Skip to main content

Featured Post

Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park infographics: what's built/what's coming/what's missing, who's responsible, + project FAQ/timeline (pinned post)

Time for an update? Markowitz, on video, praised Forest City to potential investors: "I can assure you that their reputation is unbelievably reliable"

In December, I first wrote about Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz's hyperbolic praise for Forest City Ratner, assisting the developer's effort to raise low-cost capital from Chinese (and Korean) investors seeking green cards.

Now that Forest City executive Bruce Bender has been caught on government wiretap trying to get government help to fulfill the obligation to rebuild the Carlton Avenue Bridge, and also saying, "I don't mind fucking the bridge," maybe Markowitz's claims of FCR reliability deserve a rethink.



"The largest company in Brooklyn is Forest City development, and I can assure you that their reputation is unbelievably reliable," he declared on the video produced to pitch the project to the investors. "They're a great company to work with; they've worked very closely with government. And the most important thing: they make a promise, they keep it."

Right.

The original video, produced by the New York City Regional Center, an investment pool, is made available by a South Korean video-sharing site.

It is hard to download, so the excerpt was created the old-fashioned way, by filming the screen, as with the excerpt in which Markowitz claims, incredibly, "Brooklyn is 1000 percent, 1000 percent behind Atlantic Yards."

Comments