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In Hong Kong, the golf games, dinner parties and intensive talks featured the awkwardness and cultural miscues that can crop up in any high-stakes international negotiation. Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to play golf, but Mr. Trump was appalled when they told him they usually bet more than $1,000 on each hole. They ended up betting $100 per hole, and Mr. Trump wound up losing more than he won, Mr. Lo recalled in an interview this month.
“He’s a good golfer, but we had the local knowledge — he probably was jet-lagged,” Mr. Lo said.
Mr. Lo and Mr. Cheng invited Mr. Trump to dinner at the home of Mr. Cheng’s father, an uncommon honor in Chinese culture. But the evening was a trying experience for Mr. Trump.
“He didn’t like the food, and couldn’t use chopsticks,” recalled Mr. Wallach, who was there. “The first course was a whole fish, with the head still on. You could see the face of the fish and the teeth, which really looked grotesque. The servant put the fish in front of Donald. Donald said, ‘The honor belongs to Abe.’ I took my chopsticks and began to pick at it.”
Mr. Cheng and Mr. Lo also half-jokingly proposed an informal drinking contest, which Mr. Trump, a teetotaler, declined.
The Hong Kong partners were wary of Mr. Trump’s well-earned reputation for litigiousness. But for more than a decade, Mr. Trump avoided conflict with them. Indeed, he often deferred to them. Chase Manhattan Bank, which held Mr. Trump’s mortgage, initially scheduled the closing of the deal during China’s Ghost Month, during which some believe the spirits of the dead roam the earth.
“The Chinese told me that we would have to wait until after the fifteenth of September to close the deal,” Mr. Wallach wrote in a chapter of an unpublished book he is writing about his years with Mr. Trump. “Trump went apoplectic.” But he said that Mr. Trump went along.
(Mr. Lo said that any delay had been caused by a need to complete paperwork, and that he and his business partners were not superstitious.)
The project proved extremely profitable, as the New York real estate market rebounded. In 2005, the Hong Kong partners sold the development for $1.76 billion. Although it was believed to be the largest residential real estate transaction in the city’s history, Mr. Trump was furious, and contends to this day that his partners did not consult him first.
“I said: ‘Why didn’t you come talk to me? Whatever price you got, I could have gotten more money,’” Mr. Trump recalled in an interview this month.
Mr. Lo said that Mr. Trump had been informed of the decision, and that in any case it would have been very hard to shop such a large property around without Mr. Trump’s becoming aware of it.
Instead of accepting his share of the proceeds, Mr. Trump sued his partners for “staggering breach” of fiduciary duty in a lawsuit that demanded $1 billion in damages. Mr. Lo, who felt that Mr. Trump should have been appreciative of the deal he had received, called the lawsuit “a shock.”
And when the Hong Kong partners sought to invest the proceeds from the sale in Bank of America buildings in San Francisco and New York, Mr. Trump sought an injunction to scuttle the deal.
The judge ruled against him. Instead of receiving the cash he wanted, Mr. Trump had to accept a 30 percent share in the profits from the two Bank of America buildings, tied up in a partnership that is slated to last until 2044. But today, Mr. Trump counts that legal defeat as a victory.
“Through more luck than talent, I ended up much better because the buildings have increased in value,” he said. “In the end, it was fine.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Trump’s litigation over Riverside South dragged on for at least four years. He forced his partners to produce more than 166,000 pages of documents in court and accused them of various transgressions, including fraud and tax evasion.
During the litigation, Mr. Lo was forced to keep his trips to the United States secret, out of concern that Mr. Trump’s lawyers would serve him with court papers that would force him to remain in the United States.
Outside court, Mr. Trump’s battle seemed to take the shape of a personal rivalry with Mr. Lo, who had just bankrolled a Chinese reality television show called “Wise Man Takes All.” It loosely resembled Mr. Trump’s show “The Apprentice,” although Mr. Lo appeared just once on the show and handed out start-up capital to the winners instead of jobs.
Mr. Trump announced that he was going to take a version of “The Apprentice” to China to compete with Mr. Lo’s show, although Mr. Trump’s show there does not appear to have gotten off the ground. In an interview, Mr. Trump asked a reporter how Mr. Lo’s show had turned out, then answered his question: “Let’s put it this way. It wasn’t ‘The Apprentice,’ which was a big success.”
Mr. Lo said his show had met his real goal of promoting entrepreneurship in China.
After the lawsuit, the Hong Kong partners moved swiftly to cut all ties to Mr. Trump. Mr. Lo sold his shares in the partnership to the Cheng family, which sold to Vornado Realty Trust, now the owner of a 70 percent interest in the Bank of America buildings.
But in the interview, Mr. Trump sounded almost wistful about his former partners, marveling at the money they had made together and at the fact that they no longer spoke. He acknowledged that his former partners might have gotten the best deal possible on Riverside South, after all.
“It’s too bad that this happened,” Mr. Trump told a reporter.
“If you speak to Vincent and Henry, tell them I think they are fantastic people,” he said. “You let them know that Donald Trump has great respect for them, O.K.?”
Eight thousand miles away, in his penthouse office in Hong Kong, Mr. Lo laughed when told of Mr. Trump’s comment. He made clear that he had not forgotten being sued for $1 billion.
“Well, that’s him,” Mr. Lo said. “To file a lawsuit is nothing. It’s just like having lunch.”
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