Steven C. Witkoff is chairman, chief executive officer, and founder of the Witkoff Group, a real estate development and landlord firm. Witkoff was born in 1957 in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, in Baldwin Harbor and Old Westbury. He has a bachelors degree as well as a Juris Doctor from Hofstra University. He got his start in real estate working for law firm Dreyer & Traub. In 1985, Witkoff and Laurence Gluck, who also worked at Dreyer, co-founded Stellar Management Company and started buying apartment buildings in Washington Heights. The partners would fix up the buildings to attract higher-rent paying tenants and to raise the value of their properties in order to re-sell them. After collaborating for over a decade, Witkoff and Gluck parted, with Witkoff taking the office building part of the Stellar portfolio.

He called his new firm, which he founded in 1997, The Witkoff Group. Nowadays, Witkoff is known for high-profile condominium construction projects as well as the complicated financing and ownerships structures he attracts to those projects. Some of Witkoffs deals include the 1998 purchase, with partner Rubin Schron, of the Woolworth Building for $137.5 million. A recent Witkoff deal is the 2013 purchase of the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel for $660 million in partnership with Hong-Kong-based Jynwel Capital.

Witkoff has been married to Lauren Rappoport, now Witkoff, since 1987. Lauren is a senior vice president at the Witkoff Group, responsible for sales and marketing. The couple have two sons. A third son, Andrew, died in 2011.

-MK