Leonard Norman Stern is the Chairman and CEO of the privately owned Hartz Group based in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
. Additionally, he oversees operations of the extensive Hartz real estate portfolio owned and operated under its
Hartz Mountain IndustriesHartz Mountain Industries is a private family owned and operated company known for its vast real estate holdings in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Its former parent Hartz Mountain Corporation , was founded by German-American businessmen Max and Gustav Stern. Multi-billionaire Leonard...
subsidiary company, of which he also serves as Chairman and CEO. Under his forty plus years of leadership,
Hartz Mountain IndustriesHartz Mountain Industries is a private family owned and operated company known for its vast real estate holdings in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Its former parent Hartz Mountain Corporation , was founded by German-American businessmen Max and Gustav Stern. Multi-billionaire Leonard...
, which began as a hobby for Stern, acquiring land in New Jersey's Meadowlands during the 1950s and 60s, has built and currently owns over of office, industrial, hotel and retail properties in over 200 buildings, including major developments on the
New JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It is bordered on the north by New York, and to the east by the Hudson River, Upper New York Bay, the Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, the Arthur Kill, Raritan Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, Westchester County, New York City, Long Island, and...
Hudson RiverThe Hudson River is a river that flows from north to south through eastern New York. It rises at Lake Tear of the Clouds, on the slopes of Mount Marcy in the Adirondack Mountains, flows past Albany, and finally forms the border between New York City and New Jersey at its mouth before emptying into...
waterfront, and across northern New Jersey. Based in Secaucus, NJ, Hartz Mountain Industries has added property in
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, Westchester, NY, Long Island, NY, and Maryland. In addition to its property operations through its 'Industries' subsidiary, The Hartz Group has an active and growing financial operation.
Inheritance
Stern's initial wealth was inherited from his father,
Max SternMax Stern was born in Fulda, Germany and emigrated to America in 1926. He established and built the Hartz Mountain Pet Food Company, which eventually became one of America’s most successful private companies....
, who died in the early 1980s. Max Stern was the
GermanGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
-born vice-chairman of the Board of Trustees of
Yeshiva UniversityYeshiva University is a private university in New York City, with six campuses in New York and one in Israel. Founded in 1886, it is classified as a very high research activity university and it ranked as 50th in the US among national universities by U.S...
for whom its
Stern College for WomenStern College for Women is the undergraduate women's college of arts and sciences at Yeshiva University. It is located at Yeshiva University's Israel Henry Beren Campus in the Murray Hill section of Manhattan....
was named. He had emigrated from Weimar Germany to the U.S. in the 1920s after his textile business proved unprofitable, bringing along 2,100 canaries from Germany to sell on the U.S. market. By selling caged birds, bird cages and other pet bird supplies to U.S. pet owners through
WoolworthThe F. W. Woolworth Company was a retail company that was one of the original American five-and-dime stores. The first Woolworth's store was founded, with a loan of $300, in 1878 by Frank Winfield Woolworth...
's stores over the next thirty years, Stern's father built up the family business: Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC), also headquartered in Secaucus, NJ. HMC would later grow to become the flagship subsidiary of The Hartz Group. The business was named after the
Harz MountainsThe Harz is a mountain range in central Germany. It is the highest mountain chain in northern Germany occupying parts of the German states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. The name Harz derives from the Middle High German word Hardt or Hart...
of Germany.
Control and growth of Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC) -- (the pet products side of the business)
Leonard Stern graduated from
New York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian, research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
(NYU) in 1957, purchased his brother's and sister's share of the family business and, by the early 1960s, exercised absolute control of Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC). Hartz Mountain Corporation then began to use monopolistic techniques to capture the pet supply market that catered to both dog and cat owners and parakeet and canary owners . He rapidly broadened Hartz' distribution channels from variety stores into more than 30,000 supermarkets and mass merchandisers. Under his leadership, the "Hartz" trademark became the most widely known and respected pet supply brand in America, and America's leading manufacturer of pet supplies.
By 1984, Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC) controlled 75% to 90% of the U.S. market for most U.S. pet supply goods . Its pet supply business was estimated to be worth $400 million and was earning $40 million in annual profits.
Real estate and finance
In 1966, he began a major diversification of his business interests by going into active real estate development. Today the
Hartz Mountain IndustriesHartz Mountain Industries is a private family owned and operated company known for its vast real estate holdings in the New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. Its former parent Hartz Mountain Corporation , was founded by German-American businessmen Max and Gustav Stern. Multi-billionaire Leonard...
(HMI) subsidiary has become one of the largest privately held real estate companies in the United States.
Stern began Hartz Mountain's real estate operations in 1966 when he started to purchase land in New Jersey's swampy Meadowlands at $20,000 per acre. By 1987 Meadowlands' real estate was selling for $500,000 per acre. The value of Stern's Meadowlands property had jumped from $10 million in the late 1960s to over $1 billion by the late 1980s. According to a September 1987
Fortune Magazine article, Stern "made a killing building industrial parks" in the Meadowlands and "attracting companies with low rents." Gene Heller, the well-known President of Hartz Mountain Industries up until the 1990s, was the man with the grand vision and ability to broker the mega-deals during the company's heyday. He left Hartz in 1991 after a difference of opinion with Leonard Stern as to which direction the company should go, and has since started his own real estate firm.
Among the companies that moved their corporate offices from Manhattan to Stern's Meadowlands commercial office buildings were The Equitable Life Assurance Society, UBS/
Paine WebberPaine Webber and Company was an American stock brokerage and asset management firm that was acquired by the Swiss bank UBS AG in 2000. The company was founded in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber. Operating with two employees, they leased premises at 48...
,
PanasonicPanasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation Under this brand the company sells plasma and LCD display panels, DVD recorders and players, Blu-ray Disc players, camcorders, telephones, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens, shavers,...
's U.S. headquarters, and WWOR-TV. Stern also made money from Hartz's Meadowlands real estate by building the Harmon Cove Towers high-rise apartments and condo village.
In 1987, the Hartz Mountain Industries subsidiary also completed a 24-story luxury office tower in Manhattan on Madison Avenue and 61st Street to which it relocated Stern's corporate offices, The Hartz Group. According to
Business Week, 2004 rents were as high as $120 a square foot, second only to the General Motors building.
In order to concentrate on the management of his growing real estate and financial interests, Mr. Stern sold the Hartz Mountain Corporation (HMC) pet products company in December 2000, thus ending the family's 76 years of ownership. The 'Hartz' brand name (
goodwillGoodwill or Good Will may refer to:* Goodwill , the value of a business entity not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities* Goodwill Games, a former international sports competition...
) was included in the sale of that subsidiary. To outsiders, there has always been some degree of confusion between the once flagship Hartz Mountain Corporation, which dealt exclusively with pet products, and that of the more glamorous business of Hartz Mountain Industries' real estate concerns. Currently, the pet products "Hartz" operation, still maintains a presence, but now as a regular tenant, at the same headquarters building as Hartz Mountain Industries (HMI) in Secaucus, NJ. Leonard Stern currently serves on the Board of Governors of the Real Estate Board of New York.
Publishing
From 1986 through 1999, Stern successfully built Stern Publishing, publishers of the Village Voice, the LA Weekly, the Seattle Weekly, the Cleveland Free Press, and City Pages in Minneapolis, into America's leading publisher of alternative weekly newspapers, with a total weekly circulation of more than 900,000. Mr. Stern sold his publishing interests in March 2000.
Other businesses
Over the years, he also built, and sold numerous other businesses including:
- SM/Cork, the United Kingdom's largest "non foods" service distributor
- Harmon Homes which published 180 free circulation local "Homes" magazines
- Carpet Magic Company which manufactured and serviced carpet cleaning machine rental centers in 20,000 retail stores
- Currently has an ownership interest in a nearby Chart House Restaurant location
- SoHo Grand Hotel and the TriBeca Grand Hotel both in New York City (among others establishments)
1970s and 1980s
The methods of Stern's privately owned corporation created both legal and image problems for Stern. As Cynthia Green noted in an article titled "The King of Hartz Mountain Polishes His Image" that appeared in "Business Week" shortly after Stern bought "The Village Voice" in 1985, "Stern knows he has an image problem...Over the past 20 years, Hartz Mountain Corp. has been the subject of more than a dozen antitrust suits and of investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Dept."
Officials of Stern's company committed a variety of white collar crimes to which they pled guilty in March, 1984. In 1979, Hartz Mountain had also agreed to pay $42 million to A.H. Robins Company, whose subsidiary sold Sergeant's pet supplies, after Robins filed a suit which charged Stern's company with bribery, perjury and antitrust violations such as strong-arming distributors and offering stores special deals to induce them to sell only Hartz Mountain products. Among the illegal business practices used by Hartz Mountain was the providing of free prostitutes to distributors of pet supplies.
According to the first count of the criminal information to which Hartz Mountain pled guilty , "in or about September 1978, at New York City, New York, an un-indicted co-conspirator instructed another un-indicted co-conspirator to testify falsely in a deposition that women in attendance of the Hartz hospitality suite at the annual January Chicago housewares trade show were hostesses and not prostitutes."
The American Lawyer magazine deduced in an article by Connie Bruck that appeared in its October 1984 issue, titled "The Hartz Mountain Corporate Officers' Guide To Committing Perjury, Suborning Perjury, Obstructing Justice, Locking Up The Market, and Paying a $20,000 Fine," that the "unindicted co-conspirator" who "instructed another unindicted co-conspirator to testify falsely" was Leonard Stern.
1990s
According to the unsigned cover article, "Dynasty In Distress" in the February 9, 2004 issue of
Business Week, Stern was "intensely engaged" as a board member of Rite Aid in the mid-to-late '90s when the drugstore chain admitted to overstating net income by $1 billion over two years.
Stern was named in several class action suits in which investors claimed that he and other directors had breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders. A separate lawsuit, filed by Kevin Mann, the son of the original founder and former executive vice-president, alleged that Stern used his influence to increase shelf space in Rite Aid stores for Hartz's pet products at the expense of competitors. Rite Aid settled that suit in 1999 for $11 million.
Stern resigned from the board in late 2001. According to the article, he "brushes all of this aside: 'We saved that company from bankruptcy. We threw out the old management and brought in the new and set it on its turnaround' ".
http://businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_06/b3869001_mz001.htm
Affiliation with New York University
Mr. Stern earned B.S. and M.B.A. degrees from
New York UniversityNew York University is a private, nonsectarian, research university in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
, and served as an NYU trustee from 1976 - 1996. New York University renamed its Graduate and Undergraduate Schools of business, The Leonard N. Stern School of Business, in exchange for his $30 million donation and his many years of active service as a university trustee. NYU also awarded him the Albert Gallatin medal.
Founding of Homes for the Homeless
He was the founder in 1986 and is Chairman of
Homes for the HomelessHomes for the Homeless is an organization which provides housing and employment training for families and homeless people in New York City. It was founded in 1986 through a collaboration with Leonard N. Stern, the Cathedral of St...
, which is the largest non-profit provider of residential, education and employment training centers in the United States . According to its website, it serves over 630 homeless families and over 1,200 homeless children each day at five separate sites across New York City.
http://www.homesforthehomeless.com/index.asp?CID=1&PID=8
Honorary degrees
He is the recipient of numerous honors including: "Doctor of Humane Letters" awarded by Yeshiva University 1985, and an Honorary "Doctor of Law" degree 1995 from Fairleigh Dickinson.
External links