When Gerard "Jerry" Inzerillo was growing up in a two-room apartment with four siblings and his hard-working parents, he had much more room to roam on the streets of Brooklyn, New York, home. But when the other kids were playing baseball in the local sandlot, Jerry was sneaking on to the subway and riding into Manhattan where he was attracted to the lobbies of the fancy hotels like The Plaza and Waldorf because people looked and dressed nice. "I got the bug as a boy because I just loved the festivity of a lobby," says today's CEO of the Diriyah Gate Development Authority, a US$20 billion-plus giga-project based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, aimed at restoring and reimagining the ancestral home of the original Saudi state. "And I loved the fact that people were nice to one another and it was genteel. Even the bellmen were nice in those days." Within a few years, on May 2,1967, to be exact, at age 13, after a local judge helped him with ID papers that would get him a job, he started working as many as 50 hours a week as a pickup banquet bus boy. He pulled his first shift that night at The Gotham Hotel on 55th Street back in Manhattan (today The Peninsula), working 12 hours for US$15.90 plus tips. It marked the start of Inzerillo grabbing at his lifeline away from the neighborhood streets.
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