As a boy, David Rubenstein lived in a red-brick rowhouse on Fallstaff Road in Northwest Baltimore. He went to City College high school, where he was friends with future Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and gravitated toward government and civics studies.

At 75, he’s the fun-loving owner of the Orioles, turning up game after game at Camden Yards as the team limps toward the playoffs. He’s stepped up his charitable giving in the city. He’s taking meetings with local officials, businesspeople and community leaders about the city’s future.

But for most of his life, nobody — not even David Rubenstein himself — thought he was a Baltimore guy. He was a Washington tycoon, where he plunged into politics and then made billions as a co-founder of The Carlyle Group, a well-known global investment firm.

“I wasn’t really deeply involved in Baltimore or its challenges because I just had a different life,” he said in a recent interview. “I was focused on things more in Washington or around the world,” he said.

And the Orioles, his boyhood team?

“Like most people, you like to be associated with winning things,” he said, “and I would say probably the Orioles were, after the heyday of their last World Series [in 1983] ... I probably didn’t spend as much time focusing on them.”

Rubenstein has never been busier: He has a new book about the American presidency, and he continues to host an interview show for Bloomberg and serves on several prominent nonprofit boards. He also remains Carlyle’s co-chairman.

But for the first time in about six decades, Baltimore is part of Rubenstein’s mix.

He led the investment group that bought the Orioles for $1.75 billion in January, and he seems determined to be the beloved team owner that Birdland could only dream about in the icy final years under the Angelos family.

There’s a kind of symmetry in this Orioles handoff: When Peter Angelos assembled the investors who bought the team in 1993, he was a hometown lawyer — a champion for the little guy who had just settled a huge asbestos case on behalf of thousands of sick union workers. It made him a fortune, and he swooped in and returned the O’s to local ownership.

Rubenstein, who hobnobs with Washington’s most elite lobbyists and lawyers and has homes in Bethesda and Nantucket, essentially saved the team from the Angelos family.

“You once told me that you now consider yourself a Washingtonian,” former high school classmate Robert A. Manekin wrote in an email to Rubenstein after the Orioles sale became public, which he shared with The Baltimore Banner.

“In buying the Orioles, you just demonstrated to me that you can take the boy out of Baltimore, but you can’t take Baltimore out of the boy.”

Rubenstein and Manekin, a commercial real estate titan, got together recently at the Sagamore Pendry hotel in Fells Point. Rubenstein had just addressed a crowd of local business and community leaders at an office nearby.

Now he was peppering his old friend — who left the area only to serve with the Navy at Pearl Harbor for three years — with questions about numerous local organizations and officials and his view on the downtown commercial real estate market.

“He realizes that the ownership of the Orioles and the Orioles’ organization have a unique opportunity to significantly impact on the economic development of city,” Manekin said. “He wants Baltimore to succeed.”

Schmoke had reconnected with Rubenstein about two decades ago and said he is pleased that his friend is “physically present in the city in the way that he hasn’t been in the last couple decades.”

“I enjoy watching him in the stadium, I love the way people are connecting with him,” Schmoke said. “And I think he’s enjoying himself.”

An isolated boyhood

But from an early age, Rubenstein, who grew up in the 1950s, felt a pull to Washington — its grandeur, its history, its power.

“Baltimore was a large city then,” Rubenstein said. “But Washington was the nation’s capital.”

An only child, Rubenstein was born to a postal worker and homemaker, neither of whom attended college. They raised him in Fallstaff, a predominately Jewish working-class enclave. He has talked of feeling culturally isolated. “Until I was 11 or so, I thought everybody was Jewish,” he told The Washington Post in 2012. His mom hoped he’d grow up to be a dentist.

Rubenstein told The Banner he was “reasonably happy” growing up in Baltimore. He quipped: “It’s hard to be Jewish and happy at the same time, sometimes.”

He said he was drawn to politics and history and recalled being moved by John F. Kennedy’s call to service when he was in the sixth grade. He also loved to read, checking out the maximum number of books the library would allow each week.

His self-assessment is that he wasn’t the most athletic or smartest in his class. (Classmates said he did quite well, academically. He skipped the eighth grade, making him a year younger than most of his peers.)

In high school, he was a member of the Lancers, a local youth civic group that was created and led for more than 50 years by Baltimore Judge Robert I. H. Hammerman. Schmoke, also a Lancer, said Rubenstein would perk up during sessions with guest speakers who were involved in government and politics.

Rubenstein attended Duke University on a scholarship, then the University of Chicago law school. He told the website BaltimoreBaseball.com that his mom threw out his baseball cards and record books when he went to college, and that he didn’t follow the game closely again.

After his studies, he moved to New York to practice law, and that’s about when his parents relocated to what he joked was a “suburb of Baltimore,” West Palm Beach, Florida. That cut off a major tie to his hometown.

Eyes on DC

At age 25, Rubenstein landed a job as deputy domestic policy advisor to President Jimmy Carter, but soon after he was crushed by the Democrat’s failure to win a second term.

Manekin recalls speaking to a mutual friend at the time, Rubenstein’s boss and Carter aide Stuart Eizenstat, who relayed that Carter appointees gathered to give each other comfort.

Rubenstein was a no-show, and “everybody was worried about how poor David was going to make it through this,” Manekin said Eizenstat told him.

“Poor David” wallowed in lobbying for a few years, before helping come up with a business model that would become The Carlyle Group, working political connections to set up a groundbreaking private equity and leveraged buyout firm in Washington.

Baltimore played in the background, at least: Seed funding from T. Rowe Price, among others, helped get the company off the ground. Carlyle’s first venture involved helping native Alaskans and corporations avoid billions in taxes using a legal loophole.

Rubenstein has said that he travelled anywhere from 200 to 300 days a year developing relationships around the world for Carlyle.

That left little time to pop in on a baseball game or scan box scores. But Rubenstein also professed not having much interest in the Orioles anyway, turning the time he had for sports fandom to Duke basketball.

Trips to Baltimore were sparse. He visited his childhood home on Fallstaff Road with his mother for a “60 Minutes” segment in 2015. He was in and out for meetings of the board of trustees for Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Medicine.

‘Patriotic philanthropy’

Rubenstein, who signed the Giving Pledge vowing to give away the majority of his wealth instead of leaving it to heirs, has showered his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., with charitable contributions.

His actual hometown? Not so much.

Following his theme of “patriotic philanthropy,” Rubenstein has given $10 million to repair the Washington Monument; $10 million for a library at George Washington’s Mount Vernon; $50 million to the Kennedy Center; and $10 million to the Library of Congress. Since 2011, he has given $22 million to the Smithsonian National Zoo’s panda conservation program, including $10 million just this month.

That list only scratches the surface. “Billionaire David Rubenstein Sure Funds a Lot of DC Stuff,” read a Washingtonian magazine headline from last year.

He also has given more than $140 million combined to his alma maters, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

In Baltimore, Rubenstein has a history of giving generously to Johns Hopkins, where he has long served on the board of trustees. He gave $5 million in 2006 to create the first outpatient facility exclusively devoted to children and adolescent health care. And both in 2015 and again in 2021, he gave $15 million to the Department of Otolaryngology to study hearing loss.

His only other known Baltimore donation came in 2005, to his alma mater City College. He was being inducted into the school’s hall of fame, and noticed a piano on the stage that was in rough shape — and likely dated to his own years as a student there. On the spot, he dashed off a wire transfer of $100,000. It was at the time the largest donation in the history of the school, which counts many-a-successful alum.

But years later, he declined when asked to contribute to a $2 million drive to build a new library for City College.

James Piper Bond, executive director of the Baltimore-based Living Classrooms Foundation, recalled meeting Rubenstein at an awards dinner in California in 2014 and asking him for a contribution to the organization. Living Classrooms does work in both Baltimore and Washington. Rubenstein declined.

“He was very kind; he’s on all these different boards and didn’t have the time at that point,” Bond recalled.

Re-upping Baltimore ties

Rubenstein appears to have started to renewing ties to Baltimore around 2007, when he reconnected with his childhood friend Steve Baron. They got a group of other City College grads who had gravitated toward Washington together to have lunch.

“Then somebody said, what do we do next?” said Baron, who for 20 years served as executive director of Baltimore Mental Health Systems. “And David said, let’s go to Nantucket.”

Rubenstein owns a $39 million compound along Nantucket Harbor — he often hosts President Joe Biden for Thanksgiving there. Annual lunches with his classmates have been held in Columbia or Annapolis, but not Baltimore.

It was in Nantucket that Rubenstein said John Angelos, who had had taken over stewardship of the Orioles from his aging father, approached him in the summer of 2023 about buying a minority stake in the team.

Rubenstein said Abe Pollin, who died in 2009, had once asked him if he would be interested in buying Washington’s hockey and basketball teams, the Capitals and Wizards, from him.

“I didn’t pursue that in part because I thought if you are in private equity and you have investors, they are gonna be saying ‘Why are you spending time on sports teams rather than investing my money prudently?’” he said.

In hindsight, he says now, plenty of his peers were buying sports teams without causing issues in their business life. But he became more open to the idea after stepping down as co-CEO of Carlyle in 2017.

He would be prodded — in private, by people such as Orioles Hall of Fame player Cal Ripken Jr., and in public, by then-Gov. Larry Hogan — to buy the Orioles. And he tended to respond by saying he’d consider it if the opportunity arose.

“David would ask me, ‘Are they going to be sold?’ And I said, ‘You should buy if they are,’” Ripken said. “Then as the landscape ... took a little more of a serious tone: ‘No, seriously, you should buy the team. You’d be the perfect owner.’”

Bill Miller, the former chairman and chief investment officer of Legg Mason Capital Management, said that he brought up buying the Orioles after Rubenstein interviewed him for an investing book that came out in late 2022.

Miller himself had been part of an effort in 2005 to buy the team with Legg Mason’s Raymond A. “Chip” Mason, and said he was told at the time that Peter Angelos wanted to sell high as the team came out of the gate playing well that year, only to sour on the idea as the team collapsed.

In the 2022 conversation, Rubenstein asked if Miller was still interested.

“I said I’d be interested in considering it, but aren’t you working with Ted Leonsis down there to try to buy the Nats? He was like, ‘Yeah, but that’s not going anywhere,’” Miller recalled.

Rubenstein told The Banner that he wasn’t really involved in an effort to purchase the Nationals, but that he was indeed engaged in what at the time was a rumored effort by Leonsis, who owns the Capitals and Wizards, to buy the Orioles.

Leonsis “had been thinking of buying the Orioles, and he had actually once tried to buy them before, and it had fallen through. He was interested in trying again,” Rubenstein said. “He wanted me to consider investing in his company, Monumental, and then Monumental would go buy the Orioles and we’d have three teams in Monumental.”

Those talks didn’t pan out.

Play ball

Then, John Angelos paid Rubenstein that visit in Nantucket. His pitch was that Rubenstein buy a minority stake in the Orioles, with a path to eventual majority control.

Rubenstein was interested.

He said it was Angelos who eventually suggested he instead buy a majority stake, and Rubenstein went about pulling together a team of investors. He included Ripken and his high school friend Schmoke.

Brown Advisory’s Michael Hankin would also be brought into the ownership fold.

In March, Hankin said, Rubenstein asked him for advice on the best place to gather a Baltimore crowd and “talk about why he was doing it.” They quickly put together a talk at Brown Advisory’s waterfront space at Brown’s Wharf in Fells Point, where Rubenstein addressed about 125 people.

“He begins to talk about — ‘This is really important for Baltimore. I want to play a role in helping Baltimore be a successful city, and helping people in the city feel better about Baltimore,’” Hankin recalled.

Bond of the Living Classrooms Foundation reconnected with Rubenstein after the Orioles purchase. Rubenstein invited Bond to the B&O Warehouse, wanting to know more about what Living Classrooms does and how he could support communities.

“He realizes that this is an opportune time to not just do great things for the team, but he has a genuine interest in the city in helping those that are less fortunate and helping to create access for opportunities,” Bond said. “I was very impressed.”

This month, Living Classrooms honored Rubenstein on Defenders’ Day at Fort McHenry for his contributions to preserving history.

Has a donation materialized?

“One step at a time,” Bond said.

To give in Baltimore

Rubenstein has no staff or foundation to manage such gifts, and he has said in the past that he relies on his interests and his gut when deciding who to give to and how much to give.

He told The Banner he has been trying to figure out how to kick off his Baltimore philanthropy.

“Not surprisingly, I am being approached by many people in Baltimore and I am looking at a number of things. It’s hard for me to do everything that everybody’s asked me to do. So I’m trying to figure out now what to do,” he said. “I can’t say I’m ready to say, ‘This is what I’m going to do, and this is my philanthropic thrust with respect to Baltimore.’”

Two days later, Rubenstein announced his first major Baltimore donation outside of Johns Hopkins, giving $1.5 million to the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

“His was the largest gift and made completion of the project possible,” Manekin said.

Rubenstein, who as a kid sat in the bleachers at Memorial Stadium and snuck into better seats, can be regularly seen sitting behind home plate at Camden Yards. He said he makes a point of not leaving early, saying it wouldn’t convey a good message about his commitment to the team.

He doesn’t have a place in the city, either returning to Bethesda or crashing at a hotel. He has dined in Little Italy, but hasn’t ventured beyond downtown since buying the team.

At the games, he has served as “Mr. Splash,” dousing Section 82 with water, and danced on top of the dugout with the team mascot and a couple of fans. He has walked the warning track and through the concourse throwing hats into the crowd and signing autographs.

He writes his name like he does anytime he has to sign something, in print instead of cursive, and always with the date.

He is still a bit befuddled by the notion that people want the signature of a Washington billionaire. “I don’t know what to say when an 8-year-old boy comes up to you and says, ‘Can you sign my baseball?” Rubenstein said.

Rubenstein knows his legacy in Baltimore is yet to be determined.

There are critical decisions looming, such as whether the team will extend its young core of players or continue to operate as a small market team. Prior to Rubenstein taking over, the state approved $400 million for improvements to Camden Yards. There’s also the issue of development that could take place around the stadium; while options seem limited, Rubenstein said possibilities could arise through use of eminent domain.

“I’ve tried, as you know, to give back to the country a bit, and did a lot of that in Washington,” Rubenstein said earlier this year in an appearance at the Economic Club. “I wanted to do more for Baltimore than I had done, and I thought maybe I could give back a little bit by helping to energize the team, and maybe energize a city.”

David Rubenstein will be a featured speaker at The Baltimore Banner’s second annual iMPACT Maryland conference on October 1. Tickets are available for purchase here.