The shop that sells private jets
Steve Varsano runs the world’s only street-level corporate aviation showroom. It’s his job to sell high-flying dreams to the rich and famous at his London store. Here he reveals how he smooth-talks them into splashing out millions for a luxury private jet
IMAGINE for a moment you’re rich. Really rich. You want to buy a jet. A big jet. A jet that can whisk you and your entourage wherever you wish in style and comfort, cutting through the sky like an arrow, its low engine-hum barely audible beneath the clink and fizz of champagne glasses being refilled at 35 000 feet. You have a budget – R850 million – and, just to reiterate, you really want a jet.
If there’s one thing I can tell you about jets, it’s that once you start imagining what it would be like to own one – waiting for you on the tarmac, gleaming in the sun, freshly fuelled and utterly at your disposal – it doesn’t take long before the idea starts to haunt you. I can’t afford a jet but, nevertheless, for the past week or so my thoughts keep returning to the possibility, and I’ve been repeating the names of makes and models in my head. A Falcon 7X. A Gulfstream G650. A Challenger 850. A Global 6000.
But you? You can afford a jet. And you want one. So where do you go? This is a bit of a trick question. Because while there are plenty of brokers and dealers you can call and speak to about making your dreams a reality, there’s only one place in the world where you can just walk in off the street.
It’s called The Jet Business, and it’s in London, on Park Lane opposite Hyde Park. It’s hard to miss. Displayed in the front window, there’s a large section of an Airbus A319 fuselage. A slice of luxury jet for anyone passing by to see. If you crane your neck, you can peek at the plane’s interior: comfortable cream leather sofas, velvety grey carpeting, Art Deco touches in black and silver. There’s a glass-fronted drinks cabinet. A backgammon set on a low coffee table. A heavy cream swivel chair, like something from the command deck of the Starship Enterprise.
The super-rich individuals who cruise up and down Park Lane in their Bentleys and Ferraris pass this window display day after day. And finally, perhaps after a week, or a month or a year, they snap and pull over. They walk in – because they want to buy a jet.
They’ll be met by Steve Varsano, a tall
61-year-old American from New Jersey. He’s been selling jets for almost 40 years. In that time, he calculates, he’s shifted at least 300 aircraft, which represents something like £3 billion (R51 billion) worth of sales.
“You stop counting after a while,” he says, almost a little bashfully. Varsano has a rich, sonorous voice, a deep tan and strong, handsome features. He wears a navy pinstripe suit and brown loafers. He could be a Roman senator or a retired baseball star or a Rat Pack crooner (he gets that last comparison a lot). In fact, when he was “24, maybe 25” he sold Frank Sinatra a Learjet, an experience that was “beyond surreal, like a dream”.
The bulk of Varsano’s professional life has been spent among the highest stratum of the super, super, super-rich. No one is more knowledgeable than him on the private aviation industry – and the customers who power it. During our time together his phone hardly stops vibrating. “People are always emailing me, WhatsApping me,” he says. “I’m always on the phone because successful, powerful people want instantaneous responses. And if they don’t get it, they move to somebody else. You don’t want to lose that moment of opportunity.”
WE SIT together inside the slice of Airbus A319. Varsano takes the Star Trek swivel chair, I take a sofa. An assistant brings bowls of nibbles and drinks. Varsano’s job is essentially that of a broker. He keeps records of all the private and commercial jets coming onto the market – there are only about 7 000 genuine luxury jets in the world – and records of the individuals or organisations that own them.
When somebody wants to buy or sell a plane, Varsano calls his contacts. This is what most jet brokers do. But, unlike most brokers – unlike any broker – he has physical premises where customers can come. There are few places in the world where attracting passing customers can lead to the purchase of a £50 million (R850 million) asset. But Park Lane is one of them. “That’s why we’re here,” he says. “We want people to walk in.”
Since The Jet Business opened on Park Lane four years ago almost 120 billionaires have been through his doors. Varsano’s “showroom” is a gigantic wall of high-definition screens. Onto this wall he can project a scale floor plan of almost any jet on the market, so potential customers can see how much space they might get for their money. He can also project cross-sections of jets, and he encourages his guests to walk up to the screen and check how much head space it would give them.
For 15 minutes we pretend I have £30 million (R378 million) to spend, and I genuinely agonise. I tell him I want to be able to take my family to America to visit my sister, who lives in Washington, DC. I think I want a Gulfstream G450. Varsano gently points to the £1,7 million (almost R29 million) annual costs.
“You’re getting a big plane but do you really need it? It might be overkill,” he says. I chew my fingers. In the end I decide on a Falcon 7X, which is slightly smaller but cheaper to run and has a longer range. We see what’s available and find a relatively new model on sale for £22 million (R374 million). I’m happy with it, and Varsano is happy that I’m happy. “You can fly that right out of London City airport and go straight to Washington, DC. See? You’re done.”
VARSANO grew up in working-class New Jersey. “I was brought up in a very rough neighbourhood,” he says. His mother raised four children on her own, always doing at least two jobs. And from a young age, Varsano would help. “When I was seven years old, I would sweep the floor of the beauty salon where she worked,” he says. “Any time I could go out and make some extra money, I would. I’d make ice-cream sodas in coffee shops. Deliver newspapers. Anything.”
When he was 14 he was invited for a ride in a plane. His friend’s brother was having a flying lesson at a local airstrip and there were two spare seats. “So I was sitting in the back of this little four-seater airplane, we took off and I just lit up,” he says, miming a plug being stuck into the base of his spine, eyes bulging wide. “It triggered something in my body. You’re so free when you’re up in an airplane. Like a bird. I felt like I was the richest guy in the world.”
Varsano began taking on extra work so he could save up for flying lessons. Within three years he had a pilot’s licence. He took student loans “up to my head” so he could attend Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida.
After graduation in 1978 he started as a lobbyist in Washington, DC, working for a trade organisation that represented small aircraft manufacturers. “It was a great job but it paid very little,” he says.
So he would moonlight as a doorman at a local disco. He noticed that one of the men who came to the club wore a tie pin in the shape of a Learjet. “So I asked him what he did and he said he sold airplanes. He used to show me his commission cheques.
“After a few months I thought, ‘Okay, I need to find out where you work. It sounds such a cool job, selling jets’.”
Even though he’d never sold anything in his life, Varsano persuaded the company to give him a shot.
It took him seven months to sell his first jet, and he took a second job waiting tables to pay the bills. Finally, he sold a Westwind II jet to a company operating out of Venezuela. He remembers sitting in the jet with two men representing the
Varsano calculates that in almost 40 years he’s sold at least 300 aircraft
company as they flew to Miami, having closed the deal in North Carolina. “I felt like a king,” says Varsano, leaning back, beaming. “Here I am. I’m 23. I’ve sold a jet. Unbelievable. I felt like it was a major step in my life.”
Only then the two men representing the Venezuelan company, “who were sitting closer to me than you are now”, casually informed him they wanted to discuss their fee. Varsano was confused. Fee? What fee? They represented the buyer. Why did they need a fee? He tried to explain this, but they shook their heads. They wanted a slice of Varsano’s commission. And when he rebuffed them, they suggested, casually, that they all go down to Caracas to sort things out.
“I said, ‘No, you guys are wrong. This transaction is finished. You get paid by your boss. I get paid by my boss. When we get to Miami, I’m going to Washington, DC, and you’re taking the plane to Venezuela’.”
It was at this point that one of the men reached into his trousers, pulled out a pistol and aimed it at Varsano’s head. “He said, ‘No, Steve, we’re going to Venezuela and when we get our money, you go home. And if we don’t get our money, you will never be going home.’ My heart went from 35 000 feet to the floor. I went from the king of the world to a little mouse. I was shaking. I didn’t know what to do. What do you do? All I started thinking was, ‘I’m going to Venezuela and he’s going to cut me up into little pieces and send them back in a box to my mother’.”
Varsano was, at this point, effectively being kidnapped. The way he describes it, the whole thing could have been scripted and directed by the Coen brothers. They landed in Miami. There was no security in the private jet terminal so the
man with the gun marched Varsano off the plane to a payphone so he could call his boss and arrange for the two Venezuelans to be paid so he didn’t end up vanishing in Caracas. His minder was distracted for a split second and Varsano bolted.
“I jump in a taxi and see the guy come running out after me,” he says. “I thought he was going to start shooting at me.”
Although rattled, he decided to hold out until he’d sold one more jet. And then another. And then another. By the start of the ’80s he was no longer doubling as a waiter. By the mid-’80s he was driving a Ferrari with the licence plate “BUYAJET” and appearing in Cosmopolitan as “bachelor of the month”.
Today Varsano lives in London and recently acquired British citizenship.
His girlfriend, Lisa Tchenguiz, is the sister of Iranian-British entrepreneurs Robert and Vincent Tchenguiz, who are worth a reported £850 million (R14 billion). “Lisa is very social, so we’re out six nights a week,” he says. “Charity events. Dinner parties. Weddings. Always something.” They like to travel, he says, and a few days later he calls me from what turns out to be a luxury hotel in the ski resort of Courchevel in the French Alps.
Funnily enough, he doesn’t own a jet himself. Indeed, he often advises people against buying one. “If you don’t fly more than 150 to 200 hours a year you really shouldn’t own an airplane,” he says. “You should just rent or charter one or fly commercial or something.”
Varsano, I think, worries that the general public see a private jet as a luxury, a frivolity, a conspicuous plaything. It doesn’t help that many of us are now used to seeing celebrities posting Instagram shots of themselves inside such planes or listening to rappers namedropping the “G6”, slang for a Gulfstream G650. In reality, the cost is such that most actors or hip-hop stars are unlikely to own a jet. Certainly not the luxurious ones they pose in.
“I remember seeing something that said, ‘You know you’re rich enough when you can fly on a private jet and not post a picture of it’,” Varsano says. “Most people who own an airplane don’t put photos on social media.”
He’s at pains to stress the utility of the aircraft he helps people acquire. “They’re very important corporate tools,” he says. “They increase the efficiency and productivity of a corporate executive.” If time is the one resource that these powerful business people can’t control, then a private jet is simply a means of clawing some back. “A time machine, if you will.” This is a good line, and he knows it. Who doesn’t want a time machine?
To Varsano, CEOs who travel in their own jet aren’t some ivory tower elite. Rather, they’re people getting stuff done, flying through the night to arrive at meetings first thing in the morning, or criss-crossing continents to keep their businesses ticking over, to strengthen the economy, to keep people in work.
US president Donald Trump has been good for business, Varsano says. Jets, more than ever, broadcast endeavour and success. Think of the televised rallies when Trump was on the presidential campaign trail, where his arrival would be heralded by the roar of the twin jet engines of his Boeing 757. These things have an effect. “If you’re waiting for someone to arrive in a jet you’re thinking, ‘Wow, this person must be really successful.’ People like to do business with successful people.”
It’s time to go. The sun has set over Hyde Park and the luxury cars rolling past the window all have their dazzling headlights on. I joke about the £22 million Falcon 7X I’m going to buy and Varsano plays along. He’s being polite but also enjoys my excitement. Is he honestly never tempted to just buy a jet?
He looks around and sighs. “I’m tempted,” he says, smiling to himself. “Yeah, I’m tempted.”
‘Here I am. I’m 23. I’ve sold a jet. Unbelievable. I felt like a king’