Envy Apartment

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - When a new owner bought an indistinct building off Front Avenue in St. Paul’s North End, he had no clue what was in the basement. It didn’t look like much: boxes, other clutter, a water hookup. He started a gym upstairs and thought nothing of it, the Pioneer Press (http://bit.ly/2vxSjJm ) reported. But when it came to gyms, he was squatting on a big piece of history. Decades earlier, a small troop of boxers moved into the vacant space below. It didn’t look like much then, either. “It was all shut off and dark . a cluttered-up mess,” said Gary “Rice Street Skinny” Struss, the light heavyweight. The young men cleared out half of it - pushing all the junk to the rear. One, a plumber, installed a shower in the corner; another had relatives do a little ironwork. In time they had a pair of heavy bags, a speed bag and a small “ring,” about 10 feet by 10; a quarter of regulation size. Nothing more than two-by-fours with plywood on top. “That’s all we had. You know what ...

One day in August, 2016, the financier Carl Icahn made an urgent phone call to the Environmental Protection Agency . Icahn is one of the richest men on Wall Street, and he has thrived, in no small measure, because of a capacity to intimidate. A Texas- based oil refiner in which he had a major stake was losing money because of an obscure environmental rule that Icahn regarded as unduly onerous. Icahn is a voluble critic of any government regulation that constrains his companies. So he wanted to speak with the person in charge of enforcing the policy: a senior official at the E.P.A. named Janet McCabe . Icahn works from a suite of offices, atop the General Motors Building , in midtown, that are decorated in the oak-and-leather fashion of a tycoon’s lair in a nineteen-eighties film. During that decade, Icahn made his reputation as one of the original corporate raiders , pioneering the art of the hostile takeover and establishing himself as a human juggernaut—a pugnacious deal machine ...