Jay Kriegel, a ‘New York City Patriot,’ Is Dead at 79

Whitman Knapp, the commission’s chairman, concluded that Mayor Lindsay could not “escape responsibility” for the department’s foot-dragging. But the degree of the mayor’s culpability hinged on what appeared to be Mr. Kriegel’s contradictory testimony about how much the mayor had known about the corruption allegations.

In one instance, Mr. Kriegel suggested that he had told the mayor about the officers’ accusations; in another, he testified that the mayor had not known of those allegations.

Criticized over his conflicting statements, Mr. Kriegel found a loyal supporter in Mayor Lindsay, who defended him as “a man of unbending integrity and decency.”

After Mr. Lindsay left office at the end of his second term in 1973, Mr. Kriegel was named director of special projects for the Loews Corporation, which Mr. Tisch owned with his brother, Preston Robert Tisch; he served in that capacity from 1975 to 1978. He was publisher of The American Lawyer from 1979 to 1982.

At CBS, where he was senior vice president from 1988 to 1993, Mr. Kriegel helped persuade Congress to require the cable TV industry to pay broadcasters for the right to retransmit over-the-air programming. Those efforts “literally saved broadcast TV and hundreds of national and local news stations,” Mr. Tisch’s nephew Jonathan, the chief executive of Loews Hotels, said at last month’s tribute to Mr. Kriegel.

“I think we might even blame ‘The Apprentice’ on you,” Mr. Tisch said to the gathering, referring to the long-running NBC reality show that made its star, Mr. Trump, a household fixture across America.

Mr. Kriegel later ran his own strategic consulting firm and served on numerous philanthropic and civic group boards, including Prep for Prep and New Visions for Public Schools.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/05/nyregion/jay-kriegel-dies.html?emc=rss&partner=rss