Deep Read: Sam Zell in 'The New Yorker'

Sam Zell is better known in the real-estate business, where he made his billions, than in media, where he has merely dabbled. But that's changing, thanks to Zell's $8.2 billion deal to take control of Tribune Co.

And that's a good thing, because, judging from his profile in this week's New Yorker, Zell is nearly as colorful as Ted Turner, which is to say about five times as colorful as Rupert Murdoch and 20 times as colorful as Sumner Redstone.

Here's what Connie Bruck learned about him:

-He is a showoff and a thrill seeker. Zell rides a yellow Ducati motorcycle with a group of guys who call themselves "Zell's Angels"; he tears down black diamond ski runs in a yellow bodysuit; and he used to show up for meetings with bankers in "a red polyester jumpsuit and a gold chain."

-He fancies himself a verse writer. He set up the $39 billion sale of his Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone by sending a "Roses are red" poem to Vornado CEO Steven Roth, and he has a thing for song parodies:

Every year since 1994, he has sent a music box of his own design to more than six hundred people. Cast in bronze and standing about two feet high, the boxes feature lyrics composed (though not sung) by Zell. Last year's song skewered the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.... The song plays to the tune of the fifties hit "Love and Marriage"--"Sarbanes-Oxley/ They've got moxie/ But for businesses/ Their act is toxic/ It's not rocket science/ We're killing profits with compliance."

-He doesn't like paying taxes, unlike all those billionaires who love paying taxes.

-He throws mean parties. They started out as scavenger hunts, but have evolved into something else. At the most recent one, guests boarded boats in Chicago and headed out onto Lake Michigan.

Eventually, the guests disembarked at an industrial site in Indiana, where a fifty-thousand-square-foot structure had been built from six hundred corrugated-metal shipping containers, to resemble a Mayan temple. Throughout the evening, French acrobats leaped from one container to the next, opening doors to reveal scenes--a performing orchestra, a beautiful young woman in a colorful setting slowly turning a large cylinder--that were meant to evoke Joseph Cornell boxes.

-He has a filthy mouth -- but what else would you expect from a guy who got his start in business as a 12-year-old selling copies of Playboy at a 500-percent markup? Says one Zell associate, "He gets your attention by communicating messages you've heard before in an unconventional way. In other words, he wouldn't say to me, 'Why don't you work harder?' He'd say, 'Hey! Reach around in your pants and see if you can find anything down there! Don't you have any balls? Go do it!'"

-For a guy who does a lot of business in the Middle East, he's a little paranoid about anti-Semitism:

"I think that being Jewish means that you're vulnerable forever. Was there a stronger Jewish community anywhere in the world--more intellectual, more successful--than Germany in the late twenties and early thirties, before Hitler? And seven years later they're building concentration camps! So, do I expect something like that to happen in the United States? Of course not. Do I think it could? Absolutely."

-Maybe there's an audience for Fox Business Network's pro-business message after all? Speaking to a class on business ethics, Zell lashed out at one aggressive questioner this way:

Are human ethics an oxymoron? I don't think so. Neither do I think business ethics are an oxymoron. It's real fun to take a shot at the business community. After all, those motherfuckers are getting all the money, right? But let me tell you something: I'll put my work schedule against anybody you know, including you, and I work my ass off every day! The idea that somehow or other the business community is full of all these greedy characters--you should see the greed in teachers' unions! You should see the greed in any political organization! Business is made up of a whole group of individuals, and within that group there are straight people, there are not-straight people, and then there's a whole bunch of us in the middle, who some days are straight and some days we're not.

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