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September 24, 2009
MEET MIKHAIL PROKHOROV
NewYorker.com
by Keith Gessen
Some background on Bruce Ratner's savior from The New Yorker.
Being a Russian oligarch these days isn’t easy. The best and brightest of them are in exile or in jail; others, after feasting on leverage during the commodities boom, now have tummies full of debt. Of those still in the game, Mikhail Prokhorov is the richest, with an estimated net worth, according to Forbes, of $9.5 billion. At six-foot-seven, he is also the tallest, though this alone cannot explain the complicated process whereby he appears ready to buy the New Jersey Nets and build a stadium for them in Brooklyn.
...We’ll see. In Norilsk—a city constructed by labor camp prisoners and now so polluted that no vegetation grows within twenty miles of the city center—Prokhorov and his partner had first to remove a stubborn sitting factory director, Anatoly Filatov, before taking over the plant. This took a long time. In the downtown Brooklyn area known as Atlantic Yards, a neighborhood almost equally devoid of vegetation due to the “development projects” of current Nets owner Bruce Ratner, Prokhorov will have to get past the no less stubborn Daniel Goldstein, the man who almost single-handedly has been holding up the construction of the stadium for the past five years. The obvious joke here would be that Prokhorov will make Goldstein an offer he can’t refuse, but, in fact, according to one government official I spoke to recently, back in the mid-nineteen-nineties Prokhorov and his partner couldn’t figure out how to remove Filatov and had to appeal to the government for help. This is unlikely to impress Goldstein.
NoLandGrab: A couple corrections. The area near downtown Brooklyn, not in it, is known as Prospect Heights, not Atlantic Yards. And Daniel Goldstein, whose lynchpin role in, and leadership of, the Atlantic Yards opposition can't in any way be underestimated, would be the first to tell you that it's hardly been a single-handed effort.
Posted by eric at September 24, 2009 11:51 AM