‘The Jewish Kennedys’: Inside the wild world of the Steinberg family

There’s this lovely little bit in Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s novel about the brash tycoons who swaggered around 1980s New York, where a character describes $100 million as a “unit”. Why a unit? “A unit, of course, is a starting point.” Nine figures in your bank account is just the beginning. That sort of shtick sums up the attitude of the Steinbergs, a real family that lived on such an outrageous and grand scale that they could have walked out the pages of Wolfe’s book.