Strange Things Happen In This World: of Mosques and Mice

(I cannot link this story due to the fact it is from a paid service, although it can be located at the NY Post)


• 5 Sep 2010

• New York Post
• By ISABEL VINCENT and MELISSA KLEIN




LET’S MECCA DEAL


The mosque money trail has taken another strange turn. The original owners of 45-47 Park Place mysteriously walked away from an $18 million cash offer for their damaged Ground Zero building in 2007, only to accept $4.8 million 18 months later from mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal. El-Gamal also happened to give the building owner’s son a job. The original owners of the Ground Zero mosque site mysteriously spurned dozens of higher bids before selling the prime downtown real estate at a bargain-basement price.

The Pomerantz family, which had owned the building since the late 1960s and fielded offers after the patriarch died in 2006, rejected at least one bid that was nearly four times what prospective mosque builder Sharif ElGamal eventually paid, The Post has learned.

El-Gamal did offer what could be viewed as a sweetener to his $4.8 million bid in July 2009 — a job as a property manager for a son of the family, Sethian Pomerantz.

New York developer Kevin Glodek was livid when he found out the building sold for a fraction of what he offered in 2007 — $18 million cash — and wondered whether money changed hands under the table, according to sources close to the deal.

Glodek and his partners wanted to build a 60-story condo tower with retail space on the Park Place site, had inked a purchase agreement and even had keys to the existing building, according to sources and documents obtained by The Post.

But Kukiko Mitani — whose late husband, Stephen Pomerantz, owned the property — and her brother-in-law, Melvin Pomerantz, a trustee to the estate, went silent at the end of 2007 and Glodek’s deal disappeared, sources said.

Glodek, who owns the ChefsDiet food delivery service and several Manhattan properties, declined to comment.

The property is now at the heart of one of the most divisive issues in the country — whether it should be the location of a $100 million mosque and community center. The location two blocks from Ground Zero has been called insensitive, and questions have been raised about whether extremists will help fund the project. Recent polls show that 70 percent of New Yorkers want it moved.















strange bedfellows