“I Knew If They Found Out, They’d Bury Us”

“I Knew If They Found Out, They’d Bury Us” Celebrity broker Carl Gambino on selling $700 million in real estate while fighting pancreatic cancer. Celebrity broker Carl Gambino went through ten months of treatment for pancreatic cancer; he’s now in remission. Photo: Ahmed Gaber Celebrity broker Carl Gambino went through ten months of treatment for pancreatic cancer; he’s now in remission. Photo: Ahmed Gaber Celebrity broker Carl Gambino went through ten months of treatment for pancreatic cancer; he’s now in remission. Photo: Ahmed Gaber Last month, Carl Gambino, a New York–based celebrity real-estate broker, was sitting in the living room of an elegant mid-century house in the Studio City hills with clients who had made an offer on the property. It was midafternoon and sunlight streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows that framed views of the hills. The seller’s broker had politely excused himself so Gambino could speak privately with the couple, a film director and his wife, who runs a celebrity jewelry brand. At $3.29 million, the house was priced at a fraction of most of the properties Gambino handles — last year, he and John Bercsi, a former mentor who’s now one of the 23 agents on the Compass team that bears Gambino’s name, represented the buyers of a $51.8 million estate in Beverly Hills. Two years earlier, he sold Mark Wahlberg’s Beverly Park estate for $55 million, and last fall he represented the buyer in the $38 million sale of the Woolworth mansion (an LLC tied to Leon Black). His roster is full of celebrity clients like Jennifer Lopez, Travis Scott, Joe Jonas, and Harry Styles. This spring, he sold Lily Allen and David Harbour’s Carroll Gardens townhouse in the wake of their very public split. Normally, the 41-year-old broker wouldn’t even be at a showing like this, but the buyers were longtime clients and friends. Gambino lowered his voice — he knew the seller’s broker was listening and trying to learn if they would back out of the deal — but he wasn’t talking about drainage problems or the punch list of changes they wanted to submit to the seller. He was telling them how it felt to spend the past ten months fighting to stay alive. “Did you think I was going to die?” Gambino asked his friends. “Yeah,” the wife said. She started to cry; her father had died of pancreatic cancer. Almost everyone who gets it does. The doctor who’d confirmed Gambino’s diagnosis last fall warned him not to Google anything, but Gambino didn’t need to — he knew the fatality rate. Shortly after getting the diagnosis, he had a panic attack, fainted, and hit his head so hard he required stitches. He decided he wouldn’t let himself think he was going to die, but he understood that everyone else would. So he did what he thought was necessary to protect the business he had spent the previous ten years building: He hid his diagnosis from almost everyone. “I’ve been doing this from hospital beds, negotiating deals while I was in the ER throwing up blood,” he says. “I haven’t seen anyone for ten months. I know the nature of the business, and I knew if this got out there, other brokers would bury us.” There are two types of high-end real-estate brokers: those like Serena Boardman, who grew up ensconced in the Upper East Side social circles she now sells to, and those who have hustled their way up, like Gambino, who was raised in New Jersey, the son of a teacher and a bank teller from Italian American families in Greenwich Village. Until recently, both his grandmothers lived in the same Village building where his parents met on the staircase as kids; his first real-estate job was with Adelaide Polsinelli, a commercial broker whose dad was the super in his grandmothers’ building. He was ambitious and real-estate-obsessed from a young age; he used to ask his friends to drive him around so he could look at the local mansions. But when Gambino was 15, he started smoking weed after a friend’s accidental death. Before long, he was deep into drugs and alcohol. He was institutionalized by the court system and went through opioid withdrawal numerous times before getting sober at 22. “In my addiction, it was like hell,” he says. But he credits sobriety with everything he did after. He met his wife, Sarah Ivory, through AA, and applied the step work of recovery — accountability, mediation, surrender to a higher power — to all areas of his life. One day while working for Polsinelli, he asked her how she got so successful and she dumped a bag of self-help books on his desk. Soon, he was obsessively reading early 1900s gurus like Napoleon Hill, Neville Goddard, and Florence Scovel Shinn, whose visualization and affirmation exercises he used to reshape the way he thought about the world and himself. But he found commercial real estate cutthroat and selling investment properties unfulfilling. He followed Ivory out to Los Angeles, where he ended up working as a dog walker. When he found out the owner of a Weimaraner he walked was looking to buy a house, Gambino convinced the client, who was hesitant, to let him show him some houses. When the first deal he lined up fell through, he was crushed. Then he set up another deal, for even more money: $6.25 million. It changed his life, allowing him to pay off his debts. He was still walking dogs when he met Joe Jonas, whose girlfriend was friendly with Ivory. The two men became friends, and after Jonas saw him represent buyers on several deals, he asked Gambino to sell his house. It was his first deal as a seller’s agent and his first celebrity client. Having the calling card of a famous client put him in a different league; real estate is a word-of-mouth business. But it wasn’t only who he knew but how he operated. “Carl will outwork anyone. There are no hours of the day that are off-limits to him,” says Adam Modlin, a high-end broker whose celebrity clients have included Justin Timberlake and A-Rod. Gambino went to work for Modlin’s bespoke brokerage in New York after establishing himself in L.A. “There were occasions when he was sourcing a property for a particular client and he would drive every block, every street in the neighborhood. He could go until two or three in the morning. He’d memorize the addresses — he has an encyclopedic memory — look up every single property, and call every single owner. He would stop at nothing to get a property or a deal for his client.” While some top brokers prefer to work as solo operators, doing the bulk of the pitches, showings, negotiations, inspections, and board applications themselves with the help of an assistant, many increasingly work in teams, with the leader essentially running his or her own company out of the larger brokerage. Teams revolve around a successful, charismatic broker like Ryan Serhant, who now runs his own brokerage, or Fredrik Eklund at Douglas Elliman. Gambino’s style is more subtle and understated: The star broker brings in much or most of the business and offers other agents on the team access to a larger network of buyers and sellers than they would have on their own. When Gambino was starting out in L.A, he worked under Kurt Rappaport, a top broker who has represented Beyoncé, Larry Ellison, and Tom Brady. Working with Rappaport offered instant credibility, and Gambino gained experience dealing with high-profile clients, which helped him when he later built his own team in L.A. In 2020, Gambino brought his L.A. team to Compass. He now has two dozen agents working under his name in the five states where he is licensed: Florida, New York, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. This structure allows him to do far more business than he could ever do by himself; he couldn’t possibly be at every single showing or termite inspection. His team handles much of the on-the-ground work, while Gambino focuses on negotiations and managing relationships, a rhythm that continued over the grueling months of treatment this past year. In 2025, while he was secretly undergoing cancer treatment, his team did $700 million in sales. Robert Reffkin, the CEO of Compass, says Gambino is “not in the top one percent of agents, he’s in the top .1 percent.” “Carl does deals in some of the most competitive cities in the world, where everyday someone else is coming and saying, ‘I’m going to take your clients, your business, eat your lunch. I’m going to be the next superstar,’” a broker who has worked with Gambino tells me. But scaling a business built on the skill and personal charm of one broker can be tricky. Some people still expect him to personally shepherd them through every step of a transaction. “I have dear, loyal clients, like one in L.A. who just called me to sell his $30 million house,” says Gambino. “He was like, ‘I don’t give a fuck if it takes a year to sell. You can fly in and do showings.’” “He’s the key man to his business,” the other broker tells me. “You can have five, 20, or 100 people. When the key man goes down, the business goes down. It may continue for a time, but the key man is the rainmaker. He’s the one bringing in the business, he’s negotiating, he’s closing the deal. That person can’t announce, ‘I’m checking out for three months, but you’re in good hands with my team.’” I meet Gambino this fall at the duplex in Brooklyn Bridge Park that he shares with Ivory, their two kids, 6 and 8, and a new Pomeranian puppy — the reason a chunk of the living room is currently encircled in knee-high fencing. He is wearing a pickle-green cashmere pullover and black track pants, clothing that’s loose by design but still looks baggy on him. Just shy of 6 feet tall, he dropped from 186 to 128 pounds over the past year and by October had gained back about 14. “I was going to all these doctors with GI symptoms, and they were telling me, ‘You’re a workaholic, and you drink 40 cups of coffee a day. You’re fine,’” he says. After an endoscopy and testing for parasites and pancreatic enzymes, Gambino was given a diagnosis of lactose intolerance. His pancreatic enzymes were low, but the gastroenterologist assured him it was nothing to worry about; at worst, it was pancreatitis — a case of inflammation. He decided to pay out of pocket for a CT scan. At the scan, Gambino could tell from the tech’s face that something was wrong: “I said, ‘Am I going to be okay?’ And he said solemnly, ‘I hope so.’” He found out later that getting the scan when he did likely saved his life. Pancreatic cancer is usually asymptomatic, and by the time most people are diagnosed, the cancer has spread beyond the pancreas and is essentially untreatable. Gambino when undergoing treatments. He is now in remission. Photo: Courtesy of the subject Photo: Courtesy of the subject Eileen O’Reilly, his oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, told him that his best chance of survival was the Whipple procedure, a radical surgery that removes the head of the pancreas, part of the stomach and small intestine, the gallbladder, and the bile duct, essentially restructuring the digestive system. The surgery is considered curative, but he would have to do 12 rounds of chemo, most of them beforehand, to shrink the tumor, which was right next to an artery. “I asked my mom how many times I’d been through opiate withdrawal,” says Gambino. “She told me six or seven, and there were probably a few she didn’t know about, so I figured I could handle the chemo.” He closed the Woolworth deal two days before his chemo mediport was installed. He told Modlin, the broker at the other end of the sale, that he was going through something personal, and Modlin didn’t press; usually, when a married 40-year-old guy tells you he’s going through something personal, it’s a divorce. If everything went well, Gambino’s treatment would take a little under a year. He thought he could keep it secret for that long from everyone in real estate, including his team. “I knew other brokers would try to take advantage of the situation and we’d lose listings,” he says. Also he didn’t want to deal with the death-watch energy that would come his way if everyone knew. He had a good cover: He was always flying off to L.A. or Miami, so he figured that, at least for a while, no one would question it if he said couldn’t meet in person. He always negotiates deals over the phone anyway. And then he had his first chemo session on December 3. “You watch the color drain out of a person’s face. It basically intoxicates them and they start slurring,” Ivory says. “Afterward, he got in the car and started running calls.” She took his phone, telling him, “You can’t do this.” “The reality of what we were going through hadn’t caught up,” she tells me. They decided to inform Addie Dorsey, the team’s co-founder and executive director. And Ivory, who had been working as an interior designer, stepped in to help as well. “We felt that we needed to protect the clients, the business, the team,” Ivory says. “I knew I would be the one who could get answers if he was in a hospital bed.” Chemo was a three-day process — after treatment in the hospital, he left with a bag of medicine to administer through the port for the rest of the period. Gambino would feel the sickest afterward. “I tried to schedule meetings around the treatments,” says Ivory. But some clients were persistent: “Everyone wants Carl. There were times when people were insisting on talking to him, even if it wasn’t super-pressing, and he’d just have to do the call.” It was unnerving to see how much the business depended on Gambino. Ivory, who has a marketing background, worked to shift the branding. “I tried to take the focus off Carl,” she says, “and build up the Gambino Group name” — including helping agents with professional development and offering concierge services to clients who were relocating. She was also unnerved by the industry itself. “One day, all these messed-up things happened,” she explains. “Through someone else, a client bought a property we had showed them; another agent blamed us for something they did.” It was nothing cataclysmic, she adds, “just four or five deflating things before lunch.” She called Gambino to vent. “Welcome to Tuesday,” he told her. On New Year’s Eve, during his third round of chemo, Gambino was going to the bathroom constantly; he rapidly lost 30 pounds. “I thought, Holy shit! If this is chemo, it’s going to kill me.” He was almost grateful when he found out it was a case of norovirus. Then he got thrush and lost even more weight. In mid-January, he met a seller for the contract signing of a $12.5 million Flatiron condo — his last in-person meeting. After that, he kept to his house and the hospitals. When his hair started to fall out, his kids shaved his head. At one point, he was in a Sloan Kettering waiting room, wearing a mask, and another guy, also in a mask, kept looking at him weirdly. He couldn’t figure out who the guy was. Then the nurse came out screaming his name: Carl Gambino! Carl Gambino! Later that day, he got a text from a client he was trying to cultivate, a man looking to sell his Tribeca apartment: “Hey man, I saw you at Sloan Kettering. Is everything okay?” Gambino called him immediately. The man asked if he had cancer. “I had to tell him,” Gambino says. He got the listing, and he and the man, who was there with a sick family member, became friends. There were less heartwarming brushes with exposure. A seller he’d told about his diagnosis the day he received the news later tried to negotiate down the commission they had agreed to, implying he would tell Compass about Gambino’s illness if Gambino didn’t set more favorable terms. Another time, he heard there was a rumor going around that the reason no one had seen him in months was because he had relapsed. “It was very difficult not allowing this to come out,” Gambino says. “Still, I felt it was fair to have my health information private as long as we weren’t dropping the ball and were performing for clients.” Was concealing the cancer actually necessary, though? I called Frederick Warburg Peters, a broker at Brown Harris Stevens who got cancer ten years ago when he was running his own firm. I told him I was writing about a broker who’d had pancreatic cancer and hidden it. Several friends had advised him to do the same, Peters told me. “But I decided I didn’t want to do that. It just didn’t feel like part of the authentic self that I wanted to be,” he says. “So I actually told everyone.” The decision didn’t seem to hurt business. “I guess part of me feels like there are always listings you’re not going to get. Might there be more if people think you’re going to die? Maybe,” he says. “It’s a competitive business and people are going to behave competitively. But there’s a line between behaving competitively and behaving badly. The latter happens, but it’s not the norm.” In mid-March, as Gambino was finishing his eighth round of chemo, he went for a preoperative CT scan. It revealed what appeared to be a growth on his liver, and doctors told him there was a 90 percent chance the cancer had spread, making it inoperable. The surgeon was like, “I’m so sorry,” says Gambino. “Basically, telling me with his eyes, You’re dead.” Further tests were inconclusive, but a team of doctors reviewed the scan and agreed it was likely cancer. A liver biopsy was scheduled to confirm it. Gambino latched on to the possibility that it was actually an infection. “I think the doctors thought I was delusional,” he says. “But now that I’ve been fortunate enough to surround myself with some of the most successful people in the world, I know that you have to be what the normal world would call delusional. That’s how I built my success, too.” As he recalled of his dog-walking days, “I used to tell myself things like, I’m going to rep the most successful and influential people in the world. I’d read it and be like, This is fucking absurd, but I repeated it over and over, and I did everything I wrote down.” The liver biopsy came back negative. The week before his Whipple surgery, Gambino closed two deals, representing the buyer of a Beverly Hills mansion for $41.25 million with Bercsi and selling Lily Allen’s Carroll Gardens townhouse for $7 million. He also got Cara Delevingne’s triplex penthouse listing at 34 Gramercy Park East. After a nine-hour procedure on April 21, his surgeon told him he had removed the tumor with clear margins. Gambino understands that he was healed by medical science. He tapped his social network to get appointments with the best doctors. He also went to therapy, got on antidepressants, and, crucially, pushed — and was able to pay out of pocket for — the scan that led to his diagnosis. But he also believes that his mind-set, his “delusional optimism,” as he puts it, played a critical role in surviving what is known as an unsurvivable disease. “I started studying people who had healed from this, and I studied them obsessively. I’m an obsessive person. And the common theme was that there was some kind of positive thinking, spirituality, a mind-body connection.” Dr. O’Reilly, his oncologist, gave some credence to this, writing in an email that Gambino’s “youth, vigor, tremendous motivation, and personal background have all played important roles.” His life experiences, she added, “equipped him with the tools to navigate the physical and emotional challenges of this disease and treatment.” Carl today. Photo: Courtesy of the subject “There wasn’t a morning I woke up that something wasn’t playing by Neville Goddard or someone like that,” says Ivory of the past year, describing the motivational recordings Gambino starts his day with. “He wants the first things he hears to be positive. He has these visualizations and meditations, very clear and specific things he could focus on that would keep him in this world.” His approach to getting better is also why he’s so open to talking about the disease now, he says. He’s currently working with nine other cancer patients, teaching them the exercises he used to get through his treatment, and working on a self-help book. Modlin, whom Gambino confided in earlier this year, “was shocked, surprised, and concerned,” he says, when he learned what Gambino had been going through, especially given the number of deals he’d done. “There was a part of me that thought it was superhuman.” But he wasn’t surprised that Gambino kept working: “Carl’s personality, he cannot shut it off. He cannot shut off the engine. It’s always all systems go.” This was obvious after I spent just a few hours with Gambino. While he always seemed fully present when we talked, he also bought a painting and took a call to discuss the sale of a Minneapolis car wash, one of his many real-estate investments. In the course of three hours, 153 work texts piled up. He was also in the middle of negotiating two $7 million deals that day. It was a brief glimpse into the pace of the business that continued unabated while he was sick. This past year, he tells me, was his team’s best sales year by far. And as crazy, and perhaps inadvisable, as it first seemed to me to be constantly closing deals between chemo sessions and surgeries and life-or-death scans, I could also see something else: It had kept him tethered here. After the Whipple procedure in April and six days of recovery in the hospital, after watching TV with his family the first night back and feeling like this was what he’d been fighting toward, he woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and it was nonstop blood. He woke up Ivory and they got in a cab to go back to the hospital. On the ride there, Ivory noticed him typing furiously into his phone. “Keep in mind it’s 4 a.m.,” she tells me. “He’s like, ‘There’s this artist I’ve been trying to buy. Something just came up and it’s 10 a.m. in France.’” “Have you lost your fucking mind?” she screamed to him. “You’re internally bleeding.” “I’m currently getting the piece framed,” he tells me. “I bought art all through last year even though I didn’t know how this would affect me financially. This was maybe 3,000 euros, but I bought pieces for $50,000, too. I couldn’t stop. I think it helped keep me alive.” At the ER that night, they gave Gambino an MRI; he started throwing up blood. A nurse told him he had air in his stomach, which could kill him. A doctor told him actually it was fine; they had put air into his stomach for the surgery. He had a roommate in the ER also named Carl, who started flatlining, he says, “and they’re saying, ‘Come back to us Carl.’” At some point during the night, he went to the mirror and saw staples down his chest, blood all over, cuts, tape, wires. He was unshaven and gaunt. “I looked like a wounded animal,” he says. “I was about to mentally give up.” But then for some reason, he thought about Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which he hadn’t read in years. “And I was like, If he could survive everything he went though, I can survive this. I’m not leaving my kids. I’m not leaving my family.” The next morning, he was on the phone with Chase, sending wires for the painting and negotiating a $12 million condo sale. Gambino finished his last chemo treatment on August 15, his 41st birthday. He has been in remission since April. He will go in for check-ups with decreasing frequency for the next five years. And he is back to meeting with clients and flying to other cities again. He exercises most days — he is, he says, far more fit now than before all this happened. His refrigerator is full of lactose-free dairy products: cream cheese, butter, yogurt, milk. The cancer did, in fact, make him lactose intolerant — his first diagnosis was correct, if woefully inadequate. His kitchen counter is full of enzyme pills, which he has to take before he eats anything with fat, probably for the rest of his life. And right now, he’s eating every two hours to gain weight. The trip to L.A. last month was his first in a year. “It’s surreal,” he says, calling from his room at the Waldorf Astoria. “In April, I was internally bleeding and on my way to my deathbed, and now I’m here, completely fine, eating sourdough bread and cream cheese, and looking at the Hollywood hills.” A Celebrity Broker’s Secret Fight Against a Deadly Diagnosis Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.