Owner of Nets, Devils dies in plane crash

Football

Owner of Nets, Devils dies in plane crash

Published: 02 Jun. 2014, 20:31

Lewis Katz, a self-made man who built his fortune in New York parking lots, billboards and cable TV, and went on to buy the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, NHL’s New Jersey Devils and The Philadelphia Inquirer, died in a weekend plane crash. He was 72.

Katz died Saturday night in a Massachusetts crash that killed six other people.

Katz grew up in working-class Camden, New Jersey, and worked as a lawyer before earning hundreds of millions of dollars investing in the Kinney Parking empire and the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network in New York. He went on to become a major philanthropist in the Philadelphia region.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver called him “a visionary’’ and the Yankees held a moment of silence before Sunday’s game.

AP