While in Vail, Ron acted as Chairman for two fund raisers for the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project.  In partnership with the Vail Valley Foundation, he sponsored a performance of the “The Guys,” at the Vilar Center for the Arts in Beaver Creek. This acclaimed play focus on a fire chief struggling to prepare eulogies for all his men who were lost at the World Trade Center. For the second, he worked with the Bravo Vail Valley Music Festival on an event held in conjunction with a performance by the New York Philharmonic at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater. Both fundraisers were successful and resulted in a number of additional rescue workers being sponsored to go through the detoxification program. 

One Vail-sponsored firefighter stated after completing his detoxification program “I have regained an energy level that I haven’t had for years! My memory is back and I sleep 8 hours every night without waking up every 2 hours. I am pain free and no longer have my “WTC cough”. I am no longer angry and short tempered. For me, the program was a HUGE success! I can’t thank Ron, the Vail Valley Foundation and the staff of the project enough for this incredible gift, MY HEALTH!” 

He recounted one story about a company who claimed to have a special process to recover and process oil and other minerals out of petroleum tar sands.  The company obtained the rights to develop the tar sands of a vast area in Canada, and was working on raising funds for its first processing plant.  The market opportunity for the company’s special process was huge, if it worked.   The truth was that the company’s special process did not work.   Through its research, Ron’s team discovered that no experts at the time would endorse the company’s special process — not even the consultant whom the company had hired to assess its feasibility!  The consultant, in fact, was livid because the company had put out, in press releases and public filings, statements that his work had proven the viability of the process, which he said categorically, it did not.  The company eventually collapsed after a series of negative news reports, including that of the SEC and FBI (in connection with a federal grand jury) were investigating the company for false statements and stock manipulation. 

At the request of union officials and rescue workers, the detoxification project was established to help these men and women recover their health. All project services are provided on a humanitarian basis, at no cost. Ron took on the role of Chairman of the Fundraising Committee in 2002 and worked tirelessly to ensure that the project had the funds it needed to help those who came to it. As Carol Hamaker, Executive Director of the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project states, “Ron really stood up and took a leadership role to get our living heroes some help”. 

Ron himself sponsored many rescue workers for the detoxification program over the years. In a letter to Ron, the daughter of one of the many rescue workers that Ron sponsored wrote “My Dad had not been feeling well for months and his symptoms were only worsening despite his more frequent visits to doctors and increases in medication. He was not himself and it was disheartening to watch.  He lost eleven of his friends and colleagues of his firehouse on 9/11not to mention other firefighters he knew from other houses. He looked and acted old. He was pale and his mood and energy was overall down.  During his first days on his program we saw his mood brighten up. He seemed hopeful and excited. Each day my Dad improved. All of our spirits lifted and we were happy to see him getting back to his old self.  On the morning he completed his program he knew he felt “normal” again.  These were the best words he could have ever said.  Through Ron’s kindness and generosity he is giving so many people the best gift they could ever imagine; recovery, health and the best of all, hope! My Dad has been given back to us and we are all so grateful to him.”

Ron considers his participation in this project to be one of his greatest achievements. With his help, the project has been able to restore quality of life to nearly 1000 rescue workers. These recoveries have brought relief and hope to thousands more of their husbands, wives, children and colleagues. Today, the philanthropic effort that Ron brought life to has grown to include well over 150 foundations, corporations and individual sponsors.  

If you passed him walking down the street you wouldn’t guess this man had set up what was at one time one of the largest hedge funds in the US, which peaked at over a billion dollars. Sitting in a Florida office wearing shorts and a t-shirt, Ron Pollack (http://www.ronpollack.net) talked about his career as a hedge fund manager and short seller, his family, the charity groups he’s helped and why he’s decided to return to the markets after a six-year hiatus. “Short selling is what I do and I need to get back to doing it.”

Ron Pollack graduated Magna Cum Laude from Yale and went on to get both an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School (HBS) and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. After graduate school, Pollack went to Wall Street where he became an investment banker and later honed his skills as a hedge fund manager. Ron was trained as a short seller by industry pioneers, the Feshbach Brothers.

Both Yale and HBS seem to have a penchant for turning out successful investors: Jim Chanos (widely credited with exposing Enron as a fraud, whom Ron got to know back in the 1980s when they were both short First Executive Life), Zoe Cruz (a brilliant commodity trader who rose to the co-presidency of Morgan Stanley, was a sectionmate of Ron’s at HBS), Jamie Dimon (CEO of JP Morgan Chase, with whom Ron used to play pickup basketball at HBS), Strauss Zelnick (media wunderkind and Chairman of ZelnickMedia and Take-Two Interactive, Ron’s roommate at HBS), Scott Schoen and Scott Sperling (co-presidents of leveraged buyout giant THL, and friends of Ron from HBS), Steve Pagliuca and Joshua Bekenstein (of Bain Capital, friends of Ron from HBS and Yale respectively), Glenn Hutchins (of Silver Lake Partners, also a HBS classmate) to name just a few. Pollack is no exception. After leaving Feshbach in the early 1990s, Pollack built a highly successful family of hedge funds, the most well-known of which was his short fund, appropriately named Dancing Bear. But towards the end of 2001, Pollack started to examine how he could spend more time with his growing family and help charities.

“After the terrorist attack on 9/11, I was moved by what happened and I really wanted to help,” said Pollack. He started on a plan of action that would allow him to have more time to spend with his family and to help charity organizations. He set up successful fund-raisers for New York’s sick firefighters, police, and sanitation workers. by working with Vail Valley Foundation, the New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Foundation and others.

As part of his fund-raising activities, Ron would occasionally end up in the offices of fund managers. This would invariably pull at his heart strings as he had stopped trading after his decision to become a full-time dad and volunteer. In fact, during his time as a volunteer, Pollack traded only once.

At a charity auction in Vail, Pollack bid for, and won, a day of trading and instruction with a local stockbroker, “just for fun.” The broker did not know who had won the bid. Needless to say, he was surprised by his visitor’s depth of knowledge.

Although the broker didn’t recognize him, many others know that he built one of the largest successful investment management firms in the US. When Russ Ramsey, Chairman and CEO of Ramsey Asset Management, wanted to set up a ledge fund specializing in short selling, he called in Pollack as a short sell guru for advice. During this time, Pollack researched the current markets and what investors were doing. He figured that by this time, the short sale space would have been saturated. It wasn’t.

“I was amazed. Nothing in short selling had changed while I was gone. Investors were still using the same techniques that we were using back in the 1980s” exclaimed Pollack. “I had already moved on to a newer shortselling model with Dancing Bear back in the mid-1990s. I thought for sure others would have followed suit, and that by now shortselling would be overcrowded, just like most other investment strategies.” Not only was the space not crowded, he found out that only a handful in the space were doing well. Although it was not the right time to get back into this field, he realized then that he would eventually come back to it.

In late 2007, Pollack decided that it was time to get back to investing. He realized that although he enjoyed working with the charities, he could actually contribute more by making and donating money than through hands-on hours. His children were growing up and although he had enjoyed his break from the sometimes turbulent and often stressful world of investing, it was also his passion. It was in his blood.

To put it simply, “I needed this time away to be with my family and really enjoyed working with my charity groups but I realize it’s now time to come back. I love the challenge of investing, especially shorting stocks, and I missed it dearly.”