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 Beautiful Weather and Bad Luck
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Forsythia in bloom in Central Park's 79th Street tranverse. 2:30 PM. Photo: JH. |
April 5, 2009. A beautiful weekend in New York, ending with a warm, sunny Sunday.
A Palm Beach story. The house at number 515 North County Road in Palm Beach is famous in the world because of its previous owner, Donald Trump, who bought the property at auction for $41 million in 2004, and sold it two years later to a Russian businessman for $98 million.
The six acres at 515 North County (listed on real estate records at 513) with 475 feet of ocean frontage has had a prominent provenance. The first house built on it was a u-shaped Tuscan villa erected1916 for Robert Dun Douglass, a member of the Dun & Bradstreet family. |
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515 North County. |
In 1930, the Douglass family sold the place to Harrison Williams, the utilities tycoon, known at the time as “the richest man in America” (with a fortune estimated at $800 million – or more than $20 billion in today’s currency). Mr. Williams place in social history, however, comes through his wife Mona (later Countess von Bismarck), one of the most fashionable women of her time (1930s – 1970s) and a lifelong member of the International Best Dressed List.
Mona Williams sold the property in 1947 to Jayne and Charles Wrightsman and moved her based of operations to a villa on the island of Capri, on land which had once belonged to Caesar Augustus and later, Emperor Tiberius.
The Wrightsmans hired the Palm Beach architect, Maurice Fatio, to enlarge and re-design the house; and the French decorator from Maison Jansen in Paris, Stephane Boudin, to create a showcase for what was one of the greatest collections of 18th century French furniture and decorative arts in America, including a 17th-century French parquet floor which covered the first floor of the villa.
In 1985, businessman Leslie Wexner bought the place from Mrs. Wrightsman for $10 million and tore it down. Three years later, in 1988, Wexner sold it for $12.08 million to a Massachusetts healthcare tycoon named Abraham David Gosman. |
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Abe at his desk. |
Two years later, Abe Gosman, as he is known, got approval from the town to build a 44,000 square foot one-story villa, as well as outbuildings. The property would be called Maison d’Amitie.
The acquisition and building of Maison d’Amitie would, in retrospect, mark the beginning of one of the most sensational reversals of fortune in the history of Palm Beach.
Abe Gosman, a native of Manchester, New Hampshire, the son of a factory foreman who put himself through the University of New Hampshire, first gained notice in the shoe business in the 1950s when he developed an inexpensive way to attach alligator and lizard skins to shoes, gaining him local business fame as “The largest reptile laminator in the United States."
In 1957, he moved into the fledgling healthcare business by buying his first nursing home. He then began buying large old rundown mansions and turning them into nursing homes. In the 1970s he bought into a chain of small Massachusetts banks called Multibank, and after acquiring more than 20% of the stock, and being regarded by the company’s officers a hostile bidder, was bought for more than $10 million, giving him a thirty percent profit in a little more than two years.
In the early 1980s, with his new profits, Mr. Gosman took his now established nursing homes business, MediPlex and went public. In 1985, he spun off a company called Meditrust, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in the business of buying healthcare facilities and then leasing them back to MediPlex.
The following year, 1986, Mr. Gosman sold MediPlex to Avon Products for $220 mllion, while retaining his share in Meditrust. Four years later, MediPlex floundered under Avon’s management and Abe bought it back for $42 million or 20% of what he had sold it for. Four years after that, in 1994, Abe Gosman re-sold it to Sun Healthcare for $320 million.
In the meantime, his Meditrust had grown to be the largest healthcare real estate investment trust in the country, with a portfolio made up of 65% nursing homes, 14% retirement and assisted living communities, 12% rehabilitation facilities, 4% medical office buildings, 3% acute care hospitals, and 2% psychiatric, alcohol and substance abuse facilities.
By 1998, his companies had total assets of approximately $2.3 billion and his fortune was estimated by Forbes to be between $300 to $400 million. |
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The Gosman Sports and Convocation Center is one of the largest, best-equipped sports and recreation facilities in New England. It was, until recently, the practice facility for the Boston Celtics. The complex is a state-of-the-art facility for all students, not just varsity athletes. The 70,000 square-foot field house contains basketball, volleyball, tennis, and squash courts, a six-lane indoor track, batting cages, workout rooms, and a fencing room. Each year, Gosman hosts athletic competitions (including NCAA Division III national contests), big-name concerts, and graduation. Since it has opened, performers have included Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Live, Blues Traveler, Counting Crows, Ben Harper, Indigo Girls, John Mayer, and The Steve Miller Band. Even the Dalai Lama visited as a speaker. |
Abe Gosman's soaring fortunes changed his life in many ways. He became a philanthropist joining boards and building committees of several institutions and cultural organizations including Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts to whom he gave the Gosman Sports and Convocation Center, one of the largest facilities of its kind in New England. He gave major gifts to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, to the United Way, Home Safe, the Good Samaritan Medical Center, to Mass General Hospital, Boston University, to the Norton Museum of Art, to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of which he is a member of the Board of Overseers. He is a Life Trustee for the Kravis Center in Palm Beach to which he gave $1 million to build the Gosman Amphitheater, and was one of the first recipients of the Ellis Island Congressional Medal of Honor.
His great fortune and prominence was accompanied by a change of lifestyle and in marriage. In 1987 in Palm Beach he was introduced to a goodlooking thirty-something blonde (Abe was 59) named Linda Castre who was in Florida on vacation.
The relationship grew as Abe Gosman’s longtime marriage to Betty his wife of more than thirty years, and mother of his two sons, waned. In 1990, Abe and Betty Gosman were divorced with Mrs. Gosman receiving a $32 million settlement as well as their family home in Boston.
Meanwhile, the Castre-Gosman relationship had already taken hold around the property at 515 North County Road where together they planned what would become (for awhile), the largest house in Palm Beach.
The new lady helped the healthcare tycoon decorate, acquiring expensive possessions like antique crystal chandeliers, Fernando Botero sculptures as well as more than 100 pieces of artwork by artists such as Lichtenstein, Stella, Hockney, Jasper Johns, valued at more than $10 million. In 1990 after Abe and Betty Gosman’s divorce, the new couple, yet unmarried, moved into their dream palace, Maison d’Amite.
The tycoon lavished his beautiful blonde with gifts including $3 million in cash, a Mercedes, art. Almost nine years after meeting and six years after they moved into Maison d’Amite, he and Lin Castre became engaged in 1996 when he slipped a 20-carat million dollar diamond on the third finger of her left hand, and they were married aboard his 143 foot yacht, “The Octopussy.”
The trip to the altar for Abe and Lin did not immediately assuage the new Mrs. Gosman’s disappointment about the new house. She had initially believed she deserved a part ownership in the property because she helped in putting it together.
In the days leading up to the marriage, she was asked to sign a pre-nup that came only after her insistence. The agreement gave her an annual allowance of $100,000, increasing by 15% on each third anniversary. She also waived any interest in the house, the artwork, the furniture and other assets. |
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Gosman Amphitheatre at the Kravis Center for Performing Arts, West Palm Beach, Fla., named for Abe Gosman's sons, Michael and Andrew Gosman. This intimate, open-air facility (featuring a large, canopy-covered elevated stage, 600 permanent bleacher seats and additional seating for approximately 800 guests on the lawn) showcases an assortment of performances to be enjoyed by the whole family. All shows held in the outdoor Gosman Amphitheatre are offered as general admission, with seating available on a first-come, first-served basis. Photo: Kravis Center for the Performing Arts. |
The pre-nup also required Abe to establish a trust for Lin, first endowed with cash or securities worth $3 million with an additional $5 million on their fifth and tenth anniversaries. Not exactly a king’s ransom but not exactly peanuts, Lin signed.
Looking back on the man’s life, Dame Fortune also changed gears around about the time Abe Gosman bought 515 North County.
The early 1990s were the palmy days for Abe Gosman and his Lin. Meditrust was booming. It acquired the Santa Anite Cos., which owned the racetrack of the same name in Arcadia, California. In 1998, it acquired the La Quinta Inns chain for $2.65 billion.
What at first looked to be a brilliant move to expand the company’s cash flow, suddenly turned sour when the government eliminated the paired-share REIT’s tax advantage. His physician-practice management business, CareMatrix, collapsed, and many companies were slammed by cutbacks in Medicare reimbursements.
In one 90-day period in 1999, the value of Abe Gosman’s assets plunged from about $300 million to $150 million. |
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By now, all was not well in paradise. Lin alleged that Abe had failed to create and fund that trust named in the pre-nup. She hired a lawyer to protect her interests. Abe sold “The Octopussy” and took out a $17 million mortgage on Maison d’Amite. He also put Lin’s name on the note to satisfy his purported failure to fund her marital trust. Abe later claimed he gave Lin the ownership share only because their relationship had matured.
In March 2001, Abe Gosman filed Chapter 11 listing assets of $250 million and liabilities of $233.6 million. The house was put on the market first asking $52 million, then lowered to $48 million. Six acres on Blossom Way on the intercoastal, bought from Ray Floyd for $7.5 million were later sold to, among others, Reed Krakoff and Jeffrey Epstein.
The Gosmans remained in residence at Maison d’Amite until 2004 when Donald Trump picked it up at auction. By then the marriage had seen better days. In an attempt to establish Maison d’Amite in the name of Lin Gosman under Florida Homestead laws (keeping it outside the reach of creditors), it was discovered that Linda Castre Gosman’s quickie Mexican divorce from her previous husband – made just before her marriage to Abe, was ruled not legal because she had failed to serve her husband with divorce papers, and therefore in the eyes of Florida law was not legally Mrs. Gosman.
Last November (2008), Lin Gosman was indicted on multiple felony counts of bankruptcy fraud, mortgage fraud and arranging financial transactions to avoid bank reporting and record keeping.
Accused of taking $344,000 in cash from bank accounts during the bankruptcy, as well as hiding jewelry, artwork and furniture, she was also accused of making false statements regarding her finances when applying for a second $350,000 mortgage on a home in Jupiter.
Because there was a dispute over the source of her bail money when she was arrested, Mrs. Gosman spent nearly a month in jail.
She admitted to filing a false 2004 federal income tax return. She did not disclose that she had a Swiss bank account, that she received money from a foreign Belize trust and that she received substantial taxable interest and dividends from various foreign accounts.
Also as part of the plea, Gosman admitted she had not filed federal income tax returns since 2005 and had failed to report income from her foreign accounts.
This past Friday in Federal court in West Palm Beach, Lin Gosman pleaded guilty to criminal bankruptcy, mortgage and tax fraud charges and agreed to pay $343,966 in restitution to the IRS. Now Mrs. Gosman faces up to 38 years in prison (although her attorney said sentencing guidelines call for 37 to 46 months).
Her husband, now 80, has, as he always said he would, remained in his beloved Palm Beach. Now reportedly separated from his wife, he has taken a job as a salesperson at Corcoran’s Royal Poinciana Plaza office. His first listing is the Clarke Avenue French Normandy style villa owned by art dealer Arij Gasiunasen. Maison d’Amite is now only a memory of real estate deals, and the bad luck of Abe Gosman and Linda Castre.
— With additional reporting by Augustus C. Mayhew. |
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