Howard Michaels, the tough-talking finance broker, shot off an email in 2014 to his client Michael Shvo.
Michaels, who heads the Carlton Group, had just gotten off a long phone call with Nicholas Mastroianni II, the head of the U.S. Immigration Fund, New York’s biggest EB-5 regional center, and was convinced that EB-5 money from Chinese investors was the perfect financing solution for Shvo’s planned 275-unit condo at 125 Greenwich Street in Lower Manhattan. “[It] sounds like legalized crack cocaine,” he raved to Shvo, according to an email later revealed in a lawsuit between the two. “You guys would be crazy not to jump on this.”