A “possible leader” of the anti-Israel protesters, who broke into and barricaded themselves in Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall last week, is reportedly a 40-year-old heir to a multimillion-dollar fortune and repeat provocateur.
James Carlson, who has also gone by “Cody Carlson” and “Cody Tarlow,” is “a longtime anarchist,” a high-ranking police source told the New York Post.
He is the son of notable advertising executives Richard “Dick” Tarlow and Sandy Carlson Tarlow, and reportedly has a child with model Kim Heyrman.
By the time the couple sold Carlson & Partners to massive advertiser DDB Worldwide in 2001, the company “was doing $165 million in business,” the Post reported.
Sandy Carlson Tarlow died at 59 in 2003, and was “responsible for defining the public face of Polo Ralph Lauren for almost a quarter-century,” according to her obituary.
Dick Tarlow died at 81 in 2022 with an estate worth $20 million at least, court documents obtained by the outlet show.
He lived in a $15 million Manhattan mansion with his second wife, Kristin Kehrberg — who is now dating singer John Cougar Mellencamp, according to Page Six.
As for James Carlson, who has an arrest record dating back to 2005, he spends time agitating college protests when he’s away from his $3.4 million three-story townhouse in Brooklyn.
He is currently being viewed as a “possible leader” of the anti-Israel demonstrators who were arrested early Wednesday morning after Emergency Services Unit cops had to use a military-style truck to get inside Hamilton Hall on the Columbia campus, City Hall sources told the Post.
Carlson was hit with burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal mischief, conspiracy and criminal trespassing charges and brought to a holding cell at One Police Plaza, where he allegedly destroyed a security camera, police sources said.
An additional criminal mischief charge was reportedly tacked on for that incident.
“I observed the defendant inside the location with several other individuals,” a police officer wrote in an arrest report for Carlson. “I did observe doors with shattered windows, doors off hinges, broken desks and exits blockaded by piled-up chairs.”
Carlson does not appear to have any connection to Columbia University. Around 30 percent of arrests made at the protest at Hamilton Hall were “outside agitators,” the Post reported.
Carlson has also been charged with a hate crime, assault and petit larceny for allegedly lighting a 22-year-old pro-Israel demonstrator’s flag on fire and hitting him in the face with a rock during an April protest, police said.
The millionaire heir has managed to participate in several headline-making protests, including the ones that blocked traffic at multiple major New York City bridges in January, sources told the Post.
In 2005, Carlson was arrested for his part in the San Francisco “West Coast Anti-Capitalist Mobilization and March Against the G8,” where rioters cracked a police officer’s skull and attempted to set a cruise ablaze.
He was charged at the time with suspicion of attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery to a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and willful resistance to a police officer that results in serious bodily injury, sources told the outlet.
The charges were dropped in 2007, the San Francisco Superior Court confirmed to CNN.
When the Post called Carlson’s sister’s home, a woman who answered the phone said, “We don’t talk to him. Leave us alone. He is out of our lives for so many years.”
