I was going to make this a special true crime edition, but I got overtaken by events.
Jack Welch, former CEO of GE.
It was a time when successful, lavishly paid corporate executives were more admired than resented. Mr. Welch received a record severance payment of $417 million when he retired in 2001. Fortune magazine named him the “Manager of the Century,” and in 2000 The Financial Times named G.E. “the World’s Most Respected Company” for the third straight year.
Mr. Welch’s stardom extended beyond the business world. In a 2000 auction for the rights to his autobiography, Time Warner’s book unit won with a bid of $7.1 million, a record at the time. “Jack: Straight from the Gut,” written with John A. Byrne, was published the next year and eventually sold 10 million copies worldwide.
…
He attacked bureaucracy and made sweeping payroll cuts, creating a more entrepreneurial, if more Darwinian, corporate culture. He led the globalization of G.E.’s business, both expanding sales and manufacturing overseas. And he made G.E. far more dependent on finance, as banking and investment grew as a share of the American economy.
Mr. Welch distilled his management concepts into one-sentence nuggets. “Control your destiny, or someone else will.” “Be candid with everyone.” “Bureaucrats must be ridiculed and removed.” “If we wait for the perfect answer, the world will pass us by.”
His goal at G.E., Mr. Welch wrote in his autobiography, was to create “a company filled with self-confident entrepreneurs who would face reality every day.”
…
Mr. Welch was also attacked when he was leading G.E., especially for slashing the G.E. work force, which earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.” But most of the second thoughts about him and his management legacy have arisen in recent years. The superstar chief executive, laser-focused on enriching shareholders, is often criticized today as a symbol of corporate greed and economic inequity.
The widely diversified corporation that Mr. Welch built is also out of favor, an idea underlined by G.E.’s precipitous decline in the last few years.
The New York Times business columnist James B. Stewart wrote in 2017, “Hardly anyone considers Mr. Welch a management role model anymore, and the conglomerate model he championed at G.E. — that with strict discipline, you could successfully manage any business as long as your market share was first or second — has been thoroughly discredited, at least in the United States.”
Joe Coulombe, founder of Trader Joe’s.
Linda Wolfe, writer. She started out writing short fiction, and was clipping true crime stories to use in novel plots…
A turning point of sorts came in 1975, when twin doctors, both gynecologists, were found dead in their trash-filled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It turned out that Ms. Wolfe had been the patient of one of them, years before — only briefly, but that was enough to propel her to investigate the case and turn to a life of writing about crime.
“This will sound callous,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, but she felt lucky that she had had “the ‘good fortune’ of knowing somebody involved in the kind of story I had been clipping.”
Both doctors had been barbiturate addicts and had died not of an overdose but of the drug’s typically severe withdrawal syndrome. Ms. Wolfe, by then working at New York magazine (she worked there for 25 years as a contributing editor, writer and restaurant reviewer), wrote a journalistic account of the case, “The Strange Death of the Twin Gynecologists.” Her article inspired the David Cronenberg movie “Dead Ringers” (1988), which starred Jeremy Irons.
She became a prominent true crime writer.
She would go on to write several books and magazine articles that delved behind some of the nation’s most sensational headlines. Her articles included “The Professor and the Prostitute” (1983), about a Tufts University professor who bludgeoned to death the prostitute he loved, and “From a Nice Family” (1981), about a teenager in Dallas who killed his mother and his father, who was the president of Arco Oil and Gas.
One of her best-known books was “Wasted: The Preppie Murder” (1989), so called because the perpetrator, Robert E. Chambers Jr., had bounced around various elite schools and lived on the Upper East Side. He pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the 1986 strangulation death of Jennifer Levin in Central Park after they had had sex behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was released in 2003 after serving 15 years in prison and subsequently went back to prison on drug charges.
I read parts of The Professor and the Prostitute quite a while back: it shows up pretty frequently at Half-Price Books. I might have to grab a copy next time I’m there.
Finally, Dr. Charles Friedgood. I’d never heard of him either, but this is one of those interesting true crime stories (for multiple reasons). Dr. Friedgood was convicted of killing his wife in 1975.
While he admitted that he had injected his wife, Sophie Friedgood, 48, with a painkiller, Dr. Friedgood insisted that he had not intended to kill her. She had suffered a stroke in 1959, when she was 33, and had become an invalid.
Dr. Friedgood was convicted of second-degree murder after prosecutors proved to a jury that he had deliberately given his wife an overdose at the family’s 18-room home in Great Neck, N.Y., where they had reared their six children.
Her cause of death was recorded as a stroke, but the police grew suspicious because Dr. Friedgood had signed the death certificate himself and rushed the body out of state for immediate burial in accordance with Jewish religious custom.
Five weeks later, he was arrested at Kennedy International Airport with more than $450,000 of his wife’s cash, negotiable bonds and jewelry. Prosecutors said he had intended to fly to Europe to join his paramour, a Danish nurse who had sometimes cared for Mrs. Friedgood and with whom he had fathered two children. He had begun his affair with the nurse in the late 1960s.
He was sentenced to 25 years to life. He was released on compassionate grounds in late 2007, after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d served 31 years and was 88 when he was released.
He lived another 11 years after being released. According to the NYT, he died in May of 2018 at the age of 99, but his death had not been reported until now.