August 10th, 2006 11:00pm

By Carol Beggy & Mark Shanahan, Globe Staff

He's the guy who decided Conan O'Brien will eventually get Jay Leno's job, but NBC chief exec Jeff Zucker hasn't always been best buddies with the Brookline native. In fact, on Plum TV's ``Open Exchange," airing Sunday on Na n tucket and Martha's Vineyard, Zucker tells host Jonathan Tisch that he once tried to get the redheaded wag arrested when they were students at Harvard. (At the time, Zucker was editing the Harvard Crimson and O'Brien was leading the Harvard Lampoon.) ``Oh, yeah, we knew each other. I hated him . . . We were putting out a serious newspaper every day and they didn't have anything to do because they put out a magazine once a month if they were lucky," zings Zucker. ``So they would often steal stuff from us . . . and, you know, it pissed me off. One time they did that, I called the Cambridge police."