Silverstein Was Calling Lawyer To Get Double Insurance On WTC On The Evening Of 9/11
Firstly, you can watch a recent CBS interview in which Silverstein claims that he should have been in the WTC on 9/11, but his wife insisted he go to a dermatologist’s appointment, thereby saving his life:
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/60_minutes/video/?pid=dCJDTFzLiEO_a32xTRfMdMMYQd1nHV1N&play=true
Secondly, it is worth noting that already on the evening of 9/11, Silverstein was calling his lawyers, to see if he could make a double claim on his WTC insurance policy. See this 9/11 Timeline entry:
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a091201doubleinsurance&scale=0
The key information is from pp. 18-19 of Steven Brill’s book, After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era. Brill wrote:
“Real estate developer Larry Silverstein was on his way to a dermatologist on the morning of the 11th, instead of the Trade Center—the multibillion-dollar complex where he had leveraged a $14 million personal investment in a partnership that owned the leasing rights to the buildings into bragging rights as the complex’s putative owner. Silverstein would tell the author five months later that he was so shocked and sickened by the destruction and by the loss of four of his employees that morning that he did not think he focused on issues like insurance or finances until “perhaps two weeks later.” In fact, according to his own lawyers, by that evening he was on the phone with them worrying whether his effort to shave costs when he’d bought insurance would now come back to hurt him, or whether his insurance policies could be read in a way that would construe the attacks as two separate, insurable incidents rather than one. The difference was roughly $3.55 billion versus $7.1 billion—the kind of gap corporate litigators dream of.”
[End of quote]
If you want to verify this quote for yourself, you can search Brill’s book at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743237099/