Doctoroff tied to W. Side deal Juan Gonzalez NY DAILY NEWS

For more than five months, the deputy mayor has resisted giving straight answers to questions I've asked him about a rather large financial gain that his current and former business partners made in December 2003,

when they refinanced a 16-story office building in the Hudson Yards area through $330 million in loans and equity.

The deal closed two months after top staff at the Department of City Planning - an agency supervised by Doctoroff -

gave initial approval to an unusual rezoning proposal that was tailored for the building.

Doctoroff was one of the investors in the building when its managing partners began their negotiations with the city for the change.

The two-block pyramid office building at 450 W. 33rd St. sits directly across Tenth Ave. from the West Side railyards -

right by where Doctoroff and Bloomberg are pushing to build a new Jets stadium and Olympic plaza as part of the city's bid to capture the 2012 Games.

The zoning change is immensely valuable. It would permit the building's current owners to demolish the structure and replace it with a commercial and residential complex larger than Time Warner's mammoth 2.8 million-square-foot building at Columbus Circle.

The City Council approved the change in January as part of the entire Hudson Yards package,

but it has been in the works since at least early 2003.

Current tenants in the building include the Daily News, The buttociated Press and WNET Channel 13.

Doctoroff has said he held a minor, noncontrolling stake of "less than 2%" in one of the partnerships that bought the building jointly with three other real estate groups in 1999 for $220 million.

Texas billionaire Robert Bbutt, the deputy mayor's former employer and longtime business partner,

was the main investor in the Doctoroff group, FW 450 West 33rd St. LLC.

Doctoroff has referred all my questions about this to his personal lawyer, David Lakhdhir,

who said last week that the deputy mayor's original equity interest in the building was

"a relatively small amount" of "approximately $71,000."

Lakhdhir declined to disclose precisely when the deputy mayor divested from the building,

except to say that it was sometime in "late 2003."

He also refused to say how much he profited.

"It was not a material amount," Lakhdhir said.

What's "material" for Doctoroff might be quite different than for you and me.

He is, after all, a multimillionaire financier who accepts only a $1-a-year salary because the annual income from his investment portfolio dwarfs any conceivable government salary.

Like his billionaire boss Mayor Bloomberg, Doctoroff is so rich he had to place his extensive holdings in two blind trusts when he entered city government to avoid any potential conflicts with his official duties.

At his request, one of those trusts - the one that manages his numerous private investments with Bbutt - sold off Doctoroff's shares in the 33rd St. building, as well as a half-dozen other mid-Manhattan office buildings, after he joined the Bloomberg administration.

Until last week, Doctoroff said he couldn't recall when he was notified by the trustee that those sales were completed.

His New York real estate investments, including the 33rd St. building, were partially financed by a series of loans from Bbutt,

for which Doctoroff pledged a share of his interest in those investments as security, according to state Uniform Commercial Credit records reviewed by The News.

Those same state records, however, do not indicate the loan for the 33rd St. investment was ever terminated,

which raises further questions about when - or if - Doctoroff actually divested from the building.

"They screwed up in the Bbutt organization and neglected to file a termination," Lakhdhir said.

Termination notices are not required by law, but they are routinely used by Bbutt and other major lenders to record a debt as paid.

Bbutt employees also apparently neglected to file terminations for his other loans to Doctoroff for Manhattan real estate, state records show.

None of that matters, according to City Hall spokeswoman Jennifer Falk,

because the deputy mayor had no involvement in rezoning decisions for the 33rd St. building and thus could not have affected its value.

Amanda Burden, chairwoman of the City Planning Commission, does report directly to Doctoroff, but Burden's staff handles rezoning matters, Falk said.

Well, not exactly.

After I filed repeated Freedom of Information requests with Burden's staff, they finally confirmed to me that the agency had identified at least one E-mail exchange in its files,

dated May 14, 2004, among Doctoroff's office, the city planning staff and the city's Economic Development Corp. staff, that discusses the rezoning of 450 W. 33rd St.

The agency has refused to provide me a copy of that E-mail,

claiming it is part of

"interagency deliberations" that are exempt from public disclosure.

It did supply copies of other staff E-mails, however. One of those indicates that a month after the May 14 E-mail exchange with Doctoroff's office,

department staff added a second, more lucrative enhancement to the proposed rezoning for the 33rd St. building.

Next: Doctoroff's partners in 450 W.33rd St., and how the building got its special rezoning.