Corporate titan trades his sprawling Palm Beach estate for $12.5M

Donald Carter, who helped foster a generation of corporate raiders like billionaire Carl Icahn in the 1980s, has just sold his waterfront compound in Palm Beach for $12.5 million.

The home’s kitchen

Located at 6 Lagomar Road, the estate measures just under an acre and is mainly occupied by a six-bedroom, six-bathroom home that was built in the 1950s. County records show it also has a separate one-bedroom guest house that was put up in 2001.

Carter first listed the home for sale with Paulette Koch of the Corcoran Group for $24 million in February 2015, though the price was chopped several times before reaching its final ask of $16.9 million in April of this year, according to listing service RedFin. Gregory Weadock of Brown Harris Stevens’ Palm Beach office brought the buyer.

The buyer is a trust in the name of Bruce Taylor, a Midwest businessman who also owns the home at 720 North County Road.

Carter and his then-wife Nancy began assembling their holdings on Lagomar Road back in the late 1990s, starting with the $2.6 million purchase of the estate’s main home. They paid another $2.4 million through the years for three beachfront parcels that give their estate deed access to the ocean, bringing their total expenditure to a flat $5 million.

Aerial view of the estate and its deeded beachfront access

This was all following the virtual implosion of Donald Carter’s career on Wall Street when he was investigated by the state of New York for allegedly overbilling his well-heeled clients and falsifying tax returns, according to a 1990 report from the New York Times. He had built an empire around proxy solicitation, which essentially means whipping up votes from a company’s shareholders to aid in a corporate takeover.

Years later in 1998, a New York state judge tossed Carter’s conviction, according to a Wall Street Journal report, saying prosecutors had concealed information that could’ve helped Carter’s defense.