The "Starship Enterprise," as the structure had become known among its outraged neighbors, was Mohamed Hadid's latest "spec" house, a multicolored 30,000-square-foot, seven-story hemisphere of future shock that he referred to on his heavily trafficked Instagram account as "#themodernhouseofhadid." He was planning to sell it for upward of $100 million. Millions of Times readers might have thought Steven Spielberg was making a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind when they saw the front page photo of what looked like a massive spaceship perched on one of the top-dollar hills of Bel Air, L.A.'s most exclusive, most elegant subdivision.
Given that Beverly Hills is one of the world capitals of schadenfreude, the buzz on Rodeo Drive was that had finally met his Waterloo and that disaster was near.
In the months that followed, the City of Los Angeles filed criminal charges that could send him to jail. Instead, that Times feature of December 14, 2015, was the worst booby prize Hadid could have imagined. Hadid may be the second-most famous person ever born in Nazareth.