of familial web that can be spun only in Los Angeles.

The history of Jelena “Gigi” Hadid goes all the way back to Palestine, where her father, Mohamed — an enigmatic, overly tanned man with an open disdain for shirt buttons — was born in 1948. His family lived in Damascus, Syria, and later in Tunis, Tunisia. When he was 15, the Hadids moved to Washington, DC. Mohamed attended North Carolina State and took graduate classes at MIT.

Though he didn’t graduate from either, he began to scratch his entrepreneurial itch by running a nightclub on the Greek island of Rhodes and then flipping used Rolls-Royces in DC.

But those businesses were merely a warm-up for his real calling — real estate development in the nation’s capital. With his tailored suits,slick personality and pretty, blond first wife, Mary, he stuck out in the town filled with stiff politicos. He owned a private plane and lived on a 1,000-acre Maryland farm that once belonged to automaker Walter Chrysler. But Mohamed had his eyes set on even bigger things.

“He was a lot of flash and dash right from the start,” says Harry Jaffe, a writer who chronicled Hadid for now-defunct business magazine Regardie’s during the 1980s. “As a fanciful high-flyer making deals in a town that was used to staid operators, he was one of a kind.”

In 1987, Mohamed began his move west — by outfoxing Donald Trump. He swooped in with $42.9 million and bought a foreclosed, undeveloped site and an additional 66-acre piece of land in Aspen, Colo.