You have to wonder about Lucky Larry's prescient timining?
September 11, 2012
If you or I were to take out a fire insurance policy, and our houses were burned to the ground at near free fall speed a few weeks later, what would happen? How long would it take you or I to see the inside of a jail cell? Your answer is probably different than lucky Larry's. Larry Silverstein, the New York real estate investor of growing infamy, is an extraordinary case indeed. Larry collected a mind melting 4.6 billion dollars in insurance money from the national and global tragedy, insurance that was purchased an obscenely incriminating seven weeks before the attacks.
As if the opportunistic nature of his behavior wasn't flagrant enough, Silverstein demonstrated his almost supernatural audacity by filing two separate insurance claims, one for WTC 1 and another for WTC 2, the argument being that since two separate terrorist acts had occurred, they should be filed as two separate terrorist insurance claims. Interestingly enough, Larry thought better of also filing a claim for the third building to spontaneously disintegrate that day, world trade center 7.
Any average American would get to tell the rest of their story in a courtroom rather than an interview, but Larry is no average American. In an interview with PBS, Silverstein confessed to arranging for the demolition of building 7. He stated that the "smartest thing to do was to pull it." While Larry made crude attempts at damage control by backpeddling and denying that this phrase is widely known to mean the demolition of a building, it is plain fact that within the demolition industry, to pull a building is to demolish it. It is a challenge to understand how Silverstein, a real estate giant, could be unaware of such basic lingo within his own industry.
Shortly before the building collapsed, several NYPD officers and Con-Edison workers told me that Larry Silverstein, the property developer of One World Financial Center was on the phone with his insurance carrier to see if they would authorize the controlled demolition of the building – since its foundation was already unstable and expected to fall.
- Jeffrey Scott Shapiro The twin towers were not the only American landmarks that Larry owns and controls. He's the happy owner of the Sears tower in Chicago. Yet for all his financial savvy, he isn't one to change habits quickly, as evidenced by his hiring of the same company to provide security for the Sears tower, that he hired for security at the world trade center. Apparently he still has confidence in them. While an entire book can be written on the topic of the international war criminal that is Larry Silverstein, suffice to say, for the purpose of this article, that if an authentic investigation of the largest terrorist attacks in history were to ever take place, a good long interrogation of lucky Larry would be a reasonable place to start.
