Word: weinberg
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...Harry Weinberg, 53, is an up-from-the-slums entrepreneur who has made a fortune by buying faltering city bus lines and then paring payrolls, slashing services, and raising some fares. Robert Ferdinand Wagner, 52, the mayor of New York with ambitions for higher office, is a consummate politician who wants to stay on the safe side with bus riders and labor unions. Last week these two determined men collided on the streets of New York, snarling public transit from the Bowery to The Bronx. The nation's biggest metropolitan bus line was stalled by a strike...
Whipsaw. The trouble began when Weinberg set his sights on the Fifth Avenue Coach Line, whose routes lace Manhattan and suburban Westchester County. With the shrewd counsel of Lawyer Roy M. Cohn, 35, the boy Torquemada of the McCarthy era, Weinberg and friends bought up 23% of Fifth Avenue's stock for $3,500,000, put Weinberg in the driver's seat. Straightway, he began to complain that the company was barreling toward bankruptcy, demanded a fare boost from 15? to 20? to save it. Mayor Wagner, who had promised to hold fares down, would tolerate none...
Money Makes Money. Born in Austria and raised in Baltimore, Weinberg quit school in sixth grade to help out in his father's auto repair shop. This left him short on the niceties of syntax (for ex ample, he says of former Fifth Avenue Coach Chairman Howard Cullman: "He was entrusted of these stockholders with their money and he done as chairman a very bad job"). But Weinberg is a near genius at numbers...
...Weinberg halved the payroll and chopped services, but Scranton Transit now rides in the black, and a union man says grudgingly, "That guy kept 125 jobs that might have been lost." Then he bought control of Honolulu Transit, used Honolulu Transit assets to buy Dallas Transit, and Dallas Transit money to buy control of Fifth Avenue Coach...
Down with Riders. Weinberg's swashbuckling tactics can hardly be regarded as a responsible answer to the woes of transit companies. He sets up no depreciation fund to buy new equipment, and the number of riders on his buses is skidding fast. His critics, who are many, charge that he intends to eventually liquidate his bus lines and keep only the valuable real estate holdings of his companies. Weinberg insists that he believes in providing only as much bus service as people are willing to pay for, a simple proposition that infuriates politicians who may be anxious to keep...