createpositivechange

Tag: Blackstone Group

  • Scott Boras: The Ari Gold of baseball

    Like any sport, baseball needs its villains.

    And right now, there’s no better villain than Scott Boras, the California-based sports agent who has the audacity to seek and get really, really good contracts for his millionaire clients.

    Boras, 55, is so hateful, it would seem, that he will even upstage the World Series.

    While the last game between the Boston Red Sox and Colorado Rockies was being played last month, the word emerged that Boras client Alex Rodriguez was opting out of the last three years of his contract with the New York Yankees. In doing this, he was passing up $91 million to seek more money elsewhere.

    The writers were appalled that Boras — the presumed leaker of the info — didn’t wait until after the World Series to let the opting-out be known.

    “At the very least, the decision to announce Rodriguez’ decision violated baseball etiquette in the extreme,” wrote Jack Curry in the New York Times.

    Casual observers might wonder how a game in which the players spit frequently and scratch themselves could have etiquette, but baseball does.

    And there are lawyers who might argue that Boras, who is a lawyer and a former minor league player, was just doing his duty to his client.

    Regardless, the fuss over Boras, sometimes called the most hated man in baseball, may obscure the fact that he is a business powerhouse.

    His company, Boras Corp., has so many clients on so many baseball teams that he may be the best-connected person in the sport.

    According to an Oct. 29 profile by Ben McGrath in the New Yorker, Boras Corp. represents 65 major-league players.

    For its services, the company gets 5 percent of the major leaguer’s salaries.

    Daisuke Matsuzaka, a star player in Japan who signed with the Boston Red Sox last December, is a Boras client.

    To get Matsuzaka, Boston first won bidding rights by paying $51.1 million. Then the Red Sox agreed to pay Matsuzaka $52 million over six years, a figure that could reach $60 million if Matsuzaka reaches certain goals.

    Boras also got pitcher Barry Zito $126 million for seven years from the San Francisco Giants in 2007.

    And his bargaining brought outfielder Carlos Beltran $119 for seven years in 2005 from the New York Mets.

    Many other Boras clients have done very well.

    However, none has received the contract numbers Boras negotiated in 2000 for Rodriguez. The player signed a 10-year, $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. (Rodriquez went to the Yankees in 2004 and the contract remained in force.)

    According to reports, Boras now hopes to get Rodriguez, an extraordinary player who has had less than extraordinary results in the post-season, a new contract in the range of $350 million.

    With the exception of Rodriguez, it’s usually Boras and not the players who are accused of greed after big contracts are signed.

    And sometimes, too, it’s Boras, and not the team owners, who is blamed by fans for high ticket and hot dog prices.

    Boras, though, would seem to be able to take the heat, believing he has a role to play. “There’s a clear need for someone to represent the athlete and to explain the athlete’s value,” he told the New Yorker. “If that person is characterized as a villain, well, so be it.”

  • Linda Stein, celebrity real estate agent, found murdered

    Update: On Nov. 9, police reported an arrest in the case. Natavia Lowery, 26, of Brooklyn, Stein’s personal assistant, was charged with second-degree murder and second-degree grand larceny. According to the New York Times, the assistant told police that Stein “kept yelling at her.” Our updated story is now here

    ——–

    Linda Stein, punk rock band manager and real estate agent to the stars, was found dead Tuesday night in her apartment. Police said she had been bludgeoned to death.

    Stein, 62, co-managed the Ramones, a band that recorded on Sire Records, a label founded by her ex-husband, Seymour Stein. She later represented Billy Joel, Sylvester Stallone, Debra Winger, Perry Ellis and other celebrities.

    A powerful personality, Stein was the inspiration for Sylvia Miles, the aggressive real estate agent in the movie Wall Street.

    Close friend Elton John issued a statement saying: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years. She was a godmother to my kids. She helped me with my AIDS foundation.”

  • Torre Should Have Looked Over the Fence

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  • ‘Free’ tutoring is big business for Sylvan

    The No Child Left Behind act is a bonanza for private tutoring firms, including Sylvan Learning.

    Under the act’s provisions, students enrolled in schools judged to be failing are entitled to free tutoring, paid for by taxpayers. The costs total $2.5 billion annually, according to U.S. News and World Report.

    Tutoring companies contract with individual states and school districts. Sylvan provides such tutoring at about half of its 1,200 U.S. locations, according to Tabatha Sweeney-Gehrt, Sylvan’s director of new business development. At some centers, she says, business has doubled because of the service.

    Earlier this year at a Sylvan location in West Hartford, Conn., the number of tutored students more than tripled, according to Kathleen Keenan, the center’s director at the time. She estimates 250 kids came to the center specifically for the free tutoring. Keenan is now director of education at a Sylvan center in East Hartford.

    In 1993, two Baltimore businessmen, Christopher Hoehn-Saric and Douglas Becker, gained ownership of Sylvan and first took the company public.

    A decade later, Sylvan sold its tutoring business to New York-based, private equity firm Apollo Advisors, founded by Leon Black. At that point, Sylvan became part of Educate, Inc., an Apollo-owned company that went public in 2004. Educate’s holdings include the Hooked on Phonics grammar/language training system.

    In a $535 million deal completed in June, Hoehn-Saric and Becker, working with Citigroup Capital Partners, took Educate private under a new entity, Edge Acquisition, LLC.

    Hoehn-Saric is still CEO of Educate (and senior managing director at Sterling Capital), while Becker is CEO of Laureate Education Inc.

  • Linda Stein, celebrity real estate agent, found murdered

    Linda Stein, punk rock band manager and real estate agent to the stars, was found dead Tuesday night in her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

    Police said she had been bludgeoned to death.

    Stein, 62, co-managed the Ramones, a band that recorded on Sire Records, a label founded by her ex-husband, Seymour Stein. She later represented Billy Joel, Sylvester Stallone, Debra Winger, Perry Ellis and other celebrities.

    A powerful personality, Stein was the inspiration for Sylvia Miles, the aggressive real estate agent in the movie Wall Street.

    Close friend Elton John issued a statement saying: “I’m absolutely shocked and upset. She’s been a friend for over 37 years and she was a huge supporter of the Elton John AIDS foundation.”

    Police, who had not announced an arrest by Thursday morning, said there were no signs of forced entry.

  • Bear’s Cayne holds cards close to vest

    In a classic fiddling-while-Rome-burns story, the Wall Street Journal traced the activities of James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Stearns Cos. this summer.

    While units of Bear Stearns, an investment and banking powerhouse, were collapsing because of the crisis in the subprime mortgage market, Cayne was out of the office on several occasions, according to a story in the Journal on Thursday.

    Not surprisingly — he’s a CEO after all — Cayne was incommunicado at times on the golf course, the Journal said.

    But at other times he was, hold on to your hats, playing bridge.

    (He might also have been puffing on a joint, the Journal implies, but that’s a whole other issue.)

    Cayne shot back at the Journal, saying in a memo to employees that the article “alleges I engaged in inappropriate behavior and includes a number of other inaccuracies and personal slurs.”

    Regardless, he is an avid bridge player, though his devotion to the demanding card game may sound a bit old-fashioned.

    But other moguls are drawn to bridge, as well.

    Bill Gates, the richest man in America, according to Forbes magazine, loves bridge, as does Warren Buffett, the second richest man.

    But Cayne, who didn’t make the list of America’s 400 richest people this year but was 384th in 2005, is at a much higher level in the card-playing world than Gates or Buffett.

    He’s ranked 611th the world and has been a top bridge player in the U.S. for years.

    For sure, bridge opened doors for Cayne at Bear Stearns.

    Alan “Ace” Greenberg, the head of Bear Stearns when Cayne was rising through the ranks at the company, also played bridge, as the Journal noted.

    The club at 15 East 67th St. in New York City was described this year by New York Times bridge columnist Phillip Alder as having “the highest standard of play in any club in the world, certainly more than a century ago.”

    While skill at bridge would appear to be advancement plus at Bear Stearns it may not trump concern about work habits.

    Warren Spector, who until this summer was co-president of Bear Stearns, is also a competitive bridge player, ranking 10th in the U.S.

    Both he and Cayne were at the same bridge tournament in Nashville this summer when all hell was breaking loose at Bear Stearns.

    Cayne went back to New York before Spector and he later asked for, and received, Spector’s resignation.

    “Mr. Cayne was annoyed that Mr. Spector was away from the office during the fund crisis,” the Journal reported.

    Since the crisis, Bear Stearns has laid off 800 people, though 15,000 remain, the paper reported.

    Cayne, who is 73, remains on the job, presumably analyzing his hand and deciding which card to play next.

  • Kay Bailey Hutchison Protects Oil Interests

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  • Princeton, donors’ family battle over $880 million

    In 1961, A&P supermarket heir Marie Robertson and her husband, Charles, gave $35 million in stock to Princeton University for its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

    Today, the gift is worth more than $880 million.

    But the university and the descendants of the couple have spent millions in legal costs in a years-long fight over how the money should be used.

    A New Jersey judge’s decision last week that the dispute should go to trial has drawn nervous attention from college administrations across the country. The New York Times has called it “one of the largest lawsuits ever filed exploring how closely colleges must adhere to the original intent of donors.”

    The Robertsons’ children – Anne R. Meier, Katherine Ernst and William Robertson – maintain that the donation was meant to help prepare graduate students for careers in federal government, particularly in foreign and international affairs. They filed suit against the university in 2002, claiming that Princeton had failed to adhere to their parents’ instructions and had spent the money for other uses.

    The suit also charges that Princeton took control of the foundation set up to administer the gift, and commingled its funds with the university endowment.

    Princeton officials respond that the Robertson offspring are trying to overturn the structure set up by the original grant, and use the money for their own purposes.

    Both the university and the Robertsons have launched web sites about the suit. And both sides say they expect to win at trial.

    Regardless of the outcome, colleges are likely to pay much closer attention to the restrictions that often come with major gifts.

  • America’s ruling families

    We’ve come to expect political dynasties. They’re a fact of life in the U.S., perhaps even more than royal succession is in the modern UK.

    The 2008 presidential campaign is the first since 1952 without a sitting president or vice president. An entire generation has grown up thinking the race for the White House requires the presence of a Bush or a Clinton.

    Even beyond the obvious – the Bushes, Kennedys, Rockefellers, Roosevelts and Adamses – many American clans have passed the political baton from one generation to the next.

    In recent decades, Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker, the “dynastic dynamic” has accelerated.

    The presidential field includes not only Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of a former president, but Mitt Romney, son of a former governor of Michigan. Hertzberg notes that there are currently five U.S. senators whose fathers preceded them in the Senate. A prominent example in the House is Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose father was a member of Congress and the mayor of Baltimore.

    Such connections yield intriguing Muckety maps. One of our favorites was created by the marriage of Howard Baker and Nancy Kassebaum, which linked not only their separate Senate careers, but the legacy of Kassebaum’s father, former Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, and Baker’s former father-in-law, Sen. Everett Dirksen.

    Political dynasties tend to overlap with the business and media spheres. (Think Maria Shriver.) After Louisiana Congressman Hale Boggs died in an airplane crash, he was succeeded by his wife, Lindy. One daughter, Barbara Boggs Sigmund, was mayor of Princeton, N.J., before dying of cancer. Another, Cokie Roberts, is a correspondent for ABC and NPR, and the wife of journalist Steven Roberts. A son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., is a powerful Washington lobbyist.

    Offspring of the powerful can learn from their parents’ example and their parents’ mistakes. Or can they choose not to learn at all. Hertzberg’s column closes with an observation on George W. Bush:

    “Bush’s failure to learn much of anything for the past six years suggests a deficit of character, not of experience; his unwillingness to employ his father’s skills and advice on behalf of the nation shows a disrespectful disregard for a dynast’s biggest advantage. He has given both freshness and family a bad name.”

  • Christopher Hitchens revives the enemies list ([Muckety](https://web.archive.org/web/20071031184448id_/http://news.muckety.com/2007/10/30/christopher-hitchens-revives-the-enemies-list/165))

    In the early 1970s you couldn’t have a better opponent than Richard Nixon.

    Indeed, when the embattled president’s Enemies List became public, there was no complaining from those who made the cut.

    Newsman Daniel Schorr and actor/activist Paul Newman treated their inclusion like a badge of honor. To have Nixon against you was to have the world for you.

    These days, the best possible seal of disapproval might come from Christopher Hitchens, the erudite, outrageous, provocative, witty and indefatigable contrarian.

    When Hitchen’s your enemy, you don’t need friends.

    Regularly venting his spleen, Hitchens has pieced together an Enemies List that might even make Nixon envious, were he alive.

    For starters, Hitchens, who is 58, has never liked Mother Teresa, the founder of the Missionaries of Charity who received worldwide approval for her work with the poor, the ill and the needy in Calcutta.

    In essays and in his book, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, Hitchens has argued that Mother Teresa wasn’t modest, wasn’t humble, and wasn’t really opposed to poverty and that she buddied up to dictators.

    Hitchens also doesn’t like the late Pope John Paul II, in part because he fast-tracked Mother Teresa on the road to sainthood.

    Absolutely no Hitchens love is lost on the Dalai Lama. And he doesn’t like The Rev. Mr. Jerry Falwell either.

    None of these dislikes is that surprising given the fact that God himself (or herself) is a frequent Hitchens target.

    Hitchens takes on the diety in God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. To the surprise of many, the book became a bestseller this spring and its sales may net Hitchens $1 million.

    Beyond that it has helped increase the visibility of atheism in this country and it has given Hitchens a regular chair on talk shows and in debates against true believers.

    Hitchens, a former member of the British left who is now difficult to classify, doesn’t confine his scorn to religion or the religious.

    A short list of his favorite non-religious targets includes Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton – both war criminals in Hitchens’ opinion.

    Also among the disliked are Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan, Mel Gibson and Princess Diana.

    The next best thing to having Hitchens hate you may be to have Hitchens like you.

    The writer, who is now an American citizen, has been strong in his support of Scooter Libby, Ahmed Chalabi, Tony Blair and George W. Bush (sometimes).

    He also remains a strong voice for the Iraq war.

    And he has a wide and varied list of literary and journalistic saints, beginning with George Orwell.

    But, in general, Hitchens, who knows the value of enemies, hasn’t spent his time making nice. His list is long and getting longer.