Harry B. Helmsley

Entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is remembered as a 20th-century American real estate executive who became a billionaire. For many years, he held the record of being on the annual "Forbes" magazine list of the richest Americans. His real estate company, Helmsley-Spear, became one of the country's biggest property holders, owning the Empire State Building and many of New York City's most prestigious hotels. In 1955, he purchased the real estate firm owned by Leon Spear, thus changing the firm's name to Helmsley-Spear. Born Harry Brakmann Helmsley, the son of a dry goods merchant, he had his childhood in the Bronx and attended Evander Childs High School but did not graduate. His grandfather found him a job as a sixteen-year-old office boy in a real estate office. Learning on the job, he was soon made partner. At first, he purchased properties in the less-desirable neighborhoods but had many holdings. In 1954 he purchased the Lincoln Building, a 53-story skyscraper built in 1930 on 42nd Street in New York City. In 1961, he purchased the Empire State Building, which at the time, was the tallest building in the world at 102 stories. In 1964 he acquired the residential broker firm of Brown-Harris-Steven, Incorporated. Over the next decades, he purchased at least six more buildings in Manhattan. In the 1970s and 1980s, he made investments in old hotels in Manhattan, with some being historical buildings. He married a widow, Eve Ella Sherpick Green in 1938, divorcing her in 1971 and marrying Leona Roberts the next year. He was her third husband. His lifestyle changed with the second marriage, moving from a modest residential setting to a Park Lane Hotel penthouse. As the vice president of one of his companies, Roberts was known to be an aggressive businesswoman and according to her employees, a demanding boss. In 1980 he opened the 50-story Helmsley Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue at Fiftieth Street, but the renovation budget was many thousands of dollars. In 1988, the couple was charged with major tax evasion based on their creative accounting. At age 79, he was declared too frail to stand trial for health reasons but his wife went to trial. His wife was found guilty of "33 criminal offenses concerning conspiracy, tax evasion, filing false tax returns, mail fraud, and extortion," and although she was sentenced initially to sixteen years in jail with a heavy fine of millions of dollars, she actually served nineteen months with two months under house arrest. She was released in January 1994 at age 73, and Harry died of pneumonia three years later. Originally, he was entombed with his parents in a stately mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx but in 2007 at his wife's request, he was moved to a new private mausoleum at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Having no children, his $5.5 billion estate was left to his wife. In 2007, his Leona was entombed next to him. Since 1999, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust "aspires to improve lives by supporting exceptional efforts" and has donated to medical centers, universities, disadvantaged children, disease research, and other endeavors worldwide. The Harry B. Helmsley Distinguished New Yorker Award was created in 1992 to recognize the Real Estate Board of New York members, who have a lifetime of exceptional accomplishment in the profession and have made invaluable contributions to the civic welfare of the community.