cover image The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York

The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune, and the Empire of Olympia & York

Anthony Bianco. Crown Business, $30 (608pp) ISBN 978-0-8129-2140-3

Departing the Canary Wharf development expanse on the Thames, Prince Charles said to Paul Reichmann, ""I understand that your mother is chairman of your company. How does that work for you?"" Wryly, Reichmann answered: ""You could say we had the same problem."" According to Bianco, however, had Ren e Reichmann, then nearly 90 and in Toronto, still been active, the family empire might have been spared billions in losses that resulted from her son's too lofty ambition. The shrewd, feisty matriarch left Hungary with her husband, Samuel Reichmann, to run an egg-distribution business in Vienna; they then fled with their children when Hitler came. Settling in the international zone of Tangier, across from Gibraltar, Samuel Reichmann turned his entrepreneurial skills to currency trading while his wife worked at rescuing Jews under the Nazi heel, audaciously slipping back to engineer escapes or to arrange for food shipments. Without ever meeting the Caudillo, she managed entry visas via Spain through Generalissimo Franco. ""[T]his ultra-Orthodox refugee and brutal fascist dictator,"" quips Bianco, a senior writer for Business Week, ""made one of history's oddest couples."" When Tangier was absorbed into postwar Muslim Morocco, many Jews exited, among them the Reichmanns. They began anew in Canada, bolstered by bulging Swiss bank accounts. In Montreal, their wall-and-floor tile firm would metamorphose into a construction and real estate octopus. Five enterprising Reichmann sons branched out into the U.S. and across the Atlantic. While huge commercial complexes like Manhattan's World Financial Center arose, managerial oversight diminished as acquisitive ardor grew. By the early 1990s, a worldwide drop in property values plunged Canary Wharf and related investments into bankruptcy. Yet the brothersD""the Rothschilds of the New World""Dare reemerging, as are their 99 children and grandchildren, many still sternly traditional in their faith. Bianco's enormous, vivid chronicle ends there, but the saga of the Reichmanns, from their 18th-century shtetl beginnings to their tangled business dealings of the 1990s, continues. Illustrations not seen by PW. Author tour. (Feb.)