Zell was a major donor to Jewish causes, including the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress, the American Jewish Committee and the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School, named for his father, in Chicago. “The ‘grave dancer’ of real estate development was now the ‘grave digger’ of the newspaper world,” a Forbes columnist wrote at the time. Although the deal took place at a time of declining fortunes in the media industry, Zell’s personal leadership and decision to saddle the company with debt were widely blamed for the failure.

The company foundered in what Zell himself called the “deal from hell,” and filed for bankruptcy in December 2008, one year after Zell took the company private in a heavily leveraged $8.2 billion deal. He pioneered the use of REITs, real estate securities that trade like stocks on the major exchanges.īut Zell appeared to lose his magic touch in 2007 after buying the Tribune company and its assets, which included televisions stations, the Chicago Cubs baseball team and major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. His firm also invested in manufacturing, travel, retail, healthcare and energy. He developed an office-tower company that he sold to the Blackstone Group for $39 billion in 2007. in 2007, the billionaire was known for his gift for reviving moribund companies. ( JTA) - Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate magnate and son of Holocaust survivors who led a tumultuous leveraged buyout that bankrupted the Tribune media company in the early 2000s, died Thursday.

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