COGAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-12-24 published
'The lovable rogue' who made and lost fortunes
One of Canada's most successful real-estate salesmen threw famous
parties, especially during the 1980s boom, when he brokered property
deals worth more than $10-billion
By James McCREADY,
Special to The Globe and Mail Wednesday, December
24, 2003 - Page R9
Toronto -- His Friends called him a lovable rogue. His enemies
left out the lovable. Eddy
COGAN was a love-him or hate-him kind
of guy, a brash real-estate salesman, maybe the most successful
real-estate salesmen of his era in Canada. He sold more than
$10-billion of real estate in the 1980s, by far his most successful
decade.
When Eddy COGAN died in late October, people remembered two things
about him straightaway: He was the one who brokered the huge
Greymac apartment deal. And he was also the greatest party-giver
of the 1980s in Toronto, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars
on a three-day bash, when he would take over the entire Windsor
Arms Hotel -- rooms, restaurants and bars -- and open them to
his Friends.
Mr. COGAN brokered a deal in 1982 to sell 10,931 apartment units
belonging to Cadillac Fairview to a group led by Leonard
ROSENBERG
of Greymac Trust. The sale was worth $320-million but Mr.
COGAN
found out a couple of hours later that Mr.
ROSENBERG and his
partners had flipped the buildings, selling them for $500-million
to what turned out to be a fictitious Saudi Arabian consortium.
Mr. ROSENBERG eventually went to jail, but Mr.
COGAN was clean
since he didn't have any part in the illegal flip.
Edwin Aubrey
COGAN was born on October 5, 1934. His father had
fled Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. It was a sound decision,
since Stalin starved the Ukrainian peasants in the 1930s and
Hitler's death squads killed almost all the Jews in Kiev during
the Nazi occupation.
Eddy's father was a professional boxer and waiter who changed
his name from
COHEN to
COGAN to get work at Toronto's Park Plaza
Hotel, which didn't hire Jews in the 1930s. Eddy went to Palmerston
Public School but wasn't much of a student and dropped out of
school in Grade 9. At 15, he went west and worked in the woods
in British Columbia.
A few years of manual labour had him thinking about a change,
and he returned to school and qualified as a land surveyor. After
many years working surveying properties, he decided to move into
real estate. In the 1950s, when Mr.
COGAN started doing property
deals, most of the action was in what is called "assembling"
land, which means buying up huge tracts of land, not just in
the country but also in the city.
Mr. COGAN would do things such as go door-to-door asking people
if they wanted to sell their houses or buildings. He was working
for developers such as Cadillac Fairview, which in turn would
put up a strip of high-rise apartment buildings once the land
had been assembled. Probably more than any town planner, Mr.
COGAN changed the face of Toronto from the 1950s to the 1980s.
"After rent control came in, in 1975, there was less demand for
buildings," says Larry
COGAN, who worked with his father for
more than 20 years. "It was the main reason Cadillac Fairview
decided to sell off those properties."
It was that deal that made Eddy
COGAN rich and allowed him to
launch the famous parties of the 1980s. The parties ended with
the real-estate crash of 1989-90. Mr.
COGAN had invested in a
6,000-acre property called the "jail lands" just north of the
city. It was an old prison farm that was to be turned into a
residential development. When the property boom went bust, so
did Mr. COGAN. It was the end of one big fortune and the start
of a decade spent rebuilding his wealth. In the 1990s, perhaps
his most successful transaction involved Terminal 3 at Toronto's
Pearson Airport.
Mr. COGAN was a slender man with a wiry build and movie-star
good looks. Women found him attractive, and his Friends said
that women were his weakness. He enjoyed spending time in Los
Angeles and New York in the company of models and actresses --
some famous, some not.
"When he saw an opportunity to be with a high-profile, beautiful
woman, he would approach it like a real-estate project," his
son Larry said. "He would network and use all his skills to close
the deal."
Like many people who work on deals for a living, Eddy
COGAN had
an unconventional business day, in particular in the latter part
of his career. He loathed gadgets. He didn't like cellphones
or computers and never had an e-mail address of his own. Rather
than offices, he preferred to meet in restaurants, though he
was a light eater and didn't drink much. After the Windsor Arms
and its restaurants closed, he switched to Prego, a restaurant
in Yorkville.
Mr. COGAN lived his work. He was always working on a deal, micromanaging
it to make sure the project came off.
"He was a big thinker. He was very fit and he liked to walk and
think," said Diane
FRANCIS, the journalist who became a close
friend after doing a few stories on him in the mid-1980s. "The
last big deal he was working on was in Niagara Falls, New York."
When he first looked at Niagara Falls, the town on the Ontario
side was a success, with a casino and a diversified tourist trade.
Niagara Falls, New York was a dump, with an empty centre, shuttered
factories and a neighbourhood that was a household name for environmental
catastrophe, Love Canal. Mr.
COGAN spent the better part of a
decade trying to develop the New York side into a place as successful
as the Ontario side. At the time of his death, a casino had opened
on the New York side and he was closer to putting his dream together.
He lived in downtown Toronto in a huge penthouse in the Colonnade
on Bloor Street, a rental apartment with a small swimming pool
inside the unit. Mr.
COGAN was a generous man, always willing
to help his Friends. Once, when promoters were trying to put
together a race between American and Canadian superstar sprinters,
Mr. COGAN helped bankroll it. It lost money.
Mr. COGAN married once and divorced. He leaves his six children.
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