Alan C Greenberg, who led Bear Stearns through its rise and fall, died on Friday at the age of 86. During his long career on Wall Street, he was known as a colorful character with a penchant for magic tricks and a generous heart.
In guiding Bear Stearns to the top of the banking world, and then watching it crumble, Greenberg was never afraid to speak his mind. In his book "The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns, " he called the bank's collapse "our man-made disaster." Along the way, he exuded confidence and gained the respect of many powerful people. The New York Times wrote, "He was a champion bridge player, a magician who conjured coins with sleight of hand, a show-off who could whiz-bang a yo-yo, an adventurer who played pool with sharks and stalked game in Africa."
DealBook looks back at Greenberg's career, in his words and others'.
In 1985, when news broke that Bear Stearns was preparing to go public, Greenberg was apparently over the moon, according to an article in The New York Times: "Our secret's out," Greenberg beamed. "Look at 1984. That was a period when others were losing their shirts, and we weren't."
The New York Times Magazine ran a profile of Greenberg in 1989 titled "Where the Ace is King." In what now might cause many to cringe, the reporter, Sarah Bartlett, wrote, "Bear Stearns has not simply survived but flourished. And, by all accounts, that can be attributed in large part to its idiosyncratic leader."
"If Alan represents me on something," Donald Trump said in the same article, "nobody else is going to know about it. He's extremely close-mouthed." (Greenberg attended Trump's wedding to Marla Ann Maples in 1993.)
In 1991, the Chicago Tribune wrote an article about a barber who trimmed the hair of Wall Street bigwigs, including Mr. Greenberg. Greenberg was described as "balding." At the time, the writer wrote, Greenberg got a shampoo and trim every other Thursday that took "precisely four minutes."
"Alan C. Greenberg, the colorful chairman of the Bear Stearns Companies, is moonlighting as an actor these days, perhaps hoping to pick up a little pocket money since the firm cut his compensation in half last year - to about $7 million," The New York Times wrote in August 1995. Greenberg was shooting a scene in Central Park for a cameo "Milk and Money," a romantic comedy.
In the forward to Greenberg's book, "Memos from a Chairman," a collection of his notes to employees that was published in 1996, Warren E. Buffett wrote, "Ace Greenberg does almost everything better than I do: bridge, magic tricks, dog training, arbitrage - all of the important things in life."
In 2001, after a particularly horrendous day for the stock markets, Greenberg said, "I don't believe in charts. Stocks are inanimate things. People move them."
In December 2004, Greenberg was mentioned in a bridge column in The New York Times: "His opening of one no-trump was standard, but the response of three clubs was not. It was a transfer to diamonds, and in combination with the subsequent three no-trump it hinted at slam, a slightly optimistic assessment."
Greenberg planned to give $360,000 to some of the bank's lowest-paid workers, who were likely to lose their jobs when Bear Stearns merged with JPMorgan Chase, The New York Times wrote.
"It was a place where a young guy could get ahead on merit," said Jerome Kohlberg Jr., who worked at Bear for 21 years before leaving to found KKR. in 1976 with Henry R Kravis and George R. Roberts. "They didn't care where you came from if you showed you were willing to work. There were Jews, gentiles, Italians, Irish. It was a mixed bag."
In May 2008, before JPMorgan Chase shareholders approved the acquisition of Bear Stearns, Mr. Greenberg had choice words for James E Cayne, who presided over the bank before he was ousted in August 2007. "Jimmy was not interested in my point of view," Mr. Greenberg said. "He was a one-man show - he didn't listen to anybody. That is when the real break took place," Greenberg said.
In 2009, William D. Cohan's a book "House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street" about Bear Stearns was published. The New York Times wrote that Bear Stearns was "kind of microcosm of what went wrong on Wall Street" and "a parable about how the second Gilded Age came slamming to a fast and furious end."
In 1993, when Mr. Cayne took over as chief executive, Cohan wrote, "Greenberg remained a ubiquitous presence at the firm, in the way that Deng Xiaoping remained powerfully behind the scenes in China following his supposed relinquishing of power in 1989."
Two Years Later | Two years after the fall of Bear Stearns, Mr. Greenberg appeared on Bloomberg Television. Asked how he felt about Washington's efforts to enact financial reforms, he responded: I feel about Dodd's bill and the other legislation, exact how Jamie Dimon feels." Asked what that was, he responded, "I don't know, but however he feels is how I feel. " Told that he was being a company man, he said, "You betcha."
Sandy Weill or Sacha Baron Cohen? | Mr. Greenberg caused a bit of a stir in 2012, when Sanford I. Weill called to break up big banks. In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Mr. Greenberg said that the Mr. Weill he knew would never make such a remark. "It wasn't Sandy Weill. It was that guy Sacha Barry Cohen, or whatever his name is," he said. "Yeah, he was impersonating Sandy."
JPMorgan's Last Word | In a note to employees on Friday, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Mary Callan Erdoes, the chief executive of the bank's asset management arm, called Mr. Greenberg a "true industry icon."
"It's hard to imagine a financial services industry without Ace. In many respects, he epitomized the American dream," they wrote.
©2014 The New York Times News Service
