Mr. Jobs had been given up for adoption as an infant by his biological parents, Joanne Simpson and Abdulfattah Jandali, known as John. In the mid-1980s, after Mr. Jobs became wealthy from Apple, he located and met his biological mother with the help of detectives and, through her, the biological sister he never knew he had, according to the biography by Walter Isaacson.
Mr. Jobs did not want to meet Mr. Jandali, though. He told his sister, the author Mona Simpson, who did meet Mr. Jandali, not to mention Mr. Jobs’s identity to him. In the biography, Mr. Isaacson quotes Mr. Jobs saying he “didn’t trust him not to try to blackmail me or go to the press about it.” In an audio recording of Mr. Jobs that was broadcast in a segment on “60 Minutes” about the book, the Apple co-founder said cryptically that, during the course of hunting for his biological father, he “learned a little bit about him, and I didn’t like what I learned.”
An article in the December issue of Seattle Met magazine could provide a clue about what Mr. Jobs learned. According to the article, Mr. Jandali was a political science professor at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., in 1974, when he took a group of almost a dozen students to Egypt on a study-abroad trip.
Less than two weeks after arriving there, though, Mr. Jandali abandoned his students, stranding them with thousands of dollars in unpaid lodging bills, the article says, citing accounts from a former administrator at the university and a student on the trip. Amid the controversy that ensued, Mr. Jandali resigned from the university, an event that was covered in The Seattle Times at the time, according to the Seattle Met article.
Mr. Jandali, 80, is now a food and beverage manager at the Boomtown Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nev. A woman who answered the phone at the casino on Friday said Mr. Jandali was on another line and took a message, which he didn’t return. Mr. Jandali also didn’t respond to messages sent to his work e-mail address and Facebook account.