The New Yorker

This article was referenced in Paul Pribbenow's Notes for the Reflective Practicioner Vol. 6. No. 2 (December 2004)

The New Yorker: "THE GIFT
Zell Kravinsky gave away millions
But somehow it wasn't enough
IAN PARKER

Last summer, not long after Zell Kravinsky had given almost his entire forty-five-million-dollar real-estate fortune to charity, he called Barry Katz, an old friend in Connecticut, and asked for help with an alibi. Would Katz call Kravinsky's wife, Emily, in Philadelphia, and say that the two men were about to take a weeklong trip to Katz's ski condominium in Vermont? This untruth would help Kravinsky do something that did not have his wife's approval: he would be able to leave home, check into the Albert Einstein Medical Center, in Philadelphia, for a few days, and donate a kidney to a woman whose name he had only just learned.

Katz refused, and Kravinsky became agitated. He said that the intended recipient of his gift would die without the kidney, and that his wife's reluctance to support this 'nondirected' donation-it would be only the hundred and thirty-fourth of its kind in the United States-would make her culpable in that death. 'I can't allow her to take this person's life!' Kravinsky said. He was, at forty-eight, a former owner of shopping malls and distribution centers, and a man with a single thrift-store suit that had cost him twenty dollars.

'You think she'd be taking a life?' Katz asked.
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