Jay A. Pritzker

Jay Pritzker wiki (1922-1999) founded Hyatt Hotels and the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

"Among hard-core financiers, Jay is considered to have been perhaps the greatest deal-maker of his day, although he was almost completely unknown to the general public. Few people, for example, knew that he controlled Braniff Airlines for a time in the 1980s, or McCall's magazine, which he bought in 1973 and then sold in 1987, or Ticketmaster, which he bought in 1982 and sold in 1993, or Levitz Furniture. Or that his family owns a quarter of Royal Caribbean Cruises and helped found Tenet Healthcare Corporation, the second-largest hospital owner in the country. Jay hated publicity and managed to avoid it even when involved in wildly controversial deals—using a partnership called Resource Holdings for an unsuccessful hostile run at the ITT Corporation in 1984, for example, and a partnership called GKH to represent him in 1989 in a failed bid by First Boston to break up RJR Nabisco...

"To many of those who invested with Jay over the years, there was no financier who was more honorable. “You could play cards with Jay over the phone,” says Leadbetter. “You could absolutely trust him.” Not everyone felt this way, however. In the early 1990s the Pritzkers were sued by Donald Trump, who charged that the family had used “fraud, extortion and money laundering” in an attempt to force him out of his 50 percent share of the Hyatt next to Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. In his lawsuit, Trump said the Pritzkers had, among other things, extracted $60 million in unearned management fees from Hyatt, used other Pritzker companies to bilk the hotel, and siphoned off even more money through “improper bookkeeping” in order to force him to sell his interest to them. The suit was eventually settled. Similar allegations were made in another lawsuit, filed in 1988, that was even more bitter and protracted. Paul Dopp, a New Jersey businessman, accused Jay of using “deceit and duress” in an attempt to force him out of his share of a deal he’d made with Jay to buy two casino hotels in Puerto Rico. The case went to trial, and eventually Dopp won a judgment of $15 million."

It was Penny Pritzker "who dealt with one of the Pritzkers’ biggest public embarrassments—the collapse, in 2001, of Superior Bank. Purchased in 1988 by Jay and an old friend of his, the New York real-estate developer Alvin Dworman, the savings bank got into trouble with regulators because of accounting problems with its huge portfolio of loans to low-quality borrowers."

His brother is Robert A. Pritzker and his sons are Thomas Pritzker, John Pritzker, and Daniel Pritzker, and his daughter Gigi.

Related Sourcewatch articles

 * Pritzker & Pritzker
 * Liesel Pritzker