notable excerpts about the Kluge money that started Trump's vineyard
https://www.readthehook.com/66663/john-kluge-benevolent-billionaire-goes-out-stylehttps://www.readthehook.com/66663/john-kluge-benevolent-billionaire-goes-out-style
John Kluge's business interests were varied. At the height of his fame, the firm he created, Metromedia, owned subsidiaries selling everything from lawn tractors to steak dinners to Academy Award-winning films. In 1997, though, he sold off most of his film library–- about 2,000 titles including such Orion Studios hits as Dances with Wolves, Platoon, and The Silence of the Lambs–- to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for $573 million.
Something that remained a passion for the nonagenarian was supporting a local group called Hiromi T'ai Chi. As recently as April, Tussi and John Kluge hosted an afternoon fundraiser for the group at their Albemarle home, Featheridge. Thanks to their donations, Hiromi teaches T'ai Chi, a Chinese martial art known for uniting mind and body, to underprivileged area children.
And Kluge certainly didn't cheat his newfound nation out of his time. He served in U.S. Army Intelligence during World War II, a conflict that put him in opposition to his native Germany.
Kluge's biggest success brought him plenty of attention– not all of it adulatory. It was his 1984 leveraged buyout of Metromedia. Kluge had already served as CEO when Metromedia was a public company, and he took it private in a deal that secured his fortune–- and touched off a wave of debt-funded deals that didn't necessarily benefit the former shareholders or the American public.
Kluge and his longtime right-hand-man and chief financial officer, Stuart Subotnick, had "dumbfounded their critics," according to Jim Murray, in his book Wireless Nation.
"In a matter of weeks they lined up all they needed with a complex combination of private investors, venture capital, and a massive pile of fresh bank debt," Murray writes. "The deal structure, laden with interest deductions, cost the U.S. Treasury more than it did any of the participants."
That wasn't the end of the controversy. Although Kluge bought the company for the then jaw-dropping sum of $1.1 billion, he sold its pieces for at least five times that amount, prompting a 1987 discussion about insider information in a Fortune article entitled, "Are shareholders cheated by LBO's?"
Metromedia's television stations became the nucleus of what Rupert Murdoch would later buy and brand as the Fox Network. At one point, Kluge's Metromedia was America's largest billboard company and owned Snapper lawn tractors, the Harlem Globetrotters, and Ice Capades. Later, Kluge and Subotnick founded the professional soccer team now known as the New York RED BULLS.
In 1995, Kluge and Subotnick formed Metromedia International Group, a publicly held company aiming to tap the burgeoning markets of China and Eastern Europe with cellular phone systems. At some point, the company went private, and last year the now North Carolina-based firm declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In January, a trust bearing Kluge's name filed a claim for $10.8 million as part of the bankruptcy.
As detailed in a lengthy story by Avery Chenoweth in Spy magazine, the peak of local controversy came in 1988, when Patricia and John Kluge ran afoul of laws and neighbors over their British-styled exotic bird hunts. They'd lend historic guns to period-costumed guests who would then begin shooting game birds.
The problem was that to keep the exotic game alive for such fish-in-a-barrel slaughters, some neighborhood dogs in Keene were also slaughtered–- along with hawks, a legally protected species. Albemarle and state officials pressed criminal charges, and the British gamekeeper was convicted and deported to the mother country.
Higher moments at Albemarle House included fund-raising parties for Douglas Wilder, who was elected Virginia's first black governor in 1989. That same fall, at a party for all of America's governors, Albemarle House was the alleged site of Bill Clinton's first eyeful of eventual grope-alleger Kathleen Willey.
In the early 1990s, Kluge bought four adjacent Palm Beach properties for the sum of $16.5 million and began demolishing unwanted houses for what became one of his primary residences. He also had a multi-level condominium in Manhattan, and his vacation homes included a restored castle he bought in the 1990s for about $6.5 million near Queen Elizabeth's Scottish country farm, Balmoral.
In the opening scene of the classic film Citizen Kane, the reclusive titular character utters the word "Rosebud" as he passes from this earth, an initially cryptic reference to something special from childhood. Somewhat similarly, seven years ago, Kluge told the Library of Congress, at a celebration honoring a $60 million gift, that he had a favorite china figure that he kept from his own childhood in Chenmitz, Germany.