The Poker Player, the Billionaire Aunt and a $5 Billion Real-Estate War
Four decades of bad blood and a family that simply can’t stop fighting lie beneath some of Manhattan’s most iconic buildings.
THERE ARE FEW THINGS these days that Jane Goldman and her nephew Steven see eye to eye on.
They don’t agree on who should manage the multibillion-dollar family real-estate business, or how they should do it. They don’t agree about the circumstances that led to the death of Steven Gurney-Goldman’s father, who died alone in a Russian hospital.
And they certainly don’t agree whether Steven blackmailed Jane in her Midtown Manhattan office about four years ago.
Jane is the only female billionaire in the U.S. running a real-estate business, according to Forbes. She has short brown hair, tortoiseshell glasses and an irreverent wit. She feigns outrage loudly, according to people who like her, and yells maniacally, according to people who don’t. By reputation she is a tough negotiator who cuts commercial tenants little slack for minor violations and refuses to give an inch when negotiating a lease. She gets away with it because the Goldman family has extensive holdings throughout New York City, including the land below some of its poshest properties, from the Gramercy Park Hotel to the Cartier Building on Fifth Avenue. Many ground leases—where tenants develop on Goldman land—run for 99 years.
Jane began managing the family company in 1987, when her own father died. For some of that time she worked with her brother, Steven’s father, Allan Goldman, at her side. (Aunt and nephew can’t even agree on this: It was a decade by Jane’s account, more than three decades—some from home—by Steven’s.)
By 2024, she was in her late 60s, sitting in the witness stand of a Delaware courtroom, recounting the way this nephew of hers was saying if Jane didn’t fork over a quarter of the business, he would share unflattering information with her older sister, Amy Goldman Fowler. “I’m going to tell Amy and you’re going to look very bad, and you don’t want that,” Steven allegedly said.
“What is it?” Jane wanted to know. The two sisters were already locked in a fight over the value of some company holdings. Did her nephew have information that could make life harder for Jane?
She wasn’t buying it. “He was a professional poker player for a while,” she said from the stand as Steven, who views poker as a hobby, looked on. “I think he was bluffing me, and he was trying to get me to agree.”
Later that day, on that very same witness stand, Steven testified he had received information from family employees that an appraisal to determine the worth of some company holdings was improperly conducted and that Jane had purposefully lowered it. And they’d spoken about how public lawsuits weren’t good for the estate. But threats or blackmail? “Ridiculous,” he testified.
After the trial wrapped for the day, Steven and Amy left the courthouse with Jane behind them. It was familiar territory for the Goldmans—the family has fought on and off for 40 years. This time, two generations were battling for the family’s legacy, the future of its real-estate empire and the billions at stake.
“Wait, one second,” Jane yelled. “Family picture!”
Nobody waited. And nobody laughed.
THE IRONY ABOUT very rich families fighting over money is that the battles are rarely about money. They are over power and control, legacy, sibling rivalry and the parental attention that money can’t buy. Members of the Goldman family had been fighting over money since the 1980s, lobbing accusations of cheating and fraud and mental illness.
By the time Steven (a third-generation Goldman) and his aunt Jane (a second-generation Goldman) began battling for the future of the family business, there was plenty of money and land and more than enough emotional baggage.
Jane’s father was the famed Sol Goldman, a scrappy Brooklyn grocer’s son who would at his height amass 1,900 properties across the city, including a stake in the Chrysler Building. Even as a teenager, he bought up foreclosed properties, borrowing $50 from the pharmacist, then the liquor store owner, until he had enough to purchase a $500 lot.
Sol named his business Solil—a combination of his own name and that of his wife, Lillian. He was known to drive a hard bargain. As legend has it, a buyer who owned buildings surrounding a Sol Goldman property once approached him. Sol told the buyer he wanted $20 million—even though the small building was worth a fraction of that. How can you possibly ask that, the buyer said.
“Because my name is Sol Goldman and my name is on the deed,” said Sol, the story goes. The buyer ponied up.
Sol was subtle about his wealth, says Raoul Felder, Sol’s friend and onetime divorce attorney. The lawyer recalls trying to convince Forbes to take Sol off the magazine’s list of the 400 richest Americans. “He always said, ‘Real estate is a quiet business,’” recalls Felder in an interview. “Then he held his finger up to his lips.” (Sol appeared on some lists during the 1980s.)
Less quiet were his familial battles. Before Sol died, his wife Lillian filed for divorce, accusing her husband of abuse and alleging he dangled her out the window of their 31st-floor suite at the Waldorf Astoria. (“An absolute damn lie,” testified Sol; Felder claims the window in question had been locked since 1931.)
When Sol died in 1987, he was thought to be the largest private landlord in New York City, with a billion-dollar estate to boot. After his death, Lillian fought in court with her four children, seeking what she viewed as her rightful portion of Sol’s wealth.
Jane and her siblings took their late father’s side, accusing their mother of being disloyal. The three daughters called their mother mentally ill; Allan did not.
“I love them very much,” Lillian told reporters of her kids, after a court hearing. “But I don’t like them.”
IN SOL’S LATER YEARS, Felder broached the question of succession. “I don’t mean to be sexist, but women don’t run real-estate businesses,” he recalls saying to the real-estate mogul. “You won’t live forever, so who will take over the business?”
“I have a son,” Sol retorted. “My son’s name is Jane.”
Jane remembers in her 20s spending seven days a week with her father: working at his office, spending weekends at his house, having dinner together every single night. In a deposition, a lawyer asks if she had any formal training in real estate.
“Yes, the best,” Jane says. What was it, the lawyer presses.
“Sol Goldman.”
Jane was 32 when Sol died.
He had named as co-executors of his estate Jane and her brother, Allan, plus charged Jane with appointing a third. Jane and Allan ran the business, consulting the other two siblings, Diane Goldman Kemper and Amy, on major decisions. Amy was a philanthropist and renowned gardener who had bonded with her father over the art of picking produce; Diane worked in the office doing residential leasing. Each of the four siblings held equal stakes in the business. But much of the structure was informal, with a lack of documentation about transferring a company between generations. It was, after all, all in the family.
Jane says that was how her father wanted it: “It was his hope—and at the time the other family members’ hope—to keep it together for ourselves and the future generations.”
Some who know Jane personally say she is sharp, witty and goes out of her way to connect friends with doctors, often through her cardiologist husband. She lives in a $25.5 million townhouse on the Upper East Side with her husband and her sister Diane, who has multiple sclerosis and requires 24-hour nursing care.
She has one home in the Hamptons, and another on Billionaires’ Row in Palm Beach, just south of Mar-a-Lago.
Her dry sense of humor at times confounds those around her. In one deposition, a lawyer for Steven asks whom she talked to prior to the questioning.
“My hairdresser,” she says. She had wanted to look good on video. The lawyer asks for her stylist’s name.
“His name is Sam. He moonlights as a lawyer too so he was prepping me,” says Jane, deadpan.
“Is that a true statement?” says Steven’s lawyer.
“It’s a joke,” Jane says.
Then there is the way people in the real-estate world describe Jane: a myth, mercurial, difficult, sharp elbowed. She can be hard to get a meeting with—except for a select few. When negotiating a deal she can be tough, short and take a my-way-or-the-highway approach.
“One of the incredible strengths that she has is to negotiate from a position of ‘I don’t care,’” says Gary Barnett, president of Extell Development, noting that she forces the other party to the max, almost as if the whole thing is a game.
“Almost every single deal I’ve done with her I’ve paid more than I thought I would,” Barnett adds. Because of her family wealth, she can afford to take an extreme position, and still sleep at night if she loses a deal, he says.
Her “no Mr. Nice Guy” approach to enforcing the terms of a lease is also within her rights, her defenders say.
“She gets a bad rap for being too tough,” says Tyler Morse, who in 2023 paid $50 million for a 99-year lease with Solil for the land beneath the Gramercy Park Hotel after Goldman foreclosed on the prior operator. “She strikes deals and she holds people to them.”
She learned from her father. Nearly four decades later, Jane still recites his mantras like gospel: Don’t sell. Don’t subordinate. Don’t use financing.
Today the company has very little debt.
IN 2013, Jane took on a new employee: her nephew. Steven, Allan’s only son, had just graduated from Vanderbilt University with a degree in political science.
On its face, they had little in common. She was well coiffed. He hadn’t realized he was rich until in public high school at Stuyvesant, where he favored ratty clothes, even in winter pairing gym shorts with a Jets hoodie so well worn he stuck his thumbs through holes in its cuffs. She flies in a private jet; friends say he flies coach.
She ran the business conservatively; he wanted to not only collect rent, but buy and develop properties.
At the time, Steven had been playing poker competitively, winning first place—and $29,342—in No Limit Hold ‘Em at the Hollywood Poker Open in 2015, and thousands in similar tournaments for years. “Steven had a knack for reading other people and adjusting the math based on what he saw other people were doing,” says Joe Blay, a longtime friend.
One thing Steven and his aunt had in common: Their love of real estate began with their fathers.
Allan, who was 47 and toward the end of his second marriage by the time Steven was born, got annoyed by errant balls that Steven didn’t get in his plastic Little Tikes hoop. He didn’t care about Steven’s devotion to learning the cello. What Allan really loved was real estate. So Steven, desperate to connect with his dad, tried to love real estate, too.
Allan, who was battling Parkinson’s at the time, was spending little time at the office. Steven brought his dad something he lacked: office intel. He knew who came into the office and what was going on. When his dad asked about tenants—”How are the Di Palos doing?,” he’d say of a famous Italian grocer—Steven knew the answer.
Jane didn’t think Steven did much—she tried to educate her nephew, a spokesman says, but he “accomplished nothing of note.” He thought he was modernizing the place, with his spokeswoman saying he implemented an online rent payment system, helped negotiate leases, explored development opportunities and cleared thousands of housing violations, successfully getting his father off a citywide worst landlord list.
By the time Steven left in 2020 to go to business school at Wharton, Jane said in a deposition, she hoped that Steven and her own son, Michael Lewis, who is a year his junior, would run the business one day.
Then two years later, the family suffered a major shake-up: On Jan. 15, Allan, a 78-year-old American billionaire, died alone in Russia’s Saint Petersburg’s City Hospital No. 40, Intensive Care Unit No. 3.
The family drama around his death wouldn’t become public until late 2022, when Steven filed a lawsuit against Natalia Vostrikova, the woman who spent more than 15 years by Allan’s side. (Steven refers to Natalia as a caretaker; people close to the family say she was a longtime partner.)
Natalia had said she had taken him to Russia to investigate a chain of clinics which advertised a new kind of stem-cell therapy. By that time, Allan couldn’t stand, walk or feed himself. But the longer they spent in Russia, the more suspicious Steven became of Natalia. “I am extremely concerned,” Steven typed on Jan. 14, 2022. “Please give me [an] update on my dad.”
Jane was suspicious too, but blamed Steven, who was Allan’s healthcare proxy. In her view, according to court documents, Steven and his sisters had ample chances to visit their father, and neglected to get involved. And now their father was dead.
(Steven’s spokeswoman says he and his sisters did everything in their power to come to his aid.)
Distraught, two generations of Goldmans came together, united around the common goal of bringing Allan’s body back home. His children had frantic emails and texts and calls. Jane successfully used her contacts at Fischer Travel, an ultraluxury membership-only agency, and around the chief rabbi of Moscow, to bring Allan home. About two weeks later, they held his funeral at Temple Emanu-El on the Upper East Side.
Years later, Steven and Natalia would settle the lawsuit. Natalia said in a court affidavit that she and Allan had been romantically involved since 2002, but hadn’t married due to the objections of his children. Allan received medical treatments in Russia but unfortunately nothing worked, she said.
After the funeral, Steven, the executor of his father’s estate, visited Jane at her office, hoping an in-person chat would make it easier to get the documents and funds he thought he needed to settle his father’s estate. Then, he later testified in court, he told Jane that if she was adding a fourth manager—or day-to-day operator—for a family holding company, he would be a good fit.
By Jane’s account, Steven asked to step into his father’s shoes and manage the business. She viewed Steven as too young, too inexperienced, too unprepared, she testified. She brought up her son, Michael, who had worked at Solil with Steven.
“I didn’t think either one of them were ready,” Jane said. “And my son would admit he wasn’t ready.”
THE LAW IS ill equipped to deal with the latent jealousy and hidden ambitions that lurk below the surface of inheritance disputes. Courts can divide up money and property and assess what agreements made in the past mean for the future. But when money means love and money means power, and one generation’s desire for legacy conflicts with another’s ambition, judges lack the tools to settle anything at all.
Steven, now 35 and married to his high school sweetheart with a toddler, is a partner at Arena Capital, a small real-estate private-equity firm that invests in the Hudson Valley. He rolls up his sleeves, says a colleague, negotiating boiler repairs and driving six hours round-trip to close a deal to earn $12,000 a year in rent. He has largely traded his poker-playing days for the strategy board game Catan, and was a champion at the game’s elite master’s tournament last year. The strategies are familiar: building alliances, gathering resources, using leverage and diplomacy—all skills one can use in business.
In real life, one of his allies is his other aunt Amy. After Allan died, a legal dispute between Amy and Jane was brewing. Amy had wanted to cash out a small portion of her share in the company: more than $125 million, by her analysis, and $91 million, by Jane’s. They were arguing over whether an appraisal had undervalued company holdings.
“I’m going to spend millions and millions of dollars to fight you in court,’” Jane said during one blowup, according to Amy. Jane, screaming, then slammed the door. (Jane has called Amy’s account of this conversation “a complete lie.”)
Amy Goldman Fowler attends The Orchid Dinner.
Amy Goldman Fowler. Dominik Bindl/Getty Images
Steven and Amy sued Jane in Delaware, and, alongside Steven’s sisters, filed a lawsuit in New York. They argued Jane, now 71, forced through a flawed appraisal that improperly undervalued some company holdings by more than a half-billion dollars.
“In what is best described as a real-life parallel to the television show Succession, Defendant Jane Goldman has engaged in a brazen and illegal scheme to wrest control of the largest privately owned real-estate empire in New York City from her family members,” the complaint began.
“The comparison fits in one respect: Both are works of fiction,” Jane’s lawyer fired back. Of the appraisal, her lawyer told the court, “There’s not a stitch of evidence she did anything wrong.” A judge hasn’t ruled on the matter.
Things got personal. Amy wrote in her diary, which appeared in court filings, that Jane’s daughter Solina—named after the family patriarch—told her that Jane had said she “wanted to kill [Steven] or else hire a contract killer.” (Jane’s spokesman said: “Jane has absolutely no recollection of saying this or anything similar. And if she ever did, it obviously would’ve been in jest.”)
Steven had said that, during a break in deposition proceedings, Jane screamed at him and referred to him winding up dead. Steven said he was shocked: “I don’t honestly remember exactly what she said.”
Jane’s lawyer asked pointedly, “You didn’t hear her telling you that you lied, and that if you believed in God, karma would come back to you?”
When Jane was deposed, she brought Allan’s autopsy report—and pictures of his dead body. “I want to make sure the pictures are entered,” she said.
In the wake of what they view as Jane’s power grab, Steven and Amy see a scenario in which they are willing to split up the empire, much like Sol once did.
After Sol’s business partner died of a heart attack while sitting at his Chrysler Building desk, he and his partner’s son flipped coins to divvy up envelopes with dozens of properties. But Jane, who enters her office to an oil painting of her father, smiling kindly in a maroon armchair, is confident that Sol would have wanted his holdings intact for generations to come.
Unless the family settles, the legal battles could run on for years—the Delaware case is over but litigation in New York continues, both in a trial court and Surrogate’s court. These days, Steven rarely sets foot at the family office.
Meanwhile, family members are still making moves: Jane stepped down in late July as a manager of a key family holding company. Michael, 34, has taken her place. Michael had left asset-manager Blackstone and began working at the family business last year, according to people familiar with the matter.
To add insult to injury: Jane didn’t even bother telling Steven.
