Eli Landau Obit.

Eli Landau was the Mayor of Herzliya while I managed the Wastewater Treatment Plant. He was called the Sheriff because of his authoritarian manner and because he was a man of general Arik Sharon, a Likudnik. I admired his style. 

In my time, the Engineering Dept. was nominally in charge of the largest civil engineering project of the country, the Marina of Herzliya, but Eli was never seen in the office: he managed all from his home. As a result, he was suspected of corruption, and brought to trial for changing the terms of the Marina contract, which required the use of Hebron natural stone blocks for the sea wall, for cheaper and better prefab cement pentapods. The police interrogation caused him a quadruple coronary infarct, but he was acquitted and lived twenty years more.

He transformed this poor coastal town of maabarot (refugee camps) into Israel's most exclusive residential area, Herzliya Pituach, with the American Ambassador and Israel's tycoons building their homes there. He also developed Israel's "Silicon Valley" in what was his industry-less Industrial Area. There was a fancy restaurants street that I called the Valley of Gluttony - עמק ההסבעה -  and the name caught. In a secondhand bookstore I discovered a detective book written by Eli Landau (pic) - he had started his life as a journalist of Ma'ariv. He married the daughter of Oved Ben Ami, owner, one of those socialist pioneers of Israel that emerged as its landowner and capitalist class.

A mensch.