Conrad Black’s bail guarantor: Roger Hertog

Roger Hertog, who posted the $2m bond for Conrad Black. Photograph: Kiichiro Sato/AP

Roger Hertog, who guaranteed Conrad Black‘s $2m bail, is an old friend and business partner.

He was born in 1941 in New York to what he described as “poor German-Jewish immigrants” who had fled to America in 1937. He studied at the City College of New York – the “Harvard of the poor” – while trying to break into Wall Street. Decades later, he described his early priorities as “Money and girls. Ideas came in third.”

Today, he is a philanthropist. He is said to have given away more than $100m, including paying for a new library in the Bronx where he grew up, and for military “grand strategy” to be taught at several US universities. His support for Judaism includes funding undergraduate courses on Jewish thought at Princeton and the New York University’s law school.

But he has also made significant donations to New York’s Catholic schools in an attempt to give poor children a chance of a better education, having previously financed several scholarships.In 2007 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. He launched The New York Sun in 2002, with Black as an investor.

It lasted only six years.