Star-Kist Tuna Founder Dies At 92ff

Joseph Bogdanovich, the wealthy expatriate who led Star-Kist Foods and its San Pedro-California tuna cannery, in its heyday to become one of the world's largest tuna canneries, died earlier this week at his London apartment, his son said. Joseph Bogdanovich parlayed his father's business into the Star-Kist Foods tuna giant

The onetime San Pedro resident, who stayed out of the public limelight as Star-Kist's top executive, succumbed to a hemorrhage Monday morning. He was 92.

“He was a very quiet man,” said Martin Bogdanovich, one of three sons. “He placed an importance on his family, on his work. ... He was a very generous person in a private way.”

Bogdanovich lived in the South Bay until the early 1990s, when he moved to Europe to develop canneries in Africa and the Seychelles Islands.

His son said he was the main factor in the expansion of the business into other markets.

Following the death of his father, Martin J. Bogdanovich, in 1944, the younger Bogdanovich took over as president of the French Sardine Co. on Terminal Island.

Adopting the brand name “Star-Kist,” he quickly moved to expand the company's reach, introducing its tuna into national, then international, distribution channels. Bogdanovich was instrumental in shifting the company to canning tuna when sardine began to disappear off the Southern California coast in the mid-1940s.

He led the company's merger with the H.J. Heinz Co. in 1963, serving on that company's board until his retirement in 1998. Bogdanovich remained a prominent investor at the time of his death.

“He was instrumental in making advances in (the tuna canning) business,” said Pam Wigley, a Heinz spokeswoman. “We would certainly agree with what his son had to say about him propelling that business into a successful venture for Heinz,” Wigley said.

Heinz sold Star-Kist to the Del Monte Co. in December 2002. Instead of canning tuna, the company now uses the former Star-Kist cannery as a labeling plant for pet food, Star-Kist tuna and other products.

In 1990, he created an endowment as part of the Ireland Fund -- founded by former Heinz Chief Executive Tony O'Reilly - for the “further development of the Irish fishing industry.”

Bogdanovich made headlines in the mid-1990s, when Congress began targeting rich Americans who had renounced their citizenship for tax havens overseas.

Both Bogdanovich and his son, Joseph Jr., renounced their U.S. citizenship in the 1990s to go to England, where he didn't have to pay estate taxes or taxes on U.S. earnings and investment income.

The son of Croatian immigrants, Bogdanovich, like many Croatian families in San Pedro, traced his origins to the island of Vis on the Dalmatian coastline.