[2] Born Joseph Jack Cayre[2] to a Syrian Jewish family[3][4][5] in Brooklyn but raised in Kansas City, Missouri until he was 8 and then Miami Beach, Florida until he was 20.
[6] In 1959, Cayre and his brothers started their first business operating a duty-free retail store, the Paris Freeport Shop, on a cruise ship then owned by a friend that made a daily trip from Miami to the Bimini, Bahamas and back.
[6] They took the money and put together the SalSoul Orchestra in Philadelphia (with Earl Young on drums, Ronnie Baker on bass, Norman Harris and Bobby Eli on guitar, Bunny Sigler and Ron Kersey on keyboards, Vincent Montana, Jr. on vibes, and Larry Washington on the congas) and recorded three songs including the SalSoul Hustle which was an immediate hit.
It continued to release new material until 1984 when the Cayre brothers shut down their recorded music operations to concentrate on the home video business.
Many of its home-video titles (such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Jungle Book, Hercules, Pocahontas, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Sinbad, and Thumbelina) were named similarly or identically to big-budget animated films from other studios[8] (though their plots were sometimes very different), and released close to the theatrical or home-video releases of the other studios.
As a result of that lawsuit, GoodTimes was required to print its name atop its VHS covers, but it was still allowed to produce animated films.
[2] In early 2001, he partnered with Larry Silverstein and Lloyd Goldman to purchase the lease of the World Trade Center from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey[2][15] for $3.2 billion.
[2] Cayre has been married to his wife Trina for 37 years and they have four sons and one daughter:[2] Michael, Grace, Steven, Jack, and Daniel.
[2] His son, Jack Cayre, is a co-founder of the CORE Group, a New York-based, full-service real estate brokerage firm.