Word: hoffenberg
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This prompted the Post, which doesn't have a dime to buy a banana from a pushcart, to lodge a lawsuit against the News. Hoffenberg charged that Zuckerman is a "vulture" and "body snatcher" who is trying to destroy the Post with his "crazy Kamikaze attack." The pages of both papers, meanwhile, barked daily accusations of impropriety and nasty innuendos about each other -- behaving, in other words, like tabloids. IT'S WAR! shrieked a Post banner. DAILY NEWS RAIDS THE POST...
...Peter Kalikow, like Zuckerman a real estate lord, who ran down the circulation (from 550,000 to about 438,000), threw his real estate holdings into bankruptcy and exacted a 20% pay cut from his staff before finally putting the paper up for sale. Answering the call was Hoffenberg, whose millions come from "financial services," in this case buying other business's bad debts at a discount and then hounding the debtors...
Zuckerman was not about to take this interloper -- and the threat of heightened competition -- standing up. His newshawks were soon reporting that Hoffenberg once employed a "Mafia leg buster," a commodities swindler and even the discredited former billionaire Adnan Khashoggi. Not only that, Hoffenberg had been involved in questionable business dealings that aroused the interest of federal and state securities regulators...
Never mind all that, says Hoffenberg, a self-styled "nice guy from Brooklyn," who explains that his troubles were merely "technical violations." In any case, he wants to make the Post a going business. He has already made good on his promise to reinstate half of Kalikow's salary cuts and hopes to bolster the bottom line by using his 1,000-member sales force as advertising salespeople. He won't interfere in editorial matters, he insists. "The creative side, that's not my job. I have enough to do on the publishing side," although he wants to write...
Some family. One Post columnist calls his new boss "Repo Man." Another newsman in that shop grouses, "We're sort of like a MASH unit. There's never been enough of anything. We don't know if ((Hoffenberg)) is for real. He talks * a good game. If it turns out to be bluster, we've all been duped...