Crazy and In Charge

In setting out to write the story of my rewarding and controversial life, I wanted to set something straight right away. As you probably know, I have been called crazy, a lot, and by many people, mainly by people in the media who I supposed get tired of calling me by the boring title of “real estate tycoon.” In 1999, New York magazine profile about me was titled “Crazy As He Wants To Be,” in which they said I was “crude and irrational.” Other publications have called me “a wrinkled, rumpled eccentric,” “riddled with delusions,” and “the millionaire New York crackpot.” The New York Post in 1993 ran a story on me that asked in the headline, “Who Is This Nut?” And I happened to have owned the paper at the time!

Sometimes I think the media exist just so they can call me names. Even high and mighty Time magazine got in the act, calling me “fabulously loopy,” and let me tell you, it’s nice to be called fabulous in Time -- but it’s even nicer to be called a genius in Time. That happened in 2000 when in the “Time 100” issue they named me – a Polish immigrant with a fifth-grade education and a middling knowledge of the English language – as one of “the most influential business geniuses of the century.” Yes, under “Builders and Titans” there I was. Of course, they put me into a section titled “Crazy and In Charge” with “Brilliant tycoons [who] have had a tendency to get eccentric or worse” and lumped me in with Howard Hughes, J. Paul Getty and H.L. Hunt, which is a lot better company to keep than the ignorant, lying nobodies who have torn me up in the press.

Still, I have been called crazy so many times and in so many ways that I figured it was my turn now to set everybody straight.

Yes, I am crazy, or meshuga, as my people say.

Everybody should be so crazy.

Only if they were, then I wouldn’t be half as rich as I am, because then I wouldn’t be so much smarter than everybody else.

Not that being meshuga is such a bad thing. I’ve been called much worse. And isn’t everybody is a little bit crazy? Sure, I am a little mad. That’s where my ideas come from. That’s how I am rich. I am a Polish peasant. How else would I have become an American millionaire if I was not crazy? Another Polish peasant, Lech Walesa, overthrew Communism. Einstein was thrown out of high school! As I like to point out, only truly sane people are in insane asylums.

With the rest of us, I believe the expression is “crazy like a fox.”

For the record, I should point out that a few years ago a court-ordered psychiatrist and psychologist found me legally sane – actually they found me absolutely, perfectly sane, but why ruin the image, especially when being meshuga has served me so well? Without being meshuga,

I wouldn’t be the guy who brought to an end the biggest crisis in the history of the American presidency. That’s right, without me Bill Clinton would have had to go into court and talk about his private parts and the country would have been so paralyzed it would have fallen into a Depression. This, of course, was where things were headed when I got involved in the Paula Jones case.

Most people in America probably know me mainly as the schemiel who gave Paula Jones $1 million to drop her sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton. If you’re a New Yorker, though, chances are you knew me a long time before that. I have for many years been what they call a New York gadfly, whatever that means. All I know is, I’ve been around the block and back in my adopted home town. In New York, in fact, I’m probably much better known as the man who owned the New York Post for 18 stormy days during the biggest newspaper crisis in the city’s history. (I was branded as the villain in the story but I actually saved a paper that had been completely mismanaged and was about to be buried. Not before or since have sales of that paper been as high as they were during those turbulent two weeks.)

They also know me as the guy who built the world’s finest parking garages and the first and finest upscale health and fitness club, and who has run for office so much – eight times, twice for the U.S. Senate, and won a term as City Commissioner and Deputy Mayor in Miami Beach. But I’m also the guy who once held a building inspector “hostage” over a permit (that charge was a gross exaggeration), and who spit in the face of the New York State Assembly Leader – just like I spat in the face of a lying newspaper reporter in Miami Beach. (Both deserved every ounce of my saliva.) I was charged with 123 counts of tax evasion by the crooked District Attorney of New York City, the eminent and stupendously corrupt Robert Morgenthau, whereupon I represented myself and walked free because of a hung jury, only to be re-tried and railroaded to conviction.

Recently, you may have heard, I spent two years in prison -- the same prison where David Berkowitz, aka “Son of Sam” makes his residence -- after the vengeful Morgenthau brought me up on a ludicrous charge of  trying to have my business partner killed. (I also gained a mistrial on that charge, only to be, again, railroaded in the re-trial.)

I also made headlines when I once paid jurors in my first tax trial $2,500 apiece after they found me not guilty. (This was completely legal at the time, and as you will see, it changed for the better the entire legal system in New York. Today there is something on the books there called “Hirschfeld’s Law.” It is the only law in America named for a person, except for one –Son of Sam.

Gadfly or whatever, I am somewhat unfazed by this history. After all, at last count, I have been accused to plotti