NYC Christmas Tree Mafia

A story about how the Christmas tree business in New York City is controlled by a few powerful "tree men" who operate like a mafia.

"Christmas trees are a big business in New York. A lot of people see these quaint little shacks that appear on the side of the road just before Thanksgiving with a bunch of trees, and you think they're independently owned by jolly families of lumberjacks looking to make holiday bucks. That's what I thought anyway.

In reality, a few eccentric, obsessed, and sometimes ruthless tycoons control the sale of almost every tree in the city. They call themselves 'tree men' and they spend 11 months preparing for Christmas time, which to them is a 30-day sprint to grab as much cash as they can.

They've carved up the territories - one guy gets Harlem, another gets Manhattan. There's George Nash, a smooth-talking hippie from Vermont, and Kevin Hammer, a Brooklyn-born Scientologist who shaped the business. Hammer is rumored to own half the tree stands in Manhattan, bringing in more than $1 million every December. The lore is Hammer lives on a yacht somewhere in the Atlantic and visits New York only at Christmas time, where he holes up in a midtown hotel room with a pile of cash on the bed and a pit bull squatting on either side of him."

The story then traces back to 1851, when a Dutchman named Mark Carr became the father of the Manhattan Christmas tree business. He was out of work when he realized he could chop trees from the forest and sell them in the city. His wife thought the idea was terrible, but he got a $1 permit to sell at Washington Market, and he started explaining to people that these trees could stand upright in their houses to signify Christmas. That's how the trend of indoor Christmas trees began.