April 7, 2010; Yale Daily News | Newswire readers will recall that we recently ran another story on a disputed donation to Yale but now Yale is electing to keep a donation which was, as this article tells it, more than likely pilfered.
John Mazzuto, class of ’70, donated $1.7 million to Yale’s baseball program and possibly more to Yale but Industrial Enterprises of America, the company he headed at the time, has now filed for bankruptcy and in their debtor’s disclosure statement they claimed that Mazzuto “wrote $83.7 million in checks from company holdings. Current CEO, Renck said he has tracked down the recipients of about half that, including a $13 million chunk Mazzuto wrote to himself.
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Mazzuto and his associate Jim Margulies also improperly issued a total of 16.1 million shares to different recipients—including Yale and Mazzuto’s prep school, Tabor Academy in Massachusetts—amounting to $87 million between 2005 and 2008, the statement says. The company is now taking Yale to court but the article also states that other alumni are becoming angered at Yale’s reticence on the matter.
NPQ wants to recommend to Yale and to you an article in our upcoming issue of NPQ about how to handle the “tainted donor.” We have a guess about what else might be going on here but let’s just all keep an eye on this and see how it plays out.—Ruth McCambridge
