The Leningrad Shipbuilding Institute was about to award a degree in engineering to Chaim Katzap in 1974, when a Soviet Union apparatchik decided the young man, who was preparing to emigrate to the U.S., wouldn’t get his diploma.
“Allegedly I’d been told secrets and would be a spy,” Katzap recalled of the institute’s fears of what he might do in America with all he had been taught.
Katzap was no spy. But later, in the U.S., he would go on to carve out a career that required him to operate in near total secrecy. He became a silent real estate broker, meaning his job was to quietly buy parcels of land that he would then sell to developers who wanted to build towers.
Katzap’s ancestors in Romania and Moldova were developers, and after settling with relatives in Borough Park, he at first worked as a residential real estate broker. He found selling homes in Brooklyn unsatisfying, though, and moved on to commercial properties in Manhattan.
“I did most of my work in the middle of the night,” he said. “I didn’t want other brokers to see what I was doing.”
Nighttime was the right time because he could see which buildings’ floors were dark and potentially vacant. He took the lack of lights as a sign that the owner might be getting ready to sell the building. Once he identified a willing seller, he’d ask owners of adjacent properties if they might sell too. After all, if they teamed up, the plot of land would be larger, and the sellers would get more money.
In the 1980s property in New York was cheap, and lots of owners were looking to work with Katzap, who typically charged a 3% commission and said he resold sites to the Brodsky Organization and The Related Cos., among others. (Related couldn’t confirm it had done business with Katzap, and Brodsky didn’t reply.)
“It was rather profitable,” he said, adding that he dabbled in real estate development but didn’t like being anyone’s minority partner.
Over his 40-year career, Katzap, now 76, estimates he had a hand in $15 billion worth of deals. Office buildings at 505 and 712 Fifth Ave. as well as 750 Seventh Ave., and the apartment tower at 11 E. 29th St. were built on parcels of land that he assembled, he said.
The key to being a silent broker is patience. He courted a Flatiron District church for 23 years before it finally agreed to let him broker its air rights. Sometimes land parcels were so small, he’d have to assemble eight to have enough to interest a developer.
The trickiest part of the job was getting paid. Some developers refused to honor their deal and dared him to try to collect. Secrecy was important, but sometimes fights in public couldn’t be avoided. Court records show that in 2006 the owners of Knickerbocker Village, a 1,600-apartment complex in Lower Manhattan, refused to pay him. He sued, and after nine years of litigation, a jury awarded him $1 million.
“I thought about taking baseball bats to heads,” he said, but always reconsidered. That could attract publicity, after all. “I never blew my cover.”
