IN WHAT HE CALLS A WIN FOR EVERY HARD-WORKING HOTELIER , JERRY INZERILLO ALWAYS HAD ‘ THE EYE OF THE TIGER ’ AND WISDOM TO OPERATE AS A SERVANT LEADER .
IN WHAT HE CALLS A WIN FOR EVERY HARD-WORKING HOTELIER , JERRY INZERILLO ALWAYS HAD ‘ THE EYE OF THE TIGER ’ AND WISDOM TO OPERATE AS A SERVANT LEADER .
by JEFF WEINSTEIN , EDITOR IN CHIEF
When Gerard “ Jerry ” Inzerillo was growing up in a two-room apartment with four siblings and his hard-working parents , he had much more room to roam on the streets of Brooklyn , New York , home . But when the other kids were playing baseball in the local sandlot , Jerry was sneaking on to the subway and riding into Manhattan where he was attracted to the lobbies of the fancy hotels like The Plaza and Waldorf because people looked and dressed nice . “ I got the bug as a boy because I just loved the festivity of a lobby ,” says today ’ s CEO of the Diriyah Gate Development Authority , a US $ 20 billion-plus giga-project based in Riyadh , Saudi Arabia , aimed at restoring and reimagining the ancestral home of the original Saudi state . “ And I loved the fact that people were nice to one another and it was genteel . Even the bellmen were nice in those days .”
Within a few years , on May 2 , 1967 , to be exact , at age 13 , after a local judge helped him with ID papers that would get him a job , he started working as many as 50 hours a week as a pickup banquet bus boy . He pulled his first shift that night at The Gotham Hotel on 55th Street back in Manhattan ( today The Peninsula ), working 12 hours for US $ 15.90 plus tips . It marked the start of Inzerillo grabbing at his lifeline away from the neighborhood streets .
Even today , when you talk to Jerry , he refers to his hospitality roots . When he tours a hotel as vice chairman of the Forbes Travel Guide , one of his first stops is the kitchen to shake hands with the line staff , for he is humbled to this day for all the hotel industry has given to him . So , when he was chosen by the readers of HOTELS as the 2021 Corporate Hotelier of the World award winner , Inzerillo first talks about how this is going to resonate with all the bus boys . “ This is a blue-collar winner this year . This is a victory for the workers , and it ’ s a victory for the ops people ,” he says .
CAREER PATH It has been a long and storied career for Inzerillo , now 67 , who still refers to himself as an innkeeper , starting as a bus boy , finding his way to the UNLV hotel school , getting a night timekeeper ’ s job at the Flamingo in Vegas with one of his original mentors , the hotel ’ s GM Xavier Lividini , another Italian gentleman from New York . By the time Inzerillo was 19 , he was the night manager making US $ 19,000 and hanging out backstage with the likes of Frank Sinatra , running errands for him during the day , all the while finishing his bachelor ’ s degree with honors .
By 1976 , he landed back in New York at the Statler Hilton as executive assistant manager to help manage the Democratic convention soon coming to the hotel . After succeeding with the big convention , he was promoted to Miami Beach ’ s Fontainebleau , and two years later he got a call from Four Seasons Isadore Sharp to become GM of the brand ’ s property in Houston under another of the company ’ s legendary leaders , Wolf Hengst . Inzerillo went on to open the first Four Seasons resort property in Dallas and by 1987 , he was heading back to New York to work with Steve Rubbell and Ian Schrager to develop what would soon become Morgans Hotel Group .
A pivotal moment in Inzerillo ’ s career came in June 1990 , when still with Morgans , he was asked by New York ’ s mayor to coordinate the visit of Nelson Mandela , who had just left prison in South Africa . “ Mandela and I became really close and he asked me to go other points beyond with him ,” Inzerillo reflects . That took him back to South Africa , where four years later he led Mandela ’ s inauguration . It was also the start of a 21-year run with hotelier Sol Kerzner , starting at the fabled Sun City in Botswana and then the development of Atlantis on Paradise Island in the Bahamas , which opened in 1994 .
After a number of twists and turns , including the further creation of the One & Only brand and the tragic 2006 death of Sol ’ s son Butch , Inzerillo left Kerzner to
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