When Gooch Ware Travelstead dreamed, he dreamed big. When he built, he built on a gargantuan scale -- skyscrapers looming over midtown Manhattan; desolate London docklands transformed into a glittering new city; a spectacular tower on a beach in Barcelona.
Product of a modest Baltimore upbringing, Travelstead lived with abandon, outspending ordinary millionaires at posh restaurants and resorts.
He planned a ski resort with the shah of Iran; helped Margaret Thatcher muscle her capitalist vision through Parliament; charmed Prince Charles into endorsing his splashy constructions; bought Bruce Babbitt's Arizona ranches when his old friend became secretary of the interior; lent $8,000 to Sidney Biddle Barrows, the "Mayflower madam," to hire a lawyer.
And now that he is falling, Travelstead naturally is falling on a grand scale.
His bankruptcy has dragged on for three years, employed a dozen Baltimore lawyers and left a trail of furious partners, employees and friends. They call him not G. Ware Travelstead, but Beware Travelstead.
He is forced to scrape by on a $15,000-a-month "allowance" from the bankruptcy account. In Spain, he faces a criminal charge of misappropriation -- a charge he says was concocted by a former CIA agent with whom he shared a Planet Hollywood franchise.
"I became a convenient target," Travelstead, 61, said in a recent interview in his lawyer's office on St. Paul Street, the first time he has spoken publicly about his financial troubles.
Most of the aggrieved investors and employees made plenty of money -- they just wanted to make more, Travelstead says. With a wave of the hand, he retreats to what it takes to make omelets.
"I've broken plenty of eggs," he says.
In an age in which most buildings are safe imitations, Travelstead seems a throwback to earlier times when grandiose egos built their colossal reflections, from the pyramids to the Taj Mahal. Where others had bookkeepers pinching pennies, Travelstead confidently lavished millions -- usually other people's millions -- on his ideas.
A big man -- he's 6 feet 2 and weighs well over 200 pounds -- with thinning gray hair, Travelstead nearly bounced from his chair as he relived the glory days.
By his own estimate, his wealth peaked in the mid-1980s at close to $100 million. He had a 135-foot motor yacht, a private jet he flew himself, a fleet of luxury cars, a London townhouse, a Connecticut mansion, an island estate on the Eastern Shore and, for a while, a fondness for cocaine.
He invested some money in preserving his name: There's a G. Ware Travelstead Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University graduate school of design.
This month, Travelstead plans to move from Barcelona to Virginia Beach with his third wife, Cheryl, 36, her two children and their baby son. But between him and a new start is a legal and financial quagmire.
"When all this is over, I'll be lucky to have a few million dollars left," he lamented. But then, he added, "I've never done anything just to make money. I like to create things. I love to see a blank sheet of paper and have an idea and a few years later see it built."
Edythe Travelstead, his second wife, an interior designer and his collaborator through the high-flying '70s and '80s, watched that process play and replay from Utah to Australia.
"Visionary he certainly is," says the former Mrs. Travelstead, 57, who now lives a quieter life renovating old houses on Nantucket. "And to make visions come true, I guess a visionary has to be a little bit of a con man."
"He's larger than life," says Baltimore developer David S. Cordish, who played lacrosse for City College when Travelstead played for Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. "He paints with a big brush on a big canvas. Ware's the stuff movies are made of."
Martin Kabat, business manager at Washington College in Chestertown before he was recruited as bookkeeper for the Barcelona hotel project, says, "Ware has this incredible ability to charm people when he wants to. He can be incredibly generous. But he's not a saint. He's a developer."
Like Travelstead, Kabat faces Spanish criminal charges. Both say the charges are groundless, the work of Ray Velazquez, Travelstead's former partner in a planned five-restaurant Planet Hollywood franchise in Spain. They say Velazquez has harassed them and distorted the facts in an attempt to acquire Travelstead's Spanish assets cheap.
A Cuban-born former CIA man and Treasury agent who proudly displays signed photographs of himself with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Velazquez says he merely wants to see Travelstead brought to justice.
"I just want to stop him so he can't hurt anyone else," says Velazquez, 59, a Miami businessman.
A little bit of magic
It might not surprise his business partners that Travelstead, who could conjure spectacular buildings out of thin air and make millions of dollars disappear, taught himself magic while growing up in Roland Park. Calling himself the "Great Goocharini," he used his patter to cure his stuttering.
He had been born Fletcher Ware Travelstead, son of Will Gooch Travelstead, a Baltimore contractor. But when the next son, Will G. Travelstead Jr., died at age 5 of leukemia, his parents renamed the older child Gooch Ware Travelstead. In 1997, when his new son was born, Travelstead named him Fletcher.
The young Travelstead attended Roland Park public school and graduated from Poly in 1956. His father, who ended his career overseeing construction of the World Trade Center and other projects for the port of Baltimore, wanted him to be an architect. He enrolled in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
By his account, he barely graduated. Many years later, the prodigal son would return as an RPI trustee.
After working for his father for a year, Travelstead joined McCormick, the Baltimore spice giant, working at first in sales. "The dry cleaners could never get the smell of cinnamon out of your clothes," he says. Moving to McCormick's real estate division, Travelstead oversaw construction of the Hunt Valley Inn and a nearby golf course.
In 1969, he left McCormick to found Total Concepts Inc., to manage real estate projects from conception to construction. While a secretary handled the money from offices on Ritchie Highway in Arnold, Travelstead jetted around the country. After splitting up with his first wife, the mother of his three now-grown sons, he married Edythe.
With Edythe handling design duties, Travelstead built an insurance company headquarters in Wisconsin; renovated a building for Hanes, the underwear maker, in Winston-Salem, N.C.; and vastly expanded the Snowbird ski area in Utah. Then, in a characteristic leap of ambition, he decided to parlay the ski experience into a deal with the shah of Iran.
'He'll get us the shah'
Spotting former New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay on television one day, Edythe Travelstead recalls, Ware had a brainstorm. "He said, 'I'm gonna get Lindsay, and he'll get us the shah,' " she says. "I said, 'You don't know Lindsay. Lindsay's not going to talk to you.' But I was wrong."
Before long, Travelstead was cruising over Iran's Elburz Mountains in military helicopters, surveying the shah's proposed $275 million ski resort. As scores of Western businessmen stewed in the Tehran Hilton awaiting appointments with the shah's aides -- former Vice President Spiro T. Agnew among them -- Travelstead met the ruler himself in Tehran and St. Moritz, the Swiss ski resort favored by the shah.
"We had to wait 10 days one time to see him and skied every day -- as his guests," Travelstead recalls.
But Iranian unrest and oil prices killed that project, and the Travelsteads' failed attempt to buy Steamboat Springs, a Colorado ski resort, left them broke. "We were living on candy bars," Edythe recalls.
In New York City, Travelstead bounced back, tackling huge high-rise projects, pioneering the move of financial firms from overcrowded Wall Street to midtown Manhattan. Chiefly in partnership with First Boston, he built at least five Manhattan office towers.
"A lot of development is just problem-solving," Travelstead says. "You end up being everything from pop psychiatrist to time-and-motion expert to management consultant. And at the end of the process, you may put up a building."
An international view
In 1985, Travelstead and a friend were looking at London's dilapidated docklands. "It was more desolate than Baltimore's Inner Harbor at its worst -- wind swept, a lot of buildings knocked down," Travelstead recalls.
The friend thought an old banana warehouse had renovation potential, maybe for a trading floor. Travelstead, as usual, was thinking much bigger.
London's old financial district was overcrowded and troubled. "The answer was lying out there in no man's land," he says. But to lure yuppie traders required shops, restaurants, a subway connection.
Over the next two years, enlisting such allies as Prime Minister Thatcher and Prince Charles, Travelstead planned Canary Wharf, then the largest real estate development in Europe. He negotiated a rail tunnel under the historic Tower of London and persuaded Parliament that the big American wasn't crazy after all.
He and Edythe accelerated their already Concorde-speed lifestyle.
"They lived on a scale that was beyond my comprehension," says Brooke Travelstead, who is married to Travelstead's younger brother, Malcolm, a banker.
Ware and Edythe would take several couples to Venice for long weekends at $2,000-a-day luxury hotels or rent a villa in Tuscany. They had chauffeurs on both sides of the Atlantic. One friend says they estimated total expenses for their various homes at $3 million a year.
Something else added to the spending, Edythe says: Cocaine. She says she used the drug far less than did her husband, in whom she says it provoked fits of "paranoia and rage."
Travelstead doesn't deny the drug use, which he says ended in 1991, but adds: "I never viewed it as a problem on my part."
In July 1987, the three banks investing in Canary Wharf decided to sell their interest to the Canadian Reichmann family, who owned one of the world's largest real estate empires. The Travelsteads were heartbroken -- but when the stock market crashed in October 1987, they realized they were fortunate to be out of the project.
Canary Wharf struggled for years and bankrupted the Reichmanns; today it is a spectacular success.
In 1988, when the mayor of Barcelona phoned, Travelstead thought it was brother Malcolm spoofing an accent and hung up on him. But soon Ware and Edythe were working long days overseeing another huge project, the 45-story beachfront Hotel Arts.
It brought a world of headaches. At the peak, construction cost $1 million a day, employing 4,000 squabbling construction workers from a dozen countries. The Travelsteads' marriage was falling apart; eventually Ware banned Edythe from the construction site. But he didn't curtail his spending.
Kabat, the former Washington College manager who was keeping the books, says he tried fruitlessly to rein in Travelstead's nothing-but-the-best style.
"He'd answer, 'In this business, there's no other way. If you fly coach, no one will respect you,' " Kabat recalls.
Only 200 of the new hotel's 463 rooms were open for the 1992 Olympics, though Travelstead says tennis and track stars rushed to take the opulent rooms. In the end, Kabat says, the hotel, planned at $230 million, cost a whopping $800 million.
Sogo, the Japanese department store conglomerate that provided the hotel's financing, sued Travelstead in 1994 for $85 million, claiming he had "systematically looted million of dollars from project financing."
Yet the Great Goocharini's magic was not yet exhausted. In August 1994, Travelstead flew to Tokyo to confront Sogo's chief. Sogo dropped its suit -- and lent Travelstead $3 million. (The hotel is now a success, with 90 percent occupancy, though its huge cost makes it a money-loser for Sogo.)
Meanwhile, Travelstead landed with a splash in Australia, where he became a major shareholder in a land company.
But in 1996, his luck finally ran out. Facing a foreclosure sale of his million-dollar Eastern Shore estate near Oxford, called Sol's Island, he filed for bankruptcy in Baltimore. He listed $58 million in assets; based on the sale price of some major properties, that seems to have been an overestimate, as was the $117 million he listed in a statement for a lender a few months earlier.
More blows followed.
Gail Tabor, a girlfriend living at Sol's Island, sold some paintings to an Easton dealer; he had her charged with theft. Eduardo Canet, a former employee, sued him and won $2.7 million, becoming the largest creditor in his bankruptcy. Patrick J. B. Donnelly, a Baltimore lawyer, went to court seeking $4 million, claiming that his old friend had deceived him in the Australian land deal.
Virginia Kowalski-Ramirez, who had run Travelstead's personal finances from the Ritchie Highway office for more than 20 years, accused him of reneging on a promise of a house and lifetime salary. Ray Velazquez pursued criminal charges against his former partner in Spain. And Edythe, who was fighting cancer, took on her former husband in a nasty divorce fracas.
Last September, a judge told them it was high time to strike a deal. Travelstead stood up and said, "Edythe, let's go to dinner."
Sans lawyers, over crabs at Obrycki's on East Pratt Street, they reached an agreement. "We'd lobbed missiles at each other since 1994. But we had a lovely dinner. It was as if we'd never fought," Edythe says.
Along with an industrial-sized ego and temper, Edythe Travelstead says, her former husband had a generous, public spirit. She would scold him for routinely giving his Mets skybox tickets to New York doormen. Once, he injured himself subduing a man threatening to hijack a plane,Edythe says.
"I learned a lot of graciousness and softness from him," she says. But since the bankruptcy, she says, he has changed: "I think the dark side has taken over."
Nonsense, Travelstead says. He expects the Spanish charges to go away. He insists all his creditors will be paid in full -- an assertion backed by Joel I. Sher, the Baltimore lawyer appointed to sell off assets and pay debts.
Travelstead has offers from two major law firms to do real estate consulting, he says, and he plans to see what can be done with air rights he owns near Grand Central Station.
He recalls his father, the Baltimore contractor, driving around town, pointing at buildings and declaring, "I built that." Despite erratic finances, Travelstead says of his father, "he took great pride in what he did."
"As a family, we went from boom to bust to boom to bust," Travelstead says. "I guess I followed in his footsteps."
Pub Date: 7/04/99