Victor the Poseur
Telling tales to gullible journalists

© by Mark Reutter

Excerpted from “The Posner Chronicles I,” published in Warfield's, Baltimore’s Business Monthly, May 1990

The 12,000-word "Posner Chronicles" published in Warfield's is available upon request. Send request through “Contact Us.”

In a 1981 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Victor Posner reminisced about his early life in Baltimore. “When I was 11 years old, I had a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory. I was so good that a famous violinist wanted to take me as a pupil.”

Posner’s descriptions of his achievements as a Baltimore adolescent are regularly trotted out by the financial press. According to Forbes, for example, Posner was “born in poverty” in the “slums of Baltimore,” quit school at age 13, and was a real estate mogul by 21. Business Week reported that he had $1 million stashed away in real estate profits before he was old enough to vote. “I could have retired at 18 if I‘d wanted to,” he told the magazine.

Posner values himself highly and seems to have tailored his early life to fit his opinion of himself as a child prodigy and teenage empire builder. Records at Peabody do confirm that he attended the school at age 11, but not as a full-time student. He was one of 2,000 children who participated in Peabody’s popular after-school programs. He took half-hour lessons in sight-reading and piano, according to the school, and if he had a scholarship, it was for a modest sum: Music lessons then cost $66 per semester.

His childhood was scarred neither by poverty nor prejudice. Born in 1918, he grew up in Pimlico (of race track fame and nobody’s definition of a “slum” in the 1920s), where he lived with his parents and seven brothers and sisters in one of the larger houses in the neighborhood. His father, Morris Posner, was a Russian immigrant who owned a delicatessen in East Baltimore.

Boyhood friend Tony Piccinini scoffs at reports that Posner was a millionaire by 18. This would place him on that lofty summit in Depression 1936, the same year that Tony remembers him as an anxious, argumentative clerk at his father’s deli. Polk’s City Directory backs up Piccinini’s recollection, listing Victor Posner’s occupation as “store clerk” in 1936 and as “store manager” in 1937.

The manager label was a source of intergenerational friction, Piccinini remembers. “Victor and his father argued over everything.” When Morris refused Victor’s demand to be put in charge of the store, the son opened his own shop down the street.

While Morris stuck to deli foods, Victor branched out into meats, cottage cheese, eggs, and other grocery items. Always competing, he would send delivery boy Piccinini out to gather intelligence on the prices and products of other mom-and-pop stores in the neighborhood. When Tony reported that another merchant had lowered the price of eggs to 13 cents a dozen, Victor reacted quickly. “He had a big sale – eggs two dozen for 25 cents. And we sold a whole lot.”

Baltimore friends discount two other stories that have circulated over the years – that as a teenager Victor started a newspaper stand where “he had the whole family working for him” (Connie Brock, The Predators' Ball), and that he “put together a small chain of supermarkets” out of his father’s holdings (Business Week). The first venture apparently did not happen. The family never had a newsstand, according to several Posner relatives. The second is an inflated description of a humble operation.

Sometime between 1938 and 1939, according to Piccinini, Victor staged his first hostile takeover ­– he bought his dad’s deli. He sold the store and used the proceeds to buy several other stores.

“No way you could call it a chain of supermarkets,” says Piccinini. “It was two or at most three stores with no more than five employees. I remember his store on Greenmount Avenue was unbelievable, maybe 20 by 15 feet [in size]. He had to sit on a wooden milk box to eat his lunch because there was no other place he could sit.”

If young Victor was piling up profits buying and selling inner-city houses in the late 1930s, there is no record of such frenzied activity in Baltimore City real estate records. Instead, the records indicate that he did not become a property trader until June 1940, when he was nearly 22 years old. With partners Paul Huddles and Jack Fox, Posner bought two small rowhouses in West Baltimore, taking out a $1,100 mortgage.

Posner subsequently bought, sold, and mortgaged properties, often in predominately poor and black “alley streets,” but was never considered a major factor in the city’s property business. “If Victor Posner was pulling in a million bucks, he was doing some funny math,” Piccinini observed.

According to other realtors who knew him and based on public records, Posner did not achieve noticeable success until he started building suburban housing in 1950 in Dundalk and Essex, the beneficiary of abundant post-war employment opportunities at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point mill and Glenn L. Martin’s aircraft factory at Middle River.