Woody and Mike

New York

Robert Wood Johnson IV is the billionaire owner of the New York Jets, an American football team which plays in New Jersey, as its crosstown rivals, the New York Giants, also do. Big Bagel real estate is much too expensive to waste on football stadiums, or so the saying goes. Mayor Mike Bloomberg is also a billionaire, and the two of them — the trust-fund baby and the self-made one — have recently joined in an unholy alliance to make Woody the IV even richer.

Let’s take it from the top. Some time ago, Woody the IV craned his neck from across the Hudson River, where his Jets were going through their paces, and noticed an enormous parcel of unbuilt real estate on lower Manhattan’s west side riverfront. I suppose his heart must have skipped a beat or two, and surely must have felt a bit like Colombus’s upon first encountering land back in 1492. Unlike Christoforo, Woody the IV knew exactly where he was and what he was looking at. A waterfront property right up against the Hudson and within walking distance of Times Square. So he rang his buddy Bloomberg with a proposal. Why not have the city pay the lion’s share for a Jets football stadium on the publicly owned property so that he, the IV, could house his privately owned team? Brilliant, said Bloomy. Mayor Mike then went to work. He persuaded the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns the real estate, to hand it over to Woody (his nickname among his buddies) for a price way below — hundreds of millions, in fact, shy of — its real value. Everything was hunky-dory, even when it transpired that the $600 million subsidy was equivalent to what Woody had paid for his football franchise.