This week marks the one-year anniversary of the sale of the National Enquirer — a headline-grabbing publishing deal that still hasn’t been consummated.

On April 18, 2019, a press release heralded American Media’s $100 million sale of the Enquirer and several smaller supermarket tabloids to a new company owned by James Cohen, the chief executive of mag wholesaler Hudson News.

Since then, nothing has happened — raising questions about what went wrong.

“The coronavirus only explains the last two months,” said a source who has followed the company closely over the years. “It shouldn’t take 10 months to complete a $100 million deal. Is it dead?”
Another source who has known Cohen over the years added that the Enquirer deal never made a lot of sense.

“He has a huge house in the Hamptons,” said the exec. “He lives the social life. He likes to be in polite society and he cares about his public image. For him to own a publication that brings down celebrities who could be his neighbors didn’t seem to fit.”

The exec also noted: “Jimmy’s pretty cheap. For him to spend $100 million on anything, even in good times, would be fairly miraculous.”

Cohen told Media Ink before the coronavirus hit that he had the financing to consummate the deal, but that the legal back-and-forth had slowed the process down.

It’s not the first eyebrow-raising deal between Cohen and the Enquirer owner. Years earlier, Cohen had done a deal with American Media when he helped the company buy OK! Magazine for $22 million. A year later, American Media bought out Cohen’s 50 percent stake, public documents revealed at the time.

Cohen’s family made its fortune in the magazine distribution business. He sold his retail Hudson News outlets to a private equity firm that also runs duty free shops worldwide, but maintained a big interest as a shareholder. He also remained the CEO of the wholesale distribution wing of Hudson News that delivers magazines to retail outlets at airport and rail terminals and supermarkets.

On the other side of Cohen’s latest deal was Chatham Asset Management, the main backer of American Media, which was holding an asset facing troubles. Some speculated that the hedge fund, controlled by Anthony Melchiorre, had been drawing heat from its pension fund investors because of the unsavory headlines being generated by the National Enquirer in early 2019.

“Chatham and Pecker were under a lot of pressure at the time,” said an executive, referring to American Media boss David Pecker.

The Enquirer, even in its battered state a year ago, was making about $30 million a year for Chatham before it ran into a buzzsaw of bad publicity in late January 2019.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos claimed American Media and its then-editorial director Dylan Howard were engaged in “extortion and blackmail” over Bezos’ affair with girlfriend Lauren Sanchez that was the subject of a headline-grabbing Enquirer story. That was on top of an earlier controversy that swirled around the Enquirer and the role that Pecker, a longtime pal of Donald Trump, played in the hush-money payments to two women who claimed they slept with Trump years earlier.

To avoid prosecution for illegal campaign contributions, American Media cooperated with federal authorities and pledged to stay out of any new legal entanglements.

American Media has always maintained that it “acted lawfully” in its approach to Bezos.

In a sign that American Media still needs cash despite the $100 million deal with Cohen came in February, when it sold its Mr. Olympia bodybuilding show and Muscle & Fitness and several other titles, for an estimated $70 million.

A spokesman for Chatham referred questions to Cohen. Cohen did not return calls or texts. An American Media spokesperson declined to comment.

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