If you are looking for a speaker who will walk onto your stage with the energy of a closing argument — and send your members home ready to fight for the businesses they built — then I am your speaker.
For thirty years, my arenas have been the places where businesses live or die. Brooklyn courtrooms, standing in front of juries with everything on the line. The halls of city and state government. And the national stage — more than 500 appearances on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and the Today Show. In all those rooms, I learned one truth:
The verdict does not go to the side with the most money. It goes to the side with the most passion, the deepest preparation, and the truer story.
That’s how we kept Walmart — the largest retailer on planet Earth — out of New York City. They haven’t opened one store. To this day. That’s how we passed the first-ever cap on Uber in the United States of America — when no city in the world had dared to stand up to them, we stood up. And we won.
That’s how we saved in-school medical care for 100,000 New York City schoolchildren. That’s how we passed New York’s first-ever staged-accident insurance fraud legislation. That’s how we kept thousands of children with special needs in New York schools instead of being bused out of
state. That’s how we passed bills vital to healthcare and to the beer industry, won new fields for Little Leagues, and broke through administrative agencies blocking important projects. And
that’s how we stopped thousands of pieces of horrible legislation from ever becoming law.
And when Donald Trump was a private businessman, he brought me his toughest fights against government — and we won. We beat the Parks Department to win him the permits to build at Jones Beach. We took on the California Coastal Commission so his giant American flag could keep flying over the Pacific at his golf course. We carried the fight over windmills all the way to the government of Scotland. And my firm produced the event the whole world remembers — the escalator ride into history.
“How to Fight City Hall and Win” turns those battles into a playbook for your members. Because City Hall is not a building in New York — it’s the zoning board sitting on their expansion, the inspector at the door on the busiest night of the year, the legislature about to vote on a bill that treats them like the enemy. Every hearing is a trial. The government is a jury. And most business owners are losing their case without ever putting on a defense.
This keynote is not a lecture — it is a closing argument, delivered on behalf of your members’ survival. They will walk out with a five-move, courtroom-tested strategy they can run in any
town in America — tell your story first, find your political champion, out-prepare everyone, run a campaign instead of a complaint, and never get baited — and with the certainty that the
American dream they built with their own two hands is worth fighting for.
One promise: before I walk onto your stage, I will know your industry’s fights by name — the rules, the agencies, the bills — and I will call them out from the platform. Your members won’t hear a speaker. They’ll hear their advocate.
My speaking reel accompanies this letter — watch it, and you’ll see the fire your stage will get.
If it’s the fire you want, give me fifteen minutes — I’ll fight for that room the
way I’ve fought for every client of my career.