About

Greg has built and run companies, traveled the world both as adventurer and businessman, run marathons, played scratch golf (twice with Tiger Woods), written three books, created numerous viral music video parodies, raised three kids, spent a month in federal prison for essentially political reasons, and continues to collect enough real-life material to keep the stories and songs coming.

“A graduate of Choate, Princeton, and the Canaan Federal Penitentiary.”

THE JOURNEY THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

Upon graduating first in his class from Princeton in 1972 (alphabetically), while otherwise having lived a sheltered suburban life and aching to flap his wings, Greg backpacked around the world for almost a year. Lived with random families and in youth hostels. Was in Munich when the Israeli athletes were slain, and also saw the US Olympic basketball team lose for the first time in history (to the Soviet Union, amid lasting controversy) while sitting in the stands surrounded by surly Russians… until they won and began slobbering him in kisses. Spent two months behind the Iron Curtain (Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia) at the apex of the Cold War, finding himself a magnet for slews of oppressed but wonderfully warm, curious people who’d never seen an American before. Experienced life on an Israeli kibbutz. Was feted to a Ramadan feast in a Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon, where his bullet-belted commando hosts graciously acquainted him with their side of history. Lived with Bedouins in a cave at Petra. Hitch-hiked on camels across a Jordanian desert, where he experienced gunfire on the same route to Aqaba as taken by T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia). By remarkable chance he met Charlie Chaplin in Venice, and spent a few days with author Irving Stone and his wife exploring the ruins of Troy, where Stone was researching his book on Heinrich Schliemann (founder of modern archeology). Seeing himself as representing his country even as an obscure 22-year-old, these travels made indelible impressions that went a long way to forming his political worldview. His intense loathing of Communism and the far left, and their unscrupulous tactics, is only exceeded by his love of the USA and its freedoms. Still, he ceaselessly seeks common ground, and sees two rare opportunities for the DSA to embrace MAGA policies: 1) rebuild the twin towers, and 2) Build that Wall. This will enable Islamunists in the first case to throw Jews and homosexuals from the rooftops, and in the second to keep people from leaving the country in the event the lunatic left gains power.

Greg comes by his convictions honestly, through first-hand experience and amid numerous cross-currents. The blood of all three major religions— Christianity, Judaism, Islam—flows through his veins, while his political DNA runs the gamut from card-carrying Communists to hard-core capitalists. Both sides of his family fled severe religious persecution to embrace this country, to become Americans rather than hyphenated Americans. A lot for his young brain to process, though due to his parents’ assimilation being a patriotic, baseball-loving American is at the core of his identity. At age 6 his father took him to Game 2 of the 1956 World Series at Ebbet’s Field, where he saw the heralded Dodger-Yankee legends of baseball’s golden age play, including Jackie Robinson, which is the primary reason he became a die-hard Dodger fan and remains one today (in a clear case of arrested development). 1956 was the last “subway series”, until the Mets and Yankees played in 2000. His father—who drove a tank in Patton’s Third Army in what Ilhan Omar calls World War Eleven—was slowly dying of cancer; Greg flew from Colorado to New York and surprised his dad with tickets to Game 4. First pitch: Jeter homerun. Not a dry eye in their box that night as father-son love came full circle.

While living in Aspen, CO in the 1990s, Greg built a spectacular teepee that found itself on the cover of Architectural Digest (August, 1994), an issue that sold more AD magazines than any in history up to that time. Greg smoked many a cigar in that teepee with his neighbor Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, and may also have, on occasion, smoked the “peacepipe”.

SUCCESS. FAILURE. RESILIENCE.

Greg has experienced both sides of the American dream—great success and extraordinary setbacks. He built the largest private label producer of men’s and women’s undergarments and t-shirts in the USA. Was a founding investor of EarthLink, doing his small part to usher in the internet revolution… only to be devastated by the Reed Slatkin Ponzi scheme in 2001, the largest ever Ponzi prior to Bernie Madoff. Lives were ruined; suicides occurred. Of the 1000+ Slatkin victims, mostly sophisticated investors but also retirees and a quadriplegic, Greg was chosen to be co-chair of the creditors’ committee (working tirelessly and pro bono) supervising recovery, consoling victims despite his own devastation, and speaking at Slatkin’s sentencing. The judge, quoting his speech almost verbatim in rendering her verdict, sentenced Slatkin to three more years than the prosecutors were seeking—a rarity indeed.

Ever tenacious, Greg created and poured his heart and soul into a groundbreaking packaging innovation, the world’s only aseptic dispensing tap. His product was named by WorldStar (the Oscars of packaging) as the world’s most significant packaging innovation and endorsed by Jane Goodall for its humanitarian and environmental benefits. Deals and press releases were consummated by PepsiCo, Coca Cola, and others, only to be scuttled in each case by big company bureaucratic dysfunction. Centered around food service establishments where people gather, his business cratered due to the draconian COVID shutdown, and ultimately could not survive the ensuing supply chain issues despite Herculean efforts. Had Dr. Anthony Fauci been an honest broker and true to his diary entries, or had Ron DeSantis been in charge of COVID policy, Greg believes his packaging business would be thriving today and fulfilling its humanitarian promise of delivering safe and healthy beverages in bulk to Third World countries lacking in refrigeration.

In the spirit of full disclosure, Greg pled guilty in the 2019 Varsity Blues college admissions scandal; he spent almost a year hounded by a hostile press and anonymous death threats, before serving a month in federal prison even though the court declared his particular case a victimless crime. A felon, he hopes President Trump will pardon him based on his music videos (but is not holding his breath). If you want to read an unvarnished, fully transparent account of what really happened—mitigating personal factors, overzealous prosecutors, mob-rule politics, fake media, prison life—read his book, The United States vs Abbott et al, A Love Story. After watching his videos, you may also want to crack open his highly entertaining novels, Sheer Pressure and its sequel Sheer Madness, both depicting Manhattan’s Upper East Side with insight and aplomb.

Today he is involved in two high-tech businesses, a disruptive e-commerce company and a quantum centric supercomputing company.

His life journey, filled with emotional ups and downs, has tempered Greg’s character and sense of humor. “As long as we’re laughing,” Greg says, “we are less likely to murder, rape, and embezzle—unless the laugh is of the woo-ha-ha-ha-ha Dr. Evil variety.” One of Greg’s heroes, who inspired him to learn the piano and develop a comedy shtick, remains the late genius Tom Lehrer, perhaps the greatest social and political satirist ever, and the person who inspired Greg to learn the piano. Lehrer worked his magic in an era of civility; a left-leaning Harvard professor, he was devoid of meanness, brimming with sophisticated, brilliant wit. With this new AI artform, writing abilities, and quirky takes on things, Greg aspires to become at least some semblance of Tom Lehrer, only right-leaning, to inject humor and heart into today’s nasty political discourse.

A LIFE FULL OF UNEXPECTED COMPANY

How does a kid born in Sayre, PA, who grew up in Ithaca, NY and worked without fanfare in the private sector, and not always successfully, stumble across such an extraordinary collection of celebrities and world leaders? Even Greg is mystified by the fact that he has interacted with some of the most fascinating names of the past half-century, not simply to pose and shake hands at some function, but to forge some kind of connection. In no particular order: Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Ginger Rogers, Jane Goodall, Tiger Woods, Tom Watson, Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Tom Lehrer, Sandy Koufax, Elston Howard, Bianca Jagger, Jane Fonda, Governor Greg Abbott (Texas), Greg Abbott (singer/musician), Eli Manning, Hector “Macho” Camacho, Cary Grant, William F. Buckley, Jr., Susan Sarandon, John Kerry, Kevin Costner, Don Johnson, Irving Stone, Julie Taymor, Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, James Salter, Paul Newman, Cindy Crawford, Arianna Huffington, Mike Nichols, Matthew Broderick, Quincy Jones, Charlton Heston, Andrea Jaeger, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagal, Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, Jay Leno, Oliver Stone, Hulk Hogan, Goldberg the Wrestler, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Pete Carril, Leo Durocher, Frank Gifford, Donald Trump, Joan Rivers, Yoko Ono, Madeleine Albright, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Tommy Lasorda, Tommy John, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Wynn, Murray Gell-Mann, RFK Jr., Ethel Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, John Havlicek, Red Auerbach, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Laura Ingraham, Queen Noor, John Gotti, Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine, George Stephanopoulos, Anderson Cooper, the Koch brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Howard Cosell, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Jerry Jones, Art Modell, Mike Ditka, Leona Helmsley, Roberta Flack, Paul McCartney, Princess Grace and Prince Albert of Monaco, the Aga Khan, Lee Radizwill (to name a few). And oh, I almost forgot, Jeffrey Epstein (but not in the way you may be thinking). Each name above has a real story behind it. How Greg has managed to attract such people and experiences into his orbit without trying, à la Forrest Gump, remains a mystery to him, though his open attitude to the universe and God may have helped pave some sort of energetic path… All that said, he despises name droppers.