Fortress Acquires Toby Moskovits’ Bushwick Generator

A foreclosure four years in the making resulted in Toby Moskovits’ Heritage Equity Partners trading its Bushwick Generator site to its lender.

Fortress Investment Group acquired the Brooklyn site at 215 Moore Street for $25.5 million, Crain’s reported. The ownership transfer stemmed from a foreclosure process Fortress initiated against Heritage in 2019.

A limited liability company affiliated with Fortress acquired the site at the beginning of the month, weeks after it submitted a credit bid during a foreclosure auction. At the time of the sale, Heritage owed $53 million to Fortress, which acquired the construction loan from Axos Bank in 2019. After the sale, Fortress is still owed $27.5 million.

Fortress did not respond to a request for comment from Crain’s. Heritage Equity Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Real Deal.

Moskovits and her partner, Michael Lichtenstein, owed $48.2 million on the mortgage they took out in 2018 and more than $4 million in interest accrued over five months in 2022, according to a referee’s report from mid-January.

After Fortress filed to foreclose in 2019, Moskovits fought back, claiming the lender was running a loan-to-own scheme. Moskovits said Fortress interfered with her effort to refinance the debt and chased other lenders away. A judge was unsympathetic, ruling there was “no dispute” that Moskovits failed to repay her debt.

Heritage’s plan for the site was a 13-story, 375,000-square-foot property with office and retail space. The development’s primary tenants would have been startups in the blockchain, agriculture and gaming industries.

Moskovits in April lost control over The Williamsburg Hotel in one of the most heated bankruptcy battles in recent memory. London-based Quadrum Global acquired the 147-key luxury hotel in the Brooklyn neighborhood for $96 million.

Private lender Fortress made waves in New York City real estate earlier this year, when it bought up approximately $1 billion of loans from Capital One in August. A large portion of the debt portfolio centered on Big Apple office loans.

— Holden Walter-Warner