Public Intelligence

• Chairman and Editor-in-Chief, U.S. News & World Report¹
• Chairman and Publisher, New York Daily News²
• Chairman, Boston Properties, Inc.³
• Member, J.P. Morgan Advisory Board⁴
• Member, Council on Foreign Relations⁵
• 468th Richest Person in the World⁶

Biography

Mortimer Benjamin Zuckerman was born on June 4, 1937  in Montreal, Quebec.  He entered McGill University when he was sixteen year old.  He graduated from McGill with a B.A. in 1957 and an LL.B. in 1961, though he never took a bar exam.  In that same year, he went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business where he earned an M.B.A. with honors.  The next year, he attended Harvard University’s Law School where he earned an LL.M. ⁷

After graduating, Zuckerman remained at Harvard Business School as an associate professor for nine years. He also taught at Yale University. He spent seven years at the real estate firm Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.⁸

In 1980, he purchased the literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly, where he was Chairman from 1980 to 1999. In 1999 he sold the magazine to David G. Bradley for US$12 million. Commenting on this sale and that of Fast Company magazine, which he sold for $365 million at the height of the tech boom in 2000, he quipped, “I averaged out.”⁹

While he still owned Atlantic Monthly, in 1984, Mortimer Zuckerman bought U.S. News & World Report, where he remains its Editor-in-Chief. ¹⁰

Mr. Zuckerman now serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Boston Properties, Inc. and has been a director since June 23, 1997. Mr. Zuckerman co-founded Boston Properties in 1970 after spending seven years at Cabot, Cabot & Forbes where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. He is also Publisher of the New York Daily News. He serves as trustee of Memorial Sloan-Kettering and he is also a member of the JPMorgan National Advisory Board, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies and the International Institute of Strategic Studies. He is also a former Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a former lecturer of City and Regional Planning at Yale University and a past president of the Board of Trustees of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Mr. Zuckerman was awarded the Commandeur De L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France, the Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall and the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architecture in New York.  He has also received three honorary degrees.¹¹

Mr. Zuckerman married Marla Prather, a curator of the National Gallery of Art, in 1996.  They divorced in 2001 after having a single child, Abigail, who was born in 1997.¹²

On 19 December 2008, Zuckerman’s second daughter, Renée Esther, was born.  The child’s birth was announced in the Gatecrasher column of the Daily News on 23 December 2008.  However, the mother was not identified.¹³

Mr. Zuckerman has a net worth of approximately $1.5 billion dollars.  He has been on the Forbes list of the Richest People in the World for several years.  As of 2009, he is ranked 468th on the list.¹⁴  He keeps homes in New York, New York, East Hampton, New York and Aspen, Colorado. He also keeps a 166 foot Oceanco Yacht, the Lazy Z. For transportation, he previously owned a Falcon 900 corporate jet, but has recently purchased a Gulfstream G550.

Support for Jewish Organizations

Zuckerman is also an active supporter of Israeli and international Jewish causes. Between 2001 and 2003, Zuckerman was the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Typically, the nominating committee attempts to choose a person who is both respected and uncontroversial. However, Zuckerman was widely opposed by liberal Jewish factions. Nonetheless, Zuckerman was eventually elected and served a full term.¹⁵

In their 2006 paper The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, named Zuckerman as a member of the media wing of the “Israeli lobby” in the United States. Zuckerman replied: “I would just say this: The allegations of this disproportionate influence of the Jewish community reminds me of the 92-year-old man sued in a paternity suit. He said he was so proud, he pleaded guilty.”¹⁶

Bernard Madoff Connection

Mr. Zuckerman is one of the investors defrauded by the so-called “Ponzi scheme”  run by Bernard Madoff.  Zuckerman had investments with Fifth Avenue Synagogue president J. Ezra Merkin who staked roughly 10% or $30 million of Zuckerman’s charitable trust fund with alleged scammer Bernard Madoff.^17 18 Zuckerman has stated that all current charitable obligations will still be honored with no changes.

On April 6, 2009, Zuckerman filed a lawsuit against J. Ezra Merkin and his Gabriel Capital LP. The lawsuit claims fraud and negligent representation and seeks unspecified punitive damages. Merkin had a “huge incentive not to disclose Madoff’s role, especially to investors like Zuckerman,” because he charged clients “substantial fees” to manage both his Ascot Partners LP and Gabriel Capital. The lawsuit claims over $40 million in losses for placing his assets with Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC without his knowledge. Zuckerman invested $25 million with Merkin’s Ascot Fund in 2006 through his Charitable Remainder Trust, or CRT Investments Limited, and personally invested $15 million with Merkin’s Gabriel Capital. Merkin charged Zuckerman a 1.5% fee and imposed significant “lock-up restrictions on redemptions,”, but his agreement with Gabriel Capital contains an arbitration clause against Merkin for his lost personal $15 million investment. The lawsuit also named the accounting firm BDO Seidman LLP, and a related entity called BDO Tortuga, as defendants.¹⁹

The case is CRT Investments Ltd. v. J. Ezra Merkin, 601052/2009, filed in New York State Supreme Court.

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