BRUCE WASSERSTEIN:BRUCE WASSERSTEIN, who has died aged 61, was an inventive and forceful banker whose frenetic-paced Wall Street career closely tracked the era of hostile takeovers and the tycoons that spawned them.
Wasserstein, who was the chairman and chief executive of Lazar, was known among the Wall Street crowd as "Bid 'Em Up Bruce" for a take-no-prisoners negotiating posture that kept him in deals to the very end and often produced outsized prices.
The banker and supporter of the Democratic Party was also well known for his philanthropy, his media properties and his four marriages, the latest this year to Angela Chao, sister of former labour secretary Elaine Chao.
The deals that Wasserstein helped negotiate are some of the most iconic in recent memory, including Philip Morris's $13 billion bid for Kraft in 1988, KKR's $31 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1989 and the $15 billion merger of Timemagazine and Warner Bros in 1990.
Wasserstein was known for innovative tactics such as "lock-ups", which gave his client the most valuable part of the acquisition.
A wunderkind who graduated with dual degrees with honours from Harvard University's law and business schools at 23, Wasserstein began as a lawyer in New York and then rose to fame as the co-head with Joseph Perella of the merger and acquisitions unit at First Boston.
In 1988, the portly, dishevelled Wasserstein and the urbane Perella founded Wasserstein Perella, the boutique investment bank that became known as "Wasserella". Wasserstein sold it in 2001 to Germany's Dresdner Bank for about $1.4 billion.
Forbes recently estimated Wasserstein's worth at $2.2 billion.
His financial success enabled him to become a New York media tycoon of sorts, first buying New Yorkmagazine in 2003 for $55 million. He paid $63 million for American Lawyerand $200 million for National Law Publishingin 1997 and sold those publications to Incisive Media of the United Kingdom for $630 million in 2007.
About the same time, he donated $25 million to Harvard Law School for the construction of an academic centre.
Bruce Jay Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn on Christmas Day 1947 into a prolifically talented family that included his late sister Wendy Wasserstein, a Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose works included The Heidi Chroniclesand The Sisters Rosensweig.
She once told New Yorkmagazine that their mother believed Bruce's auspicious birth date signalled "Messiah potential".
Wasserstein showed promise early on, entering the University of Michigan at 16. While at Harvard, he spent one summer working for consumer advocate Ralph Nader as one of "Nader's Raiders".
At that time he befriended Mark Green, later to became a candidate for New York mayor and the city's public advocate.
They were among the co- authors of The Closed Enterprise System(1972), which asserted that relaxed anti-trust enforcement leads to higher prices.
During a research project into British business mergers at Cambridge University, where Wasserstein was a Knox fellow, he became interested in business.
Upon his return to the United States, he joined Cravath, Swaine and Moore and later moved to First Boston. According to a Bloomberg News report from 2004, Wasserstein and Perella left First Boston after their colleagues became tired of Wasserstein's dominant role there.
Wasserstein took over Lazard after a well-publicised row with its then chairman, Michel David-Weill, whose family had founded the bank in New Orleans in 1848.
David-Weill had hired Wasserstein to run the investment house.
Over David-Weill's objections, Wasserstein took the firm public in 2005 with an $855 million initial public offering.
Wasserstein forced David-Weill out of Lazard and they had been bitter foes ever since. "He was afraid of sharing power and tried his very best - and succeeded - in expelling me," David-Weill told Vanity Fairmagazine.
Bruce Wasserstein: born December 25th, 1947; died October 14th, 2009.