Taking account of a consummate deal maker

Husband-and-wife team Amey Stone and Mike Brewster note several times in their biography of Citigroup chief executive Sanford "Sandy" Weill that their subject isn't a particularly deep or introspective thinker. Good thing, since the authors' face time with the most powerful executive in the financial services industry amounted to a single 20-minute meeting.

In fairness to Stone and Brewster, days worth of interviews might not have given them any greater insights into what makes Weill tick. What you see is what you get. Weill's essentially a workaholic with little patience for navel gazing, and no patience at all for the sort of psychobabble that fills the pages of many biographies.

The result in "King of Capital," whether out of necessity or a stylistic choice, is a rather workmanlike accounting of Weill's life and career. Readers won't find dirt on Weill's personal life here - he has been married to the same woman for 47 years and his biggest vice is apparently cigars - or even on his notorious boardroom power struggles.

Stone and Brewster wisely decide to focus on Weill's perhaps underappreciated talent for mergers and acquisitions. "Calling Sandy Weill a dealmaker is a little like calling Warren Buffett an investor, Bill Gates a techie, or Al Dunlap retired," the authors write in the book's introduction. "Weill, through a keen eye for value, pure will, and boundless energy, may have fathered more corporate births and presided over more corporate deaths than any other single business executive."

Weill grew up in his Polish emigre grandparents' home in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, where business was a constant theme. His grandfather, Philip Kalika, founded and managed a dressmaking company for more than four decades. He in turn helped Weill's father, Mac, start his own dressmaking companies.

Young Sandy absorbed enough about running a business and paying attention to the details that he developed an interest in the corporate world himself. When Weill didn't have enough credits to graduate on time from Cornell in 1955, he was forced to give up an assignment to become an Air Force officer. It was a twist of fate that pushed him to Wall Street, where he could make enough money to show his fiancee's parents that he was able to support a family. "In what now seems one of the all-time great father-in-law misjudgments, [fellow Cornell graduate Joan Mosher's] father was worried about Sandy's future prospects," the authors note.

Whatever led Weill into the world of high finance, he took an immediate liking to the hum of the brokerage office. His first job paid $150 a month and required him to run, buy, and sell orders between brokers and and traders at Bear Stearns. Before long, he had become a broker himself.

Weill's big breakthrough came in 1960, when he cofounded a firm with a trio of fellow aspiring brokers, using $215,000 in seed capital they had scraped together. They bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, hired a secretary, rented office space and, before long, started a series of acquisitions that would establish the blueprint for the rest of Weill's career.

After furious growth pushed by the stock market boom of the 1960s, the firm by then known as Cogan, Berlind, Weill, and Levitt moved into the big time with the acquisition of the struggling Hayden Stone brokerage, a firm 10 times its size.

As with many of his future deals, Weill moved to buy the better-known firm on the cheap, adopt its brand name, close underperforming divisions, integrate its operations, and aggressively cut costs.

Weill's one obvious career misstep came in 1981, when he sold Shearson Loeb Rhoades to American Express and joined the management team under James Robinson. Weill chafed under Robinson's leadership and was ultimately pushed out as American Express president in 1985.

Rather than retire with his by-then considerable fortune, Weill staged a comeback from an unlikely launching pad. A year after leaving American Express, he took control of little-known consumer finance company Commercial Credit, then two years later bought struggling Primerica Corp., which included Smith Barney.

Over the next decade, Weill would take over Travelers Insurance and Salomon Brothers, and recapture Shearson from American Express. In 1998, he merged his organization with Citigroup to form the largest financial services company on the planet. And he hasn't slowed down since. The latest rumors have him showing interest in creating a retail presence in New England, with a possible takeover of FleetBoston Financial Corp.

Scott Bernard Nelson can be reached at nelson@globe.com.

This story ran on page E2 of the Boston Globe on 8/4/2002.
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