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OK, so it's in NY, but this week's New York magazine examines what billionaires get to do (Hint: a lot of it involves gorgeous young things) - and Agelenos Ron Burkle and Steve Bing are among the well-heeled patrons cited.
Around midnight, the most beautiful young models in the city arrive, squired in quickly, their backs with shoulder blades like arrows disappearing inside. Door, as the nightclub is creatively called, popped up late this summer. No one is supposed to know it’s there. It is where moguls go: After the Yahoo board meeting, Jerry Yang and David Filo came by. Another night in the fall, Sergey Brin and Larry Page were there. Supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle, Virgin head Richard Branson, and Steve Bing, the down-to-earth Democratic donor who inherited nearly a billion dollars from his real-estate-magnate grandfather, the developer of some of the most beautiful Art Deco buildings on Park Avenue and the West Village. Advance men for President Clinton. Few other guys can get in, except for a couple of model wranglers, those handsome, usually South American guys who round up models at their apartments and herd them to nightclubs. Promoter Danny A., a friend of Ron Burkle’s, runs this place—he even got to go on a trip to Israel with President Clinton. The wranglers are the only people in here not having fun: One hand on a mojito, they are nervous as they text madly on the phone to more girls, more girls, more girls.
Burkle takes up a fair amount of space - much of it covering well-trampled ground (divorce, Page 6, etc.) We do discover that he's a fixture at the Mercer Hotel, where he has meetings when in NYC, and that he splits a pied-à-terre with Leonardo DiCaprio, but is looking for something nicer.
He offered $17 million in cash to the owner of Sky Studios, the city’s preeminent bachelor pad, with rooftop pool, on lower Broadway, several times, but the owner, himself a rich man, won’t take anything under $17.2 million. They go back and forth about it—pennies between stubborn men.
Mark Lacter created the LA Biz Observed blog in 2006. He posted
until the day before his death on Nov. 13, 2013.