The foreclosed, lawsuit-laden, incomplete tower that stands at One Madison Avenue scared away most of New York City’s big-name developers, except for Bruce Eichner, who reportedly placed a low-ball $45 million bid. So it came as quite a surprise last month, the Observer said, when a man intent on rising to those ranks agreed to pay $165 million to acquire the Flatiron tower. That man is Ziel Feldman, and it’s one of several risky bets the head of HFZ Capital is making in the midst of a market recovery. It started during the boom, when Feldman successfully refurbished a pre-war condo at 823 Park Avenue, and sold units for more than $2,000 per square foot. [more]

Lev Leviev is looking to appease his company’s creditors in order to avoid putting his embattled Africa-Israel company under bankruptcy protection. After months of trying to restructure $2 billion of the company’s debt, Leviev is now offering up $200 million of his own funds and a hefty portion of his stake in the company order to stabilize Africa-Israel, according to a Dec. 2 filing in an Israeli court. Leviev’s high-profile investments, such as One Madison Avenue, the Clock Tower building in Manhattan, bought for $200 million at the height of the market in 2007, and the New York Times headquarters, purchased for $525 million around the same time, led to his downfall, according to Bloomberg. “Hubris was Leviev’s sin,” Micha Cherniak, CEO of Lehava Investment, said. “He stopped listening to the managers he hired and began calling all the shots, focusing on an aggressive expansion of the company.”