The marriage ended soon thereafter, in a similar manner. “Cause I wanted to be me–do my own thing,” says Rahr. “Wake up in the morning, not have to be responsible, just go and be happy.”
Forbes – by Caleb Melby and Steven Bertoni
At 9:15 on a Wednesday night Stewart Rahr struts into Catch, a thumping restaurant in New York’s Meatpacking District, with a lithe Taiwanese party promoter on one arm, an aspiring Brazilian actress on the other and his bodyguard, Big Tommy, trailing behind. Rahr wears his thinning hair greased back from his tangerine-tan forehead, a wide-open black button-down hanging untucked over his tight jeans. His custom, highlighter-yellow Swatch (with his face on the watch face) matches his “I Love Ibiza” phone case, both consistent with his bright trademark sunglasses. He’s promptly seated–for about 30 seconds.
Soon Rahr, who is 67 years old and refers to himself in the third person as “Rah Rah,” begins pinballing among tables, a 50-cent Black & Mild cigar wedged in his mouth, pointing finger pistols at rapper/producer Doug E. Fresh and R&B singer Maxwell as he shakes his hips and grunts “Hey-hey-hey!” It’s his latest tagline, one borrowed from Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines,” this summer’s ubiquitous hit song made infamous for its music video featuring three aging pop stars surrounded by naked nymphets. Rah Rah’s own nymphets sulk at his table, thumbing iPhones, as he bounces over to the eight models seated nearby and informs them that he’s single. Hey-hey-hey . Introduced to another young woman, he breaks the ice thusly: “Where do you work? Over the desk? Under the desk? Everyone has a position.”
Since selling his New York-based drug distribution company, Kinray, to Cardinal Health for $1.3 billion in 2010, the Big Apple has been seeing a lot less of Stewart Rahr. Rah Rah, however, has been pretty unavoidable.Everyone has a friend who seems tons of fun to hang out with for a night but proves so exhausting you would rather not see him for a few months. Stewart Rahr is that guy. Times a billion.
Rahr keeps an ever-growing list of celebrities, journalists, politicians and fellow billionaires up to speed on his adventures through massive e-mail blasts, often signed “Stewie Rah Rah Number One King of All Fun.” Mark Cuban tells FORBES these e-mails are probably the best he’s ever seen. The notes almost always come with attachments. See photos of Rahr mugging with Michael Milken, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton. See a clip of his private concert by opera star Andrea Bocelli. See him accept an award for his $10 million gift to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Check out these gorgeous young women in bikinis, cocktail dresses and sometimes nothing at all. In late July Rahr sent an e-mail with the subject line “So r u going w me to Capri, Italy, n Ibiza,” which contained a picture of two naked women with the words “Love life, have fun, Rah Rah,” along with an abstract likeness of Rahr painted across their bare bottoms.
The 400 or so people on Rahr’s blind-copied e-mail list (he conspicuously cc’s the names, and e-mails, of the more famous, from Jay Leno to Oprah Winfrey, rotating the visible celebrities as a farmer does fields) have become used to such antics. Those not on Rahr’s e-mail list also get to live voyeuristically. He’s become a staple for the gossip pages, particularly the New York Post’s Page Six. In November he was banned from the midtown outlet of Robert De Niro’s celebrity sushi joint, Nobu. Ten days later he was taken into custody for allegedly pulling a gun on an elevator operator. And most notoriously, this June it was revealed that he had been sending friends copies of a sex tape involving three women that he filmed in the back of a limousine.
“It was in France; I was single,” shrugs Rahr. “I turned around, and the girls were, ‘hey-hey-hey, ho-ho-ho,’ it’s a party.”
All this action dovetails, coincidentally or not, with a $250 million divorce settlement made in May with his wife of 43 years, Carol. Rahr says there’s no connection to the uptick in his antics and that he and his ex still have lunch once a week. “My divorce with Carol was phenomenal,” says Rahr. “I love that girl.”
Love is the key word in Rah Rah’s vernacular. He intermittently uses “love life” and “love & have fun fun!” as mottos on almost every communication he sends. He expresses love of friends and family. A love of people, as evidenced by the philanthropic honors he’s keen to share.
That’s what makes the story of Stewart Rahr more than just a tale of Caligulan excess, an ongoing episode of HBO’s Entourage (which Rahr scored a walk-on role in, naturally, courtesy of cocreator Mark Wahlberg), except with a lot more years and zeroes. Rahr showers people with what he considers love. The question remains whether he is getting any return on that investment.
PAST THE HALLWAY with Picasso, Miro and Koons on the high floor of the Trump Park Avenue apartment building, you’ll find a sparse, cream-colored room with knockout Manhattan-skyline views that Rahr implies gets a lot of visitors. He calls it the “panty dropper.” You can learn a lot about someone by looking around his bedroom.
Above his king bed’s leather headboard Rahr shows off his most recent art acquisition, a painting depicting a reclined nude woman, those signature yellow sunglasses in hand, “Rah Rah Forever Young!” scrawled across her yellow skin, Basquiat-style. His two nightstands, meanwhile, display Rahr’s evolution. The one on the left is all Rah Rah, chock-full of framed photos showing him with various members of the A-list (Scarlett Johansson, DiCaprio, Bill Clinton), the drawers below stuffed with copies of Page Six. While he doesn’t call the right nightstand Rosebud, he may as well: It’s filled with old photos of his parents as well as the grin-and-grab photo that started it all–a young Rahr, perhaps 6 or 7, on vacation at Disneyland, holding hands, at his father’s insistence, with Walt Disney himself.
Stewart Rahr grew up in Far Rockaway, Queens, the second of two sons. Rahr says his father, Joseph, was rarely home, a workaholic, managing both a small family pharmacy and intermittently trying to get into the distribution game. Rahr describes his mother, Gertrude, as a dominating homemaker who kept quieter Pops “under her thumb.”
As a kid, Rahr says, he was stricken with polio. He remembers the pervasive loneliness of lying on the floor of his family’s living room, trapped in leg braces, while listening to his friends play stickball on the street. By high school, though, Rahr had toughened up. He was a baseball player and top scorer for the varsity basketball team–a fact he proves by producing the official scorekeeper’s book. His yearbook has him listed as “King Rahr” and “Most likely to bully teachers.”
After NYU as an undergrad, he attended law school, which he hated. When his father announced plans to sell Kinray in 1969, Rahr dropped out and persuaded his father to let him run the company. “I wasn’t born into the lucky sperm bank like a lot of these other people are,” Rahr says, glossing over the fact that he inherited an established, albeit small, company. “You know, I couldn’t buy my way–I had to work my way.” He pauses. “What a great quote: ‘I couldn’t buy my way into success, I had to work my way into success.’”
Around this same time he began courting Carol. A friend had shown Rahr a photo of her, and the inner-salesman took over. Without prior introduction he phoned her just after Rosh Hashanah and said “Happy New Year, this is gonna be the best year of your life.” They went out for coffee, and Carol remembers two things distinctly: Rahr talking at length about his ambitions for Kinray, and his driving, which teetered between aggressive and reckless.
“I said, ‘If your business doesn’t work out, you could always drive a cab.’”
Pharmacy distribution is a brutal business, especially for smaller players. Giant companies like McKesson and Cardinal Health are happy with cash flow margins under 3%. To stand out Rahr spurned the big drugstore chains to focus on single mom-and-pop shops, casting Kinray as the “underdog” distributor. Rahr hustled hard to develop deep relationships with small-business owners in metro New York and New Jersey, often lending them money to expand or get through hard times. “Listen, I don’t sell to your competitor over here–Duane Reade or CVS. But I see you’re dealing with McKesson,” he’d tell the smaller pharmacy owners. “They’re selling to them and supporting them, and they’re supporting the mail-order houses.” The guilt trip usually paid off.
As Rahr expanded he sought every cost advantage. An automated order-packing system, installed in 1993 after Rahr randomly met the system’s inventor on an airplane, shortened turnaround times and helped sales jump 40% to around $200 million the following year. Rahr put the money back into Kinray and moved from a 25,000-square-foot headquarters into a 400,000-square-foot warehouse in Queens, near the Whitestone Bridge. The new digs could handle a massive amount of volume, and soon the champion of the little guy was out-muscling smaller distributors.
Rahr worked diligently. “Let’s say they’d predict 2 feet [of snow],” Carol remembers. “They’d sleep in the warehouse so they could be open the next day. I don’t think there was a day they were closed, like ever.”
Kinray, at it roots, was a family company. Rahr’s older brother Elliot made a go of it with him in the early days, but it worked out poorly. Elliot left, and Rahr wound up owning Kinray outright. In 1998 Rahr brought a third generation into Kinray, tapping son Robert (Rahr also has a daughter, Felicia) as executive vice president and general counsel. That apparently flopped, too–by 2005 he was gone.
“It was a wonderful company with wonderful people, and I enjoyed my experience there immensely,” Robert says in a telephone interview, each word uttered deliberately, as if he was reading from a statement. “And I have the utmost respect for my colleagues and team members.” Even his dad? “I’d prefer not to answer that question,” he says. (He called back later, unprompted, to revise his answer: “It includes everybody, including my father.”)
As success accelerated, Rah Rah began to emerge. In the 1990s Rahr would play the role of Gatbsy in his co-op on York Avenue, throwing parties with gaggles of women frolicking in the building’s stainless-steel pool.
During this time Rahr, along with the rest of the industry, made a bundle speculating on drug prices, stockpiling pharmaceuticals he believed would go up in price. After the practice was banned in 2004, Rahr focused on the high-margin generics business, private-label health care products and client services, from pricing consulting to in-store displays.
By 2010 Kinray was the largest privately held pharma wholesaler in the country, grossing $4 billion a year, supplying 80% of independent pharmacies in metro New York. But Rahr says he was exhausted from the “war” and felt that he had led his battalion for too long without enjoying the spoils. “I heard all about these places all my life from my other friends. Single guys or guys who had no businesses or little businesses. I could never go to Saint-Tropez, Ibiza, Monaco, Cannes. Never. I would hear about it, but I never could go.”
He’d had his fill. “I got up one morning, without telling anybody, and sold the business,” Rahr says. “[My wife] didn’t even know, neither did my son. I just said, ‘What the f—? I’ve been in this 42 years.’”
The marriage ended soon thereafter, in a similar manner. “Cause I wanted to be me–do my own thing,” says Rahr. “Wake up in the morning, not have to be responsible, just go and be happy.”
Stewart Rahr, sixtysomething family man and billionaire pharmaceutical entrepreneur, was gone, Stewie Rah Rah, the Number One King of All Fun, was fully unleashed. The Nobu and gun incidents occurred within a month of the divorce announcement, and beginning the next week he was e-mailing photos of himself and various young brunettes from the floor of a Miami Heat game and in front of a private jet, shopping bags in tow. At the Miss Universe pageant Rahr sent a picture of himself mounting a statue of a canine that he dubbed “Rah Rah doggie style.” There was no one to put on the brakes.
RAHR MAY NO LONGER have a business, but that doesn’t keep him from having an office. The billionaire rents 7,500 feet of space on the 24th floor of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to go with his Trump apartment nearby. Incidentally, he also wears Trump Success cologne, which he seems to apply every 30 minutes or so. “He’s different than other people,” says Trump, the previous standard-bearer of New York billionaire gauche. “He’s a character, and he’s fun to be with.”
Ostensibly, the business of this office is philanthropy. In reality the core mission is the fabulous life of Rah Rah. The ceiling speakers pipe in his adopted “Blurred Lines” party song, along with a rotation of other pop hits. The decor is a mix of trophy case and Pee-wee’s playhouse. A dummy outfitted in Rahr garb slumps on a white leather couch as videos of the billionaire accepting charity awards loop on the wide-screen Samsung. A coffee table is shingled with magazines that he’s appeared in, including a previous edition of The Forbes 400. A magazine rack labeled “Porn” sits in the corner next to a sculpture of magenta lips.
And that’s just the reception area.
When Rahr sold Kinray he immediately put $100 million into a foundation. On a relative basis, it’s a pittance–FORBES estimates that Rahr is currently worth $1.7 billion, and it’s all liquid. An average portfolio would throw off that kind of money every year. But in real terms, it’s enough to blast open any door he wants on the American charity circuit. Most Forbes 400 members who’ve turned to philanthropy as a second career have a specific goal or worldview. Bill Gates applies numbers-based analysis to maximize the efficacy of poverty solutions. Jeff Skoll funds social entrepreneurs. Milken, a prostate cancer survivor, has decided to target his disease.
Stewart Rahr describes his foundation goals the way a budding pageant contestant might. He wants to focus on “our youth, education and medical research.” But a cursory glance of how he gives–much less his office’s inner sanctum, where the photos of him and more than 300 celebrities line the walls like subway tiles–shows that his philanthropy is geared around one thing: fame, or access to it. “I don’t look at ‘em as pictures,” says Rahr. “I look at them as levels of achievements, as trophies of where I am in life.” His favorite one? “The one I don’t have.” If you’re famous and want money for your cause, Stewie Rah Rah is your man.
Spend a day with him at his office and you can see that play out. On his black leather desk, two bells labeled “Ring for Sex” bookend a stack of checks for charities sponsored by Alicia Keys, rapper Swizz Beatz and America’s Next Top Model personality Nigel Barker.
The last one is causing Rahr some irritation. Someone from Make-A-Wish called Rahr on behalf of Barker asking for the $25,000 check. But Rahr won’t hand it over to anyone but Barker himself. “I said, ‘I want the guy to come here, this Nigel guy, I like him,’” Rahr says. What will Make-A-Wish’s top supporter do if Barker doesn’t show? Rahr says he’ll tear up the check if he has to wait much longer.
Those on the receiving end clearly find Rahr worth the effort. Says Trump, “If I’m ever honored, he’ll give a million dollars every time, even if it’s a small event.”
Michael Milken, who has received $15 million in Rahr largesse, enough to fund an entire team of investigative doctors in Michigan, is still more effusive: “He’s got a heart as big as the entire world. There’s different levels of philanthropy. One thing is just writing checks; another is interacting with the individuals.”
The good he generates is unquestioned–and Rahr focuses diligently on making sure everyone knows that. In January he sent members of his e-mail list–cc’ing the likes of Leon Black and Steve Wynn–a $10,000 monthly invoice from a public relations firm. In the e-mail he called out the firm’s chief, saying the invoice “does zero for me,” and demanded that his Make-A-Wish donations get written about in “some major publications,” such as the New York Times or Wall Street Journal (“No blog stuff.”). “This could be your last chance,” he wrote, before signing off, “I love helping the world!!!”
Rahr recently struck upon the idea of using his e-mail blasts to further promote his charitable nature. The first five recipients who can correctly identify the celebrity and location featured in the photos get $5,000 for the charity of their choice, with Rahr touting the incrementally increasing figure. In 2010 he engineered a similar promotion with the New York Mets–every team home run generated $1,000 for charity (fan favorite David Wright generated $5,000 per blast), and Rahr was ultimately feted with a “Home Rah Rah Day.” Fans took home 25,000 pairs of yellow sunglasses, the sides inscribed with the words “The #1 King of All Fun.”
This charity-fame-publicity nexus has at least one refugee. Rahr once counted comedian George Lopez among his entourage, thanks in no small part to $700,000 in donations he made to the National Kidney Foundation, where Lopez serves as spokesman. But after a joke Rahr made at a 2009 Lopez-hosted fundraiser offended the comedian–Rahr offered just $25 at auction for four tickets to Lopez’s new show–Lopez launched a public fight, accusing Rahr of buying friends.
No matter: Make-A-Wish has more than 100 celebrities associated with it, many of whom turned out in June at its annual New York gala, where Rahr was the guest of honor. His table included Trump and his wife, Melania; R&B artist John Legend; Carmelo Anthony; and LL Cool J. Most impressive, Stewie Rah Rah brought into his tent two people who otherwise would seem to have nothing in common: Bill Clinton and America’s fourth-richest man, conservative power broker David Koch.
Koch sat at Rahr’s table, sandwiched between Melania Trump and Legend (in 2011 he and Milken were sighted awkwardly dancing to hip-hop beats at a party at Rahr’s Hamptons estate). Clinton saluted Rahr remotely, capping off a video tribute that started with clipped greetings from DiCaprio and Wahlberg.
“I’m grateful your generosity will make a lasting positive difference in the lives of so many kids, their families and their communities,” Clinton said. If you watch the tape carefully, something else pops out. Twice during his tribute Clinton makes reference to his “friend Stewart Rahr.” And both times he uses those words, the former president, intentionally (his spokesman says he was twice suppressing a chuckle about the Rah Rah nickname), sticks his tongue into his cheek so squarely that it juts out.
IT IS A RARE DOWN WEEKEND in August at Burnt Point, Rahr’s sprawling East Hampton mansion. The aspiring Brazilian actress suns by the pool; Rahr sits inside, checking his phone constantly. The only movement in the house is Michael Milken’s chef; Rahr has lent his kitchen to the junk bond king’s foundation so they can prepare food for a nearby fundraiser.
The calm generates memories for Rahr: how he beat out real estate mogul Steve Roth for the $45 million property; when Andrea Bocelli and Lionel Ritchie visited; how Alicia Keys performed there; the time he let his assistant, Nicolette, use it for her wedding. “I have so much,” he reflects. “Why did it all happen to me? There has to be a reason.” He recalls how Carol cried happy tears when he first toured the house with her.
Rahr insists that even after the nine-figure divorce, they remain best friends. They even spent their anniversary together. “You don’t spend 40-some years with somebody…,” says Carol. “I’m not telling you it’s perfect, but there was a lot of good, a lot of good.”
But that’s the past. A few weeks later Rahr forwards FORBES an e-mail exchange with the Robin Hood Foundation to show off both his giving and his relationship with the ex-wife. In 2006 Rahr and Carol donated $1 million to help build schools. A plaque has been erected in their honor on a building in Brooklyn, and Rahr confirmed that he’d like to take Carol to see it for her birthday in October. In the same e-mail, though, Rahr discussed the plaque soon to be installed at a second school, in the Bronx. On this one, he said, Carol should be left off.
That’s a better fate than that of Rahr’s older brother and onetime business partner, Elliot. As Rahr helicopters from his Trump apartment to the Hamptons compound and showers money on seemingly any celebrity who will ask, Elliot lives in a dated Upper East Side high rise above a hardware store and pet hospital. He filed for personal bankruptcy in 2010, with assets of $8,810. (Elliot declined to comment; Stewart Rahr says they haven’t spoken in 25 years.)
Rahr now has a new family. Like Tiffany, whom he’s texting now (“I will be in the city next week,” she texts back, “let’s do something then :-).”). And her sister, whom he says he dated before Tiffany. That one didn’t go well, and Rahr has been tearing her apart via e-mail lately, cc’ing many on his list, bragging about how he had sex with her on the 13th of the month, adding “Not sure what day of week I was w your sister, Tiffany!” And Arnold Palmer and Ron Burkle can read about how he plans to sell a Picasso and then donate the proceeds to her “STD doctor, who must b soo busy these days!!” (The sister responds: “I don’t want to be involved with that psycho.”)
Just another day for the king of all fun. For now he’s focused on lunch, bemoaning the 15 extra pounds that he can’t seem to shake as he unwraps a brownie. “What am I going to do with a beautiful woman like her around?” he asks of the chef. “We’re not going to be cooking! Maybe some spooning and forking!”
Even as he eats, Rahr remains glued to his phone. Every time he sends an e-mail, the silence of the empty estate is broken as his iPhone rings out a spanking sound followed by a woman’s sensual moan. He turns up the volume of the sound system blasting through the house–it’s “Blurred Lines” again. “Happiness just doesn’t happen,” he says while tapping on his phone. “You have to force yourself.”
So he’s another rich A-hole. Why is this news?
I’d be willing to bet he has some kind of STD.
. . .
And I bet you are right Cathleen.