Immigrant entrepreneur imported dates and VWs, then built a real estate empire. Fund at The Trust continues his charitable legacy.
Victor Elmaleh (1918-2014)
It all began with the chewy, caramelly fruit of the date palm, a symbol of prosperity in Morocco, where Victor Elmaleh was born. His business ventures eventually grew into World-Wide Group, a multibillion-dollar New York real estate development enterprise.
In the early 1940s, Victor and his young wife, Sono Osato, a celebrated ballerina, were living in Brooklyn and expecting their first child. Victor had studied architecture at the University of Virginia and worked as a draftsman but realized he needed a more secure income. He decided to join his father’s import-export business, bringing dates from Morocco to this country and shipping sugar and tires to the northern African nation.
Before long, he and two friends from college, Frank and Arthur Stanton, started World-Wide Holdings to trade surplus goods around the globe. In the early 1950s, they began shipping Volkswagen Beetles to Morocco and importing the first of those tiny cars into the United States—no easy task. They had to persuade American dealers to stock a product from Germany, which only a decade earlier had been the enemy. Then there was the car’s squat, bug-like look. “Think small,” their ads said.
Victor Elmaleh was born November 27, 1918, in Mogador, French Morocco, to Ralph Elmaleh and the former Sarah Levy. The name Victor was chosen to commemorate the victory of France and its allies in World War I. One translation of his Arabic last name is “the master,” and Victor lived up to it.
In 1925, his family traveled to Brooklyn to join relatives who had already established roots there. Later that year, his parents decided to move back to Morocco, but Victor stayed behind with family members because he wanted to go to school in this country. “I’ve never quite understood how they let a seven-year-old make such a decision,” he said in an oral history interview.
Victor attended Brooklyn’s Edward B. Shallow Junior High and New Utrecht High School, graduating in 1936. He studied piano at Brooklyn College, but after a ruptured appendix nearly killed him, he transferred to the University of Virginia and switched his major to architecture.
Growing up in Bensonhurst and Borough Park, Victor loved playing one-wall handball. That led to four-ball handball and then to squash, a sport he dedicated much of his life to. In 1968, Victor, who was 49, and his partner, squash legend Victor Niederhoffer, 23, won the national doubles championship. “Too old for squash?” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch headline said. “Don’t tell Vic Elmaleh” Forty-three years later, a headline in The New York Times read: “92 Years Old, And Still Ruling the Squash Court.”
Another favorite pastime was painting, which Victor took up in the 1970s. He estimated he’d painted more than 4,000 watercolors in his lifetime, most of them very small, which he displayed in more than 30 gallery exhibitions. “The more you look, the larger these works become,” New York Times art critic Grace Glueck wrote in 1984.
In the mid-1980s, after Victor and his partners had imported and distributed nearly 2 million Volkswagens, Audis, Porsches, and other European cars into this country, they sold the distributorships and started investing in New York City real estate. Their new enterprise, World-Wide Group, developed an estimated $7 billion worth of properties while Victor was chairman.
The firm teamed up with William Zeckendorf Jr. on the $300 million Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza-Manhattan, a 46-story hotel on Broadway between 48th and 49th Streets that can light up like a jukebox. In the late 1980s, World-Wide was among the backers of Worldwide Plaza on the site of the third Madison Square Garden, at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. That project helped push midtown Manhattan development to the West Side. Other projects include Citylights in Long Island City, 71 Broadway, 255 East 74th Street, and 300 East 55th Street, according to several real estate publications.
In October 2014, Victor attended the “topping out” ceremony for his final project, QLIC, a 421-unit luxury residential and commercial complex in Long Island City. He died a month later, on November 17, at age 95.
His wife, Sono Osato, was born August 27, 1919, in Omaha, Nebraska, to Shoji Osato and the former Frances C. Fitzpatrick. Sono was the first American dancer to join the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo, and she danced with the American Ballet Theatre. Shortly after she and Victor were married in 1944, she played the lead in the original Broadway production of “On the Town.” They had two sons, Niko, an executive with World-Wide Group, and Antonio, author of “The Ones They Left Behind.” Sono died December 26, 2018, and Antonio passed away in 2020.
Arthur Stanton, Victor’s partner in World-Wide, was born in 1918 and died in 1987 at a VW dealers’ meeting in Hawaii. According to his obituary in The New York Times, he bought the first Beetle sold in the United States in 1949 from a Dutch importer, who was trying to interest American dealers in the little cars. He also was one of the first official VW distributors in the United States.
Frank Stanton, Arthur’s brother and the third partner in World-Wide, was born in 1921 and died of complications from Parkinson’s disease on May 9, 1999, at his home in Water Mill, Long Island.
During his lifetime, Victor Elmaleh supported many artistic and philanthropic causes. He was on the board of The Orchestra of St. Lukes and the Concert Artists Guild, which established an annual competition in his name. The University of Virginia School of Architecture features the Elmaleh East Wing and the Elmaleh Gallery. And in a nod to his favorite sport, he supported the Elmaleh-Stanton Squash Center at the Southampton Recreation Center on Long Island.
In 2002, the company he founded created the World-Wide Fund in The New York Community Trust.
