OUR FOUNDER

He began his meteoric rise in the business community by buying and mortgaging a taxi medallion in New York City and investing his life savings to open a wholesale electronics store on lower Fifth Avenue, which became an enclave for New York’s growing Russian community and for visiting Soviet dignitaries and trade delegations seeking to purchase state-of-the-art electronics.

A rising member of the local business community, in 1985 Mr. Sapir was invited to join a delegation of U.S officials and corporate members of the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Trade and Economics Council, the main East-West trade organization of the Soviet era. This council organized meetings between U.S. corporations and Soviet officials to improve trade. His participation allowed him to greatly expand his horizons and deploy his business acumen on a global stage. The connections and bridges he built between the business communities of the two nations in trade, allowed Mr. Sapir to become one of the major foreign partners for the emerging oil industry in Russia, where he found the next level of success for the better part of a decade.

Working with the same steadfast dedication that would be the signature of his life, Mr. Sapir understood at a moment in time that Manhattan real estate, significantly depressed by the early 1990s, was the future. In a market landscape where everyone was moving in the opposite direction, Mr. Sapir once again had a peerless understanding of value which would confirm itself over the coming decades.

He subsequently converted the success he had gained from oil and commodity trading into a real estate portfolio which would, at its peak, be one of the largest privately held commercial portfolios in New York City, owning some of the largest and most iconic structures in the American real estate industry. These included, but were not limited to, 11 Madison Avenue and 2 Broadway, buildings whose size alone places them in the pantheon of property at the absolute apex of Manhattan by square footage and irreplaceability.