Envy Apartment

Two brothers are at war over one of Victoria's biggest real estate empires , worth more than $500 million, four decades after their Italian family founded the dynasty. Former Carlton Football Club director and developer Colin De Lutis lives in a Toorak mansion three doors from younger brother Paul , who has taken him to the Supreme Court over how their property and business assets will be sliced up. Colin and Paul De Lutis are battling each other in the Supreme Court .  Photo: Supplied Paul has wanted out of the family business since 2014 but an acrimonious argument is playing out in the Supreme Court  over the break-up. Together with their mother Anna the brothers own 38 properties worth more than half a billion dollars, amassed since the family bought a Smith Street, Collingwood, shop in 1973. There, the family founded Westco Jeans and grew it into a chain of 160 retail outlets. It sold in 1999 for $85 million. That money was sunk into property and the De Lutis portfolio ...

There was a time, and it wasn’t long ago, when Mission Valley was farmland. Black and white photos from the 1960s show rows of turnip plants and herds of grazing dairy cows owned by farmers. “I remember the stories of how they would take the cows under the freeway after they built Interstate 8, or 80 back in those days,” said Rob Hutsel, a fourth- generation San Diegan . “The deal with the landowner was he still had to get his cows to the river. And so they left a tunnel under it so they could take their cows down to the river to get their water... I always wonder whatever happened to the tunnel.” The completion of the I-8 freeway around 1960 was the beginning of the end of an era in valley. The Mission Valley mall was built, and the valley became a suburban shopping destination . Now, another shape shift is on the horizon. Hutsel is president of the San Diego River Park Foundation and a member of the city’s Mission Valley Planning Group . He sees opportunity in Mission Valley . “...

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 ...