Businessman Weinberg Dies, Leaves $900 Million for Charity

Harry Weinberg, a reclusive millionaire who made a fortune in Baltimore and Hawaii, has died at age 82, leaving a $900-million charitable trust, one of the biggest in the country.

Weinberg died Sunday at the Queen’s Medical Center after an eight-year battle with bone cancer.

Last month, Forbes magazine estimated Weinberg’s worth at $950 million, ranking him 70th on its list of the 400 richest Americans.

His family immigrated to Baltimore in 1912 from what was the Austro-Hungarian empire. Weinberg quit school at 12, worked in his father’s auto shop, sold newspapers on the side and eventually parlayed a series of remarkably successful business deals into enormous wealth.

He began acquiring land during the Depression, buying 47 properties in downtown Baltimore alone.

A millionaire by the end of World War II, Weinberg began buying money-losing private transit companies in Baltimore, Scranton, Pa., Dallas, New York and Honolulu. He later sold them at enormous profit.

After visiting Honolulu in the early 1950s, he recognized that jet travel would make Hawaii’s tropical islands accessible to middle-class tourists.

He acquired Oahu and Maui properties that form the bulk of the estate and are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars in one of the nation’s hottest real estate markets.

Weinberg moved from Baltimore to Honolulu in 1968, but had already set up a Baltimore-based foundation for the poor that bears his name and that of his wife, who died in 1989.

The Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation--which will receive most of his estate--will be among the nation’s 12 largest, worth at least $900 million and obligated to spend as much as $45 million a year.

Weinberg left nothing to his son, Morton, according to Shale Stiller, attorney for the foundation.