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” . 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 , 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.
