A Bronx, New York, native, former accountant and onetime Manhattan dealmaker, Steven Kriegsman has made his mark in Los Angeles. After making a fortune investing in oil and gas partnership, and a variety of startups, he switched to biotech and the health industry. That included a savvy investment in a young company called Amgen – which grew into the world’s largest biotech. More recently, Kriegsman took over a struggling startup called Cytrx Corp. after he had invested $2 million in a predecessor company. He has shepherded Cytrx as it developed therapies ranging from an experimental treatment for Lou Gehrig’s disease – a heartbreaking affliction that leads to paralysis and death – to new drugs for prostate, pancreatic and other cancers. The 68-year-old takes his own health seriously. He eats nearly as clean as a professional bodybuilder and works out five to six days a week. Even so, the son of a New York fur processor is often shocked that he’s running a West Coast biotech – once upon a time Kriegsman had dreams of becoming a sportswriter.

Question: Why are you passionate about what you do?

Answer: My first wife died from cancer after our divorce, and most of the aunts and uncles on my dad’s side of the family died of cancer, so there’s a personal as well as financial interest in making sure these drugs do so well. I didn’t know as much about Lou Gehrig’s, but once we became involved with the patient’s community it became personal, too.

How much of the investment in cancer research your company has made is related to your family’s history?

Cancer is such a deadly snake, you really never know when it’s going to strike. I hope it never strikes me or my immediate family. But you can’t control these things, except to take the necessary precautions with diet and exercise. I don’t live in the past or worry about the future. I tend to live in the present. This day is all we have.

What is the potential for biotech? Can it cure all diseases?

Aside from something like the that vaccine virtually eradicated small pox, there really hasn’t been many things in medicine you can call a cure. Most of the time, you usually end up prolonging life or arresting perhaps the disease for a time, maybe forever, in a person.

You have a Nobel prize winner on your board. What’s it like to work with someone so smart and accomplished?

Dr. Louis Ignarro at UCLA, he’s also on our scientific advisory board. Although he’s obviously brilliant beyond belief, he’s a down-to-earth type of a fellow who can explain things in an easy way. He was part of the group who gave us a lot of advice when I first took over at Cytrx. We get along because we’re similar ages and from the same part of New York; he’s from Brooklyn and I’m from the Bronx.

So what’s it like being a nonscientist running a cutting-edge scientific company?

It’s really been an education. It’s encouraged me to take a number of continuing education courses in science: clinical development, biology and chemistry. I own a lot of medical books now. The end result is that I’m now more of a scientist than I ever thought I would be, though never as much as my senior executive team.

Did you ever think you would be in this position?

I never thought that I would be a CEO of a biotech and in Los Angeles of all places. I thought I was going to be a New York sports journalist as a kid.

Why did you want to be a journalist?

I was very athletic as a child. But my high school, Columbus High School, was one of the premiere schools for sports in the city of New York at the time and I couldn’t make the varsity basketball team, which was my sport. So, I thought, what’s the next best thing? I became the sports writer for the school paper. I loved it. I was interviewing people, was going to all the games, I had the best seats you can have, I got to go into the locker room. It was fantastic. I thought this was for me.

I guess it wasn’t.

I ended up going to NYU, which had a very good journalism program. I even got a summer job before I started college at Knight Ridder, writing about the oil and gas industry. But it was clear by the end of my freshman year in 1959 that while I was a terrific reporter in high school, at NYU I was just average compared to some of the other writers. I wanted to stay in New York, the industry was going through consolidation much like it is today, and I knew that I’d have a lot of competition for any newspaper job in New York. So I decided to switch to the business school and study accounting.

Why accounting?

Well, that was the program at business schools where you really had to apply yourself, really work, and that appealed to me. I had a cousin who had gone on to become an accountant and he really liked it. The saying in those days was that if you could learn accounting, you could always get a job. So the security of that appealed to me. As much as I loved reporting, I knew it wasn’t going to be secure.

How did college go?

Well, I worked really hard, but I also was lucky. I graduated second in my class, and me and the guy who was first in the class were recruited by the New York office of KPMG. KPMG had always been a pretty unique firm in those days. They’d hire you right out of college, throw you on a complicated account early and find out what you could do. You had to be absolutely dedicated to KPMG and never have a social life, but at the end of four years there, I had eight years of experience. And I found I had a nose for fraud.

What do you mean by that?

They’d put me on sensitive assignments, where they thought there might be a problem. I got to where I could literally go into an accounting department and smell if there was a problem. You can tell by the way people act, whether they are hiding something. So you really had to dig and work your way around to find out what was going on. I loved it. Every time they’d send you into an account in a new industry; you had to become an expert in that industry.

How much did that approach help with your current company?

Without that experience I could not have been a CEO of a public company. I got such a diverse education at KPMG. I learned how to become knowledgeable on an industry very quickly, know the questions to ask and not be intimidated. Big numbers don’t bother me. I know how to read a financial statement. Being an accountant before you become a CEO keeps you from being surprised.

So how did you end up running companies?

I ended up working on the audits for a lot of mergers and got to know all the investment bankers and senior management at a very young age. I got this assignment for Chyron, a computer company that had the technology for creating the titling you’d see at the bottom of your TV screen. I did the audit when they went public and they asked me to come on as chief financial officer afterwards. Made me a hell of a deal for a 25-year-old kid. I checked with my boss, and he said while they wanted me to stay, since it was for a client I could go. And if it didn’t work out, I could always come back.

Did the job live up to your expectations?

I stayed at that company a year. We raised money; we did deals. I traveled a lot and it was great. But I eventually came to realize that the real money was in doing the deals themselves. But instead of joining a firm, I opened my own office – Steven A. Kriegsman, CPA – since I was always entrepreneurial.

Really? Did you run a lemonade stand as a kid?

My uncle and aunt, who had a newsstand business in New York ran a summer camp in the Adirondacks for the children from wealthy and elite families, and when I was 16 they put me in charge of the canteen, which had never done well. I knew what kids wanted, so I started stocking comic books, brought in the most popular candy and even had a delivery service for late-night snacks. I also set up charge accounts that the parent would have to pay off at the end of the summer. That canteen made thousands of dollars that summer.

How did you become independently wealthy?

I had kept up my relationships at KPMG. At the time, they really didn’t have a small business group, so when they had a client who needed to do a deal and was too small for them, they’d send them my way. The kind of companies that do only $25 million a year. I even did a deal for the I.M. Pei family one time. I started my firm at 27 and by the time I was 33 I decided I had enough money to not have to work again. My first wife and I hadn’t started a family yet and by then I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in New York.

What changed your mind about New York?

In the mid-1970s New York had become a dirty, very dangerous place; I mean people were walking out of banks, getting held up and shot even after they handed over their money. I had made a business trip to Los Angeles, and I’ll never forget it. I was driving down the 405 and turned down Sunset Boulevard to go to Beverly Hills – I fell in love. I knew I had to get out of New York. I convinced my wife that we had to move to paradise, so we got a place at the Churchill on Wilshire Boulevard and Beverly Glen. I was basically going to have fun for once.

How long did that last?

Six months. Going to parties, meeting people here, socializing, was a lot of fun, but one day I was looking out of my apartment window, calling my friends back in New York – and they were all busy working. I realized that I better figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

So that eventually led to biotech, I take it.

My best friend growing up, Richard Cogan, had become president of Schering Plough, the drug company. While he was out visiting me in 1981, he was telling me that there was this field called biotechnology that was going to be really big one day; that’s the investing I ought to be doing.

And Cytrx?

Cytrx came out of an investment that didn’t appear to be turning out so well. I had invested in a company called Global Genomics, which was taken over by Cytrx in 2002. They had some failures and the stock dropped to 21 cents. I only had $2 million in it, but I didn’t want to lose it, so I made a proposition to the board to give me a chance to see what value was in the company as interim CEO. I got some advice, asked a bunch of the brightest minds in health care to brainstorm ideas with me. I moved the company from Atlanta to L.A. and we started buying other companies that had (intellectual property) that was more promising.

Early in your career you said you worked hard hours with no social life. Is your life more balanced today?

I have a grown daughter from my first marriage and two boys in their teens with my second wife. So I make sure we go on vacations and we go to the theaters. And we have Lakers tickets, of course. Our family ritual every Sunday is to take my mother-in-law out for dinner. She’s great – 89-years-old and still driving.

What’s a typical day for you?

I’m a creature of habit in a lot of ways. I’m up by 5 a.m. to work out five or six days a week, even when I’m traveling. I work at home for a while, but am in the office by 8:30 or 9 a.m. and leave by 5:30 p.m. – though I take work home with me. I have the same breakfast every morning at the same place during the week: oatmeal at the Pacific Dining Car in Santa Monica. I’ll treat myself to multigrain pancakes on the weekends at a place near my house. I pretty much eat the same thing for lunch, fish or chicken with some vegetables. Dinner has more variety; sometimes we’ll eat out, sometimes we’ll eat in. Tonight, it’s meatballs.

What kind of exercise?

I keep my body fat low, and my energy level is so good that I really don’t get jet lag when I’m traveling. I love gyms, but I also will go hiking in Rustic Canyon or take the steps in Santa Monica. For many years, I swam competitively in the Masters circuit for adults. I still shoot hoops with my youngest son, but I gotta watch it because my knees aren’t so good anymore.

Any hobbies?

Aside from sports, no. You could say work is my hobby, because work is fun for me. It keeps you young, but you have to be passionate about what you’re doing. Being in a business where what we’re making could save lives makes me very passionate about going to work each day.

STEVEN KRIEGSMAN

TITLE: Chief Executive

COMPANY: Cytrx Corp., Brentwood

BORN: 1942; Bronx, New York

EDUCATION: B.S. accounting, New York University, 1964

CAREER TURNING POINT: Turned his back on teenage dream of becoming a sports writer to study accounting

PERSONAL: Lives in Pacific Palisades with wife of 23 years, Marina; a daughter from his previous marriage and two sons

HOBBIES: Various fitness activities, including weight training, swimming, hiking and basketball; season tickets to the Los Angeles Lakers and concert series