In case you missed our previous coverage or similar coverage across the media in the last few days, Donald Trump has to come up with $464 million in cash by MONDAY to satisfy a civil judgment imposed by a fraud conviction brought by the New York State Attorney General. The original amount imposed last month was $454 million, it has increased to $464 million with interest.
Trump has spent the last month trying to get an insurance company, or basically anyone with deep pockets, to front the money on his behalf using his various real estate assets as collateral. So far, these efforts have been unsuccessful. If Donald does not come up with $464 million by Monday, presumably by the end of day, the NY Attorney General can immediately begin to seize his properties to satisfy the judgment.
If he does miss the payment deadline, the first step in satisfying the debt would be a judgment filing in a county where the NY AG plans to seize his property. And as it turns out, the NY AG has already made that filing. Not in New York City, home to the AG's office and a variety of Trump assets like Trump Tower, but an hour north, in Westchester County. What's in Westchester? Two of Donald Trump's most prized Crown Jewel assets: 1) His Seven Springs Estate personal home and 2) Trump National Golf Club Westchester.
Donald Trump's Seven Springs Estate (Johnny Milano via Getty Images)
Seven Springs
The first Westchester property in the AG's crosshairs is Trump's Seven Springs Estate (pictured above). Trump bought the 213-acre property in 1995 for $7.5 million and it has pretty much exclusively been used as a private residence for the Trump family. Though, in 2009, he did rent the estate out to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi who had planned to stay in a large Bedouin-style tent on the vast lawn while he was in town for a meeting of the United Nations general assembly. However, after a local uproar (Gaddafi was famously very supportive of the terrorists who blew up Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Scotland in 1988 after departing from New York City), the dictator stayed elsewhere, and the massive unused tent had to be deconstructed. It's unclear if Trump got his rental check or not. My money would be on YES and he did not offer a refund. But other than a few such rentals, maybe some weddings here and there, Seven Springs served primarily as a private residence for Donald and his children. Eric has described Seven Springs as a family compound, where he grew up riding ATVs and fishing in the nearby lake.
The actual 28,000-square-foot mansion on the property was built in 1918 by financier Eugene Meyer. Eugene's father was a partner at investment bank Lazard Frères. According to Westchesterhistory.com, while still in college at Yale, Eugene declared his plan in life was to make enough money by the time he was 50 so he could devote the rest of his life to public service. After a brief career at Lazard, he launched his own firm, and by his 40th birthday in 1915, he had a net worth of $40 million. That's the same as around $1.3 BILLION in today's dollars. In 1917 Eugene enacted his plan of dedicating the rest of his life to public service. He worked in various government positions during World War I and later served as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the very first head of the World Bank. In 1933, he bought the Washington Post out of a bankruptcy auction. He died in 1959, leaving behind five children. His daughter Katharine Meyer, later known as Katherine Graham after her marriage to Philip Graham, was portrayed by Meryl Streep in the 2017 film, "The Post." In October 2013, the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos for $250 million, along the way, they also founded the publicly-traded Graham Holdings Company, which owns a myriad of interesting assets today and has a market cap of $3.34 billion. Today, the CEO of Graham Holdings is Tim O'Shaugnessy. But the company is still in Graham family hands. Tim is married to Katharine Graham's granddaughter, Laura Graham.
Upon the death of Eugene Meyer's widow Agnes in 1970, Seven Springs was gifted to the Yale Endowment. In 1984, the estate was acquired by Rockefeller University, which used it as a retreat. In 1994, Rockefeller put the estate up for sale for $9.75 million. Donald Trump bought Seven Springs a year later for $7.5 million.
Seven Springs was a cornerstone of the fraud trial that resulted in Trump's pending $464 million civil judgment. The New York Attorney General alleged that Trump drastically inflated his net worth by inflating the value of the estate in order to obtain bank loans. Specifically, a balance sheet that was submitted to Deutsche Bank in 2012, Seven Springs, was valued at $291 million. At the time, the appraised value of the land was $58 million, and in a 2018 ethics filing, Trump listed the value at $50 million.
Trump National Golf Club Westchester
It's late in the day on Thursday, so I'm not going to go into quite as much detail on Trump National Golf Club Westchester, but that is the second likely property in the AG's crosshairs. Located in Briarcliff Manor, New York, the 140-acre property has an 18-hole golf course and 75,000 square-foot clubhouse. The club, which was founded in 1922, slipped into foreclosure in 1996. That's when Trump swooped in and purchased the club for $7.5 million (coincidentally, the same amount he paid for Seven Springs one year earlier). Celebrities such as Joe Torre, Jack Nicholson, Hugh Grant, Regis Philbin, and George Steinbrenner were members at one time. Here is a video tour:
