some people are into giving . . . Zell Kravinsky is into GIVING! . . .THE GIFT
Zell Kravinsky gave away millions
But somehow it wasn't enoughhttp://www.ahc.umn.edu/ahc_news/080304/The%20Gift.htmLast summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi. Would Katz call Kravinsky's wife, Emily, in Philadelphia, and say that the two men were about to take a weeklong trip to Katz's ski condominium in Vermont? This untruth would help Kravinsky do something that did not have his wife's approval: he would be able to leave home, check into the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, for a few days, and donate a kidney to a woman whose name he had only just learned.
Katz refused, and Kravinsky became agitated. He said that the intended recipient of his gift would die without the kidney, and that his wife's reluctance to support this "nondirected" donation-it would be only the hundred and thirty-fourth of its kind in the United States-would make her culpable in that death. "I can't allow her to take this person's life!" Kravinsky said. He was, at forty-eight, a former owner of shopping malls and distribution centers, and a man with a single thrift-store suit that had cost him twenty dollars.
(snip)
In 2002, Zell and Emily gave an eighty-seven-thousand-square-foot apartment building to a school for the disabled in Philadelphia. The same year, they gave two gifts, worth $6.2 million, to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. The gifts were partly in the form of a distribution center, four condominiums, three houses, and a parking lot; Kravinsky placed them in a fund named for his late sister, Adria. In March, 2003, the Kravinskys created the Adria Kravinsky Foundation, to support a School of Public Health at Ohio State University; the gift included three warehouses, four department stores, and a shopping center in Indianapolis. Together, these were worth around thirty million dollars. Karen Holbrook, the president of O.S.U., called the gift "a magnificent commitment."
Kravinsky had put some money aside-he had established trust funds for his wife, his children, and the children of his surviving sister. But his personal assets were now reduced to a house (on which he had a large mortgage), two minivans, and about eighty thousand dollars in stocks and cash. According to Katz, "He gave away the money because he had it and there were people who needed it. But it changed his way of looking at himself. He decided the purpose of his life was to give away things."
- more . . .
http://www.ahc.umn.edu/ahc_news/080304/The%20Gift.htm
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