Robert Zuckerman is chief executive of Woodland Hills real estate development firm Continental Communities Group. His father, Edward Zuckerman, bought 150 acres of coastal real estate on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the 1950s.

Robert and brother Ken later developed the Ocean Trails Golf Club on the site. But one month before the course’s scheduled July 1999 opening, most of the 18th fairway collapsed into the ocean.

The Zuckermans declared bankruptcy, and Donald Trump bought the property from the bank for a reported $27 million in August 2002. It’s now called Trump National Los Angeles.

Michael Meyer, an attorney and insurance salesman, is a longtime associate of some of the heirs of the Stueve family, which founded the Alta Dena dairy in the City of Industry.

The Stueves’ former trustee, Raymond Novell, is accused of partnering with estate attorney J. Wayne Allen to drain the family estate of more than $25 million, using tactics such as making personal loans to themselves from Stueve-owned entities, most of which were never paid back. (The Business Journal covered that saga in 2011. The case is ongoing.)

Meyer took the lead role in going after Novell and Allen, and was later named as the Stueve family’s trustee.

According to a relative of Meyer’s wife, Lily, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, the couple used $5 million worth of rifle parts from another relative’s company as collateral to get a loan to pay the legal fees to untangle the Stueve real estate portfolio – cash the Stueve family didn’t have at the time. In exchange for doing so, Meyer and his wife got ownership of one-third of the Stueve properties, estimated to be worth as much as $100 million. Public records indeed show that Meyer is a partner with the Stueves in several properties in California and Arizona.

“Mike is smart as a fox,” said the relative. “Lily’s a Fulbright scholar.”

– Matt Pressberg