This article was originally published on August 12, 2024. In October 2026, the Alexander brothers were each sentenced to 30 years in prison after being found guilty of ten counts of sex trafficking and sexual assault. This story served as the investigative basis for The Wolves of Real Estate, a three-part docuseries on Peacock produced by Vox.
A half-naked woman was lying on a table, and guests were invited to drip hot wax onto her body. Nearby, waiters passed tuna-tartare cones as a pair of burlesque dancers wearing dog collars and fishnets performed acrobatics. It was a summer night in 2015, and Oren and Alon Alexander were celebrating their 28th birthday in a $50 million townhouse on the Upper East Side.
A pair of real-life Gossip Girl characters, "the Alexander brothers," as they were known in their Manhattan circle, were perfectly coiffed, perpetually suited up, and, like the party, flashy and over-the-top. There were Carnevale-style masks on the bar. The event featured a step-and-repeat backdrop and a custom hashtag. It was the twins’ birthday, but everyone knew the Alexander brothers included Tal, who was older than his siblings by less than a year. Oren and Tal sold luxury real estate together, including the very townhouse where the party was being held. Their boss, Douglas Elliman chairman Howard Lorber, was in attendance; so was Million Dollar Listing’s Fredrik Eklund, Billionaires’ Row developer Rotem Rosen, and a whole contingent of high-fashion models. As the twins blew out the candles on their cake, family, friends, brokers, and models cheered.
“Even then, everybody knew,” one real-estate agent who worked with Oren and Tal says. But they didn’t know, not really. There were whispers and rumors about the brothers, but there had been whispers and rumors about them since they were teenagers. Nine years after the party at the townhouse, they would be publicly accused of assaulting 16 women, sometimes as a pack. “Obviously,” the agent says, “now we know it was so much worse.”
Bal Harbour, where Shlomy and Orly Alexander settled after emigrating from Israel in the 1970s, and where Oren, Alon, and Tal grew up alongside their brother Niv, is an affluent enclave on the north end of Miami Beach. The neighborhood sits on a spit of land between Biscayne Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, home to just over 3,000 people and a single designer mall. In 2000, the family built a waterfront Mediterranean-style mansion on Bal Bay Drive featuring a pool in the back overlooking the bay.
The new home was a testament to the success of their family business, Kent Security, which Shlomy and Orly founded in the early 1980s and later ran with Orly’s brother, Gil Neuman. By the time the boys were teenagers, Kent was one of the largest security contractors in South Florida, supplying guards for gated communities, parties at the Versace mansion, and Miami City Hall. The family ran the operation aggressively. Kent picked fights with competitors and clients, sparred with employees over wages, and fended off lawsuits brought by former employees who accused the company of discrimination. “Success is all that matters to them. Step on anybody you have to step on. Screw them before they screw you,” says a former Kent employee, one of more than 70 people interviewed for this story who know the Alexander family or have worked with the brothers professionally.
Shlomy and Neuman liked to refer to their Friday-night Shabbat dinners as boardroom meetings. The Alexander boys absorbed the lessons. They paid particularly close attention to their father, who, despite having an office at Kent headquarters, wasn’t heavily involved in day-to-day operations. His ambitions were bigger than the security industry. In the early 1990s, he tried to open a nightclub in a former synagogue in the heart of South Beach, but it closed within a year. Eventually, he decided he wanted to be a developer and started a modest homebuilding business. Shlomy was handsome and cocky. While some were turned off by his tendency to be the loudest person in the room, others saw it as brash magnetism. “He’s an appealing character. He’s got charisma,” says Joe Imbesi, a longtime Bal Harbour resident. As for the boys: “Our daughters, who were a little bit younger, were forbidden to even talk to them.”
As teenage twins with dark hair and chiseled jawlines, Alon and Oren were well-known members of the circle of rich kids at Michael M. Krop Senior High School, a large public institution in North Miami. Tal, a tennis star, was slightly shorter and one grade older. All of them spoke with a slight lisp. Had the Alexanders attended a private school like Miami Country Day School or Ransom Everglades, no one would have looked twice when they parked their Range Rover in the school lot. But at Krop, the Alexanders were big men on campus. They went clubbing in South Beach and threw the senior-prom after-party when the twins were only sophomores, Oren later bragged. Still, they compared themselves with envy to their friends who attended private schools. “We were raised differently than our peers,” Oren told an interviewer in 2022. “We were never given money. Being around that affluent lifestyle, you needed money. We were introduced to this lifestyle, but we weren’t given the means to live the lifestyle.”
The boys had a reputation as bullies. “If you had anything less than the lifestyle that they did, they took pleasure in making those people feel inadequate or belittled,” says a former classmate. Once, after Tal had an argument with a former tennis teammate, he started calling the high-schooler’s house to threaten him, stating that he was going to put a bounty on his head and cut his car’s brake lines, according to a police report. They also had another reputation. Imbesi wasn’t the only one who told his daughters to stay away from the brothers. The girls at Krop and the nearby private schools in Miami were routinely warned by their brothers, friends, and even, one Bal Harbour resident says, by police officers to be careful at parties with the Alexanders. If they ended up at one, they were told, they should never put down their drinks. It was all rumors and speculation until it wasn’t. Before the twins graduated, a recording began circulating at the school depicting the pair with a female classmate. “She was so fucked up, and they took turns on her,” says a former student. “I specifically remember that they bragged about ‘running a train’ on her. They used that phrase.”
At least four women have now come forward with accusations of assault by Oren, Alon, or Tal, or all three brothers at once, dating back to their high school years. In the summer of 2004, Oren and Alon allegedly locked a girl in a bedroom at a party, where Oren assaulted her, according to the New York Times. The victim said she reported the assault to police but chose not to file charges. Another woman, backed up by two friends, told The Wall Street Journal that the three brothers had tried to assault her at a home around 2003, when she was a student at Miami Country Day School. They held down her arms and legs, but she managed to get away. She remembered seeing a camcorder. In 2003, Alon and Oren were interviewed by police after a 14-year-old Krop freshman was allegedly gang-raped by a group of boys who called it “running a train,” also per reporting in the Journal. A Krop guidance counselor had alerted the authorities.
Nothing happened to the brothers. There was a sense among their Krop classmates and acquaintances in South Florida’s tight-knit Jewish community that the Alexanders were untouchable. “People were called in to guidance counselors,” says the person who said a girl she knew was assaulted and recorded by the brothers. “It had to get to the teachers. Did everyone just forget about this? I remember being pissed. Really, really upset. Thinking, like, What the fuck is going on?”
Stories that the brothers had assaulted girls even reached people who worked at Kent. One former employee said Neuman, the boys’ uncle, once asked him to act as an armed guard during an exchange between a lawyer and two teenagers at a Denny’s on Biscayne Boulevard. “There was a story going around about a girl being raped at a party by one of the brothers, and I kind of put two and two together in my head,” the employee says. “It stuck with me. Was I doing something horrible and gross?”
The twins graduated from Krop in 2005 and split up. Oren headed to the University of Colorado Boulder, and Alon went off to the University of Maryland. Tal was already at Hofstra. The twins’ senior yearbook includes a page with the prompt “What was your most memorable moment at Krop?” Oren’s answer: “Riding my first ‘choo-choo’ train.”
After college, Oren came to New York, and Alon soon followed. There was at least one accusation during Oren’s college years, when a freshman girl filed a police report in 2005 stating he had assaulted her in her dorm room. The twins joined Tal, who had recently started his own brokerage called Luxury Living, which focused on downtown rentals. Like his father, Oren had hoped to work in development, but building in New York had slowed, and he had trouble breaking into the elite circle of established developers. What he did have was an introduction to Prudential Douglas Elliman chairman Howard Lorber. Earlier that year, Lorber had toured the job site of an extravagant spec home being built on Indian Creek Island, a private retreat a mile from Bal Harbour, where he met developer Shlomy Alexander and his son Oren.
Oren managed to leverage that single introduction into a job at Elliman, later claiming Lorber had personally recruited him. The job wasn’t as glamorous as he might have imagined; Oren spent his first months at Elliman slinging rentals just like any other green agent. In 2009, he nabbed his first big deal when high-powered Miami trial attorney Jim Ferraro tapped the 21-year-old agent to be his broker on an $8.2 million penthouse. Oren celebrated with a celebrity-chef-catered dinner and a write-up in the Observer. “That’s part of my style,” he told the reporter, claiming he had jetted with Ferraro to Miami, Aspen, and Martha’s Vineyard to court the attorney, neglecting to mention that Ferraro was his friend’s dad.
Fortunately for the brothers, in 2010, as the rest of the country slipped further into the Great Recession, New York real estate was starting to bounce back. The new decade ushered in a wave of luxury development and an accompanying phenomenon: the rise of the celebrity broker. That year, Bravo decided to export its Los Angeles-based reality television show Million Dollar Listing to the East Coast, and a handful of ambitious agents competed to be the show’s new stars. Oren was an obvious contender, auditioning as a jet-setting playboy type. “I had him come up to one of his properties in a fancy car and get out and go on dates and stuff like that,” says Angela Weingrad, the casting director who made test reels for the producers. “He really wanted to be on the show.” He made the final six or seven candidates but was not ultimately cast because he lacked charisma, according to the casting director.
Instead, Bravo chose Lorber’s son Michael, former porn actor Fredrik Eklund, and former soap actor Ryan Serhant. The sole woman was Jessica Cohen, a top-ranking broker at Elliman. In October, weeks after signing her official contract, Cohen met Oren, Tal, and Alon at Michael Lorber’s birthday party at the Core Club on East 55th Street. “I was nervous because I had been chosen and I heard Oren was upset about it,” Cohen says. Her last memory of the night is being handed a drink by the brothers, then boarding a private bus with them to the after-party. Cohen regained awareness almost five hours later in the hospital, having blacked out. A bystander had found her alone in the street, covered in vomit. Later, using photos taken that evening, she was able to see she had been with the brothers and at one point had passed out on Tal. “I originally wondered if what happened to me was because I was chosen for the cast. Now, I’m not so sure,” Cohen says. Later, Oren would claim he wasn’t particularly interested in reality television, maintaining that he had actually turned down a show because it did not align with the Alexander brand.
Despite the splashy Ferraro deal, Oren had continued to score mostly small-time sales, handling condos and apartments under $2 million, occasionally teaming up with Tal. But Oren had also begun hustling for the enormous spec house on Indian Creek Island that Lorber had toured. Shlomy had been developing the home since 2008, and in 2010, they listed it for an outrageous $60 million. Oren became the property’s promoter, getting Alex Rodriguez to tour the home and leaking it to the New York Post. He hosted a private party at the house during Art Basel and secured coverage in The Wall Street Journal. It worked: In August 2012, an unnamed Russian buyer purchased the house for $47 million in Miami’s biggest-ever sale. The Alexanders profited on almost every side of the deal, with Oren bringing Tal in as a co-agent to collect commissions from both their father as the seller and the buyer. Even Neuman secured a cut as an investor. Shlomy could finally call himself a big-time developer, and his sons were lauded as twenty-something savants, regardless of the fact that it sold for $13 million below its original asking price.
Just before the deal closed, Douglas Elliman officially green-lit Oren and Tal to create a new team under the firm’s umbrella: the Alexander Group, known as the “A-Team.” Alon was on his way as well, having recently graduated from law school and run a branch of Kent in New York. To celebrate, they hosted a party at a Bridgehampton home attended by Elliman CEO Dottie Herman and Lorber. The event marked a new era for Elliman as it expanded beyond its Long Island roots into flashier markets. The Alexanders debuted a new logo emblazoned on polo shirts and beach towels, surrounded by models in bikinis.
After the A-Team launched, their momentum accelerated. In 2014, Oren and Tal listed Liam Gallagher’s Essex House condo and showed a West Village townhouse to Lindsay Lohan. They aggressively marketed themselves as a cross between the Winklevoss twins and the Property Brothers, landing on hot-men lists and securing media coverage. For a Details story titled “Meet the New Rock Stars of Real Estate,” Tal dressed in a charcoal linen Armani suit and informed the writer he would be showing over $40 million in property that very day. Discussing his method for success, he stated, “You have to be in Saint-Tropez in July. Aspen in the winter. Hong Kong for Art Basel, Cannes for the film festival, Monaco for the Grand Prix.”
This lifestyle was fueled by connections to ultra-wealthy families like the Falics, the Arisons, the Chetrits, and the Nakash family. “My clients go to those absurdly expensive and elite places that no one can get into; I have my in,” Oren wrote in a Post article titled “The Ultimate Young Gun.” “While my nights are late, and some may call me a party boy, it’s all about closing deals.”
The brothers’ youth and physical appearance—along with the twins constantly being surrounded by attractive young women—appealed to a specific clientele of divorcées, bachelors, and men looking for nightlife. “Their clients were rich older wealthy guys who were doing resets in their life,” a fellow broker says. “If there was a guy who’d just minted some money, these guys would be on him like white on rice.” One client was private-equity figure Marc Leder, whom the A-Team helped purchase two Noho apartments worth $30 million. In 2014, Oren started working on sales for the residences at Faena House in Miami Beach, followed by 565 Broome Street. Industry insiders attributed this coveted business to their personal relationship with Lorber.
Behind the glamorous facade, colleagues described them as ruthlessly aggressive. “New York real estate is filled with unethical people,” a broker who worked on the A-Team says. “And they are the most unethical business people I’ve ever dealt with.” They poached clients, inflated numbers, and worked with high-profile names like Kim and Kanye, and Jared and Ivanka. In 2019, the A-Team claimed to have broken records with a $240 million condo at 220 Central Park South bought by hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin.
According to a person with knowledge of the deal, Tal had obtained Griffin’s contact information by greasing an office employee and calling him incessantly. When that failed, Tal lied and claimed he was the exclusive broker for the building. Griffin eventually discovered the deception, prompting Lorber to intervene and take over the deal while expressing displeasure that the brothers had publicized the transaction. “Ken specifically told them not to use him to further their careers,” this source says.
Despite the controversies, allegations of sexual assault shadowed nearly every milestone of the brothers’ decade of success. In 2010, Rebecca Mandel alleged Alon drugged her at a club and tricked her into returning to his and Oren’s apartment, where the twins raped her together, according to a lawsuit. Gallerist Lindsey Acree told the New York Times that Tal pinned her down in a sauna in the Hamptons in the summer of 2011. In May 2012, Kate Whiteman alleged Oren and Alon dragged her out of a Southampton nightclub to a property known as Sir Ivan’s Castle, where they raped her in an upstairs bedroom. Months later, Angelica Parker alleged in a lawsuit that Tal and Alon raped her simultaneously while Oren watched. In 2015, René Willett stated Oren assaulted her in his apartment, and in 2017, Samantha Murphy alleged Oren held her down and assaulted her.
“There were no words needed or directions said,” remembers one victim who alleged she was raped by multiple brothers at once. “It was very routine for them.” Two women who knew Alon and Oren stated they heard the twins would secretly switch places during sex, a practice Oren allegedly described as a power play.
Industry whispers cautioned women not to put their drinks down around the Alexanders. Stories reached executive ranks at Elliman, with multiple people stating Oren and Tal showed colleagues images of naked women in the office. In 2009, an anonymous blog post described an alleged high-school assault by Oren and Alon involving alcohol and Xanax. The post circulated to Elliman executives, but the brothers dismissed it as a shakedown and eventually sued to have it removed in 2013. A spokesperson for Douglas Elliman stated the company never received complaints of sexual assault or harassment concerning the Alexanders and that executives were unaware of the blog post.
In 2014, an Elliman broker reportedly found Oren in a bathroom with reality star Tracy Tutor, who later stated she had blacked out after sharing a drink with him. Yet, their rising sales figures seemed to shield them from consequences. Oren even opined on a 2019 industry panel about men who lost everything for stupid mistakes, stating, “You gotta behave.” The next year, the A-Team members were Elliman’s highest-grossing salesmen.
In quick succession, the brothers married. Alon married Israeli model Shani Zigron in 2020; Oren married Brazilian model Kamila Hansen in 2023, with coverage in Vogue; and Tal wed venture capitalist Arielle Kogut that same fall. Benefiting from Miami’s pandemic real-estate boom, Oren and Tal left Elliman in 2022 to launch Official, an ultra-luxury brokerage aimed at the top one percent, closing out 2023 with $260 million in sales.
Behavioral patterns persisted. A 23-year-old woman recounted an incident in 2021 where Oren groped her at an omakase dinner at an Alexander property in Miami Beach in front of his then-girlfriend. When she returned for another dinner weeks later, she alleged Tal lured her upstairs to a bedroom, pushed her onto a bed, pinned her down, and violently ripped her dress when she resisted.
In March, Whiteman and Mandel filed civil suits against Oren and Alon, which were uncovered by industry news outlet The Real Deal. When the publication posted about the filings, dozens of commenters added their own experiences. “I’ve waited 22 years for this moment, since I was 15 years old,” one woman wrote.
Oren stepped down from Official first. On June 18, Parker filed another lawsuit detailing assaults by Alon and Tal while Oren watched, prompting Tal to step down days later. Evan Torgan, Whiteman’s lawyer, reported receiving a flood of calls from additional women, bringing the estimated number of accusers to 40, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation probed allegations dating back to high school. Joel Denaro, an attorney representing Tal, Oren, and Alon, stated, “The Alexander brothers have never had intimate relations unless they were consensual. They are confronting these false claims in court and will be vindicated in the end.”
While rumors circulated that the brothers had fled to Israel, Oren and Tal remained active, fighting to retain their business interests and threatening to sue former colleagues who severed ties. By October 2026, the legal reckoning culminated in federal court, where each brother was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being found guilty on ten counts of sex trafficking and sexual assault.
