor and Mr. Lutnick, BGC’s chairman and chief executive, are among its biggest shareholders. The new company took the BGC name.
HARRY WAIZER is a rarity at Cantor. He is a Sept. 11 survivor, one of the 74 people who worked for Cantor before the attacks and who still wo rk there today.
A tax lawyer, Mr. Waizer was in an elevator on his way to Cantor’s offices when the plane hit. Flames engulfed him. Badly burned, he stumbled out on the 78th floor and worked his way down.
He was given a 5 percent chance of survival. He spent two and half years recovering and returned to work in 2004. His scars are still visible. He does not have much stamina. He cannot sit for long and works just three days a week; on one of those days, he spends time with a physiotherapist.
He says Cantor is a different company today. Some of the employees who recently joined were just teenagers in 2001. Some are the children of parents who died that day.
Cantor’s survivors of Sept. 11 have a special bond, he says. “There is a certain intensity it brings among the people who were there,” Mr. Waizer says. “You don’t know it until it is going to happen. It usually hits when we talk about the issue of loyalty.”
Cantor’s success has enabled Mr. Lutnick to honor his pledge to the families of those who were killed. Over the five years, each family got roughly $175,000. Many are still getting health insurance.
The criticism of Mr. Lutnick has mellowed with time. Some widows and other family members who chastised him in the weeks after Sept. 11 now say he did all he could.
Appearing on “20/20″ in October 2001, Susan Sliwak, whose husband, Robert, was a bond trader at Cantor, sharply criticized Mr. Lutnick. She told Connie Chung that Mr. Lutnick “was not liked” by many inside the company.
Today, she said Cantor “did everything” it said it would.
Early on, Irene Boehm, who lost her husband, Bruce, a Cantor broker, spoke publicly about her financial concerns. When Cantor sent her a bonus check months later, she called Cantor, saying her husband deserved more. Today, she, too, says the concerns about Mr. Lutnick’s sincerity were overblown.
“They have been wonderful and went overboard,” said Ms. Boehm, who has two daughters now in their 20s. Her husband’s parents also received some money from Cantor.
Mr. Lutnick also hired experts from the University of Chicago to analyze the financial packages offered by the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and try to get more money for Cantor families.
“I was going to want to put my head in the oven if they didn’t get the right amount of money because that is my reason for being at this point,” Mr. Lutnick recalled. “We studied each person that died and how they were doing. We got a lot more per family.”
While the payments to the families end ed five years ago, the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund is still a full-time pursuit for Edie Lutnick. She is called upon to help families hold charitable events, or, more recently, to help find hotel rooms for the ones coming to New York City for memorial events.
Mr. Lutnick says he will never get over Sept. 11. But he has found some peace. He says that for years he had recurring nightmares that spiders were spinning webs on his face, suffocating him. Sleepwalking, he would drag his wife into the closet. Today, the bad dreams are gone.
EACH year, Cantor has a service in Central Park for families of its workers who died. This year a larger one will be held at ground zero, where the National September 11 Memorial and Museum will be dedicated.
Ms. Lutnick and Cantor became an important voice in building the memorial. Initially, it was suggested that names be placed randomly, but she successfully argued that the Cantor employees be listed together on the north tower memorial. And friends and families should be listed by one another, if requested.
“It still looks random, but Tim O’Brien being next to Glen Wall means something,” said Mr. Lutnick, referring to two friends at Cantor who died Sept. 11. “I think of the two of them, and it is nice they are together. They should be.”
Copyright. 2011. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved
My View From Las Vegas 