Common Sense: After Post Sale, Spotlight Shines More Intensely on The Times

Great journalism takes courage. It takes a sense of public mission. It takes independence. It takes time. Perhaps most of all, it takes money.

For decades, America’s great newspaper families had all of these. They shielded their editors and reporters from the pressures of advertisers and the short-term interests of public shareholders and Wall Street analysts. Subscribers were attracted to great journalism, advertisers followed, and big profits flowed to the family members and shareholders.

This week’s announcement that the Graham family had decided to sell The Washington Post and most of its publishing assets to Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bezos, surely quashed any lingering doubts that the old model is all but dead.

The sale of The Post inevitably puts The New York Times in the spotlight: will the Sulzbergers succumb to the forces that led most every other major newspaper family to sell?

“It’s absolutely true that the family did not want to be out there all by themselves,” Alex Jones, author of “The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family behind The New York Times,” and the director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, told me this week. “They’re now the only iconic newspaper family, and it’s a lonely place to be.” Mr. Jones said he spoke to several family members after the Post announcement, and said they were shocked by the news. Nonetheless, “They’re absolutely committed to the stewardship of The New York Times,” he said.

The chairman and publisher of The Times, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., and his cousin, Michael Golden, the vice chairman, confirmed that this week. In a statement, they said, “The Times is not for sale” and stressed that the company was “profitable and generates very strong cash flow, which we believe makes us perfectly able to fund our future growth.” They added, “The Times has both the ideas and the money to pursue innovation.”

That The Times and its controlling family would be among the last survivors should come as no surprise, since it is the strongest of the great newspapers journalistically, and it is profitable. The Times has won 112 Pulitzer Prizes since 1918, including four this year, more than any other newspaper. A week ago, The Times reported quarterly operating earnings of $77.8 million, up 13 percent from a year earlier.

By contrast, The Washington Post’s newspaper division had losses of $53.7 million last year, with no end in sight.

Donald Graham, the chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, who spoke to Mr. Sulzberger shortly after the sale was announced, told me this week: “I don’t think our deal has any implications whatever for The New York Times Company. The Post and The Times are completely different businesses, as different as, say, The Post and The Wall Street Journal. The Times is quite profitable and should be for a long time.”

But Mr. Graham also said the Post sale was not just about profits or money. As he put it in his letter this week to Post employees, “The point of our ownership has always been that it was supposed to be good for The Post.” He added, “The newspaper business continued to bring up questions to which we have no answers,” and concluded, “We were certain the paper would survive under our ownership, but we wanted it to do more than that. We wanted it to succeed.”

In the wake of the announcement, the Sulzberger family held two meetings, one with the Ochs-Sulzberger family trust, which owns a controlling stake in the company, and the other with the broader family, to discuss the Post sale and the decision to issue a statement from Mr. Sulzberger and Mr. Golden. The family surely has much to discuss, because it faces the same question the Graham family did: Would The Times be better off both journalistically and financially under different ownership?

Health Law Delay Puts Exchanges in Spotlight

The Obama administration’s decision, announced on Tuesday, to delay for a year a requirement that larger employers provide insurance or pay a penalty has made the operation of the state exchanges — where individuals can shop for insurance starting Oct. 1 — more critical to the success of the new health care law.

The delay is viewed as an unspoken acknowledgment by federal officials of the size of the task ahead, according to policy experts and benefits consultants. By putting off the employer requirements, officials are in a position to concentrate on making sure the state exchanges work.

“The real focus is now getting the individual exchanges and premium tax credits up and running,” said Timothy S. Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University who closely follows the new law, known as the Affordable Care Act.

In addition to the creation of the exchanges, the law’s broad market reforms of the insurance industry and the expansion of Medicaid will continue, Mr. Jost said, adding, “I just don’t see this as a game changer.”

Also still in effect is the requirement that people without insurance buy it by 2014 or face fines. Subsidies will be available for people who meet income requirements.

The companies affected by the delay — those with 50 or more full-time employees — were increasingly anxious about their ability to meet the law’s requirements, given the delay by the administration in issuing the final rules for the companies to follow to ensure they were in compliance, said Helen Darling, the president of the National Business Group on Health, which represents employers that offer health benefits.

“This is a recognition that they were not going to meet some key deadlines,” she said.

Companies that employ fewer than 50 workers have already been given a reprieve from the law’s requirements.

Many of the companies being granted the latest reprieve either offered no coverage or provided it only to certain workers — like managers or those working 40 hours a week. Some employers had been expected to pay the law’s penalty of $2,000 a worker for every employee rather than provide insurance, while others said they would go ahead and offer it.

“We don’t know how many people would have gained coverage or won’t because of the delay,” said Paul Fronstin, a senior researcher at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “It’s not a big deal because it doesn’t affect many people, but it’s a big deal if it affects you.”

A large majority of larger employers — 94 percent — already offer coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies the market. “We do believe the practical effect of this will be really quite modest,” said Drew Altman, the foundation’s president.

The reprieve will give companies more time to consider what they should do over the next year. Bill Petersen, who owns a franchise of the elder-care business Visiting Angels in South Elgin, Ill., outside of Chicago, for example, does not offer coverage to his 100 full-time employees and had been deciding whether to cut back their hours to avoid the law’s requirement or start providing health benefits.

When he heard about the delay, Mr. Petersen, who celebrates any good news by ringing a bell in the main office, said he “went down there and rang the bell.”

“It was just a relief to know that we had some time to be able to look at our options and understand the act just a little bit more,” he said.

Others say they plan to proceed with their plans to expand their coverage, although they are waiting for final guidance from the administration before deciding what benefits they will offer. “I still want to stay on the same time line,” said Don Fox, the chief executive of Firehouse Subs, a chain of restaurants based in Jacksonville, Fla. At the company-owned restaurants, only general managers and headquarter personnel are now offered coverage, and Mr. Fox said the company was going to cover the additional 90 to 100 employees required under the law. “I’ve been setting an expectation with our employees,” he said.

Thom Mangan, the chief executive of United Benefit Advisors, described the delay as “a nice gift that the government gave.” He said that companies that employ many part-time and hourly employees would probably delay providing additional benefits in the next year. “They would be crazy not to,” he said.

Bombings Trip Up Reddit in Its Turn in Spotlight

After site members, known as Redditors, turned into amateur sleuths and ended up wrongly identifying several people as possible suspects, Reddit went from a font of crowdsourced information to a purveyor of false accusations, to the subject of a reprimand by the president of the United States himself, to the center of another furious debate about the responsibilities of digital media.

Last Monday, Erik Martin, the site’s general manager, posted an apology, saying, “Activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”

In a subsequent interview, however, Mr. Martin was unclear about how it might play out differently in the future.  “We could have reminded people about our rules on the disclosure of personal information; we could have shut down the subReddit earlier than the moderators shut it down,” he suggested. (SubReddit is a name for threads of conversation that develop on the site.)

But, he added, except for higher vigilance and a moderation of discussion “tone,” the site was not ready to institute new rules of behavior. “Reddit is a sort of attention aggregator,” he said. “It can tell you what to pay attention to, but it is certainly not a replacement for news reporting.”

While Reddit has never pretended to be a news organization, it is learning that as it grows bigger and more influential the rest of the world expects it to exercise judgment — judgment that is often at odds with the freewheeling culture it and its members prize. (Internet host sites are shielded by federal law from liability for the speech of their users.)

Other sites have felt the need to police themselves after being scrutinized in similar situations. Craigslist, which carries classified ads of all kinds, suspended its adult services offerings in 2010 after more than a dozen state attorneys general threatened action against it, complaining that it was promoting prostitution. Last year Google, the owner of YouTube, blocked a video that mocked Islam in Libya and Egypt as violent reaction to the video spread in those countries.

This is not the first time Reddit has found itself in an embarrassing situation, and by some accounts the timing now could not be worse.

“They are sort of a subculture ready to break into the mainstream and it is too bad this was the moment,” said Robert Quigley, a senior lecturer for the College of Communication at the University of Texas, Austin.

Started in 2005 by two University of Virginia graduates, Reddit is essentially an updated version of the electronic bulletin board in which registered users, anonymous or otherwise, can post a comment or a link on a topic deemed worthy (subjects vary from pornography to cat tricks to science). Users can then vote the posts up or down as they add their own commentary.

The most popular posts appear on Reddit’s home page. A recent example is a bizarre picture of the teenage idol Justin Bieber in a ski mask with a bodyguard in a zippered one-piece sweatsuit.

The site’s traffic has more than doubled in the past 12 months, and it currently reports some 62 million unique visitors a month. It was acquired by Condé Nast Publications in 2006, but in 2012 was spun off as a separate entity. Advance Publications, Condé Nast’s parent company, remains the largest stockholder.

Although it is not a news organization, Reddit is used by young people as a place where they can tap into trends that do not appear on mainstream sites. It has also become an in-the-know stop for celebrities and politicians looking to gain traction with that age group. President Obama made Reddit his last official campaign stop in the waning hours of the 2012 election.

Like many digital operations, Reddit, which is based in San Francisco, keeps its staff mean and lean. It has 25 employees, and uses volunteers to police its Web site to make sure rules are obeyed. Among Reddit’s basic rules are a prohibition against vote manipulation, spam, child pornography and revealing other people’s personal information.

Still, anyone who starts a subReddit essentially becomes its dictator, deciding who can moderate and who has access. This has not always turned out so well.

With E.C.B. in Spotlight, Bundesbank Finds Itself in the Shadows

Built 45 years ago, the modernist building is hardly old by European standards, yet it is a temple to tradition, embodying the ethos of this most conservative of institutions. “We are trying to keep it just the way it is,” said Reiner Bruckhaus, head of the bank’s centralized construction management division.

That starts with the granite floors, the Barcelona chairs in the lobby (designed by the Bauhaus great Ludwig Mies van der Rohe), and the grand, white Carrara marble by the elevators, and goes all the way up to the wood grid ceilings on the top floor. “You will find not even the slightest changes,” Mr. Bruckhaus said.

When the building was erected in 1967, the Bundesbank’s dominance in European monetary policy went unchallenged. But in the hazy distance of the Frankfurt skyline, significant change is evident in the outline of two towers and three cranes, the new headquarters of the European Central Bank — a visible reminder of the institution that has supplanted the Bundesbank, just as the euro replaced the German mark.

European leaders established the European Central Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt as a symbol of its status as heir to the Bundesbank. But the danger posed by Europe’s continuing debt crisis demanded improvisations at odds with the Bundesbank’s conservative teachings.

Over the summer the E.C.B.’s president, Mario Draghi, pursued an expansive policy that was anathema to the old guard, whose cause was championed by the Bundesbank’s youthful president, Jens Weidmann. He and his supporters base their views not, they say, on rigid orthodoxy but on experience gleaned from the disaster of hyperinflation and the success of adhering to a hard-money path.

In an increasingly uncomfortable pairing, the Bundesbank functions as the largest piece of the E.C.B. puzzle. With more than 9,500 full-time workers, the Bundesbank dwarfs the 1,600-strong central bank. Because of that limited staff, the E.C.B. depends on the Bundesbank to handle many of the back-office functions of the common currency.

But the European Central Bank’s influence continues to grow. Euro-zone finance ministers agreed to a deal Thursday to put 100 to 200 of their largest banks under its direct supervision.

The arranged marriage between the two banks will take enormous effort and flexibility. As its massive headquarters suggests, the Bundesbank is capable of enormous and sustained effort, but flexibility may be inimical to its nature.

Founded in 1957, the Bundesbank quickly grew into one of Germany’s most respected institutions. The rank-and-file behind Mr. Weidmann, 44, represent an unusually tight-knit group, almost like a monastic order, and they are steeped in the bank’s secular religion — often at the bank’s own school, a kind of Hogwarts for its future financial wizards, in a hilltop 12th-century castle in the town of Hachenburg.

“You hear it in the first lecture,” said Silke Frühklug, 32, a graduate and Bundesbank employee. “You hear it in the last lecture and every day in between: price stability.”

Ms. Frühklug married a classmate and in her free time plays on the central bank’s badminton team, which on a recent evening practiced in a gymnasium on the Bundesbank campus right after the handball team. The bank also has a theater society and “hobby artists” club, which exhibits in the lobby of the headquarters. It owns apartments for workers in tight real-estate markets like Munich and here in Frankfurt. Retired employees still lunch at the cafeteria, helping to nurture the all-important continuity.

“People feel connected with the goals of the bank,” said Matthias Endres, 43, editor of the Bundesbank’s internal magazine. Like Ms. Frühklug, he married a fellow graduate from the school in Hachenburg. He has vacationed with his wife and their three children at all three of the Bundesbank getaways, on the North Sea, in the Black Forest and on a lake in Bavaria.

Mr. Endres’s wife, Simone, works part-time in the headquarters’ Money Museum, which houses some 350,000 objects, of which roughly 1,300 are on display, including the worthless bills in denominations of millions and billions from the hyperinflation of the Weimar-era and examples of commodity money, like a gold bar, a tea brick and even a preserved cow standing near the entrance, a silent bovine greeter.

Jack Ewing contributed reporting.

Sally Kohn, a Liberal Pundit, Is in the Spotlight at Fox

Sally Kohn is a former community organizer who prefers baggy clothes and doesn’t own a television. She, her partner and their 4-year-old daughter live in the liberal bastion of Park Slope in Brooklyn, and she recently proudly posted on Twitter her new status as “co-squad leader at the Park Slope Food Coop.” Absolutely nothing about her screams obvious contributor to the Fox News Channel.

But for the last year, Ms. Kohn has been making a name for herself in the crowded arena of political punditry, having made her way into the business at Fox News, the country’s highest-rated news channel, and a favorite destination for conservative viewers.

Michael Clemente, Fox News’s executive vice president for news editorial, compared her favorably to Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate who was one of Fox’s roster of liberals.

“Sally is like Gerry: she says whatever’s on her mind,” Mr. Clemente said in a telephone interview. “She has some fresh thoughts,” he said, adding, “She’s not part of the pack.”

In the last couple of weeks, Ms. Kohn has, among appearances on Fox, put forth the argument for President Obama’s re-election, discussed women voters and the election and debated whether Ann Romney has been treated unfairly by the women of “The View.” “If this is grilling, I don’t think anybody has been to a barbecue,” she said.

In August, Ms. Kohn, who also writes for Salon.com and posts on Twitter constantly, won national attention with her Foxnews.com critique of the vice-presidential candidate’s Republican National Convention speech, with the innocuous headline “Paul Ryan’s speech in 3 words.” (Those were “dazzling,” “deceiving” and “distracting” and the commentary called the speech “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”)

Although Fox News never put Ms. Kohn on the air to discuss the post, the viral phenomenon collected 2.1 million unique hits, putting it among the site’s top five original posts for the year.

Ms. Kohn, who is 35, has a law degree, has worked at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and has run a feminist organization. Her unorthodox trajectory into punditry began in fall 2009, when she left her job at the Center for Community Change after six years of organizing communities, working on issues including welfare reform, health care and immigration.

“I was one of those people on the left who was frustrated, and there were a bunch of us, that the institutional progressive movement had, for lack of a better word, had sewn its lips to the rear end of the White House,” she said, adding that her organizing work was never about party politics. “I was about movement politics, about ideas, about vision, about how to get regular people engaged in the process of making the world a better place.”

At an Opportunity Agenda conference that year, a stranger approached Ms. Kohn, insisting she needed to pursue a television career. “I think I laughed at her,” Ms. Kohn recalled, adding, “That had not been at all a role that I thought for myself. In organizing, you’re all behind the scenes.” The stranger turned out to be Geraldine Laybourne, the cable executive instrumental in the development of Nickelodeon and Oxygen.

Ms. Laybourne, in an e-mail, recalled that Ms. Kohn “was incredibly articulate about complex issues. She had a point of view and could put it forward in a way that made people listen to her,” adding that, “I urged her to become a commentator frankly because we need more bright, young, well-informed women on TV.”

Ms. Kohn, still feeling “deeply uncomfortable” on television, agreed to training at the Women’s Media Center. “I think that Geraldine and I got her to understand that she could use that voice to do an awful lot of good,” said Carol Jenkins, W.M.C.’s founding president.

After several online appearances, she went on Sean Hannity’s prime-time Fox News show in fall 2010. After more appearances on CNN and MSNBC as well, she began to enjoy it.

“I started to realize this is really just like organizing, but with a bigger audience. Instead of talking about ideas and values in a church basement with 10 people or a hundred people, you get to do it on television in front of a million people,” she said.

The MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, a mentor, knew her at the Center for Community Change and called her organizing background valuable, because it “teaches you to be undogmatic, to listen to people.”

“It forces you to take seriously politics as seen through the eyes of people, as opposed to the eyes of people who talk about politics,” he said.

In December 2011, after sending the Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, an e-mail, she was signed to a paid contributor contract.

The move raised eyebrows among some on the left, but Adam Mason, the state policy director for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, called it a courageous move similar to organizing. “You don’t see many pundits going right into the devil’s den,” he said, referring to Fox News. “You’re really putting yourself out there in front of a lot of people that really don’t want to hear what you want to say.”

Ms. Jenkins said she was surprised that Ms. Kohn ended up at Fox, but added, “I’m glad she’s there.”

Eventually, Ms. Kohn said, she would like to have her own cable show, but for the moment she is still cobbling together a living from her various outlets. She is paid when on Fox News, but not for Foxnews.com writing. The liberal Web site Daily Kos urged supporters to donate to her after the Paul Ryan commentary. She received some $4,000, she said, adding, “I was so touched.”

DealBook: David Martinez in Spotlight in Battle With Billionaire

High above Columbus Circle, atop the Time Warner Center, is one of the most expensive apartments in Manhattan, a sleek aerie of steel and stone, high windows and soaring views.

It is the home of David Martinez, a Mexican financier who has minted a fortune buying and selling the debt of troubled countries and companies from Argentina to Pakistan. He paid about $42 million for the 12,000-square-foot duplex in 2003, then spent even more on additions and renovations, covering the space in stone and stainless steel.

The apartment has a private art collection that is said to include a $140 million Jackson Pollock. But for all his extravagant spending, Mr. Martinez is, even to his associates, something of a mystery.

Now a legal battle with another powerful investor is drawing back a curtain on Mr. Martinez’s secretive world. While investors often have disputes that end up in court, this cross-border fight is with one of the giants in global distressed debt — Paul E. Singer, a major Republican donor. The dispute, and its eventual victor, could have implications for other companies in the world’s fastest-growing economies.

The fight is over the bankruptcy of Mexico’s largest glassmaker, Vitro, a 103-year-old company run by the Sada family, one of the wealthiest in Monterrey. Allegations abound of covert meetings, fraudulent debts and crooked courts in a bankruptcy that ended up leaving control of the company in the hands of its shareholders, while costing bondholders as much as 60 percent of their investment, according to some estimates.

That runs counter to what typically happens in an American bankruptcy, and Mr. Singer and other Vitro creditors have argued that if Vitro and Mr. Martinez prevail, other Mexican companies could have trouble raising money in the United States.

Both men are known as “vulture investors,” a term applied to those who buy up cheap debt that no one wants. The strategy has made Mr. Singer’s company, Elliott Management, one of the most successful hedge funds in the world. Mr. Singer, 68, cut his teeth wrangling payments on defaulted debt from countries like Peru and Congo, and has earned a reputation for bare-knuckled doggedness unparalleled on Wall Street. Just last week, Elliott Management persuaded a court in Ghana to seize an Argentine naval ship in a dispute over the South American country’s bonds.

Yet he may have met his match in Mr. Martinez. Over the last 20 years, the 55-year-old financier has plowed billions of dollars into troubled corners of the global economy, often aligning himself with the management of bankrupt companies.

“If you don’t know who the sucker is in a particular deal, it’s probably you,” a top investor in distressed debt said. “When David is involved, you know he isn’t the sucker.”

He and others interviewed for this article declined to be identified speaking about Mr. Martinez, citing the continuing litigation or fear of angering him. Through a spokesman, Mr. Martinez declined to comment.

Little is known about the financier, who splits his time between New York and London, where he runs an obscure investment company called Fintech Advisory Ltd. In life as in business, Mr. Martinez treads lightly. He is fond of shell companies, whether to buy artwork or to pay household expenses. Those he hires often know him only as “the client.”

But Mr. Martinez and Mr. Singer are not strangers. They have clashed before, most notably during Argentina’s debt restructuring in 2005. While Elliott is still holding out for a more lucrative settlement with the nation over its defaulted bonds, Fintech sided with Argentina in 2005, a move that some bondholders felt undermined efforts to force the country to pay what it owed.

In the case of Vitro, Elliott and allied investors contend that Mr. Martinez helped the Mexican company muscle investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars through financial sleight of hand. Mr. Singer and his counterparts, who own about $700 million worth of the company’s old debt, have called Vitro’s efforts “a testament to audacity, brazen manipulation and greed.”

Vitro says that it has done nothing illegal. The maneuvers, it says, are standard practice under Mexican law and have been used in many other bankruptcies there. Fintech noted that a United States bankruptcy court, which is handling the bankruptcy of Vitro’s United States subsidiaries, found no wrongdoing this summer. “Such McCarthy-like allegations were unsupported,” lawyers for Fintech wrote in court documents.

The conflict has its roots in 2009, when Vitro found itself mired in trouble after the financial crisis. Bad derivatives bets had dried up its cash, and it began defaulting on its debt. The company called on Mr. Martinez for help.

To get some much-needed cash, the company struck a deal with the investor: a $75 million loan in exchange for the title to several of its properties. As part of the arrangement, Mr. Martinez was given an option to return the properties to Vitro, once it emerged from bankruptcy, in exchange for a 24 percent stake in the company — effectively aligning his interests with management as it negotiated with other creditors.

In mid-2010, he went to the different banks that Vitro owed money to and bought the claims. In the process, Mr. Martinez became the biggest individual outside creditor, owning about $600 million worth of claims.

The company began taking big loans from its subsidiaries, in effect creating a fresh class of creditors outside of the hedge funds — a group under its control, with the rights to approve any bankruptcy plan. Subsidiaries went from owing the parent company about $1.2 billion to being owed $1.5 billion.

With the help of Mr. Martinez, the company outvoted many other bondholders to approve a reorganization plan.

That maneuver was upheld by a court in Monterrey, allowing Vitro to proceed with a plan that pays creditors an estimated 40 to 60 percent of what they are owed and keeps the Sada family in control.

Mr. Singer and the hedge funds have taken the fight to the United States, suing Vitro and Fintech. This summer, the hedge funds won a round, as a federal judge in Dallas declined to uphold the Mexican court’s ruling. Arguments in the appeal were heard earlier this month.

The outcome of this case, experts say, could have implications for other companies in fast-growing economies. A country that appears to be undermining protections that are typically granted to creditors in a bankruptcy might scare investors away. “This is a precedent-setting case, no matter how it turns out,” said Arturo Porzecanski, economist in residence at American University’s School of International Service. “It has highlighted apparent loopholes in the bankruptcy law of Mexico, through which Vitro ran an 18-wheel truck.”

In suing Fintech, the hedge funds encountered one obstacle early on: they couldn’t find Mr. Martinez.

When servers went to Fintech’s Park Avenue offices to deliver the summons, they could not reach him. They stood outside the Time Warner Center for weeks hoping to catch him, to no avail.

Eventually, the lawsuit found its way to the investment company in London.

Mr. Martinez was born in 1957 and grew up in Monterrey, which is home to some of Mexico’s largest industrial companies. Power there is heavily concentrated among businessmen in the so-called Group of 10, a club that includes the Sada family, which controls Vitro.

Though Mr. Martinez was not a part of that circle, he has cultivated deep connections to it. The Sadas relied on Mr. Martinez to help them maintain control of another of their companies that went bankrupt in 2004.

As a young man, Mr. Martinez was a member of Regnum Christi, an evangelical group related to the Legionaries of Christ, an influential Roman Catholic order in Mexico that includes among its benefactors the billionaire Carlos Slim. After earning an engineering degree from the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mr. Martinez moved to Rome to study philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University and considered becoming a priest.

But he was drawn to Wall Street instead, and earned a third degree from Harvard Business School before taking a job at Citigroup on the emerging-markets desk in New York. There, he began his long affair with distressed debt in far-flung places. In 1985, he left the bank and eventually founded Fintech.

While it is unclear how much money the company controls, or even how many employees work there, bits and pieces have emerged about Mr. Martinez over the years. Often it relates to his art collection, which includes the works of Damien Hirst and Mark Rothko.

In his lavish redoubt overlooking the city and Central Park from the penthouse of the Time Warner Center’s South Tower, Mr. Martinez has fashioned a gallery for his art. The apartment has a two-story living room and a reflecting pool, according to public records and interviews with people familiar with the unit. A special system has been rigged to support one exceptionally heavy piece of art.

Even before the costly renovations by the architect Peter Marino, the home was among the city’s most expensive residences.

But Mr. Martinez still had spending to do. In the fall of 2006, word spread that Jackson Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948” had been sold for $140 million, a record at the time. The buyer was said to be Mr. Martinez — a rumor that lawyers for Mr. Martinez denied, sending the art world into a state of confusion as to the whereabouts of the painting.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Martinez still denies that he owns the work. But according to several people with knowledge of the collection, the painting currently hangs in his New York home.
Charles V. Bagli contributed reporting.

For Justices, a Summer Spent in the Spotlight

For Supreme Court justices, summertime used to be quiet time, out of the public eye.