The neighborhood, a stronghold of the city’s Hasidic community, has its own ambulance corps, rabbinical courts and civilian security squad, the Shomrim. The Observer had been drifting around the area, a stranger in a strange land, and given our mission, we weren’t surprised to see a neighborhood enforcer bounding towards us. He had a huge belly that parted his suspenders, a sandy beard and noticeably thick hands.

Ben Herbst (Photo: Tracy Collins)

Seeking to avoid a confrontation, we gestured to the house next door. On a block of McMansions, the place stood out. It was encircled by a chain link fence. Behind it, a porchlike appendage that seemed as if it had been slapped right onto the front of the home was strewn with dust and rubble. A vague framework of bare steel girders rose from the platform, as if some structure had been planned and then abandoned. The house itself was in shambles, with pieces of the facade ripped away, windows broken and boarded up and the roof bowing and in some places missing altogether.

“Do you know what happened here?” we asked the Shomrim volunteer, whose name was Abraham. He shook his head.

The Observer explained the situation. Benjamin Herbst appeared to have destroyed his neighbor’s home, and we were there to ask him why in person. He refused to come out.

“Well why don’t you call him?” Abraham suggested.

We had called Mr. Herbst, but the tale he’d spun over the phone was so outlandish and confusing, and the litany of papers he had emailed us so convoluted, we had hoped to persuade him to guide us through it face to face.

“Try coming back another time, it’s getting close to Shabbos,” Abraham said.

He was right. The shadows were getting longer and soon, most people in the area wouldn’t so much as flip on a light switch, forget about answer the door for an obvious outsider. Seeing we weren’t much of a threat, Abraham turned away, got on his walkie-talkie and disappeared down the street. It was time for us to go as well.

In 2005, a man named Enrico Mancini died in Brooklyn. He was 98 years old and had been ill for quite some time. He had outlived his wife as well as his only child. Mr. Mancini had come to Borough Park from Italy in the 1950s. There is a decades-old picture of him in court documents, standing in front of his house, 5017 17th Avenue—the one that is now in ruins. He had his arm around Mrs. Mancini in the picture: Proud immigrants who had found a foothold in the land of opportunity.

When Mr. Mancini died, the house and the rest of his estate passed into the control of one of his only remaining relatives, his daughter-in-law, Serafina Mancini, who, at the time, was in her 70s. Thinking 5017 17th Avenue seemed like an ideal place to spend her golden years, she made plans to move in. But when she arrived, she received a rude welcome from Mr.

Herbst, who announced that she was trespassing. To her shock, construction work had begun on the home. Mr. Herbst was in the midst of a full-blown project to integrate 5017 17th Avenue with his palatial house next door, 5019-5021 17th Avenue. It was as if one house were reaching out and grabbing its neighbor, the beams encircling the adjacent residence like tentacles. Intimidated, confused and distraught, she retreated to her lawyer, William Cahill, who specializes in estate work. What the hell was going on?

To Mr. Cahill’s amazement, a quick perusal of property records indicated that Mr. Herbst was actually telling the truth. Four days after Mr. Mancini’s death in August, the deed to 5017 17th Avenue had been quietly transferred into the name of Jacob and Malka Herbst, Mr. Herbst’s son and daughter-in-law, who live with him. Technically, Mr. Herbst was the owner of the Mancini home. And on top of that, a loan had been taken out on the property in the amount of $500,000. The lender was a company called Ay One, which, as it happens, Mr. Herbst himself controls.

Mr. Herbst had likely never paid a dime of this loan to Jacob and Malka, but Mr. Cahill immediately understood what had been done. Mr. Herbst, he said, had forged the deed to put the property in the couple’s hands and then placed a lien against it.

In theory, the problem could be easily solved. Mrs. Mancini would simply need to show that the documents were fraudulent and transfer the property back into her name. But that loan had added a layer of complexity: Even if Mrs. Mancini were recognized as the rightful owner, she would be unable to sell the home now that its title was sullied with Mr. Herbst’s lien. Besides that, he could come after her for the $500,000 he would claim to have lent against the house.

“At first we just thought he was the eccentric neighbor,” Mr. Cahill remembered. “Then we quickly got an idea what a severe character Mr. Herbst is.”

As The Observer soon found, Mr. Herbst is indeed an extraordinary character—a virtuoso at turning the city’s labyrinthine legal system to his own ends. If, as an examination of his dealings suggests, he is a huckster, he is an impressively creative one—an auteur of sorts, whose canvas is New York’s bureaucracy and courts system.

In surrogate’s court, where Serafina Mancini’s lawyer, Mr. Cahill, started a proceeding to wipe away the phony debt and deed, Mr. Herbst launched a vigorous counterattack. Mrs. Mancini wasn’t a sweet old woman, he asserted, but a disloyal in-law who never visited, even as Mr. Mancini grew frail and increasingly helpless.

“We were the ones who were taking care of him,” Mr. Herbst proclaimed during a telephone interview with The Observer. “He used to come over to our house every Friday night to have my wife’s chicken soup. How do you think he sustained so long? It was her soup!”

Mrs. Mancini was jealous of the relationship Mr. Herbst had with her father-in-law, Mr. Herbst said, telling The Observer she didn’t even come to visit Mr. Mancini during his final days. “Mr. Mancini told me, ‘Call them, I’m dying,’” Mr. Herbst claimed. “‘I’m dying, I want to see my grandaughters.’ But nobody came. I was so disappointed.”

Serafina Mancini’s lawyers scoffed at these claims.

“Mr. Mancini had failing eyesight and hearing, and he barely spoke or wrote any English,” Roy Martin, another attorney of Mrs. Mancini’s said. “He also hated Herbst.”

“Herbst had this Polaroid picture of him kind of propping Mancini up in his hospital bed, and there was a big smile on Herbst’s face,” Mr. Cahill said. “It was like this manufactured photo, ‘See how much he loved me?’”

In court Mr. Herbst claimed that Mr. Mancini had conveyed the house to him for $500,000 and then, shortly before his death, forgiven the debt.

“Ask yourself, what are the odds that a 98-year-old man conveys his house for no consideration?” Mr. Cahill asked rhetorically.

It did seem unlikely, but not impossible. And establishing the facts in court proved to be difficult. Mr. Herbst offered a simple resolution. There was a home health care aide who had lived with Mr. Mancini during his last years who could clear up the whole situation. She had borne witness to all the Friday night feasts at the Herbst household, to Mr. Mancini’s bitter disappointment with his relatives, and to how, ultimately, Mr. Mancini had handed Mr. Herbst his house free of charge because Mr. Herbst was his one true companion.

The only problem was the woman couldn’t be located.

“He’s very good at raising something where there’s a glimmer of truth,” Mr. Cahill said.
All the while, Mr. Herbst was moving ahead with his efforts to join the two houses, erecting 13 heavy-duty steel beams between the properties.

“I was sitting there in court and thinking to myself, what the fuck am I going to do now?” Mr. Cahill remembered. “The legal bills were going through the roof, he was destroying the house. It was a total nightmare.”

Mr. Herbst’s digressions and postponements were stringing out what should have been a routine series of determinations. “His mother must have died in Canada six times,” Mr. Cahill insisted.

In 2008, the New York Daily News reporter William Sherman highlighted how easy it is for fraudsters to take control of a property by simply showing up at the office of the city register and filing bogus documents. To demonstrate, Mr. Sherman placed the Empire State Building temporarily into his possession, listing Fay Wray as a witness in the transfer paperwork and the famed bank robber Willie Sutton as the notary. The system hasn’t been reformed since Mr. Sherman’s stunt.

“If Bill Sherman wanted, he could probably steal the Empire State Building all over again,” Richard Farrell, a lawyer in charge of real estate cases for the Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, told us. “The recording office has a mandate. If you present a document that is the proper format and you pay the fees, they must record it. If there is fraud thereafter, that’s for other agencies to take care of.”

The loose oversight is due in part to the fact that title fraud is usually a clear-cut offense with an easily traceable paper trail.

It’s remarkable then, that Mr. Herbst, who is in his 60s, has been able to work the system for so long. Mr. Cahill soon discovered that he has a history of such shenanigans. In 2006 for instance, Mr. Herbst helped a man named Barry Chaimovitz sell a property owned by Mr. Chaimovitz’s family and said he would channel the proceeds into another building in Detroit purportedly being sold by a Hasidic man named Mayer Goldberger. Instead, they simply pocketed the money. The incident became known as the Kosher Butcher Case, because Mr. Chaimovitz’s family owns a well-known meat shop in Borough Park.

Attorney Roy Martin, who was hired by Mr. Chaimovitz’s brother Abraham Chaimovitz, eventually forced Mr. Herbst and Mr. Goldberger to return the cash, which amounted to about $1.8 million, to the Chaimovitz family. Mr. Herbst coughed up the money only after he was thrown into jail for 15 days for contempt of court.

Mr. Herbst had a different explanation for his incarceration. “I only went to jail because I made the mistake of being disrespectful to the judge,” he said, referring to a moment when he lost his patience during the court proceedings and referred to the judge as “your highness.”

Court documents and transcripts however clearly show he was caught trying to conceal the facts of the case, including how he and Mr. Goldberger had blatantly withdrawn the Chaimovitz family’s money into their personal accounts.

Earlier this year, Mayer Goldberger was sentenced to four to 12 years in prison in Nassau County for an unrelated mortgage fraud.

“Mayer Goldberger is a piece of shit!” Mr. Herbst fumed, pointing out that Mr. Goldberger’s incarceration has nothing to do with him.

Like in the Mancini case, Mr. Herbst’s account is the mirror image of his accusers’; he was only helping Barry fight for his share of the family’s real estate holdings from greedy Abraham, he said. “You’re going to get people who make these claims when you handle as many cases as I do,” Mr. Herbst said.

The Observer learned of at least two other instances of alleged fraud by Mr. Herbst where he illicitely transferred a property into his own control. In 1999, he took 5001 17th Avenue and placed it in the hands of another of his sons, Richard Herbst, then put a phony lien against the house. He was eventually forced to pay off the rightful owner of the property.

In a more recent incident, which is still winding its way through Manhattan Supreme Court, Mr. Herbst allegedly used phony documents to transfer ownership of the mortgage on a Manhattan office building to his control. “He’s just like Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie Catch Me If You Can, but with a beard,” Stephen Meister, an attorney involved in the case told The Observer.

Mr. Herbst runs an official-sounding company called the Council for Community Preservation, Inc., that he said has helped hundreds of people restructure loans on their homes and other property and avoid foreclosure. “Not just Jewish people,” Mr. Herbst said. “But everyone, Hispanic, black people, white people. Everyone.”

For a man who spends the bulk of his time sticking up for the little man though, he seems conspicuously deft at bobbing and weaving his way through fraud allegations. Mr. Herbst, whose background is in the rabbinical courts, taught himself about the secular court system by studying textbooks in the Brooklyn Law Library. Even Mr. Herbst’s opponents concede that he has a unique talent.

“He’s like an idiot savant of court procedure,” Mr. Cahill said, echoing the sentiments of several people familiar with Mr. Herbst.

While Mayer Goldberger went to jail for forging documents so that he could draw mortgages over and over on the same property in Long Island, an easily prosecutable offense, Mr. Herbst has been more subtle—even disciplined.

In several situations, the facts have been open enough to interpretation as to leave the burden of proof at least marginally in his favor.

“In the Mancini case, the issue was did [Mr. Mancini] sell it or didn’t he,” Mr. Farrell, the assistant Brooklyn DA said, explaining why he hasn’t gone after Mr. Herbst. “Mr. Mancini can’t tell us he didn’t.”

The whole situation infuriates Roy Martin. “How many people have to get ripped off before something is done about this guy?” he said.

Mr. Martin has had success beating Mr. Herbst in their numerous outings by identifying and grasping onto incontrovertible facts. In the Kosher Butcher Case, for instance, Mr. Martin focused on the way Mr. Herbst had clearly forged documents, allowing him to swipe the family’s $1.8 million. Mr. Herbst offered up endless explanations for how the money ended up with him, but in the end, he couldn’t explain the documents themselves.

Mr. Martin has spent so much time battling with Mr. Herbst, he says he has witnessed fleeting moments when the man momentarily acknowledges of his own culpability.

It happened during the Mancini case. After months of wrangling in court, Mr. Cahill had managed to get the deed back in the hands of Mrs. Mancini and the bogus mortgage that Mr. Herbst had placed on the property removed. From there, Mr. Martin took over and won a restraining order that forced Mr. Herbst to cut down the beams.

Steelworkers did the work one afternoon in 2008 as Mr. Martin and Mr. Cahill watched from the sidewalk. Mr. Herbst came out of his house and looked on as well. The three men eventually sat together on Mr. Herbst’s front steps. Though they were adversaries, for a moment, there was a sense of collegiality.

Mr. Herbst gestured at the surrounding neighborhood, where many of the homes appear to fall on the far side of what is probably permitted by code.

“Are you kidding?” he said. “No Jew-boy in Borough Park ever builds legal.”

Mr. Martin went on to win a $569,000 judgment against Mr. Herbst and his family earlier this year, almost seven years after the whole mess began. The Mancini home, or what’s left of it, was recently sold by Mrs. Mancini for $730,000 to a company called MLSMNDR LLC. Mr. Martin wouldn’t disclose the buyer behind the corporation.

“They don’t want to be known,” Mr. Martin said. “If Mr. Herbst was your neighbor, would you?”

Kevin Fritz has become Mr. Meister’s right hand man in a host of cases, including a recent $11 million fraud suit that has drawn attention in Manhattan real estate circles.

Steve Meister.

In that case, Mr. Fritz is working with Mr. Meister to defend Isaac Chetrit, a cousin of the well known real estate investor Joe Chetrit, in his attempts to rightfully gain control of the Manhattan office building 315 West 35th Street. The bizarre case began in 2010 when the current owner of the property, Aaron Chitrik, who has long been in default, allegedly altered the deed to the property’s mortgage along with cohorts, placing it illicitly into an entity they controlled.

Along with Mr. Meister, Mr. Fritz has been one of the lead attorneys in that case, helping to relaunch Mr. Chetrit’s foreclosure proceeding against the property and get the property into the hands of a receiver while the case is sorted out.

Mr. Fritz began his career out of law school at the large law firm Paul Weiss, but quickly moved over to federal court, working for Sandra Feuerstein, a judge with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. It was there that he got his first taste of criminal misdeeds and difficult litigations.

“It was intense, you’re part of a staff that is assisting the judge in preparing the rulings for all of the cases,” Mr. Fritz said. “It’s all types of cases, criminal and civil cases, everything, even gang related case. It certainly was a humbling position.”

Mr. Fritz struck up such a close working relationship with Judge Feuerstein that she officiated his wedding in 2009. After working for the judge for several years, Mr. Fritz moved to Storch Amini & Munves PC, a firm that allowed him to finally get in the courtroom as a litigator, a longtime ambition.

“Working there was the first time I really got into court in a representative capacity even though I had been in the court for years,” Mr. Fritz said. “I love the challenge of having to think on your feet. It’s one thing to put together a legal brief when there’s not a gun to our head and it’s a whole other thing when you’re being questioned by the judge on the spot and you have to be on your toes and be sharp, I love the challenge of that.”

Mr. Fritz is a fitting protege of Mr. Meister’s. Representing clients like Joe Moinian and Harry Macklowe in a series of high profile suits in the city, Mr. Meister has developed a reputation for being an astute litigator who is not afraid to scrap in the court room.

Mr. Fritz said that he got the chance to join Mr. Meister’s firm, Meister Seelig & Fein, by chance; the firm is in the same building as Storch Amini & Munves PC: 2 Grand Central Tower.

“I can’t even qualify the amount I’ve learned under Stephen,” Mr. Fritz said. “He comes up with brilliant approaches that most people wouldn’t think of in a case.”

Besides the action against Mr. Chitrik in the foreclosure case at 315 West 35th Street, Mr. Fritz is also involved in representing investor Yair Levy in his case against former partner Kent Swig. Mr. Levy alleges that Mr. Swig embezzled money at the Sheffield, a residential building that Mr. Levy and Mr. Swig bought together that eventually went into foreclosure.

The suit involves 315 West 35th Street, a 60,000-square-foot Midtown building that Isaac Chetrit, a cousin of the prominent real estate investor Joe Chetrit, has been trying to foreclose on.

The scene of the alleged crime.

The case has been locked in court over allegations that similarly named real estate investor Aaron Chitrik, the owner of the 315 West 35th Street, who is in default on the property, tampered with the deed to the mortgage, illegally transferring it to an entity that he controlled.

The debt has since been transferred back to Mr. Chetrit, who purchased it for roughly $11 million in 2010 with the intent to take control of the property. The confusion stemming from the improper transfer however has delayed efforts to foreclose, which are ongoing.

Aaron Chitrik did not return calls for comment, although an adviser, Benjamin Herbst, spoke to The Commercial Observer on his behalf.

In late October, Mr. Chetrit’s attorney in the case Stephen Meister, a principal at the law firm Meister Seelig & Fein, and colleague Kevin Fritz sent a letter to Justice Bernard Fried, a prominent judge who has presided over several high profile real estate cases in the city, outlining the fraud. Mr. Meister accuses a man named Benjamin Herbst, who has claimed to be an advisor to Mr. Chetrik, and two of his associates, Stuart Davis and Jonathan Lefkowitz, of counterfeiting the mortgage deed.

Mr. Meister told The Commercial Observer he suspected the group’s plan was to delay the foreclosure by tying up the case in court, potentially in hopes that Mr. Chetrit would offer a payoff to walk away.

In November Mr. Meister responded by adding Mr. Herbst and Mr. Davis as defendants in the foreclosure action and formally identifying their misconduct in a letter to Justice Fried. In an apparent nod to the validity of Mr. Meister’s accusations, Judge Fried has brought the case to the attention of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes.

“I am referring this matter to the Office of the District Attorney, for whatever action is deemed appropriate,” Justice Fried wrote in a letter to the DA last week. “In light of this referral, I am recusing myself from this case, effective immediately.”

The case has since been turned over to Justice Melvin Schweitzer. Mr. Meister has continued to proceed with the foreclosure action and has asked the court to place 315 West 35th Street in the hands of a receiver in order to remove the building from the control of Mr. Chitrik in the meantime.

According to court records and Roy Martin, an attorney with the Midtown law firm Hodgson Russ, this isn’t the first incident in which Mr. Herbst has been involved in fraud. Mr. Herbst has tampered with mortgage and property deeds on several occassions, modifying the names on the documents in order to illegally transfer them to entities he controls.

In conversations with The Commercial Observer, Mr. Herbst denied the allegations. He said he arranged an amicable workout between Mr. Chetrit and Mr. Chitrik and accused Mr. Chetrit of improperly altering the mortgage papers. Mr. Herbst, however, was unable to provide any proof that there was ever a willing partnership between the two parties.

“I don’t know how he has been able to get away with this for so long,” Mr. Martin told The Commercial Observer.--DGeiger@Observer.com

Mr. Ross swept past his opponent, Joe Moinian, the building's owner and chairman of his own development firm, sitting upright on a front-row bench closer to the entrance. A big knot in Mr. Moinian's baby-blue silk tie hugged his neck. Mr. Ross sat down on a bench of his own, front and center, and crossed his legs, knees stacked. "Mr. Ross, I haven't seen you in years," said Judge Charles Ramos from the other side of the room. His robe hung open below his bow tie. "It's like an old-folks home."

The city's most powerful developer grinned and arched his eyebrows. "Thank you," Mr. Ross said. A black ribbed sock and black hand-sewn leather loafer with tassels dangled from below the right cuff of his navy pinstriped suit. His plan to take over Mr. Moinian's building by controlling the debt is unusual for Mr. Ross, but Columbus Circle is his home turf: He keeps a condo and office in the Time Warner Center, which Related co-developed after helping demolish Robert Moses' Coliseum. Knocking down Mr. Moinian's building could be the next step in remaking the area.

But at 3 Columbus Circle, Mr. Ross owns only the $250 million mortgage, which collects $70,000 in interest every day. After Mr. Moinian stopped making payments in January, Mr. Ross and his financier, Deutsche Bank German American Capital Corporation, accelerated the mortgage, demanding full payment and an additional $54 million as a prepayment penalty. It was the first step toward foreclosure and taking the building away from Mr. Moinian, who has already seen his 20 million-square-foot empire shrink during the Great Recession (Barclays Capital seized 475 Fifth Avenue from Mr. Monian and a partner in 2009).

FOR A LOOK AT THE TEMPESTUOUS HISTORY OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE, SEE THE CASTLES AND CLASHES OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE. >>

Mr. Ross appeared on CNBC's Squawk Box on Sept. 10 to talk about the real estate market and the Dolphins alongside Richard LeFrak. Mr. Ross' picture floated onscreen above the title "KING OF COLUMBUS CIRCLE."

"We bought a note on a property that was kind of adjacent to Time Warner Center," he told the show's host, Carl Quintanilla, just after noon. "We saw that there was a higher and better use and we bought the note hoping to do something there." CNBC cut to B-roll of 3 Columbus Circle with the Moinian Group's "M" logo on the scaffolding in clear view.

When Mr. Moinian bought the building, a homely red-brick tower built in the 1920s at 1775 Broadway for General Motors, for $130 million in 2000, it was mostly full. Newsweek kept offices there until 2009. Before credit dried up, Mr. Moinian began a bold plan to raise the building's profile, investing $175 million for renovations, including a fresh sheath of glass. He changed the name to 3 Columbus Circle and raised asking rents.

It's not the ugliest building in the area, but the glass, which catches the reflection of Lord Norman Foster's Hearst Tower across the street, isn't fooling anyone. According to media reports, Mr. Ross would like to demolish Mr. Moinian's tower and replace it with one designed by a famous architect; he is planning to move the city's first Nordstrom's to retail space on the lower floors to anchor the tower, and fill the upper floors with 140 condominiums; and the company began shopping for architects in September. Related declined to comment.

"It's just not something that I think a lender should be saying," Stephen Meister, Mr. Monian's lawyer, told The Observer over the phone on Monday. Mr. Ross has stipulated that any new tenant in the building would have to agree to a six-month demolition clause with no provision for reimbursement.

Between Mr. Moinian's raising rent in the building and the lenders' attempts to scare off new tenants, 3 Columbus Circle is now less than 20 percent occupied. On Monday, a leasing advertisement on the building's black scaffolding read, in big white letters, "contiguous block of up to 650,000 RSF"--that's in a 770,000-square-foot building. From CNN's 10th-floor cafeteria across the street in the Time Warner Center on Monday afternoon, The Observer counted four construction workers painting sealant around a drain and installing glass sheathing on the fourth-floor balcony--perhaps dutifully polishing the Titanic's banister.

In court earlier this month, Mr. Meister, a litigator's litigator wearing a dark pinstriped suit that offset his razorback brown hair, told Judge Ramos that he wants to perform what he calls "a Ross-ectomy." There was hushed laughter. The judge slouched and gazed through half-moon spectacles at the tip of his nose.

"It's not that there are bad vibes," Mr. Meister continued later.

Judge Ramos was amused: "Bad vibes?"

"It's that there is a cancer in the building!" Mr. Meister bellowed on from a podium next to the lawyers' table. "I have to get rid of Mr. Ross. I have to get rid of Mr. Ross, O.K.? I have got the money; he's right here." Mr. Meister slapped his right hand down on the shoulder of a plump man in a gray suit sitting at his hip. The only way that Mr. Moinian can take the scalpel to Mr. Ross is by paying off his $250 million mortgage.

The gray suit was a representative for SL Green, the publicly traded real estate company, run by Marc Holliday, that controls more than 30 percent of the office space in Manhattan. Mr. Holliday agreed in October to help Mr. Moinian refinance the building as part of a joint venture.

The biggest sticking point for Mr. Moinian is the $54 million prepayment penalty. Lawyers for both sides spent the majority of the 63 minutes in court arguing over the language that describes it in the mortgage document. Do 10 words between two commas on page 99--"provided that the Loan has not been accelerated by Lender," which it has been--modify the words ahead of the first comma or behind the second? And so on.

Halfway through the hearing, Judge Ramos examined the documents in front of him, head in chin, and sighed. He pushed his glasses up his nose. There was silence for one minute and 15 seconds as he stared at the mortgage. At the back of the room, an executive sitting to Mr. Ross' right wrapped his arm over the developer's shoulder and began whispering in his ear. Mr. Ross stared down at his dangling right loafer and nodded gently. At the end of the silence, Judge Ramos scratched his head and read the clause aloud. "... And then there's a comma."

"I am not going to try to argue with your logic," the judge said, "but I have to deal with the document as written."

Later, when discussion of existing examples of foreclosure practice came to a head, Mr. Meister gently hip-checked the skinnier Mark Walfish, Deutsche Bank and Related's lawyer, away from the podium to get a point in. Mr. Walfish was not amused: "Judge, this is great--this is like The Jerry [Springer] Show."

"I want to talk to the two of you in the back," the judge said. Mr. Meister continued to press his point forward. "In the back, right now!" The lawyers followed the judge out of the room.

Twenty minutes later, the lawyers emerged from the judge's chambers. "I need Joe. Is Joe here?" called Mr. Meister. Mr. Moinian and Mr. Ross, still yet to acknowledge each other, returned with their lawyers to see the judge. Twenty minutes later, they left without a word.

Nothing was settled.

On Nov. 24, the day before Thanksgiving, a representative for Mr. Meister's office dropped off at the State Supreme Court a Bank of America cashier's check signed by SL Green Management for $258,550,838.52. The numbers run to the edge of the paper. If Mr. Ross picks up the check by Dec. 6, the dispute is over and Mr. Moinian will have a new financier. If they leave the check in the court's vault, litigation over the prepayment penalty will continue, with Mr. Ross losing more than $70,000 in interest daily.

Nobody has any idea what Mr. Ross' next move will be.

"By the way, why would any lender turn that down?" Mr. Meister asked The Observer, referring to an earlier offer turned down by the lenders that included the prepayment penalty in escrow. "Think about that! Why would any lender whose real goal is to get repaid turn that down? That proves that they're predatory! The only reason to turn that down is because they want to steal the building. That's the only reason, O.K.?"

zturner@observer.com / @zekeft