Some Very Big Deals
Say this for Sandy Weill. He's not shy. Indeed, his autobiography, The Real Deal, leads one to the inescapable conclusion that the overpowering, emotional, high-strung executive was the kind of boss people would die to work for-that is, when they weren't plotting to kill him. Weill's story follows the arc of the U.S. financial services industry's growth, in three acts.
First, Weill cobbled together the cash to form a small securities firm in 1960. Using it as a springboard, he launched a series of Wall Street acquisitions, gobbling up well-known brokerages before selling the lot to American Express in 1981 for $1 billion.
When the New Yorker with big elbows found himself elbowed out of AmEx's genteel southern management culture, he regrouped for Act II. Weill took a mundane consumer finance company in Baltimore, Commercial Credit, and leveraged it into a financial services supermarket, Primerica, that would end up buying the venerable Travelers insurance empire.
That might have capped an amazing career, but Weill had one more act in store (besides his major role in New York philanthropy): an audacious 1998 merger with Citicorp. Weill's book offers an insight into personalities that shaped Wall Street and corporate America over four decades, providing an inside look at some of the era's biggest deals.
This story appears in the November 13, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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