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Legendary Wall Street Deal Maker Dies at 61
October 15, 2009

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New York. Bruce Wasserstein, the chief executive of Lazard and a prominent Wall Street deal maker, died on Wednesday in the United States after being hospitalized earlier this week with an irregular heartbeat, a company spokeswoman said. He was 61.

Wasserstein had been a Wall Street superstar since the 1980s, working on such landmark deals as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ takeover of RJR Nabisco, and the Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter and AOL-Time Warner mergers.

He was the driving force behind Lazard, one of Wall Street’s top mergers and acquisitions advisory companies.

Rochdale Securities analyst Richard Bove said the loss was a blow to the company.

“Mr. Wasserstein was the main driver that created Lazard as a public company,” Bove said. “He forced the expansion of the business and his contacts brought in deals. He cannot be replaced easily or perhaps at all.”

In the 1980s, Wasserstein and Joseph Perella ran First Boston’s mergers and acquisitions department before leaving to form their own boutique investment bank, Wasserstein Perella Group.

It was at Wasserstein Perella that the pair worked on the RJR Nabisco deal, at the time the biggest corporate takeover in US history, with a price tag of $24.5 billion.

The deal was chronicled in the 1990 book “Barbarians at the Gate,” by journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, and later made into an Emmy award-winning television movie starring James Garner.



Associated Press