The Grave Dancer

From the L.A. Times:

A talent for finding ‘motivated sellers’
By Thomas S. Mulligan and James Rainey

He’s about 5 feet 5 and has a bald dome and a beard like an Amish farmer. He revels in the nickname he gave himself years ago: “the Grave Dancer.”

At 65, Chicagoan Samuel Zell is still apt to arrive at a cocktail party by motorcycle and walk in wearing bluejeans and a Chicago Bears jersey. He thinks like an economist but can talk like a dockworker. He has vacation homes on the beach in Malibu and on the slopes in Sun Valley, Idaho, where people say he skis like a maniac. He’s also a paintball fanatic who Forbes says is worth $4.5 billion.

Zell has a lot on his plate. On Wednesday, in the second-biggest leveraged buyout in history, he sold his Equity Office Properties Trust commercial real estate empire for $23 billion to Blackstone Group, a New York private equity firm.
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Zell, the son of Polish-Jewish World War II refugees, is all about buying at the bottom. He’s the Grave Dancer because of his history of snapping up distressed properties — assets so out of favor nobody else would look at them. He specializes in real estate but has owned companies in a variety of industries over the years, including Schwinn Bicycle Co. and Chicago’s Midway Airlines. One Zell acquaintance joked that there would be a conflict of interest if he got involved with Tribune because he also holds a minority stake in the Cubs’ cross-town rival, the Chicago White Sox.

Zell pulled off a signature “vulture-capital” deal in Los Angeles in 1991, spending $280 million for bankrupt Carter Hawley Hale, parent of Broadway department stores. He sold the still-struggling retailer to Federated Department Stores Inc. four years later for $373 million. An even bigger coup was a Zell-led investment group’s 1996 purchase of Two California Plaza in downtown Los Angeles for about $80 million, less than it had cost to build the 52-story tower four years earlier — and about one-fifth of what it’s thought to be worth today.