For eight days the agony imposed on one of the nation's wealthiest families was intense. The Edgar M. Bronfmans of New York, whose Seagram liquor fortune and other assets exceed $1 billion, feared that 21-year-old Samuel Bronfman II was buried in a box with a meager ten-day supply of air and water steadily running out. He had been kidnaped, and the kidnapers had demanded a ransom of $4.6 million, the highest ever asked in the U.S. Frantically the family tried to comply, but hitches kept developing. The wait seemed interminable.
The tension finally ended abruptly —and joyfully—at week's end as FBI agents and New York City Police staged a pre-dawn raid on an apartment building in Brooklyn. The lanky young Bronfman, newly graduated from Williams College and about to set out on his first full-time job, was found. He was weary and hungry but well. Two of his abductors were arrested, one at the scene, and police sought others. The FBI recovered the ransom, which had been arbitrarily reduced to $2.3 million by the conspirators. It had been delivered by Edgar Bronfman some 24 hours earlier in a nightmarish post-midnight rendezvous with a masked kidnaper.
The crime jolted a family long accustomed to the luxurious living that wealth affords—a world of multiple estates, private aircraft and gracious entertaining in a circle of New York's theatrical, intellectual and political elite. Edgar Bronfman, 46, owns a $750,000, 174-acre estate in Yorktown, some 35 miles north of New York City in Westchester County, and two fashionable Manhattan apartments, one on Park Avenue valued at $1.5 million, the other a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. Chair man of Seagrams Company Ltd., he is a handsome, hard-driving businessman with an often mercurial temper. But in the kidnap crisis involving his son, he displayed remarkable patience and poise under severe stress.
The abducted youth did not seem to fit the mold of either his father or his fiery grandfather and namesake "Mr. Sam" (who shrewdly built the family fortune but sometimes hurled dishes when angry). Young Sam has seemed a bit brash and arrogant to outsiders, but friends at Williams found him "relaxed" about his wealth and "even-tempered." No jet-setter, he was interested primarily in sport. Strong and wiry (6 ft. 3 in., 185 Ibs.), he had played tennis and basketball at Williams and possessed an encyclopedic mind for sport trivia. He had been looking forward to starting work as a trainee in the promotion department of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, where he could expect to meet sport celebrities.
No Answer. The harrowing ordeal for Sam—and the painful suspense for his family—began shortly after he and his father had enjoyed a quiet, late, candlelit dinner at the Yorktown home on Friday night, Aug. 8. Sam stepped into the kitchen to compliment the cook on the meal, then left about 11:30 p.m., driving away in his green 1973 BMW sedan. He told his father that he might visit some friends.