Finn Wentworth
Entrepreneur, philanthropist, sportsman
Born: April 5, 1958, in Morris County, New Jersey
Grew up in: Mount Tabor, New Jersey
New Jersey Hall of Fame, Class of 2023: Enterprise
Finn Wentworth has been scaling new peaks since his days as a scholarship student at Morristown Beard School and Lehigh University. He went on to serve as a trustee of both schools, and become one of New Jersey’s most successful businessmen, as well as an extraordinarily generous philanthropist.
A lifelong New Jersey resident, Wentworth was one in a family of 10 children raised in Mount Tabor, a Methodist “camp meeting” enclave in Morris County.
After earning his marketing degree at Lehigh, Wentworth began his professional career at the Jersey-based real-estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. He quickly moved on to help build Lincoln Property Company and became a partner at the Sammis Company. Later, he co-founded Gale & Wentworth, which, over the next decade, grew into one of the nation’s most-active privately held real-estate investment organizations.
In 1998, Wentworth ventured into sports investing, assembling a partnership that bought the struggling New Jersey Nets basketball team. Next, he helped merge the Nets with the New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils to form a new entity, YankeeNets, where Wentworth served as COO and CEO. He also was instrumental in founding the YES Network, the most-watched regional sports network in the country. During his tenure with YankeeNets, the Yankees won two world championships, the Devils won two Stanley Cups, and the Nets twice won the NBA Eastern Conference finals.
Returning to real estate, Wentworth founded Normandy Real Estate Partners in 2003, leading a firm that managed $1.5 billion of equity capital before it was sold in 2020 to Columbia Property Trust. Currently, he is founder and partner of the Morristown-based Maple Partners, a private investment firm targeting growth opportunities.
Over the years, Wentworth has donated his time and talents to numerous organizations. He co-founded the New Jersey Pandemic Relief Fund, which raised and distributed $67 million to more than 500 New Jersey organizations. As chairman of the Foundation for Morristown Medical Center, he led a campaign that raised over $115 million; today, he serves on Atlantic Health System’s Board of Trustees. He is also a past trustee of the Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge Foundation and a trustee emeritus of the Yogi Berra Museum. He was instrumental in helping create public open space around the 1,200-acre Boonton Reservoir and is a co-founder and committee member of the Friends of Jockey Hollow, a group that seeks to maintain and improve Jockey Hollow National Historic Park. In addition, he co-founded Atlantic City Development Corporation (AC Devco), a non-profit redevelopment company serving Atlantic City.
In 1984, Finn married Kim (Turner) Wentworth, a Jersey Girl from J.P. Stevens High School and graduate of The College of New Jersey. As for scaling personal heights, Wentworth has climbed to the tops of the highest mountains in 49 of the 50 states. In 2019 and 2020, he and his sons Mark and Grant successfully summited Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (elevation 19,341 feet) and Aconcagua in Argentina (22,838 feet), the two highest peaks in Africa and South America, respectively.