A Man with Friends

Each morning, in his Los Angeles penthouse, a dapper real-estate man named Alexander Wolanow carefully runs an electric razor over his chin, cheeks and jowls. Then, with smooth, swift motions, he keeps right on mowing back over his entire skull. The reason, says "Sacha" Wolanow, is that "I like to be different."

Sacha Wolanow doesn't have to look like a cue ball to be different: his mysterious operations set him apart from most men. Last week he bought a housing development for $1,025,000 ($365,000 in cash), then dashed back to his office to cook up another million-dollar deal. The buy was just one of 76 similar apartment houses (some 2,700 apartments) that Sacha has bought since he appeared on the Los Angeles real-estate scene two years ago. He drives through the city in a $9.650 white Cadillac, has been known to carry $1.000,000 in cash to close a deal, reportedly has accounts in 28 banks. So far, he has bought $25 million in buildings and shows no sign of slowing down.

"It's Very Simple." Where does Los Angeles' mystery man get all the money? No one knows. Los Angeles' better Business Bureau and California's state corporation licensing agency have both investigated Sacha Wolanow, given him a clean bill of health. He talks about "rich friends" in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Hong Kong and Formosa who want to invest their money in the U.S. "I got the cash," he says. "What for I want to explain? I got friends . . . who are thinking of the future. No one knows what gives. So these people get their money to me and I invest it for them . . . It's so very simple." Simple or not, what Wolanow does with the money has real-estate men goggle-eyed. He says he can get his investors at least a 15% yearly return on their money by buying old apartment buildings cheaply and fixing them up to rent for an average of $60 an apartment a month. He makes his big profits, he says, by fast tax depreciation.

Last month, for example, Wolanow bought the Edgemont Manor in Los Angeles for $445,000, paying a little less than half in cash, the rest with a 5% mortgage. Upkeep runs $42,600 a year and gross income $84,000. The income would be taxable except that Sacha can deduct his depreciations, e.g., 5% yearly of the building valued at $250,000, and 20% on the furniture valued at $150,000. The total yearly depreciation adds up to $42,500, every penny of it deductible from income and all taxfree. After a few years, when the furniture is depreciated 100%, Wolanow plans to exchange the building plus some cash for another, thus begin depreciating all over again. His success depends on how long Los Angeles' real-estate values keep climbing. So far, he says, "my friends love me."

The Gold-Plated Cadillac. Sacha Wolanow's past is just as mysterious as the "friends" he keeps talking about. He says he was born in Poland 40 years ago, migrated at the age of twelve, first to Strasbourg, then Paris, where he claims to have made a fortune in the textile market by the time he was 20: "I don't just spend my money. I sneak my money to England, and there I buy gold bars. In 1938 I got enough gold. When Hitler started strutting around. I, Sacha, marched out." Somehow--he won't say how--he got his money to Canada in 1939. How did he get to the U.S.? "I buy a brand-new Cadillac," he tells with a smile, "cross the border and drive to Los Angeles." Says Sacha Wolanow, fingering a three-carat diamond ring: "I am going to buy and buy until I'm the biggest real-estate man in America. I will make Zeckendorf* look like peanuts."

*Manhattan real-estate tycoon whose deals include the Chrysler Building and the site for the U.N.

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