Just Don't Call 'Em Loan Sharks

How two guys from Brooklyn lost God and found $40 million.

- Zeke Faux

Abe Zeines’s hilltop mansion in Puerto Rico looks like a frat house after a rager. A wrecked golf cart blocks the driveway. An SUV with a blown tire sits on the grass out front. A porch over looking the Caribbean is littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts.

It’s a Monday morning in June, and Zeines is lounging in boxer shorts in his living room, drinking a Blue Moon. Two girls in bikinis are cooking breakfast for him and Meir Hurwitz, his best friend and business partner. The men, natives of Brooklyn, N.Y., are complaining about the restaurants on the island they’ve decided to call home. “There’s no item called eggs,” Zeines says. “You have to get the eggs with ham, hold the ham.”

Several hours and about a case of beer later, Zeines and Hurwitz are giving a tour of the six-bedroom house. Zeines heads into his bedroom to show off the harbor view, but inside it’s dark. His two girlfriends have been fighting over the blinds, he says; one insists on blocking out the sun. Down the hall, Hurwitz produces a leather whip from a bedside drawer. When he shows it to the women he brings home, he says, they’re frustratingly blasé: “Maybe that’s just what they expect from a guy with a house like this.”

For Zeines and Hurwitz, their time in the promised land has turned out to be a little disappointing. Given the things they’ve seen, life’s long since lost the ability to surprise. With a pound of lox as a housewarming gift, I’ve come to their tax-haven sex mansion to hear their improbable story—how two sons of an ultrareligious Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn witnessed the birth of a new kind of lending, made a fortune, and then saw it all come to an end. Not in the form of an FBI raid, but with Wall Street bankers paying millions to take over the action.