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AMI’s $100M Sale of Nat’l Enquirer to Hudson News Could Take Place in Two Months

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By: David Pierce

Enquiring minds want to know when the long-awaited $100 million deal for American Media Inc. to sell the National Enquirer to Jimmy Cohen, owner of magazine wholesaler Hudson News will happen.

The short answer, as things look now: inside the next two months.

The purchase was revealed back in April, and according to preliminary reports should have been signed, sealed and delivered by now. Chatham Asset Management, headed by Anthony Melchiorre, “is the 80% owner of American Media Inc. and had reportedly been under pressure from investors in its hedge fund to divest the controversial supermarket tabloid. Cohen, who made a fortune in the magazine wholesale business, is a longtime pal and business associate of AMI Chief Executive David Pecker,” reported the New York Post.

“The price is the same — the financing is set,” Cohen told Media Ink. “All the big stuff is done.” He added: “There is no 50-pound boulder in the way. They don’t mention it in the Bible, but God did create lawyers.”

These have been interesting times for the Enquirer. The one-time star National Enquirer editor, Dylan Howard, “is using high-powered law firms that practice in Britain, Ireland, Australia, and the United States in an attempt to quash Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow’s much-anticipated exposé Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” according to The Daily Beast.

“According to two knowledgeable sources, Howard—in an extraordinary step for a journalist who otherwise claims to favor the free flow of information—has retained the services of New York’s Kravet & Vogel, Sydney-based McLachlan Thorpe Partners, and the London-based Tweed law firm in an apparent campaign to suppress Farrow’s book, which is scheduled for publication on Oct. 15,” the Beast added.

Pecker has been a high-profile guy in the media for quite some time, going back to the 1990s. Hee served as president and CEO of Hachette, which published magazines like Elle and Car and Driver.

“The company’s other ventures included “George,” a political magazine printed from 1995-2001 that was initially headed by John F. Kennedy, Jr., and “Trump Style,” a quarterly magazine distributed at Trump properties that reportedly first established Pecker’s relationship with President Donald Trump,” according to businessinsider.com.

Pecker was born to a Jewish family on September 24, 1951, in The Bronx. His father was a bricklayer who died in 1967 when Pecker was sixteen. To support his mother, he started bookkeeping for local businesses in New Rochelle, New York and in the Bronx. He graduated from Pace University in lower Manhattan. Ron

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