NY Times December 6, 2009
Scholarly Investments
By NANCY HASS
THEIR company names were conspicuously absent from their nametags, but
that is how these hedge fund managers and analysts — members of a field
known for secrecy — preferred it. They filled the party space at the W
Hotel on Lexington Avenue in late October, mostly men in their 30s.
Balancing drinks on easels adorned with students’ colorful drawings,
they juggled PDA’s and business cards, before sitting down to poker
tables to raise money for New York City charter schools.
Working the room, the evening’s hosts, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt,
who are partners in the hedge fund Gotham Capital, had an agenda: to
identify new candidates to join their Success Charter Network, a cause
they embrace with all the fervor of social reformers.
“He’s already in,” Mr. Petry said as he passed John Sabat, who manages a
hedge fund for one of the industry’s big stars. (Like Voldemort in the
Harry Potter novels, no one in the group would name him aloud.)
“I wasn’t hard to turn,” said Mr. Sabat, 36, whom Mr. Petry drafted last
year to be a member of the board of Harlem Success Academy 4, on East
120th Street, the latest in its network of school in some of the city’s
poorest neighborhoods. Boards agree to donate or raise $1.3 million to
subsidize their school for the first three years. “You can’t talk to
Petry without taking about charters,” Mr. Sabat added. “You get the
religion fast.”
Mr. Petry, 38, and Mr. Greenblatt, 52, may spend their days poring over
spreadsheets and overseeing trades, but their obsession — one shared
with many other hedge funders — is creating charter schools, the
tax-funded, independently run schools that they see as an
entrepreneurial answer to the nation’s education woes. Charters have
attracted benefactors from many fields. But it is impossible to ignore
that in New York, hedge funds are at the movement’s epicenter.
“These guys get it,” said Eva S. Moskowitz, a former New York City
Council member, whom Mr. Petry and Mr. Greenblatt hired in 2006 to run
the Success Charter Network, for which they provide the financial
muscle, including compensation for Ms. Moskowitz of $371,000 her first
year. “They aren’t afraid of competition or upsetting the system. They
thrive on that.”
Hedge fund managers may be better known for eight-figure incomes with
which they scoop up the choicest Manhattan penthouses and Greenwich,
Conn., waterfront estates. But they also dominate the boards of many of
the city’s charters schools and support organizations. They include
Whitney Tilson, who runs T2 Partners; David Einhorn of Greenlight
Capital; Tony Davis of Anchorage Advisors; and Ravenel Boykin Curry IV
of Eagle Capital Management...
“At heart we are still the kids who in eighth grade were in the backyard
doing science experiments while the cool kids were at football
practice,” said Mr. Curry, 43. “We’re the kind of people who could never
survive in the slick political environment of an investment bank.”
The claim of Mr. Curry to nerdiness is undercut by the fact he is
married to Celerie Kemble, a Palm Beach-raised decorator and socialite,
and is partners in a planned Caribbean resort with Moby, Richard Meier
and Charlie Rose.
Still, Mr. Curry has been “knee deep in educational issues” since his
20s, he said. He co-founded two Girls Prep schools and is head of the
board of the newer one, in the Bronx. The schools are “exactly the kind
of investment people in our industry spend our days trying to stumble
on,” Mr. Curry said, “with incredible cash flow, even if in this case we
don’t ourselves get any of it.”
---
THE UTOPIANS
Yaddo meets Club Med
A little more than a year ago, over the Christmas holidays, I descended
in a small helicopter onto a stretch of pristine white sand. The beach,
set against a striking coral cliff some ninety feet high, lay just east
of a golf course--one of the last designed by the late Robert Trent
Jones, Sr. Not a building was in sight. This was in the Dominican
Republic, on the less travelled north coast, fronting the Atlantic, and
I had been invited there by Boykin Curry, who stood on the sand with his
fiancee, Celerie Kemble, waving a towel in the air to greet me.
Five minutes later, as I floated in the surf, a young American couple
approached from the direction of a nondescript hotel called the
Occidental, situated beyond the cliff. Noticing the helicopter, the
woman said, "Now that's the way to travel like millionaires. Is it very
expensive?" She likely assumed that Curry, sunburned in a faded red
bathing suit and a pink T-shirt, and with windblown dark curly hair, was
staying at the Occidental as well--a fellow-gringo living it up on the
cheap in a country with a per-capita G.D.P. of only sixty-five hundred
dollars.
But Curry, who is forty, was a highly successful money manager from
Manhattan. He owned the course, the cliffs, the mountains behind the
cliffs, the rolling jungles in between, the bluffs out to the
east--everything in the area, as far as the eye could see, except for
the Occidental. And even that was just a matter of time; he and Kemble,
a thirty-two-year-old interior designer, already controlled the hotel's
water supply, beach access, and electricity, and were in negotiations to
buy and demolish it.
A few months earlier, acting on a tip from a friend of Kemble's, Curry
had flown down, drafted a prospectus, and corralled a group of friends,
including the musician and eco-activist Moby, the television interviewer
Charlie Rose, and the foreign-policy whiz Fareed Zakaria, to help buy an
enormous tract of land, known locally as Playa Grande, or Big Beach, and
establish what he called a Creative Person's Utopia. ("We are going to
keep it Bohemian, and not filled with dentists who got lucky in the
stock market," he wrote in one pitch letter.) Except for the golf
course, the twenty-two-hundred-acre plot--nearly three times the size of
Central Park--was unspoiled. They picked it up for fifty million dollars.
After my swim, I climbed back into the helicopter with Curry and Kemble,
and we began touring the property, which extends about five miles along
the coast, flanked by a nudist colony and a Rochester doctor's
retirement mansion. As Curry elaborated on his vision, it emerged that
the utopia he had in mind was a twenty-first-century, jet-setting
variety, in which golf, a game he does not play, could be used to
subsidize an artists' colony and other noble pursuits. Curry's
enthusiasms include organic subsistence farming, environmental
conservation, and entomology. ("Boykin will do anything to have an
insect named after him," Kemble told me.) He imagined a classical
Athenian village--updated--in which four-star restaurants and art
galleries could share street space with locally run fish shacks and pool
halls; with great public plazas, where Op-Ed columnists like David
Brooks and Thomas Friedman might gather to discuss antiterrorism
strategy with Zakaria and Rose, and then join Moby and his friend
Michael Stipe for a concert on the beach, followed by a nightcap with
Matthew Barney, the "Cremaster" artist, observing the migration of the
humpback whales, headed east to spawn near Samaná.
On the western edge of the golf course, Curry showed me a paved
cul-de-sac that was overgrown with weeds-evidence of the Dominican
government's aborted attempt to develop the property some years back.
"See, sloth is our friend," he said. "They had the foresight, the
vision, to keep it all together as one giant property, without breaking
it up piecemeal--and the incompetence not to do anything with it. If
they hadn't been so incompetent, there would be ten Club Meds here by now."
Sloth had not prevented the government from building the so-called North
Coast highway, a potholed two-lane road used occasionally by wild pigs,
through the middle of the property. Curry hoped to persuade the
government to reroute the road behind the property line. After we left
the helicopter and were driving west along the highway, headed to our
hotel in the tourist town of Cabarete, which is known for its favorable
kite-surfing conditions, one of the car's tires went flat. "The road
here is not so pretty," the driver remarked.
"Good time to move it and repave it!" Curry said.
Although the Dominican peso had nearly doubled in value in the five
months since he had first visited the country, Curry kept pointing out
new things that he might like to buy: a large farm, owned by a family of
Dominican sisters, adjacent to the lot's southeastern boundary; a radio
tower in the neighboring town of Rio San Juan. As we walked into the
lobby of a small hotel, which was apparently for sale at a price of a
million dollars, and beheld a view of the waves crashing against the
seawall below, Curry turned to me and said, "Just think, all this could
be yours for the, price of a small Manhattan apartment."
full: http://www.singlearticles.com/the-utopians-a1323.html
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