Donald Sturm LLM ’60, a Graduate Tax Program alumnus who went on to achieve remarkable success in the construction, energy, banking, and real estate sectors, died on August 17 at age 92. The founder of ANB Bank, Sturm led numerous corporate acquisitions, first as an officer and director of Peter Kiewet Sons’ (PKS) and later as an independent investor.
Sturm began his legal career as a trial attorney in the Chief Counsel’s Office of the Internal Revenue Service. He was then recruited to work for PKS, one of the world’s largest construction companies, as its first tax lawyer. When Sturm pursued an innovative strategy that ultimately turned a $35 million tax bill into a $5 million refund, his stature at the company was cemented. In a conversation in 2020 with Steven Dean, then the Graduate Tax Program’s faculty director, Sturm said, “It would have been impossible for me to derive such a result without the tax education I received in the NYU Tax Program.”
During Sturm’s 28-year tenure at PKS, where he eventually became vice chairman, his portfolio extended beyond construction to the energy sector as PKS became involved in the coal industry and a pipeline company. He was instrumental in the $3 billion acquisition of the Continental Group, a multi-industry Fortune 500 company, of which he became CEO. In the 1980s, Sturm owned 10 percent of PKS as its second-largest shareholder. Those assets allowed him to purchase a series of failing banks. By the 1990s, Sturm was a billionaire investing in telecommunications. At the time of his death, he was majority owner and board chair of ANB, Colorado’s 17th-largest bank in terms of in-state customer deposits.
An active philanthropist, Sturm established a family foundation focused on helping those with lower incomes. His endeavors included starting more than a dozen charter schools, contributing to some 100 affordable housing projects, and supporting a variety of cultural and educational institutions in Denver, his home in later years. In 2003, the University of Denver’s law school, which Sturm attended before earning his LLM at NYU Law, was renamed Sturm College of Law in his honor. Five years ago, Sturm funded the creation of the Sturm Collaboration Campus at Arapahoe Community College.
“What I really think about is how to help people help themselves,” Sturm said of his philanthropic activities during his 2020 conversation with Dean. He noted that the training he received at NYU Law was “part of the bedrock” of his subsequent career. “Education changes lives,” Sturm said. “It changed my life.”
Posted September 19, 2024