Turns out, this is not the first time that O’Brien and Jeff Zucker, the CEO of NBC Universal, have skirmished. The first was, by certain measures, even fiercer than today.
The first time these two faced off was in the ’80s, at Harvard. Zucker was the editor of the Crimson, the daily newspaper. O’Brien ran the Lampoon, the humor magazine.
Back in the day, the staffs of the two publications often pulled pranks on each other. And in that vein, early one morning, O’Brien and his pals broke into the Crimson offices to steal that day’s run of papers.
O’Brien riffed about this stunt — proudly, in fact — when I talked with him for a 2007 Fortune profile of Zucker, “Life imitates TV,”: “Jeff went nuclear right away,” O’Brien recalled. “He called the police. Not the campus police, which were the kind and gentle police. He called the Cambridge police.”
O’Brien soon found himself spread-eagled, cuffed, and listening to his Miranda rights — in the hands of a Cambridge cop.
http://postcards.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/01/13/conan-and-nbcus-zuckers-first-clash