Rubin Schron, the Monterey (credit: CityRealty) and Related’s Jeff Blau

The Related Companies has agreed to sell the Monterey on the Upper East Side to investor Rubin Schron for $250 million, marking the priciest sale of a multi-family building in Manhattan so far this year, Bloomberg News reported. The 521-unit rental property at 175 East 96th Street was one of Related’s largest apartment buildings. [more]

Ian Schrager, 215 Chrystie Street and Rubin Schron

Hotelier Ian Schrager and investors including developer Steve Witkoff paid approximately $50 million for a site at 215 Chrystie Street last week. The move that will bring a controversial mixed-use development to the Lower East Side, after a deal with the tenants of an adjacent building at 10 Stanton Street, the Wall Street Journal reported. [more]

From left: Rubin Schron and the Sperone Westwater Gallery

While many Lower East Side veterans might consider a two-year-old art gallery the definition of a newcomer, the Sperone Westwater Gallery has set its sights on blocking the arrival of an even newer arrival. Owners of the Bowery gallery are working alongside preservationists to halt city approval of a 25-story hotel-condominium development that they say will block a sky view, the Wall Street Journal reported. [more]

Investor Rubin Schron, who last month settled with the U.S. Justice Department over an alleged $50 million kickbacks scheme with nursing home pharmacy Omnicare, used his CAM-Elm Company as a “personal piggy bank,” according to a derivative complaint from shareholders. The complaint alleges that Schron, who owns part of the Woolworth Building and 40 percent of a group that has a 26 percent stake in the Israel Discount Bank, took more than $100 million from the company since 2006 to pay himself back for failed personal investments. The plaintiffs, Mich II Holdings and Seeva II Holdings, on behalf of real estate companies SMV and SWC Property Holdings, are suing Schron, CAM-Elm and Schron’s other companies, Cammeby’s and HSA Equipment, seeking a total of $105 million in damages. They are also suing Schron’s eight children, who are majority owners of CAM-Elm, because they failed to remove their father from his position when he abused it.
[Courthouse News]

Two prominent New York City real estate bigwigs, investor Rubin Schron and attorney Leonard Grunstein, have settled charges with the U.S. Justice Department that alleged they had taken a $50 million kickback from Omnicare, the largest nursing home pharmacy in the company, according to Crain’s. The charges against Schron, Grunstein and their associate, Murray Forman, claimed that the three had organized a plan to receive the kickbacks in exchange for allowing Omnicare to continue providing to Mariner Health Care, a chain of nursing homes Schron owns. Grunstein, who was once involved in the landmark Tishman Speyer-Stuyvesant Town deregulation case, and the two other men paid $14 million in the settlement.

New York real estate investor Rubin Schron and real estate attorney Leonard Grunstein have been accused of taking $50 million in kickbacks from Omnicare, a pharmaceutical company that serves the nursing home companies they each head. Schron, who owns the Woolworth Building, and Grunstein, a partner at Troutman Sanders, were two-thirds of a group that covered up a $50 million payout they received from Omnicare that enabled the company to continue to provide services at Mariner Health Care and Sava Senior Care, according to a complaint filed today by the U.S. Department of Justice. In the cover-up scheme, the trio allegedly masked the money as a payment for Omnicare’s acquisition of a two-person Mariner business unit that was not worth nearly $50 million. Omnicare will be forced to pay $98 million to states and to the federal government to settle the Medicare and Medicaid fraud charges associated with the case. [Crain’s]