Kiiko Nakahara walked into Salomon Brothers, which was handling the sale for Prudential Trust, and said she was there to buy the building for her father, Hideki Yokoi, a billionaire mogul from Japan.

Nakahara and Renoir approaced Trump to increase their stake in the building. (Photo by Associated Press/Kathy Willens)

Salomon Brothers rejected Nakahara’s offer. Yokoi, as it turned out, was Japan's most infamous businessman, under investigation (and eventually imprisoned) by Japanese authorities for a fire that ravaged one of his hotels in downtown Tokyo, killing 33.

For a man who came of age during World War II, amassed his power and fortune in the post-War black market, carried a bullet in his body after an encounter with the Japanese yakuza and was used to the world trembling at his every command, 'no' simply meant 'yes' in slightly different circumstances.

To create those different circumstances, Yokoi found a front man to buy the building for him in the person of Oliver Grace Jr., an investor from New York City.

According to newspaper reports that appeared a few years later, the deal worked as follows: Grace bought the building anonymously with Yokoi’s money and later transferred it to a holding company called NS 1991 American Trust, which was controlled by Nakahara and Renoir.

With the building in their hands, Yokoi, Renoir and Nakahara realized that to get real value from it they needed to break the lease held by Leona Helmsley and Peter Malkin. They also realized the lease was airtight and couldn't be broken without a heavy hitter on their side. They needed a player and approached Donald Trump to make a deal.

The deal Renoir and Nakahara made with Trump was all upside, according to Pacelle.

Trump wouldn't drop a dime. Instead, he'd use his expertise to throw out Helmsley and Malkin and receive half the value of the building in compensation for anything above $45 million.

If he could break the lease, Yokoi's stake in the building could be worth upwards of a billion dollars, leaving Trump with the potential of earning hundreds of millions on the deal.

Throughout the rest of the decade, Trump filed a series of lawsuits claiming that rodent infestations, security lapses, shoddy repairs, inadequate upgrades and an undesirable tenant base demonstrated that Helmsley and Malkin were mismanaging the building. Because of this, he declared the lease void.

Equally significant, while Trump battled Helmsley and Malkin in court, his partners were battling one another.

Yokoi, who by this time was in a Toykyo prison, claimed Nakahara and Renoir were stealing buildings from him. French authorities agreed, and by the latter part of the decade, Nakahara was arrested in France, and Renoir toiled away in a New York prison, fighting extradition to France.

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