NEW YORK — One by one, speakers rose to toast the elderly gent with baggy pants and a shy, gaptoothed smile.
"Of course, he didn't wear a tie tonight," teased one. Another called attention to the honoree's cheap watch and the plastic bag that serves as his briefcase.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, March 13, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 17 words Type of Material: Correction
Philanthropist: The Column One article in Saturday's Section A about philanthropist Chuck Feeney misspelled Liechtenstein as Lichtenstein.
The joshing at a Manhattan gathering would have been nothing out of the ordinary except that the man pulling a worn blue blazer over his head in mock modesty was none other than the onetime billionaire, Chuck Feeney.
Never heard of him? No surprise there.
Over the years, the frugal 76-year-old has made a fetish out of anonymity. He declined to name his foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, after himself, registering the $8-billion behemoth in Bermuda to avoid U.S. disclosure laws. He lavishes hundreds of millions of dollars on universities and hospitals but won't allow even a small plaque identifying him as a donor.
"We just didn't want to be blowing our horn," he explains in a rare interview at his daughter's Upper East Side apartment.
The party was to celebrate a biography of the elusive tycoon by Irish journalist Conor O'Clery, titled "The Billionaire Who Wasn't: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune," published last fall.
Feeney said he cooperated with the book and submitted to an interview because he is driven by a new public mission: nudging hedge fund heavies and silicon scions into "giving while living."
It is the latest trend in philanthropy and one that he, more than anyone, jump-started several years before billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett followed suit.
Feeney, a founder of the conglomerate Duty Free Shoppers, said he wants to "set an example" to address "that layer up there of people," the ones, as he puts it, who have "a jillion dollars. . . . I mean, honestly, if you ask them, 'Tell me what you're doing with your money this week?' they couldn't spend a fraction of what they're accruing."
Most foundations, set up after the donor's death, dribble out barely more than 5% of their assets each year, the legal minimum.
But Feeney, raised in a blue-collar Irish Catholic family in New Jersey, quietly transferred the bulk of his fortune to his foundation when he was 53. Then, eight years ago, he instructed his board to pay out every last dollar by 2016.
So far: $4 billion down, $4 billion to go. Atlantic Philanthropies is spreading its wealth at the rate of more than $400 million a year, more than any U.S.-based family foundation apart from Bill & Melinda Gates and Ford.
