Faith And Fortune

Few businessmen have ever single-handedly wielded so much power to as calamitous effect as did Paul Reichmann, the mastermind of Olympia & York Developments Ltd. Founded by Paul and two of his brothers in Toronto in the late 1950s, Olympia & York at its peak had amassed $25 billion in assets, including 40 office towers and controlling stock holdings in Abitibi-Price Inc., Gulf Canada, and a half-dozen other major industrial corporations. Yet no one but a Reichmann ever owned stock or sat on O&Y's board. Through his unrelenting drive and outsize talent, Paul, the fifth of six siblings, came to dominate completely this most private of corporate empires.

Reichmann's forte as a property developer was the contrarian masterstroke, whether it was erecting a 72-story tower in downtown Toronto when many considered the city already overbuilt or constructing the most distinguished addition to the New York City skyline in half a century--the World Financial Center--on a sandbar in the Hudson River. Paul was widely lauded as a commercial genius, "an Einstein in a field that doesn't usually produce Einsteins," as one longtime colleague put it.