BY PAUL SCHINDLER | John Catsimatidis, the billionaire owner of the Gristedes chain of several dozen Manhattan supermarkets, as well as Red Apple Group, with supermarket, convenience store, gas station, oil refining, and real estate holdings nationwide, was recognized by his nation of birth when Greece, on September 1, issued a postage stamp in his honor.
Catsimatidis was one of five individuals of Greek heritage living abroad named by the International Foundation for Greece to receive acknowledgement by that nation with a stamp. IFG recognized him with its annual Entrepreneurship Award. Born on the Greek island of Nisyros 68 years ago this week, Catsimatidis immigrated to New York with his parents six months later. He opened up his first Red Apple supermarket while still an engineering student at New York University, and within a decade had built the chain to dozens of stores in Manhattan and the Bronx and begun to diversify his business holdings.
Catsimatidis said he had not known of the IFG honors prior to being notified of his selection earlier this summer — and he even admitted he had second thoughts about “schlepping” all the way to Greece (“You know that Greek word ‘schlepping,’ he quipped to this reporter) for the ceremony.
“But then I thought of my father and mother and grandparents and how they would be so proud,” he said.
Accompanied by his wife, Margo, and two children, Andrea and John, Jr., Catsimatidis traveled to Athens for the splashy awards ceremony last week at the Auditorium of the Acropolis Museum.
The trip was his third to his homeland in the past five years, one of them, he said, because a book about his mother had been published there.
Despite his 2013 run for the Republican mayoral nomination and his ownership of the Hellenic Times, a Manhattan-based Greek-American newspaper where his wife had been president at the time of their 1988 marriage, Catsimatidis said he has never taken a public stance on political questions back in Greece.
In addition to his business life, Catsimatidis sponsors a scholarship fund at NYU’s Stern School of Business and is a supporter of the National Kidney Foundation, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America, and the Ellis Island Awards Foundation.
His fellow honorees were journalist George Stephanopoulos, Dr. Peter Diamandis, an engineer, physician, and entrepreneur who founded the XPRIZE Foundation, filmmaker Costa-Gavras, and Rita Wilson, the singer and actress who is also the wife of Tom Hanks.
