Lawyers for disgraced real-estate whiz Adam Hochfelder argued yesterday that the coke addict and alcoholic must remain free because he’s in dire need of outpatient rehab and sinus surgery.
“He’s completely blown out his nose,” Hochfelder’s lawyer Paul Goldberger told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel FitzGerald yesterday at a bail hearing following his client’s arrest on charges of cheating banks, relatives and friends out of more than $17 million over the last six years.
Goldberger said Hochfelder, 37, recently completed 60 days of “lockdown rehab,” and is continuing with a five-hour-a-day outpatient program.
Despite the pleas, FitzGerald set a bail of $1 million, which Goldberger said Hochfelder can’t pay because he has sold all of his assets to pay back more than $12 million to friends and relatives.
“He sold his home, he sold his business to his ex-partner,” Goldberger said. “He doesn’t own any boats; he doesn’t own any planes; he doesn’t own any real property. There aren’t any real assets anymore. That money has all gone toward repayment, and rightfully so.”
Hochfelder, a member of the powerful Real Estate Board of New York, was once a “golden boy” with “a joyous personality,” as one top real estate dealmaker recalled, with a “future, Trump-esque like career” in store and regular tables at Patroon and “21.”
But since his ouster from Max Capital in 2004, “he was hated,” another source said, adding, “shame on anybody doing business with him since then.”
Hochfelder’s quick smile and affable style helped propel him from obscurity as a broker at Newmark to CEO of Max Capital at 32, a firm he co-founded in the 1990s with Richard Kalikow, with backing from the billionaire Bass family of Texas, Credit Suisse First Boston and JPMorgan Chase.
By 2002, Hochfelder had bought out Kalikow for $75 million and Max Capital oversaw a Manhattan real estate empire that was worth $2.7 billion and encompassed 8 million square feet of prime office space. But two years later Max Capital President Anthony Westreich bought him out for $26 million.
But even before the split with Westreich, sources said there were red flags.
Plans for Max Capital to build a luxury condo tower behind the Daily News building at 450 W. 33rd St., which it owned at the time, went nowhere. Neither did a scheme to enlarge the Park Avenue Atrium tower at 237 Park Ave.
Then, in late 2004, The Post reported that Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau was probing whether Hochfelder had used his personal stake in Max Capital to get two loans.
On Wednesday, Morgenthau charged Hochfelder with multiple felony counts including grand larceny, which could put him behind bars for 25 years.
Morganthau claims the married father of two forged documents and lied about his net worth in order to secure $10 million in loans from Bank of America and North Fork Bank.
In 2003, Hochfelder allegedly lured a family member into investing $1.3 million in a business that was to buy foreclosed mortgages of Harlem and Brooklyn brownstones.
“He has continued to lie and steal since 2002,” despite repeated false promises to cooperate and go straight, said assistant DA Tanya Apparicio, “and nothing has stopped him.”