REAL ESTATE TYCOON’S FORAY INTO WORLD OF MEDIA FAILED
Sam Zell, the real estate tycoon who specialized in distressed assets and acquired the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and other storied but troubled newspapers in a widely criticized leveraged buyout of the parent Tribune Co. in 2007, died Thursday. He was 81.
His death was announced in a statement by Equity Group Investments, the firm Zell founded and of which he had been chair. The statement did not say where he died and attributed his death to “complications from a recent illness.”
In a career of spectacular deals celebrated mostly in boardrooms and financial columns, Zell’s venture into the publishing world as chair of the Tribune Co. proved to be a resounding failure, a five-year descent into a maelstrom of rancor, downsizing, management scandals and bankruptcy.
At the end of 2012, the Tribune Co. emerged from bankruptcy relatively intact but with half its value and with Zell gone, replaced by senior creditors, who installed new managers and planned to sell flagship newspapers and other assets. Zell’s personal losses were not heavy by his standards, but the episode was widely seen as a black eye for a real estate mogul out of his depth in newspapers.
The son of Polish Jews who fled to America in 1939 as World War II engulfed Europe, Zell, an abrasive and eccentric Chicagoan who reveled in testing the limits of business deals as well as motorcycles, amassed one of the nation’s largest portfolios of apartments, offices and commercial real estate, mostly by snatching up properties that other investors had snubbed as too risky or even moribund.
He called himself “the grave dancer,” celebrating his own sow’s-ear-to-silk-purse triumphs as a high-stakes speculator who found opportunities where others saw only stress.
Unlike Donald Trump and Harry Helmsley, who used their names on trophy properties and as self-promotion, Zell was relatively anonymous for most of his career, known largely in financial and real estate circles as an audacious investor whose vision — to create a national brand — did not materialize because real estate sales are largely local.
Nevertheless, in 2007, the Blackstone Group bought Zell’s firm — then known as Equity Office Properties Trust — for $39 billion. His own fortune was estimated at nearly $5 billion, and with holdings in residential properties,
drug and department stores, and energy and electronics companies — a lifetime of acquisitions that made him one of the nation’s wealthiest men — he might have retired comfortably in his mid-60s.
But seeing yet another inefficient market, he plunged into the unfamiliar world of newspapers, winning a bidding war for one of the nation’s premier media companies, the 160-year-old Tribune empire. Besides the Chicago and Los Angeles newspapers, it included The Baltimore Sun, Newsday, The Hartford Courant, 23 television and radio stations, the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
He was born Samuel Zielonka on Sept. 28, 1941, in Chicago. He was the son of Berek and Ruchla Zielonka,
who changed their names to Bernard and Rochelle Zell after immigrating and settling in that city, where the father went into real estate and wholesale jewelry.
Zell was an active philanthropist, giving millions to the University of Michigan, Northwestern University and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He was also a major donor to causes in Israel and to the American Jewish Committee, a Jewish primary school in Chicago named for his father, and other cultural and educational institutions.
He is survived by his third wife, Helen Herzog Fadim, along with two sisters, Julie Baskes and Leah Zell; his daughters, Kellie and JoAnn Zell; his son, Matthew; and nine grandchildren.