Then came what he would later call “the deal from hell.”
“People tend to ask me about the Tribune like it was something equivalent to having lost a child,” Zell, who died Thursday in Chicago due to complications from a recent illness, told Crain’s Chicago Business in 2014. “I promise I never had any kind of emotions like that.” “The challenge is, how do we get somebody 126 years old to get it up?” Zell told an auditorium full of Los Angeles Times employees shortly after gaining control. “I’m your Viagra, OK?”
Zell was entrepreneurial from an early age. He was barely out of grade school when he noticed a new magazine called Playboy, got his hands on dozens of copies and sold them to his friends for $3. The senior Zell was a businessman who dealt in grain, jewelry and eventually real estate. He was demanding and opinionated, and so was his son. According to Greg Burns in the Chicago Tribune, Sam Zell’s quote in the 1959 Highland Park High School yearbook read: “I am not arguing with you. I am telling you.”
In the 1970s Zell and Lurie began to diversify into office buildings such as Chicago’s landmark Field building, which they bought for $52 million in 1978 and sold for $94 million in 1981. In the 1970s he led an investment group that wanted to acquire a $9-million apartment and hotel complex in Reno. The family who owned the property was reluctant to sell until Zell’s group came up with a plan to deposit part of the purchase price in an offshore account, thereby reducing the sellers’ tax bill. That transfer led to federal charges that Zell and his partners had conspired to defraud and impede the Internal Revenue Service.
Zell made another shrewd purchase in 1991 when he spent $280 million on bankrupt Carter Hawley Hale, a Los Angeles-based department store chain. Four years later, he sold the still-struggling retail giant to Federated Department Stores Inc. for $373 million. “I’m sick and tired of listening to everyone talk about and commiserate over the end of newspapers,” Zell told the Wall Street Journal in 2007. “They ain’t ended and they’re not going to end. I think they have a great future.”
When a photographer at the Orlando Sentinel questioned his commitment to serious news — “We’re not the Pennysaver, we’re a newspaper,” she said — he capped his response with an acerbic “F--- you.” Michaels installed former associates from the radio world in top management, even though newspapers made up the bulk of Tribune’s business. One of his hires was former radio programmer Lee Abrams, who, as Tribune’s new chief innovation officer, flooded employees’ inboxes with long-winded and disjointed emails that were riddled with typos. One of his most memorable missives expressed surprise that reporters covering the Iraq war were actually in Iraq.
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