“Always come back to love”

After years of unhappiness, the coin finally dropped: my marriage would never recover. So I ended it and, to work a few things out, I saw an EMDR therapist.

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. As I see it (no pun intended), by closely watching LED lights run back and forth, you become too distracted to game the process. It leaves no room for fooling yourself or the therapist. It is the hard truth, and it produces results.

For me, every session with Linda brought a lesson, and some were epiphanies. One time, when I wasn’t getting along with my mom, my beloved grandfather appeared as a larger-than-life hologram. Looking me square in the eye, he set me straight.

“Scotty,” he cautioned, wagging his thick, manicured pointer, “It’s my daughter…and she’s your mudda (he was a Bronx boy)…do the right fucking thing.” I cried like a baby, and called my mom every day until she was killed by a Covid vax shot.

Anyway, Linda was a master therapist, and the first person to explain to me that I had been the subject of verbal abuse. I thought deeply that night about what she said while I read the pamphlet she gave me and re-watched one of my favorite films, Raging Bull.

De Niro plays Jake LaMotta, a tough boxer. He knocks out the champion, Sugar Ray Robinson. Then, he loses a decision to Robinson. In their third match, he lets Robinson clobber him, never throws a punch. De Niro loses by decision again.

All beaten to hell, he wanders the ring blind and bloody, calling out for Robinson. Finding him, De Niro delivers the line that still makes the hair on my arms stand up straight.

“Ray,” he says, “Hey Ray. I never went down, Ray. Ray. You hear me? You never got me down. You hear? See? Look!”

And here, I learned a huge lesson about a mistake I made that, contrary to my good intentions, contributed to our demise. I thought it was better to avoid confrontation and escalation, to not fight back, to be a tough guy like De Niro and take the beatings like a man. Better for us, the kids, everyone, even me.

But I was wrong. I needed to “Come back to love.” To speak my heart, and do it with kindness and compassion. To share my feelings, my pain, rather than swallow and hide them. In a way, by absorbing all those blows, I lost my marriage like De Niro lost the fight.

It was a stupid mistake on my part. Pride, ego and ignorance played their roles. I should have spoken up sooner and more often.

So, remember, don’t be a tough guy. Speak your heart. Always come back to love. It’s the best way, every time, with everyone you care about.

Thank you, Linda Cohn, for showing me the light, and enabling me to enjoy greater balance, intimacy and pleasure in my relationships with the people I love. 

“Know when to fold’em”

I enjoyed a long, interesting and rewarding career as an institutional real estate investor. Recognized by Columbia Business School as my class's Real Estate Merit Scholar and 25th Reunion Chair, I share credit for developing a number of innovative, large-scale strategies that changed the industry, led or approved tens of billions in successful investment decisions around the globe, raised billions from coveted institutional investors, authored white papers, spoke at conferences, received accolades...it was a fantastic ride! 

Make no mistake, however, professional investing is a contact sport. I left high-paying jobs and parted ways with "successful" colleagues over differences in personal values. After 25 years with leading firms including my own, I decided to retire in 2012 from a toxic industry riddled with fraud and abuse.

Leaving all that heartache behind was an easy decision to make, but the process of parting left a cloudy trail. Two years after retiring, in 2014, having substantially severenced my team and wound down my firm's activities, a small group of investors complained about a fee.

The following is meant to put the public record into context:

1) Click the Wiki and LinkedIn links atop this page for backround information on me and my companies. 

2) Click https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.431825.1.0.pdf to see the lawsuit my firm initiated and settled with the investors to claim the fee. 

3) Click https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2017/ia-4641.pdf (page 8, paragraph 32) for the SEC investigators' allegations that the investors should have been informed sooner about which of my companies provided the services, and the amount of the fee accumulating while those services were being provided. Like almost everybody the SEC ever investigated before us, including the banks and other financial institutions you rely upon, we settled their claims.

4)  Click https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2017-42 for an SEC staffer's opinions on the SEC investigators' allegations. Note that the staffer goes beyond the investigators' allegations by asserting theft and a permanent bar, whereas the investigators' allegations do not. 

5) Plus there are news articles that ignore my companies' lawsuit claims, and instead report on the staffer's opinions and the investigators' allegations--none of which were adjudicated or otherwise proven.

"Know when to fold'em." Yes, it was the right decision. Unfortunately, what the public sees on the internet is a story that is partly untold, often hyped and entirely unproven. My companies' claims, the SEC's investigation, its staffer's opinions, the news reports--none of it is confirmed by any third party much less a judge. 

Bottom line, from my perspective, the investors paid my firm a fee for its services, my firm netted millions, resigning as manager accelerated my companies' wind-down, and agreeing to be barred reconfirmed my decision to retire from the industry I loved and hated.

Following the money, the big winners were the investors, who paid a below-market fee for my firm's services; and the lawyers, who the insurers ironically paid about the same amount as the fee my firm initially charged the investors. 

Thank you, Kenny Rogers and Don Schlitz, for encouraging me to fold'em like those before us.

Thanks also to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) not only for taking a hard stance on widespread investment industry fraud that hurts every American every day, but also for taking a more mindful approach to publicity for other investigations in recent years. 

I also wish to express compassion for the SEC staffer whose press release and the news articles it spurred clouded my otherwise sparse web presence, and who was a career civil servant that served our country in this capacity while battling painful urinary cancer until his untimely demise a year later in 2018.

Last but never least, rest in peace, Peter Lewis. Ever the poet, Peter ended his life in 2013--one year to the day after being fired by one of the complaining investors. As the most inquisitive and informed of the investors' representatives, Peter would have been uniquely qualified to help all parties resolve their differences in better form. 

"Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you, you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for"

Like you, I've been deeply hurt by people I put my trust and faith in.

This wise quote from a true oracle helps me cope. It can be taken at least two ways. One, what a harsh realty to acknowledge. It could easily lead to cynicism. Yet when you think about it, it is sad, but true. Our friends, familes and certainly foes can step over the line at any time. If we feel they are not worth suffering for, we can let it go and not suffer for them.

On the other hand, we should always practice compassion for those we share love and respect with, our inner circles. Here we infer a much brighter message from Marley: Fill your life with people you not only love and trust, but who you also will forgive when they make mistakes. Because we all do. So, we must choose our most meaningful relationships wisely.

Let's take an example of each. 

A business associate asked me to lend his startup money to build a prototype. Within weeks of funding, he lost it all. Bam, gone, he blew it and he knew it. Instead of making amends, he and his colleagues went on a spending spree, declared bankruptcy, and fought to deprive me and the other investors the return of our capital. It took me several years and lots of legal bills, but I finally got all of my loan back. The other investors fared less well, losing most of their investments. Once again, I read the agreements, the others did not!

Here, we have a person who I believe betrayed my trust and showed no remorse. For me, such a person is not worth suffering for but, rather, someone to let go of. 

Now, let's turn the other cheek. Have you ever been told, "Always come back to love"? It's a really nice way to live, and it's simple. With the people you are closest to, who you share mutual love and respect with, life is to be happy and fruitful in abundance. Opportunities to be patient and forgive your loved ones arise every day. Maybe it's about their being late, angry or unkind...whatever.

Here, we have love to come back to. Our loved ones are worth suffering for. Again, we must choose them wisely.

Christ is worshipped as a practitioner of universal love and compassion. I gather other spiritual leaders like the Buddha, Ghandi and the Dalai Lama had the capacity to suffer for everyone, too, and that is a source of their great power and influence.  As a mere mortal, though, I am content to suffer for those I share love and respect with, and let go of those who intend to make me suffer.

These philosophies have led to some hard decisions, like retiring from my career and ending my marriage. But I know those were the right decisions for me, that my suffering had to end, and that my true loved ones will forgive me for any suffering those decisions may have caused them.

Thank you, Bob Marley, for showing me how to handle deceit, betrayal and other sins with dignity, reminding me to pick my loved and trusted ones very carefully, and teaching me that we will inevitably suffer for one another.  

"Read everything you sign"

Frank was a legal academic who taught an introductory law class at my business school. He was highly intelligent, educated and entertaining. In his classroom, we learned a lot about how the law works, pitfalls to avoid, precedents of note...a really great class taught by a really great professor. RIP Frank.

I think the lesson I have relied upon more than any other is to "Read everything you sign." I started with my personal credit card and car rental agreements, and graduated to a broad variety of investment documents of great complexity. Very often, my readings generated questions. When I was told nobody ever asked that before, which still happens all the time, I knew I was doing a good job. 

A good example is a unique investment I led in the United Kingdom. For ten years, it stood as the largest of its kind. It was nominated by the press as one of the best investments of the year. The largest and most influential institutional investors lined up to invest in it. It put my company and the real estate secondaries market on the map. 

Well, along came the Global Financial Crisis, and property values dropped 40%. Fortunately, my company had pulled great profits out before the crash by selling assets we bought at a discount into a rising market. Even better, while other large UK investments made around the same time by bulge bracket fund managers (who clearly did not read their agreements!) were lost to their lenders, we retained our assets. 

How, you may ask? Well, before the crash, when I was negotiating our loan documents, I noticed a seemingly untouchable "boilerplate" provision requiring loan defaults to be cured AND also for the lender to agree they were cured. In other words, the lender would decide whether or not it could foreclose and take the properties. But I (and, judging by our lender's surprise when they attempted but failed to foreclose, I alone) replaced the AND with an OR, so that our lender was prevented from foreclosing on our assets. By reading the loan agreement, I saved my company's investors over $100 million.

Thank you, Frank Macchiarola, for teaching me to read every agreement in order to safeguard my investors' and my own best interests. 

"In real estate, basis is everything"

I worked for Joe Lesser and his sidekick, Alan Gordon, the summer after my first year of business school. Alan was a sweet guy, very welcoming and interested in providing me with a solid internship. Our enlightening luncheons at the Penn Club, I'll always value and never forget.  

Joe, on the other hand, was a crusty old value investor. He ran Loeb Partners with an iron fist starting from the Shearson Lehman Loeb days. If he didn't absolutely love the price, he would never consider the investment. When he told me "basis is everything" it seemed kind of obvious. 

Not to all! I went on to spend two decades in institutional investment committee meetings, and encountered lots of investment professionals who ignored, forgot or never learned this lesson. Their presentations were inevitably entangled in weak rationales for doing deals, spinning out unsubstantiated SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analyses and saying things like "perception is realty." They had not asked the right questions or done their homework. They took on greater risk and generated lower returns without even knowing it. 

I also did an internship with Equitable Life, then the second largest US property owner. My last week was spent shadowing their construction loan monitor. We'd ride up and down skeletal elevators making sure Manhattan developers were spending Equitable's funds appropriately. When I asked why he did this every day instead of working the phones and computers like everyone else, he said "In real estate, you get what you inspect, not expect." Another gem. 

So, when buying real estate, always look closely at the property, the people involved, and the deal terms. All three must be very solid. Reduce the investment decision to numbers and math. Know the deal inside and out, up and down, side to side. Only then can you optimize the opportunity to buy low and sell high.

Importantly, don't believe the hype. People have all kinds of reasons to take shortcuts and commit capital. Momentum investing may work in other markets, but in real estate, always focus on value.

Thank you Joe Lesser for giving me the advice I needed to generate attractive returns throughout my career. 

"Only in the dictionary does Success come before Work"

No ordinary man, my sixth grade teacher Mr. Glick stopped us from flipping baseball cards by winning all of ours in a flip-off marathon. He later admitted he stacked his deck, but still, I thought he was pretty smart. 

I had cruised through grade school when Glick stopped me dead in my tracks, writing into my graduation signature book: "Only in the dictionary does Success come before Work." Along the same line, my Dad used to say: "The harder you work, the luckier you get."

It would take me until business school to put that advice fully into effect, but they were right. We're given certain capabilities. What we do with them is what matters. Keep swinging until the bell rings!

Thank you, Mr. Glick, for igniting my desire to make the most of myself.  

"Keep it weird"

Just days after my previous post, Phil Lesh passed. And then there were three--Bob, Mickey and Bill. At Phil's miraculous Terrapin Crossroads musical mecca, where I spent many a blissful moment, he hung a sign saying "Keep It Weird" aside a stage.

I know, these are not Phil's words, but I get his drift. Don't live a conventional life. Be bold. Aim high and outside. Take risks. Express yourself, and don't be boring about it.

Thank you, Phil Lesh, for a real good time...and real good advice!

"You don't want to be the best at what you do...you want to be the only one"

I started to get more into the Grateful Dead when we moved to Mill Valley in 1998, and came to think of myself as a full-fledged Deadhead by their Fare Thee Well shows in Santa Clara and Chicago in 2015. These were Phil's last Dead shows (sort of), and Jerry was twenty years gone.The love and intimacy of those stadium shows were nothing short of epiphanous. A long, strange trip indeed.

Our home was a stone's throw from where Jerry long lived and Bob still does. My kids went to school with the band's. When I'd break out a guitar at campfires under magnificent redwood canopies, ten other Dads would uncase theirs and join me in every Dead tune I knew. The Grateful Dead permeated my days there, and still do. 

The Dead's music and words resonate deeply, and have helped me grow as a person in many ways. Little did I know upon arriving to Marin County that Jerry had already captured the essence of how I always looked at big ticket philosphies like freedom and success:

"You don't want to be the best at what you do...you want to be the only one." A pearl of wisdom from a great sage. Now, don't get me wrong. Jerry took this mantra to much higher levels than I could ever hope to emulate. When I look back, though, he captures the motivation for many of my best life decisions.

Thank you, Jerry Garcia, for opening my doors of perception and confirming my life path.

I look forward to using this space to express gratitude to the kind, and compassion for others. Have a blessed day!