MERGER OF ACCOUNTING FIRMS : PROFILE : At Leventhal, He’s Stan the Man
In the gray world of accounting, Stan Ross is a whirlwind in an untucked shirt.
The indefatigable financial trouble-shooter has been known to wear down intransigent creditors in marathon negotiations, bailing out real estate moguls from Peter Kalikow to Donald Trump.
In doing so, the 59-year-old managing partner of Kenneth Leventhal & Co. wins their friendship and enthusiastic praise and, not incidentally, earns him fees of more than $400 an hour for months of work.
Now the Bronx native and son of a kosher butcher is setting his sights higher. With the announcement Monday that Century City-based Leventhal will be swallowed up by accounting giant Ernst & Young, Ross will head a new real estate practice that will span the globe.
“It will accelerate our strategic plan,” said Ross, who becomes vice chairman in charge of the E&Y; Kenneth Leventhal Real Estate Group. He added that he has no plans to retire soon: “I’m a high-energy person, and am starting something new, so I’m very enthused.”
Ross has a reputation as a creative negotiator in real estate deals for the likes of Donald Bren at Irvine Co. or debt-restructuring packages for the likes of Trump and Kalikow.
Ross joined Leventhal in 1961 at the request of founding partner Kenneth Leventhal and became managing partner 29 years later. In addition to helping out celebrity clients, Ross has been a principal consultant to the Resolution Trust Corp.
“When people think of Leventhal, they think of Stan Ross,” said Mark Coleman, director of real estate for Deloitte & Touche in Orange County.
Ross himself eschews the accouterments of wealth, living in a condo within walking distance of Leventhal’s Century City offices.
His one indulgence seems to be a daily tennis game, often with 9-year-old grandson Mark, before heading to the office at 6:30 a.m. After that, his life is work: seven days a week, 16 hours a day.
In the midst of negotiations, Ross has been known to work around the clock, often in the same clothes, his shirt untucked--at times jetting from evening meetings on one coast to morning ones on the other.
By his own estimate, he spends 120 nights a year on the road. He’s racked up 2 million frequent-flier miles on one airline alone.
It’s a pace that began in the 1960s, when he helped put together some of the real estate industry’s first big mergers.
In 1977, he advised billionaire Orange County developer Bren, who, with a group of investors that included auto heir Henry Ford II and shopping center magnate A. Alfred Taubman, put in the successful $337-million bid to acquire the venerable Irvine Co., besting Mobil Corp. In 1983, Ross worked with Bren again, when the billionaire bought out most of the remaining investors.
Leventhal’s role included evaluating Irvine Co.’s assets, which were disputed by heiress Joan Irvine Smith, who refused to accept Bren’s offer for her shares. She alleged that Leventhal’s evaluation could not be trusted since Ross was also working for Bren.
A court-appointed referee in the dispute agreed that Leventhal’s role was not disclosed to other shareholders, but the referee did not throw Leventhal’s evaluation out completely.
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In 1990, Ross took on perhaps his highest-profile client: financially troubled financier Donald Trump.
After several weeks of intense negotiations, they managed to save Trump’s overextended financial empire at the last minute, working out repayment agreements on loans with 90 banks and other creditors around the world.
At one point, Ross had exhausted his supply of clothes and was running late for a morning meeting. He ducked into a tailor’s shop on the way and gave them an hour to come up with a new suit: he was out the door in time for the meeting.
In some of the wilder sessions, Trump recalled that Ross kept everyone’s interests balanced, even when the creditors were so thick that there was standing room only.
“He was very much into the markets, saw what was happening and was able to focus on what I was doing, and he was unrelenting in getting the goal accomplished,” Trump said Monday.
Ross and his wife of 38 years, Marilyn, got away for dinner once at Trump’s Plaza Hotel. Ross left a message with the maitre d’ to let Ross know if Trump called; the maitre d’ laughed, thinking Ross was joking, and put the couple at a corner table. When Trump showed up, the maitre d’ was forced to apologize.
In 1991, he was asked by another financially troubled New Yorker to help out: developer and erstwhile New York Post owner Peter S. Kalikow, who filed for bankruptcy protection with $1.1 billion in outstanding debts.
“He would leave a meeting in Los Angeles . . . take the red-eye, and he’d be here at 9 a.m.,” Kalikow said.
As with Trump, the meetings were intense and the creditors numerous.
“You’d have meetings through till 10 or 11 p.m. after starting at 7 a.m.,” Ross recalled.
The hardest thing was to bring all the hundreds of diverse creditor groups together, Ross said. And Kalikow, no shrinking violet himself, argued with Ross about the valuation of his Manhattan properties. But Ross wouldn’t back down.
“He would tell me that I’m . . . kidding myself,” Kalikow recalled. “He told me some properties to dispose of, which I wasn’t happy about. But he was right.”
