The Shrink Next Door
Part 3: Easy Mark Markowitz
A new figure appears at Marty’s office and imposes a different way of doing business.
One afternoon in the early 1980s, Bruce Nocera¹, a longtime employee of Associated Fabrics Corporation in Manhattan, saw his boss walk in with a stranger.
The stranger roamed the warehouse floor, taking notes. He returned often in the coming days and weeks, communicating only with company owner Marty Markowitz. Bruce finally asked the man who he was.
“He introduced himself as Isaac Stevens,” Nocera said, “a business consultant.”
Soon Isaac Stevens presided over the design of a new company logo. He gave the employees new titles. He also added a quality control director: Dr. Marshall F. Feldhammer. Nobody at the company ever met Feldhammer, but customers who complained about fabrics they bought from AFC would receive tough-as-nails responses from him — often citing tests that established AFC had done nothing wrong.
Marshall Feldhammer, it turned out, didn’t exist. He was one of several “noms de commerce” that Stevens invented to deflect customer complaints, according to Markowitz.
Isaac Stevens, on the other hand, was flesh and blood. But for the most part he went by another name, Isaac Steven Herschkopf. Better known as Ike, he was Markowitz’s psychiatrist.
Herschkopf would later tell me that he used a different name at AFC to distinguish his work as a business consultant from his work as a psychiatrist — saying that he’d dropped Markowitz as a patient and turned him into a consulting client as early as 1983. Markowitz, for his part, says he never viewed Ike as anything other than his therapist.
By 1986, Isaac Stevens had become AFC’s president. Nocera said that although Markowitz had financial control of the company, his “physical demeanor was subservient” to Herschkopf.
Markowitz doesn’t dispute that. “My main goal, during that period, was to please my psychiatrist,” he said.
After all, Markowitz didn’t have many others in his life. He was estranged from his sister and family. Herschkopf cautioned that people could try to take advantage of Markowitz, a multimillionaire, driving the point home by employing a nickname for him: Easy Mark Markowitz.
As Markowitz tells it, the doctor had a solution. “He said, ‘I’ll be the face of your wealth,’ ” he recalled.
The two men set up a charitable foundation. Markowitz initially contributed $165,000, to Herschkopf’s $5,000. According to financial records and other documents reviewed by Bloomberg, Herschkopf signed the checks.
Markowitz drew up a will leaving his estate to the foundation, which he controlled along with Herschkopf and Herschkopf’s wife. In addition, Markowitz made the psychiatrist a cosigner of a Swiss bank account containing an inheritance from his father. It held about $750,000.
And then there was Markowitz’s house in the Hamptons. According to Markowitz, in 1991 the psychiatrist noted that his wife loved the house and that Markowitz should leave it to her. And so Markowitz made up a new will, bequeathing the house to the doctor’s wife and giving Herschkopf his health-care proxy and power of attorney.
The joint foundation and account were the doctor’s ideas, according to Markowitz. So was the will, he says, which he packed away along with other legal documents, financial statements and correspondence he showed to Bloomberg all these years later.
Herschkopf declined requests to be interviewed, and his wife declined to comment. But he disputed Markowitz’s claims in a series of letters, saying the ideas were Markowitz’s. According to the doctor, Markowitz pleaded with him to be the beneficiary of the house and that when he refused, his wife reluctantly agreed.
Two years after signing the new will, Markowitz received a letter from the lawyer who drew up the documents.
“I am concerned about a possible challenge to your will based on the medical relationship with Ike,” the lawyer wrote, asking Markowitz to write a letter explaining that the bequests to the doctor were voluntary.
Why, two years later, had the lawyer become cautious? The lawyer had been visited by another patient of Herschkopf’s, who had also changed her will to benefit his family.
Markowitz, it turns out, wasn’t alone.
[1] Bruce Nocera and I are not related.
(Corrects the location where Dr. Herschkopf was photographed with Brooke Shields in photograph caption.)