Dreyer & Traub

Overview

Every retelling of Dreyer & Traub starts in 1986, when Steve Witkoff, then a young real estate lawyer at the firm, met Donald Trump — a client of the firm — and a friendship began over a sandwich in a deli (The Wall Street Journal). That story is true, but it starts the clock twelve years too late. The firm’s Trump story actually begins in 1974, when a 27-year-old Donald Trump walked into the office of senior partner George H. Ross at Dreyer & Traub with a plan to convert the rundown Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street into a first-class business hotel — and Ross agreed to see him out of courtesy, as he put it, “because I represented his father, Fred Trump” (George H. Ross, Trump Strategies for Real Estate). Two generations of Trumps passed through the firm’s doors before the famous sandwich.

Dreyer & Traub was a New York real estate law firm — Ross’s own description was “a well-known real estate law firm” — and its alumni list reads like a map of the city’s property world (Ross). It employed the lawyer who would become Trump’s Middle East envoy, the lawyer who would build Stellar Management into one of the city’s largest owners of commercial buildings, and the senior partner who would advise Trump on The Apprentice. The firm itself did not survive: by the time Witkoff recounted his rise to Property Week, it was already described as “the now-defunct firm of Dreyer & Traub” (Property Week). Its documented activity runs from at least 1953 — when Ross joined — through April 1996, when it appeared as Dreyer & Traub, L.L.P. in appellate litigation (case.law).

A real estate firm’s law firm

Ross’s account of joining Dreyer & Traub in 1953 gives the clearest surviving picture of the firm from the inside. Freshly admitted to the New York bar, he spotted a Law Journal ad for a law clerk; the friend from law school who answered the phone was already working at Dreyer & Traub and warned him the job paid only $25 a week and amounted to messenger work. Ross took it anyway (Ross). Though the firm dealt primarily in real estate, it handled litigation as a courtesy for clients, and Ross started in the litigation department. A few months later, an opening appeared upstairs in the real estate acquisition and leasing practice — “the place where real money was made” — and his friend, drafted into the army before he could start, recommended Ross for the spot (Ross).

Upstairs, Ross apprenticed to Murray Felton, whom he described as a demanding taskmaster and “a superb technician and highly regarded in the world of real estate attorneys,” and became adept at drafting leases, real estate documents, and handling transactions (Ross). Ross rose to senior partner, and it was in that capacity that Donald Trump entered his office in 1974. Ross told Trump the Commodore plan was brilliant but probably impossible given the powerful people and government agencies he would need to win over — then agreed to take the case if Trump would pay the legal fees. What followed was two years of negotiations with railroad executives, city and state officials, lenders, and Hyatt executives, a period in which Ross says he and Trump developed a lasting working relationship (Ross).

The entrepreneurial culture

Witkoff’s own description of the firm explains why it kept producing developers instead of lifers. “As much as a lawyer can wear a business man’s hat, Dreyer & Traub was that lawyer,” he told Property Week. “We were encouraged to think entrepreneurially. So in that environment, you naturally wanted to do what the client did. And that’s how I started in the real estate business” (Property Week). The firm’s lawyers were billing clients and studying them at the same time.

That culture shaped the firm’s most consequential partnership. In 1985, Witkoff and Laurence Gluck — two Dreyer & Traub lawyers — started cruising Washington Heights, then a decidedly non-prime part of Manhattan, in a 1978 maroon Buick with the front fender falling off, hunting for their first property. They bought a five-storey apartment building, taught themselves the physical work of running it, and used Gluck’s Spanish to talk with the largely Hispanic tenants; the building made money (Property Week). The Wall Street Journal adds the Harlem and Bronx tenement-buying of the same era and the company’s name: Stellar, a mashup of “Steve” and “Larry” (The Wall Street Journal). The partners split in 1997, with Witkoff concentrating on office buildings and Gluck on multifamily housing (Bisnow).

The 1986 meeting and the sandwich

The firm’s signature anecdote comes from Witkoff’s own testimony. He and Trump first met in 1986, when Witkoff was a young real estate lawyer at Dreyer & Traub and Trump was the firm’s client (The Wall Street Journal). Testifying for Trump in the fraud suit brought by the New York attorney general, Witkoff said the basis of their friendship was a sandwich: they had bumped into each other in a deli after working on a deal together, Trump had no cash, and “I ordered him a ham and Swiss” (The Wall Street Journal). Trump, in turn, became one of the inspirations for Witkoff’s leap from lawyer to developer, according to Witkoff’s son Alex (The Wall Street Journal).

Gluck’s path through the firm ran on a parallel track. He began in aviation litigation before moving into real estate law at Dreyer & Traub, and during those years he met some of the industry’s most prominent figures, including Peter Kalikow, Donald Zucker, and Donald Trump (Bisnow). He co-founded Stellar with Steve Witkoff and stayed with residential property after the 1997 split; diagnosed with ALS in 2013, he died at 71 in 2024 (Bisnow).

The firm’s own courtroom trouble

Dreyer & Traub’s public record is not only about the deals it papered. In Swersky v. Dreyer & Traub, the firm and one of its partners were the defendants. The case concerned the March 9, 1987 purchase of 460,000 shares of unregistered common stock of QMAX Technology Group for $1,150,000; Howard Morse was “the attorney who helped negotiate the sale on behalf of QMAX, and Dreyer and Traub is the law firm of which he is a partner” (case.law). The complaint alleged that Morse told investor David Swersky in December 1986 that his shares could be registered immediately, then said they could not be registered under an S-3 statement until November 1987; that on December 30, 1986, unbeknownst to Swersky, QMAX granted Morse an option for 100,000 ESOP shares; and that Dreyer & Traub prepared the February 1987 S-8 registration statement that Morse signed, which did not list his option shares (case.law).

The allegations went further: during the eight months the plaintiffs waited for registration, Morse sold a portion of the shares he had personally acquired and immediately registered, making a profit of at least $340,000; at a December 1987 meeting in the Dreyer & Traub offices, he urged Swersky to be a “team player” and extend the registration deadline, representing that none of QMAX’s officers had sold their shares — while QMAX’s relationships with major customers were deteriorating and the company rejected a $15 million financing offer Morse allegedly opposed because he hoped to arrange his own financing (case.law). QMAX missed the extended March 31, 1988 filing date, the SEC began an insider-trading investigation, QMAX filed for bankruptcy in July 1989, and the plaintiffs’ shares became worthless (case.law). On April 30, 1996, the First Department reinstated the fraud claims, holding that the trial court had wrongly dismissed them as a matter of law — the complaint’s allegations, accepted as true at that stage, set out a prima facie case of fraud (case.law).

The arc of the firm

What can be fixed with confidence is the arc, not the endpoints. The firm was active by 1953, when Ross joined as a clerk; it was still operating as Dreyer & Traub, L.L.P. in April 1996, when it appeared through counsel in the QMAX appeal (case.law). Sometime after that it disappeared from the landscape, and by the time Witkoff gave his Property Week interview about his rise — an interview that looks back on the 1985 Buick runs and the 1986 Trump meeting as history — the firm was already “now-defunct” (Property Week). Its legacy is the people who left it: Ross, who carried the Trump relationship from Fred to Donald; Witkoff, who carried its entrepreneurial ethos into a development empire; and Gluck, who carried it into one of New York’s largest residential portfolios.

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not give Dreyer & Traub a founding year or founders — no personally read source verified either. It does not give an exact dissolution date; the firm is documented through April 1996 and described as defunct by the turn of the 2000s, and nothing read here fills the gap between those points. It does not claim the Trump family’s relationship with the firm began in a specific decade: Ross’s book verifies that he represented Fred Trump by 1974 but does not date when the representation started. It does not repeat the $50,000-to-$35,000 pay-cut story attached to Larry Gluck’s arrival, which appears only in Wikipedia-derived material. And in the QMAX account, it presents the fraud allegations as the complaint stated them and the court treated them on a motion to dismiss — reinstatement of the claims is not a finding that the fraud occurred.