I was a typical teenager, not very interested in learning. I went to four high schools. I was blessed to be a baal kishron, and my father is a big talmid chacham, so I always respected Torah even if it wasn’t my goal. I couldn’t see myself living as an am haaretz. I enjoyed hanging out with my friends, but I was also excited to open a Ketzos. I was always machshiv Torah and figured that I would focus on it when the time was right.
“I was proud when people would speak to me about my father’s learning. He took me to gedolim, which had a tremendous impact on me. I can still remember the kedushah of Rav Moshe Feinstein, even though I was only nine.
“I was born in Lakewood in the yeshivah apartments, and we moved to Boro Park when I was four. I’m one of six boys and one girl, and I have five boys and one girl myself. I went to Chasan Sofer until sixth grade. Back then it wasn’t a chasidishe yeshivah like it is today; it was the mainstream yeshivah where every non-chasidishe kid in Boro Park went, which means pretty much anyone in Flatbush who considers himself a bit heimish. Then I went to Vien, also mainstream. I learned well, aced the bechinos and had no problem getting into top yeshivos.
“Then came the rotation: Philadelphia for ninth grade and Riverdale for tenth, where I was expelled by Pesach. I’d been thrown out of the dorm around Chanukah for smoking a cigarette. I had a difficult time with authority, and I felt that if 11th graders were allowed to smoke in the dorm, tenth graders deserved the same rights. Then I learned in Mir for 11th grade, attended Rav Shmuel Miller’s beis midrash for 12th, and before I knew it I was married a week after my 19th birthday. More on that later.
“Leaving Philly was probably the worst decision I ever made. My rebbi, who was a tzaddik, loved me and I was shteiging, but I was the kind of kid who never listened to anyone. On June 20, all my friends in Brooklyn were finishing yeshivah the following week, but I was finishing a month later. I told my rebbi, ‘I’m out of here.’ ‘If you leave, you can’t come back,’ he replied. I left anyway, hoping they would take me back, but they didn’t. It was a bad decision, but that’s part of the story. It’s hard to remember what was going through my mind at that time.
“And it wasn’t the plan for me to marry so early. My wife was best friends with a girl who was marrying a very close friend of mine. We were both 18. I wasn’t thinking about marriage, but it was min hashamayim.
“Her parents told her, ‘He’s only 18. You should be dating a 23-year-old.’ But we both came from the same type of family. When my parents heard that she was a Spitzer and her uncle was the Viener dayan and her father was exactly like my own father, everyone calmed down. The rav of my shul, Rav Yossel Singer, the Aleksander Rebbe from 56th Street, also encouraged it.
“I have almost no recollection of what took place in the years between my wedding and the age of 30. My father is a very busy real estate lawyer in Boro Park, and my family is in real estate. Through word of mouth I got a decent management job—you don’t need much education to collect rent and maintain buildings. Then, six months after my wedding, the buildings were sold and I was out of a job, because new owners bring in their own management. Baruch Hashem, my wife was working.
“I said to myself, ‘With Hashem’s help, I’m going to have a family, and if I can lose my job just because someone sells a building, then I can’t be a manager; I have to be an owner. I have to start buying real estate.’ But without any money that’s a problem, so real estate was put on hold. My management job was in East Orange, New Jersey. Back then Irvington, East Orange and Newark were the worst areas—today they’re a little better—but that was the area I knew; I knew which buildings were available. No one was going to invest in me, so with few options I decided to open a car stereo business.
“It wasn’t as random as it sounds. Back then, Newark had cars with loud stereo systems. A $500 car could have a $5,000 system with subwoofers. But Newark and Irvington were the car theft capital of the world, so people kept buying new stereos. I asked my cousin, who owned Stereo City, where to buy things.
“I was going to open in Newark, but then I found a building for rent in Irvington with an empty space, a showroom in front and a garage in the back for the installations. The broker told me, ‘It’s a good space, but you should know that the building is mostly empty and the owner isn’t paying the mortgage.’ After we signed the lease, I realized I was the only tenant in the building.
“I opened the store. Business was decent, but there was a problem. In that part of the world, everyone services their cars on Saturday. There’s no Sunday. They’d buy the equipment during the week and say, ‘We’ll be back Saturday to install it.’ No matter how hard I tried to move them to Sunday, it didn’t work.
“So that wasn’t working. We were barely paying our bills, and every day I wondered how I got into this business. I had borrowed money from my father, who believed the business could be profitable.
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