Abe Hirschfeld, 85; Tycoon Gained Fame for Eccentric Behavior

Abe Hirschfeld, the irascible, eccentric multimillionaire who grabbed headlines by launching quixotic political campaigns and trying to buy a New York newspaper but who was also imprisoned for trying to have a partner killed, has died. He was 85.

Hirschfeld, who had cancer, died Tuesday of cardiac arrest at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital..

The immigrant, who made his fortune building parking garages, was as controversial as he was colorful. He was called a bully and a buffoon, and some thought he was flat-out crazy.

As an octogenarian, he served 22 months in prison for trying to pay a hit man $75,000 to murder his business partner. At the same time he was fined $1 million for tax evasion.

At the millennium, Time magazine cited him as one of the 20th century’s top builders and business magnates but headlined his profile “Crazy and in Charge.”

That was not Hirschfeld’s first less-than-stellar characterization in print. New York magazine once said he “occupies a place in public esteem somewhere between a loan shark and a communist spy.”

And when Hirschfeld tried to take over the financially troubled New York Post in 1993 by writing a $3.4 million check, the staff was so incensed that it created an entire issue lambasting him as a mean-spirited liar and a “nut case.”

The issue, which became a collector’s item, urged Post readers to call Hirschfeld “and ask him to sell this paper to someone who will allow it to survive.”

The front page included a photo of the venerable newspaper’s founder, Alexander Hamilton, with a tear running down his cheek, and an excoriating article about Hirschfeld, headlined: “WHO IS THIS NUT?”

Post reporter Jim Nolan told The Times during the brouhaha, “He’s definitely a few herbs short of the special recipe. He’s touched in the head.”

Hirschfeld, who candidly admitted that he loved publicity, took it in stride.

“The people at the paper hated me, because not one of them could write a check and buy it ... they hated me because a guy who can’t write can buy a newspaper,” he told the Jerusalem Post five years later.

Hirschfeld was the putative owner of the sassy tabloid for only about 16 days before a bankruptcy judge handed it back to its former owner, Rupert Murdoch. The parking lot potentate then started his own paper, Open Air, but it folded after five months.

In yet another media-made escapade in 1998, the gadfly tried to buy off Paula Jones by offering her $1 million to drop her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton.

“Personally, she’s a real American girl, but she’s not among the raving beauties,” Hirschfeld told The Times after the deal fell through. “She’s more like my secretary.”

The White House, which objected to Hirschfeld’s involvement, soon settled with Jones -- a settlement for which Hirschfeld took full credit. As for his own deal, Hirschfeld never funded the sham check he handed Jones at a Washington news conference. Her suit to collect was dismissed in court.

“Hirschfeld,” Newsday columnist Sheryl McCarthy told The Times after that stunt, “is an exhibitionist. He jumps into all of these high-profile frays just to get attention. Nothing ever comes of it.”

Eager to join politicians -- who generally regarded him as an embarrassment -- Hirschfeld self-financed several unsuccessful campaigns for U.S. senator (including one against Hillary Rodham Clinton), for New York lieutenant governor and comptroller, and for Manhattan borough president.

In his first bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 1974, he very publicly spat on New York Assembly Minority Leader Stanley Steingut for his lack of support. Hirschfeld gleefully boasted about the incident until he repeated it 16 years later.

That happened in Miami Beach, where Hirschfeld was elected a city commissioner in 1989. The next year, forced to auction his hotel there over building code violations, he spat -- twice -- on Miami Herald reporter Bonnie Weston, who had exposed the deficiencies. The newspaper came to describe Hirschfeld as the “notorious expectorator.”

Although he earned a mistrial in 1999 on one tax evasion case -- afterward inviting jurors to lunch and giving each $2,500 -- Hirschfeld was fined $1 million on other income tax evasion charges in 2000.

That same year, at age 80, Hirschfeld was convicted of soliciting the murder of his business partner of 40 years, Stanley Stahl, in 1996. Stahl died of a stroke in 1999.

“It was a mean-spirited crime by a very wealthy man ... out of greed,” said the judge who sentenced Hirschfeld to two to three years in prison.

Screaming “You can all go to hell!” at court officials as he was led away, Hirschfeld spent 22 months in New York’s Attica prison and Rikers Island jail.

Perhaps the experience mellowed him. He described the prison experience to the Miami Herald in 2003 as “fantastic” because of the nice people he met.

“I was eating every day with such a nice Irishman, Joe Sullivan. He killed 44 people,” Hirschfeld said in his heavily- accented English. “He said, ‘That was my profession.... ‘ “

Born Dec. 20, 1919, in Rymanov, Poland, Abraham Jacob Hirschfeld fled to Palestine (now Israel) with his parents and two brothers in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. He lost 10 aunts and uncles in the Holocaust.

Hirschfeld dropped out of school after sixth grade to work -- first watering trees in orange groves and then laying pipes for water tanks. Eventually, he took over his father’s weight-scale factory and began importing and selling nonferrous metals.

In 1950, he traveled to New York to buy machinery, and stayed on after the Korean War precluded his taking the equipment back to Israel.

Intrigued by Americans’ reliance on the automobile, Hirschfeld began building parking lots, which he called “open air garages,” and then added multi-story parking garages, the foundation of his fortune. As health clubs gained popularity, he launched New York’s Vertical Fitness and Racket Club (later the Vertical Club).

The self-made man self-published his autobiography, “An Accidental Wedding,” in 1984.

Hirschfeld is survived by his wife of 62 years, Zipora; a son, Elie; and a daughter, Rachel.