Dan Doctoroff
Formerly one of Mayor Bloomberg's top lieutenants as the city's deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, Doctoroff is now president of Bloomberg L.P.
The son of an appellate judge, Doctoroff grew up in the Detroit suburbs, attended Harvard and the University of Chicago Law, and started out his career working at Lehman Brothers. He eventually moved on to billionaire Robert Bass's private equity firm Oak Hill Partners, where he served as managing partner for 14 years. Inspired by the impact of the 1994 World Cup, Doctoroff hatched the idea for a New York City Olympic bid; in 1996, while still at Oak Hill, he secured Rudy Giuliani's blessing for the project and organized NYC 2012, the group behind New York's bid for the 2012 Olympics. Even though New York ultimately failed to get the games, in the process of putting together the bid, Doctoroff forged close ties to the city's political elite and learned a thing or two about what it takes to get sweeping economic plans realized in this city. In 2001, Bloomberg offered Doctoroff the post of deputy mayor for economic development. Doctoroff turned down the job twice before succumbing to Bloomberg's will, joining the administration in late 2001. He resigned in December 2007.
In his first couple of years as Deputy Mayor Doctoroff was best known for a handful of very public misses: failing to bring the Olympics to New York, of course, but also his unsuccessful plan to build a football stadium on the West Side, which was itself a linchpin of the city's Olympics bid. But he was involved in a number of more successful initiatives as well: Doctoroff championed the post-9/11 redevelopment of lower Manhattan, which sparked a boom in residential construction in the historically commercial neighborhood. And his practice of targeting decaying areas and then changing their obsolete zoning designations to encourage development also led to rebuilding initiatives on the Far West Side and in Brooklyn. During Bloomberg's second term, cars, not buildings, were his pet project: Doctoroff was one of the fiercest proponents of congestion pricing, part of Mayor Bloomberg's drive to make the city more environmentally-friendly. But before he got a chance to see the proposal fail, Doctoroff resigned from his post in December 2007, announcing he was joining the Mayor's former media company, Bloomberg L.P., as president. Once regarded as a potential mayoral candidate, Doctoroff has since given assurances he plans to remain in the private sector. [Image via Getty]