TAKING STOCK
Gristedes mogul shares his journey from college dropout to billionaire
After graduating from high school, John Catsimatidis wanted to spend the summer of 1966 much like any teenage boy would — watching TV and lounging around on his parents’ couch in upper Manhattan.
But fate had other plans for the Greek immigrant, who came to the States as an infant in 1949.
Catsimatidis’ mom, Despina, couldn’t allow her son — a standout student at Brooklyn Tech HS — to be a couch potato. So, she dragged John down to a neighborhood grocery store and got him a job stocking shelves.
His mother’s insistence that he work that summer was integral to Catsimatidis becoming a billionaire businessman, the 74-year-old writes in his memoir “How Far Do You Want To Go? Lessons From a Common-Sense Billionaire” (Matt Holt; out today).
“Life would have been quite different if my mother never pushed me off the couch,” he said.
After that summer, Catsimatidis started at New York University in the engineering program and enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. But he remained uncertain about what he really wanted to do in life. So, with just six credits needed to get his diploma, he dropped out of the prestigious school and made a deal with “Cousin Tony,” the neighborhood man who had once hired him to work in a grocery store.
An unpopular decision
Tony, a fellow Greek immigrant who may or may not have been a blood relative, was looking to sell his share in the store, which he owned with his uncle Nick. He offered his half to Catsimatidis for nothing upfront but instead $1,000 monthly payments down the road. Catsimatidis said yes, horrifying his parents.
His mother thought he “was throwing away not only my education but also the family’s whole lifechanging journey to America,” Catsimatidis writes. “I tried to tell her that the truth was exactly the opposite . . . I could have my own business? Wasn’t that the essence of the American Dream?”
In 1969, just nine months into their business venture, Catsimatidis and Nick were pulling weekly profits of $1,000 — for reference, electrical engineers were making just $129 weekly. Then, “a neighborhood tough guy” tried shaking down a store employee.
Catsimatidis brought a gun to work and pulled it out the next time the hustler came around. “‘You come within three blocks of this store again,’ I said calmly but directly, ‘I’m going to blow your head off,’ ” he writes.
By 1974, Catsimatidis and Nick’s grocery business — then named Red Apple — had expanded to several locations throughout NYC. Catsimatidis was just 24 years old.
“I was making a million dollars a year but I still lived at home with my family,” he said.
As his profits grew, so did his yearning to pursue an old passion.
Not long before his 30th birthday, he got his pilot’s license and bought a jet from Walt Disney’s brother Roy.
“I wanted to attend the Air Force academy when I was younger so that brought me to this,” Catsimatidis said. “I really did love to fly, especially on Tuesday afternoons.”
He ultimately got into the air travel business, shuttling people to Atlantic City with a fleet of 20 planes in the early 1980s.
In 1986, he sold the plane company to an associate of Warren Buffett’s, who then used it to launch NetJets.
That same year, Red Apple acquired Gristedes, making it the largest supermarket chain in New York City.
Risks pay off
As the decades went on, Catsimatidis dabbled in politics: He ran for mayor in 2013 but lost in the Republican primary.
These days, he oversees Gristedes, a grocery empire with over 30 stores. He also manages 2 million square feet of real estate in NYC, Florida and elsewhere in the US, and operates United Refining Company, a Pennsylvania oil refinery. In 2020, he acquired WABC, where he shows off his gift for gab every weekday at 5 p.m. on the “Cats & Cosby” radio show with Rita Cosby.
Forbes estimates his net worth to be $4 billion — not bad for a college dropout.
“You can’t win if you’re too afraid of losing,” he writes. “Great success comes with great effort — outwork everyone.”