by Ian Parker

The New Yorker, vol. 80, no. 21 (August 2, 2004), pp. 54-63

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. Continue reading →