Real Estate: A Towering Empire

The silvery 102-story shaft of the Empire State Building looms through the picture windows in the Manhattan offices of Real Estate Partners Lawrence A. Wien and Harry B. Helmsley. They gaze on it with a unique warmth: along with 3,000 other investors in a syndicate they formed four years ago, they have a 114-year lease on it. The tower is a fitting emblem of their domain, which last week made a major expansion. For an undisclosed sum, the partners bought the entire fiefdom of hotels and movie houses assembled over 47 years by J. (for Junius) Myer Schine.

The Schine holdings, worth an estimated $150 million, brought the value of Wien and Helmsley's coast-to-coast collection up close to $900 million, three times that of the spread controlled by William Zeckendorf at his apogee six years ago. Says Helmsley: "We know of no private investors whose holdings are larger than ours."

Shift in Tactics. Personable Lawyer Wien, 60, and shy Broker-Manager Helmsley, 56, pioneered the promotion of large-scale syndicates. Much of their property is held in common with about 10,000 other people, disarmingly described by Helmsley as "friends who go into these investments with us." The pals have included Wall Streeters John L. Loeb and Clifford W. Michel, and the syndicated holdings range from Manhattan's Plaza Hotel to properties in Los Angeles, Detroit, Buffalo, Dayton and Daytona Beach.

Conservatively built, the partners' realm has survived the general shake-out of real-estate syndicates since 1962. Some recent acquisitions, such as the 35-acre Bush waterfront terminal in Brooklyn, have been financed with only a few wealthy partners, and increasingly, Wien and Helmsley have been able to swing deals all by themselves. The Schine purchase, made without partners, brings them twelve hotels (including Miami's faded Roney Plaza and Los Angeles' first-class Ambassador), 62 theaters in the East and Midwest, and a community antenna-TV system in Massena, N.Y.

On the Carpet. For Myer Schine, who is so secretive that he does not even disclose his age (73), the sale topped an acquisitive career that began when he was 26. With savings from jobs as candy butcher and dress salesman, he bought a roller rink in Gloversville, N.Y., parlayed the profits into a chain of properties. Many real estate insiders speculated last week that the aging Schine sold out because he was hard-pressed to find successors as sharp as himself within his immediate family.

In 1957, he turned over the title of president of Schine Enterprises to his elder son, G. (for Gerard) David Schine, who was once the most famous private in the U.S. Army. Attempts to wangle an officer's commission for Schine, an investigator for the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, were a factor in the acrimonious Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. Son David also created controversy in Schine Industries. He quarreled with managers at the Roney Plaza, lost money on several ventures, including an indoor ski slope that operated on a carpeted conveyor belt. He has not been company president since 1963, when his father took the job back himself.