Police Commissioner a Billionaire?

By Arthur Schwartz

MAYOR ERIC ADAMS WITH NEWLY-APPOINTED NYC Police Commissioner, Jessica Tisch. Photo credit NYC.gov.

When Jessica Tisch was appointed as New York City’s police commissioner last week, it was the first time many people had heard her name. But haven’t we heard about the Tisch name before? Yes we have, the Tisch family is the 43rd richest in the United States according to Forbes, with members owning the Loews Corporation and the New York Giants.

The Tisch name graces buildings at NYU and the NYU Medical Center.

Jessica Tisch, however, has spent her career as a government insider. She got her start in the police department after graduating from Harvard in 2008 with a dual law and business degree. She later became Commissioner of the City’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications and most recently headed the city Sanitation Department.

Tisch’s family immigrated to the United States in 1904 from Ukraine. The family patriarch, Avraham Tichinsky, attended the City College of New York, where he was captain of the school’s basketball team.Tichinsky-turned-Tisch then got into real estate, first summer camps, then hotels, then movie theatres. You’ve heard of the Loew’s Hotels – that’s a Tisch property. How about Loew’s movie theatres?

Forbes ranks the Tisch family as the 43rd richest in the United States. It reported that the family’s wealth grew from $6 billion in 2015 to more than $10 billion this year.

Larry and Bob Tisch purchased Loews Theatres in 1959 and turned it into a conglomerate with holdings in insurance, hotels, energy and packaging, according to news reports. Bob Tisch co-owned the New York Giants. His son Steve now co-owns the team.

The family’s business model is to buy failing companies and turn them around, netting the gain in the company’s stock price. Jessica’s grandfather Larry Tisch famously did this with CBS, first saving the broadcasting network from a hostile takeover, then later selling off the company’s valuable music and publishing assets.

Jessica Tisch married Daniel Levine, a hedge fund manager, in 2006 while she was still pursuing a master’s degree in business administration and a juris doctor at Harvard. She has two children, 13 and 9.