Donald Sturm died on Aug. 17 at age 92. (Courtesy ANB Bank)
Donald Sturm, a University of Denver law school graduate whose already-impressive wealth grew exponentially when he returned to the Mile High City at an age when many would retire, and whose local philanthropy led to the law school being named in his honor, has died.
Sturm died Saturday at age 92, according to ANB Bank, where he was majority owner and board chair.
“Up until a couple months ago, Don was in the office every day,” ANB CEO Koger Propst said, praising Sturm’s commitment to “long-term thinking,” even toward the end of his life.
“Business was his vocation and his hobby,” said Stephen Sturm, one of four children.
Sturm was born in Brooklyn in January 1932 and attended City College before being drafted into the U.S. Army. After getting out, he moved west to attend law school at what is now DU’s Sturm College of Law. He subsequently got a master’s degree in taxation from New York University.
“I took a huge amount of risk in leaving Denver to attend NYU Law,” he told an NYU questioner in 2021. “I went to New York without a job and without any money, and worked full time while going to school full time.”
Afterwards, he landed in Omaha as a trial attorney for the Internal Revenue Service. He loved it.
“My work at the IRS — I ate it up,” he told NYU. “I went to places like St. Paul and Des Moines and Kansas City and Denver, traveling the circuit. It was really an exciting, informative, wonderful experience. I learned how to develop a theory, search for the necessary facts to support the theory, and negotiate skillfully.”
Sturm then joined Omaha-based Peter Kiewit Sons, a large construction and engineering firm. When he was hired, Sturm told NYU, he hadn’t realized the government had a pending case arguing the company owed $35 million in taxes, which a Chicago law firm had been handling. Sturm found a past IRS ruling that supported an alternative position — that some distributions “were not taxable but were returns of capital,” he said — and ultimately got the tax agency to pay Kiewit $5 million instead.
“Peter Kiewit got 40 percent,” Sturm told NYU. “After that, he and others in the company included me in most material matters.”
Sturm worked at Kiewit for 28 years, rising to become vice chairman, according to ANB Bank. He pushed the company further into the energy industry, developing coal mines in Montana and Wyoming and buying a stake in the pipeline company Mapco, which Kiewit later sold for twice the price.
By the 1980s, Kiewit was making more from coal than construction, Forbes reported in 1998. The company made $800 million when it bought a Fortune 500 conglomerate called Continental Group, installed Sturm as CEO and sold the company off in pieces.
The deals made Sturm very wealthy. He told NYU he was Kiewit’s second-largest shareholder at one point, with a 10 percent stake. According to Forbes, his stock was worth $160 million when he left Kiewit in 1991.
That’s when Sturm, then nearly 60 years old, returned to Denver, according to ANB. He bought Bank of Cherry Creek that year. It wasn’t his first bank acquisition. That, he told NYU, had been back in 1983, in Macomb, Illinois. He’d followed it with other buys.
“Don is very tough, but fair. He expects the best out of people, and this was good for me as long as I produced,” an executive at one of Sturm’s banks told The Denver Post in 1999. “If you don’t produce, you’re not guaranteed anything.”
The Bank of Cherry Creek and Sturm’s other banking holdings in Wyoming and Kansas were later rolled together into ANB Bank, which is still based in Cherry Creek. It is Colorado’s 17th-largest bank based on in-state customer deposits, according to FDIC data.
Sturm also helped buy Continental Airlines out of bankruptcy in 1993. In 1998, Forbes estimated that he was worth $1.7 billion, primarily citing his investments in telecommunications companies such as Level 3 Communications and MCI/WorldCom. The next year, Forbes raised the figure to $3.2 billion.
“I used to play Monopoly as a kid,” Sturm told Forbes in 1998. “I’m still playing it.”
By 2001, however, Forbes had dropped its estimate of Sturm’s net worth to $900 million. He had not been included on separate lists of billionaires maintained by Forbes and Bloomberg in recent years.
Sturm also branched into real estate after returning to Denver, helping develop The Meadows in Castle Rock, a community of about 20,000, and projects in Cherry Creek.
“He would take us down to look at The Meadows, drive around and see it, so he could get eyes on it and so could we,” said son Stephen, who was born around the time his father left Kiewit.
“His ability to be creative when it comes to thinking about how to get a deal done, or the motivations behind it, were second to none,” Stephen added.
Shortly after Sturm returned to Denver, he was invited to spend a weekend on the ranch owned by Dan Ritchie, then chancellor of the University of Denver, Sturm recalled in 2019. He agreed to join the school’s board. In 2004, Sturm donated $20 million to the University of Denver’s law school, which renamed itself in his honor. His name also graces Sturm Hall, a major academic building.
Sturm was at one point poised to become one of Denver’s key sports figures. In the late 1990s, he agreed to pay $461 million for the NBA’s Denver Nuggets, the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche and the soon-to-open Pepsi Center, besting a $400 million bid from Walmart heir Nancy Walton Laurie and her husband Bill.
But the deal fell apart after then-Mayor Wellington Webb insisted on guarantees that the two teams would remain in Denver for 25 years even if Sturm died or sold the team. Sturm balked at the clause, according to media reports at the time.
The collapse of the deal paved the way for the teams and arena to sell to Missouri businessman Stan Kroenke and his wife Ann, also a Walmart heir.
In 2019, the Sturm Family Foundation donated $10 million to Arapahoe Community College, the largest donation in the history of Colorado’s community college system. Other local recipients of donations are the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the Jewish Community Center of Denver and the Summit Huts Association.
Sturm is survived by his wife Susan Sturm and his four children: Robert Sturm, Melanie Sturm (Zac Zachary), Stephen Sturm (Sydney Hodgson Sturm) and Emily Sturm Ehrens (Ben Ehrens).
A private funeral and memorial service will be held. Those wishing to honor Sturm’s memory are encouraged to support Judaism Your Way, which Sturm founded in 2003 after he could not find a rabbi willing to marry him and Susan because she wasn’t Jewish.
