Summary

In Lesson #5: A Big Lie Can Build Character, Trey culled through public records to find the name of his landlord. While “wealthy building owners and real estate developers […] shielded their names by hiding shell companies like Russian nesting dolls”, the narrator dug through enough records to discover that his landlord’s name was Fred Trump (55). Shortly after, Marvin Leibman arranged a meeting for Trey with Clive Oswyn, “a commercial real estate owner who specialized in leasing to hundreds of bodega owners thought the five boroughs” (56). At the meeting, Clive assumed that Trey was backed by the NAACP, the ACLU, or the Urban League. While Trey had no such affiliations, he knew that the real estate developer’s assumption could work in his favor. At the library, the narrator discovered that...