Abe Hirschfeld

Abe Hirschfeld was born in Poland but moved to the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s; he later claimed that most of his family died during the Holocaust. He moved to the United States with his family in the 1950s and made his first fortune on open-air parking garages. Part of his fortune was used for his purchase of the Hudson Theater in 1956. In the year 2000, Hirschfeld was sentenced to three years in prison for attempting to arrange the murder of one of his business partners, who died before he had the chance to execute the murder. He served two years in prison, during which time he developed a new diet and a plan to build a new World Trade Center. He died in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital from heart failure and cancer.