Brooklyn-born Ira Rennert has an oceanic $185 million Hamptons compound, a few infamous smelting plants in Peru and Missouri, and a billion-dollar fortune from junk bonds and Hummer vehicles.
He also has something of a generous streak: Two sources told The Observer that Mr. Rennert has bought two of New York’s most expensive apartments, at two of the best-bred co-op buildings, for his two daughters.
Daughter Tamara Winn and her husband are in contract to buy the duplex that belonged to the late Mosler Safe heiress Janet Coleman at 740 Park Avenue, probably the most yearned-for building in New York. “That’s not something I’m even going to get into a discussion about,” said a man who picked up the phone at the Coleman apartment. He hung up twice on a reporter.
The deal, though not yet complete, will close at around $32 million. Ms. Winn, who was scheduled to meet with the board last night, said: “I really have no comment.”
Page Six reported in October that she would be buying Vera Wang’s apartment up the block at 778 Park Avenue, listed for $35 million. They were wrong: That apartment is going to sister Yonina Davidson and her husband. Ironically, Ms. Wang just left that 14-room apartment in favor of her family’s old duplex at 740 Park; maybe Ms. Davidson will be covetous.
If that 778 Park deal closes above $30 million, as it probably will, the septuagenarian Rennert patriarch will be paying well over $60 million for his daughters’ two apartments. And he spent at least a few million, The Observer reported in 2000, on a 13-room spread at 510 Park Avenue, which he bought for Ms. Davidson as a first-anniversary present.
Mr. Rennert, meanwhile, has his own multiunit spread nearby at 625 Park Avenue, plus his 63-acre oceanfront property—“the largest home in America,” The New York Times wrote in 1998. He’s also been known for a different kind of excess: According to a 2003 BusinessWeek article, the E.P.A. has ranked his Renco Group—a conglomerate based on mining and smelting—as the country’s 10th-biggest polluter.
