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“They could have gotten Larry out,” Mr. Betts said. It would have meant writing a check, Mr. Zuccotti said, but it could have been done. Robert D. Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, said the mayor and the governor “could have gotten in a room with Larry Silverstein and said, ‘You’re out of here.’ ”
But Mr. Yaro said the Port Authority had multiple motivations for retaining the Silverstein lease. “They saw it as their key to hanging on to the site,” he said. “They were afraid of losing control to the city or the state.”
Further, the Port Authority was counting on Mr. Silverstein’s aggressive pursuit of insurance proceeds as well as the more than $100 million a year in rent that the Port Authority depended on to keep its overall operation flush.
“I don’t think that should shock anybody,” Mr. Ringler said. “The World Trade Center was a moneymaker for this agency so that this agency, who pools its resources, can do all the other things we have to do.”
The World Trade Center site has been an even better moneymaker since Sept. 11, however, primarily because the attack coincided with the sale of the lease to Mr. Silverstein. While the Port Authority reported an average annual net income of $22 million on the complex in the five years before Sept. 11, it reported an average annual net income of $106 million on the empty site in the five years after.
“When you look at how much more profit we made,” Anthony R. Coscia, the authority’s chairman, said, “all it represents is monetizing an asset we sold before Sept. 11,” that is, turning the buildings into cash.