Some said he ran roughshod over other people’s money. His dad said that. And it was true, to a certain extent. But, of course, he didn’t call it that. He called it being aggressive.

In fact, you could say, that he very carefully cultivated a reputation for “running roughshod.”

“It’s called making money, dad. It’s called making a deal,” he told his father many times when they discussed his philosophy, especially toward the end.

His reputation for making the deal was like chum to sharks…He liked being called a shark but you’d better not call him a whale. That’s what the house calls suckers with money….(Plus he’s a tad bit overweight and very sensitive about it.)

But back to his reputation– it alone earned him at least a billion dollars. That’s because the biggest sharks never lost money on his deals. (Well, almost never.) And that’s because so many smaller sharks were willing to take substantial risks just so they could be in on it. So they could brag about it. So they could feel the rush of the possibility of the deal.

He dangled it, flaunted it–so they could smell the money.

He and his select partners…And they are very exclusive, his partners; only the best…made several billions of dollars off the smaller sharks that way. And he made several millions of dollars for the smaller sharks that way too.

Most of the time everybody walked away richer and happier for it. But sometimes things  didn’t pan out. The big sharks would, now and then, get a case of the jitters–and that scared away the smaller sharks.

Sometimes there was too much red tape, too many laws and regulations…Sometimes it all ganged up on the deal and sucked the precious life out of it.

It happened.

It’s not his fault that some people don’t diversify...You’ve got to have a lot of irons in the fire if you’re going to run with the big boys. Don’t play if you can’t afford to loose, or at least have the sand to declare bankruptcy and move on…(Of course he didn’t tell the smaller sharks that.)

Why should he?

At heart, he was really just a glorified salesman. And he was okay with that…Salesmen are very entrepreneurial. A salesman’s desk is his brick and mortar on somebody else’s dime. But you better have balls. Confidence. The sky’s the limit as long as you’ve got your pitch down so that you can bend and shape it to fit the mark in front of you…He respected a good salesman. A good saleswoman too, though they were few and far between.

That said, his grandmother was a good saleswoman. A business woman. Her husband died in the flu pandemic at the end of WWI when she was a very young woman, much younger than her late husband. She could have predictably sat on the small fortune he left her. Instead she used it as collateral.

Likewise, she could have sold the land she inherited. But she didn’t. She built houses and apartment buildings on the sites, effectively starting the family real estate empire.

Even so, women like his grandmother were few and far between. At least that was his take on it. Women liked to play things close to the vest. They were too conservative, content to be merely rich instead of really rich.

Even his grandmother was like that…

And then there were the whores.

There was a time when a man could call it like it is. Whores are the ones that put out. Not like boyfriend/girlfriend put out, but like hook up in the parking lot put out. You can do whatever you want with those girls…(Not that he’s advocating violence.) Any guy that’s into that stuff  needs to be put down…Like a rabid dog needs to be put down.

Sometimes a whore can be really smart, though. They can spin everything around to their advantage. Play all the angles. Women, when they are ruthless, have lots of angles.

They’re curvy.

He loved women when they were like that…He hated women when they were like that.