D'Amato: Peter Feigin presides over Bucks' transformation

The man who once worked for Warren Buffett, who turned a $20 million private aviation company into an $800 million business, who runs an NBA franchise and rubs shoulders daily with civic leaders and famous athletes, is riding in the backseat of my Kia Optima.

We’d dined at Zarletti — Bucks President Peter Feigin arrived via Uber, dressed in a sport jacket accessorized with unlaced yellow sneakers — and now he was eager to show me the team’s new practice facility.

We made the one-mile drive in my car, Feigin squeezing into the cramped back seat and Barry Baum, the Bucks’ senior vice president of communications, riding shotgun.

I was a bit self-conscious, but the method of transport wasn’t the least bit uncomfortable to Feigin, who couldn’t have cared less that he was sitting on my dog’s dried-mud paw prints, amid sweat-stained ball caps. He is proof that “unpretentious New Yorker” is not an oxymoron.

Of all the transformative moves made by Bucks owners Wes Edens and Marc Lasry since they bought the franchise from Herb Kohl in 2014, the smartest thing they did was hire Feigin, a high-energy, low-maintenance executive who arrived three years ago as an outsider but already is so ingrained in the culture of Milwaukee that he might as well be the Fonz.

Feigin, 47, seemingly knows every restaurant owner in town. He gets his hair cut at Gee’s Clippers on N. King Drive. He moves just as easily among the city’s power brokers as he does its down-and-outers. Rare is the person in his position to whom nobody is insignificant and everybody is worth five minutes of his time. He’s as popular in some circles as are the Bucks’ players — and much more accessible. People approach him because they sense they can.

“You cannot find a more down-to-earth guy,” says Gaulien Smith, owner of Gee’s Clippers. “He’s the life of the barbershop when he comes in. All the clients know him. All the barbers know him. He’s just a great guy.”

Justine Fedak, head of sponsorship for BMO Financial Group, witnessed Feigin’s pied-piper quality at a Bucks pep rally.

“It was so hilarious,” she says. “People were interrupting our conversation to tell him, ‘You’re a great guy,’ ‘We love what you’re doing,’ ‘Fear the deer.’ That includes people who you could say were a little down on their luck saying, ‘You’re that superstar from the Bucks. I love you, man.’

“I have never been at a pep rally where people are asking to have their picture taken with the president of the team. The community sees him as a star.”

Feigin was the driving force behind getting the $524 million arena deal done and is overseeing the arena development, the entertainment live block being built in front of the arena and the Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin Sports Science Center. He’s led a re-branding of the franchise and has been praised for enhancing the team’s community presence. Last week, he announced that the Milwaukee Bucks Foundation would give $1 million in grants to 15 local organizations.

“It’s one thing to be a cheerleader, but Pete backs it up,” says Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele. “The Bucks said, ‘We want to engage and be a part of the Milwaukee community,’ and Pete personifies that.

“I’ve been in Milwaukee for over 20 years now and I’ve always been involved and still am with a lot of nonprofits. I have a sense for who does what and we are very lucky in Milwaukee to have some very good corporate citizens. But the Bucks have gone from 0 to 60 on that faster than any organization I’ve ever seen.

“It’s not just the one-off checks. They want to understand and they want to make a difference.”

Feigin is out front or in the middle of all of it. He has taken to Milwaukee so quickly that if you didn’t know better, you’d think he grew up near Kosciuszko Park or in Riverwest. And he is bullish on the city’s future.

“I love Milwaukee, and I love Milwaukee with all its quirks,” he says. “This is a city that just has so much promise.”

* * * 

Feigin grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the son of parents who had accomplished careers in marketing. Salesmanship is in his DNA.

He attended high school in Brooklyn Heights, where he played guard on the basketball team and scored 1,100 points, taking passes from his identical twin brother, Dan. Baum played at a rival school and remembers Feigin as “feisty” and “hardworking” — the kind of player who dived for loose balls and was an irritating defender.

Asked to give a scouting report, Bucks coach Jason Kidd says, “Pete can shoot. He knows how to play the game. He understands what he has to do and he can shoot the ball.”

Feigin also was captain of the soccer team at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

“That’s an anomaly, for a city kid to play collegiate soccer,” he says. “I was sort of no-flash, able to hold the ball and distribute and not let anybody pass me on defense. I was relentless.”

That competitiveness lies just beneath the surface, always present. While Feigin is disarmingly friendly and has a compassionate streak a mile wide, it would be unwise to underestimate his tenacity.

“Our first real personal interaction wasn’t a positive one,” says Ashanti Hamilton, president of the Milwaukee Common Council. “He came in with a New York swagger and was pretty abrasive. He had kind of a hard-nosed negotiating style and so we had a pretty explosive first negotiating meeting about the (Bucks’) work-force development program for the arena and the ancillary development.

“We were coming from a position where we felt like we had to make the developers adhere to our programs and he felt like, ‘Nobody is going to make us do anything.’ ”

They reached a compromise and Hamilton’s initial skepticism of Feigin quickly turned to respect and admiration.

“I think two things stand out about Peter,” Hamilton says. “One, he’s sincere. Regardless of the aggressive exterior, he’s sincere about what he’s working on. I don’t care if he’s talking about the players, the organization, the city, vulnerable communities — he’s sincere about doing the work.

“The other thing is that, man, he’s comfortable in his skin. He is who he is and he doesn’t apologize for it.”

Ted Kellner, chairman of the BMO Harris Bradley Center board and a minority owner of the Bucks, had a similar run-in with Feigin a few months after Feigin was named team president in October 2014.

Kellner was quoted in a story in the Milwaukee Business Journal as saying he thought the Bucks would try to negotiate an arena naming-rights deal similar in structure to the one the Brewers signed with Miller Brewing.

“Feigin gets on the phone with me and he says, ‘Why are you doing this? I’m the spokesman,’ ” Kellner says. “He was heated, yelling at me, swearing. So we go at it. Finally, I had it and I said, ‘This is bull ..., Peter. I was talking about the structure, not the economics. Back off.’ He’s like, ‘I can be the biggest SOB in the room.’

“At the end of the conversation, we came to an understanding.”

Did the experience sour Kellner on Feigin? Quite the opposite.

“I love Peter,” he says. “He fights for everything. He’s a tough negotiator but he’s fair. The Bucks needed that. He’s a hard-charging, smart, tough businessman. If you look at what he’s done, it’s been terrific for the city, the state and the team.

“I get into it with him sometimes but at the end of the day, he’s going to come up to you and say, ‘We fought hard but you got this and I got that. Now let’s go have a beer.’ I consider him a great friend.”

* * * 

John Steinmiller started with the Bucks in 1970 as a part-time employee during his final semester at Marquette University. Now the team’s executive vice president of operations, he’s worked for every owner, president and GM in franchise history, so he’s uniquely qualified to judge Feigin as a leader.

“He’s custom-made for it because he’s inspiring and charming and he can unify people,” Steinmiller says. “He’s a hard worker and a quick thinker and he’s ingenious. He comes up with ideas and he cultivates ideas from other people. He creates a sense of comfort regardless of where he is and who he’s dealing with. He finds a way to get consensus and compromise. He’s got a great business sense and people are attracted to him because of that.

“He wants us to be the best sports and entertainment franchise in the world. Nobody laughs when he says it. We’re all believing. And we should.”

It’s a bit unusual for the president of an NBA team to be close to the head coach, but Feigin and Kidd are tight. They text and talk via FaceTime several times a day, and the needle is always out.

“I scream at Jason all the time, just to get a rise out of him,” Feigin says. “I tell him I love the off-season Jason. The off-season Jason is the greatest person I ever met. The in-season Jason? Uh, not so much.”

Says Kidd, “Peter is as good as they come. He shoots straight. He just comes with a ball of positive energy. When you have that type of boss you can only move forward and get better.”

Feigin has a varied business background. He was president and chief operating officer of Marquis Jet Partners Inc. and brokered Berkshire Hathaway’s 2010 acquisition of Marquis. He then played a central role in the integration of the two businesses.

What was it like to work for Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO and one of the wealthiest men in the world?

“He’s the brightest guy in the room,” Feigin says. “The most supportive guy ever. He makes everything simple. He’s the kind of guy who says, ‘Run your business so you wouldn’t do anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the paper the next day.’ Which isn’t a dumb way to do it.”

Feigin also directed global business and branding for Deluxe Entertainment Services Group, held sales and marketing positions with Six Flags theme parks and worked for the New York Knicks in a variety of roles.

But he might not have wound up with the Bucks if not for his brother Dan’s friendship with Edens and Lasry, whose children attended the Trevor Day School in New York, where Dan is principal.

“Marc was looking to buy an NBA team for a while and he was asking a lot of questions,” Dan Feigin says. “I said, ‘Peter has been shoulder deep in all of that at the (Madison Square) Garden. Why don’t you just use him as a sounding board?’ Peter became sort of a member of Marc’s consulting team.

“When Wes and Marc bought the Bucks, they asked Peter to be part of the search for a president. And ultimately they said, ‘The guy is right in front of us. What are we doing? The guy doing the search is best equipped for the job.’ ”

Feigin loves a challenge, and this was a big one. The owners were asking him to run an NBA franchise that needed to be ripped down to the studs and rebuilt and oh, by the way, would become one of the biggest developers in state history while creating a legacy project that would transform downtown.

“I’m this schmo from New York and the fact that they would entrust me with all this, it was like, oh my goodness, incredible,” Feigin says. “Just nuts.”

Not that it was easy. The night the $250 million public financing plan for the arena was pulled from the state budget, Feigin’s initial reaction was, “This is doomed. It’s over.” But within five minutes he called his assistant and said, “We have 99 assembly people to meet with. I’m not leaving Madison until we meet with each and every one of them because they have to know our story. And I did.”

The Bucks got their arena. And the Park East corridor is getting a massive facelift, with more than $500 million in planned economic development and some 10,000 good-paying jobs over the course of construction projects.

“A lot of people had doubts,” Abele says, “But the Bucks did exactly what they said they were going to do.”

The team was the first partner in the county’s Uplift MKE program, a job training and placement program targeting areas of the city with the highest rates of unemployment and underemployment, and has committed to hiring workers for end-use jobs from this program.

“Quite honestly,” Hamilton says, “I think the Bucks have been overachieving on the promises they made to the city.”

* * *

Let’s tackle the elephant in the room. Last fall, Feigin told a Madison Rotary Club that Milwaukee was “the most segregated, racist place I’ve ever experienced in my life,” in discussing how the arena district was designed to positively impact downtown Milwaukee and central city neighborhoods.

He took considerable heat for his remarks, much of which was along the lines of: How dare this arrogant New Yorker denigrate our city.

“I think the greatest thing it did was affect conversation,” Feigin says. “There were some people who were upset with it. I had some cathartic conversations with people who questioned where my loyalty to Milwaukee was. They don’t understand that there’s no bigger cheerleader, no bigger marketer, no person more interested in the success of Milwaukee than I am.”

Feigin might have chosen his words more carefully in Madison, but no one who has spent even a few minutes with him doubts his veracity.

“He is a person from a major city that is very integrated and multicultural,” Fedak says. “He was surprised at what, for him, seemed to be less integration than what he probably imagined, in that some of the communities he hoped would be exposed to the team didn’t have the access or the opportunities to participate.

“I think Peter is also not afraid to call people out if he sees something that is not aligned with his value system, which is one of diversity and inclusion.”

Smith says he was not offended when Feigin made his “racist city” comments and laughs when reminded that Feigin was given the Crystal Living Legend Award from the founders of the Black Inventors Gallery.

“I’m sure he didn’t mean anything malicious by it,” Smith says. “You’ve got to understand, he comes from a melting-pot city. I think when he made that statement it was like, you know, ‘I’m going to change this. Milwaukee is a beautiful place. It’s a great city, but we’ve got some work to do.’ ”

Gino Fazzari, owner of Calderone Club and Pizzeria San Georgio, two of the many downtown restaurants Feigin frequents, also vouches for his friend.

“He truly cares,” Fazzari says. “I can’t say enough about him. I don’t put my neck out for too many people but I’d put it out seven days a week and twice on Sunday for Peter.”

* * * 

It’s a cliché to say Feigin is like a kid in a candy store as he gives a tour of the Bucks’ spectacular new practice facility, but there’s no better way to describe him. He’s positively giddy as he points out the state-of-the-art features.

Afterward, I offer him and Baum a ride back to the Bucks’ offices or anywhere else downtown, but they decline.

“It’s a nice night for a walk,” Feigin says.

As I turn north on 6th St., I check my rearview mirror. Feigin and Baum are standing on the corner, gazing up at the new arena.

From that angle, or any other, the future looks good.