On the Palisades Riviera, a $50 Million Mansion Sells to the Neighbors

When José E. Feliciano and his longtime wife Kwanza Jones recently decided to upgrade from their $20 million Pacific Palisades home, they didn’t even need to hop in the car to go house-hunting. The couple found the perfect place just down the street, less than a dozen doors away from their current residence.

How perfect? To the tune of nearly $50 million, the amount that Feliciano and Jones paid for the all-new mansion, which was built on speculation and only recently completed. In fact, the house is so new that it never even had a chance to list on the open market, though it was briefly marketed as a $60 million pocket listing. Powerhouse realtors Josh, Matt and Heather Altman of the Altman Brothers Team at Douglas Elliman were the listing agents.

The deal closed mere days before L.A.’s controversial new mansion tax went into effect, narrowly saving the seller from owing an additional $2.7 million in taxes.

Records indicate that lucky seller was an LLC with clear links to David Sackler, a member of the billionaire Sackler family. The New York-based Sackler clan made its vast fortune primarily by creating and selling OxyContin, the highly addictive painkiller blamed for rapidly accelerating America’s opioid epidemic; as a result, the Sacklers have been called the “worst drug dealers in history.”

Sackler paid just under $11 million for this property, which sits on a coveted street in the Riviera neighborhood pocket, back in 2017. He subsequently demolished the existing house, a large but ungainly mansion built in the 1970s, and erected a contemporary showpiece in its stead. Specific details are scant, but the new house was designed by the acclaimed Sinclair Associates Architects and features interior design by Dejager Design.

For a $50 million estate, the house is almost incredibly unassuming from the street, where’s it’s mostly hidden from view behind lush foliage and appears to be a minimalist residential box. But out back, the place juts out and drops down mullet-style to multiple levels and vast patios, all primed for grand galas and with stunning views over the exclusive Riviera Country Club, to the Pacific Ocean.

There are a total of six bedrooms and nine baths on the premises, plus a big hot tub and one of the largest infinity pools we’ve ever seen.

Feliciano, not to be confused with the famed “Feliz Navidad” crooner of the same name, was born in Puerto Rico and co-founded private equity giant Clearlake Capital, and has a net worth of $4.3 billion, per Forbes. He and Jones, both Princeton alumni, recently donated $20 million to their alma mater.