When I first lived in Manhattan in 1987, I walked along 50th Street to work. Newcomers in New York City stare at the towering architecture, and I always noticed the Helmsley Building, 36 blocks south as I crossed Park Avenue.

Its eponymous dominatrix, Leona Helmsley, was prosecuted two years later for tax evasion. The most memorable evidence against her came from a housekeeper who recalled the “Queen of Mean” jeering, “We don’t pay taxes; only the little people pay taxes.”