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The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (Lisa Drew Books) Kindle Edition
-- from the Prologue
The first in-depth portrait of the life and times of the trailblazing financier Thomas Mellon Evans -- the man who pursued wealth and power in the 1950s with a brash ruthlessness that forever changed the face of corporate America.
Long before Michael Milken was using junk bonds to finance corporate takeovers, Thomas Mellon Evans used debt, cash, and the tax code to obtain control of more than eighty American companies. Long before investors began to lobby for "shareholder's rights," Evans was demanding that public companies be run only for their shareholders -- not for their employees, their executives, or their surrounding communities. To some, Evans's merciless style presaged much that is wrong with corporate life today. To others, he intuitively knew what was needed to keep America competitive in the wake of a global war.
In The White Sharks of Wall Street, New York Times investigative reporter Diana Henriques provides the first biography of this pivotal figure in American business history. She also portrays the other pioneering corporate raiders of the postwar period, such as Robert Young and Louis Wolfson, and shows how these men learned from one another and advanced one another's takeover tactics. She relates in dramatic detail a number of important early takeover fights -- Wolfson's challenge to Montgomery Ward, Young's move on the New York Central Railroad, the fight for Follansbee Steel -- and shows how they foreshadowed the desperate battle waged by Tom Evans's son, Ned Evans, to keep the British raider Robert Maxwell away from his Macmillan publishing empire during the 1980s. Henriques also reaches beyond the business arena to tally the tragic personal cost of Evans's pursuit of success and to show how the family dynasty shattered when his sons were driven by his own stubbornness and pride to become his rivals. In the end, the battling patriarch faced his youngest son in a poignant battle for control at the Crane Company, the once-famous Chicago plumbing and valve company that Tom Evans had himself seized in a brilliant takeover coup twenty-five years earlier.
The White Sharks of Wall Street is a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary man, whose career blazed across the sky and then sank into obscurity -- but not before he had provided the template for how American business would operate for the next four decades.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateApril 2, 2001
- File size1134 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Preferring to call himself a "corporate re-juvenator," Evans often worked without a salary, pealing off assets, eliminating entire layers of middle management, always obsessed with the bottom line. He waged war with unparalleled brilliance, accusing corporate America of forgetting who its real owners were. Henriques writes, "Evans was a man so far ahead of his contemporaries that he had moved into the shadows before the full daylight of his business style had dawned on the rest of Corporate America. At every step of his career, he was barging in where few would follow--at first. But follow they did, at last." Proxy fights, hostile takeovers, tenders and countertenders, greenmail, golden parachutes, poison pills, and shark repellent--it's all here, the deep roots of present-day corporate merger and acquisitions strategy. White Sharks is a compelling and dramatic story of power, greed, ambition, and personal tragedy that illuminates an otherwise obscure period of Wall Street history. --Scott Harrison
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
-Steven Silkunas, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, Philadelphia
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
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About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC0WQU
- Publisher : Scribner; 1st edition (April 2, 2001)
- Publication date : April 2, 2001
- Language : English
- File size : 1134 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 526 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #633,724 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #356 in Company Histories
- #402 in Stock Market Investing (Kindle Store)
- #541 in Biographies of Business Professionals
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Diana B. Henriques, an award-winning financial journalist, is the author of six books, most recently "Taming the Street: The Old Guard, the New Deal, and FDR's Fight to Regulate American Capitalism," due out in September from Random House. Her previous books include "A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History," released in September 2017, and "The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust," a New York Times bestseller that was adapted by HBO as a 2017 film starring Robert De Niro - with Ms. Henriques playing herself as the first journalist to interview Madoff in prison. She was recently featured in the widely-viewed Netflix series "Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street," produced by Radical Media.
As a staff writer for The New York Times from 1989 to 2012 and as a contributing writer since then, she has largely specialized in investigative reporting on white-collar crime, market regulation and corporate governance.
An avid reader and reviewer of financial histories, Ms. Henriques is also the author of "Fidelity’s World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant" (1995), "The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and The Original Corporate Raiders" (2000), and "The Machinery of Greed: Public Authority Abuse and What To Do About It" (1986).
Ms. Henriques was a member of a reporting team that was named a Pulitzer finalist in 2003 for its coverage of the aftermath of the Enron scandals. She was also a member of a team that won a 1999 Gerald Loeb Award for covering the near-collapse of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose troubles rocked the financial markets in September 1998.
She was one of four reporters honored in 1996 by the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Sigma Delta Chi professional journalism society, for a series on how wealthy Americans legally sidestep taxes. She has explored the expansion of tax breaks, regulatory exemptions and Congressional earmarks for religious nonprofits, and helped monitor commodity markets and money market funds in the financial turmoil of late 2008.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Ms. Henriques widened her focus to work with her colleague at The Times, David Barstow, in covering the management of billions of dollars in charity and victim assistance as part of the paper’s award-winning section, “A Nation Challenged.” She also chronicled the fate of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that suffered the largest death toll in the World Trade Center attacks.
But she is proudest of her 2004 series exposing the exploitation of American military personnel by financial service companies. Her work prompted legislative reform and cash reimbursements for tens of thousands of defrauded service members, drawing recognition and thanks from military lawyers and families across the country. For that series, she was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 and received a George Polk Award, Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize.
Born in Texas but raised mostly in Roanoke, Va., Ms. Henriques is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of what is now the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington. While a student there, she met and, in 1969, married her husband Larry. They live in Hoboken, N.J. Since an injury in late 1997, Ms. Henriques has used voice-recognition software for all her major writing projects and has coached more than a dozen injured writers at other publications on making the transition to voice-recognition writing.
Ms. Henriques was awarded a Ferris professorship in writing at Princeton University for the 2012-2013 academic year, and is a frequent guest lecturer for business journalism classes and workshops elsewhere. From 2003 to 2016, she served on the board of governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), and in 2011, she was elected to the board of trustees of The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., on which she served for eight years.
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This book chronicles the exploits of men like; Thomas Mellon Evans, Lou Wolfson, and Leopold Silverstein. These individuals were out inventing the type of financial transactions that today are commonplace, and seem to have a rather brief history. The truth is that these; raiders, proxy fighters, liquidators, were using sinking funds, Leveraged Buy Outs, and Junk Bonds long before Michael Milken heard the term. In fact much of this took place before he and Ivan Boesky and their crowd were born.
The book delves into specific deals that are enticing reading just by there names. In 1955 a complicated price-fixing scheme that included companies still doing business today operated a system known as the "phase of the moon".
Shark-repellent, poison pills, greenmail, side deals, collusion were all in a days work. What was also interesting is these people never had their fill, many ending in bankruptcy court half a century after they had started.
The did what they had to do to get what they wanted, and if that meant convincing a 90 year old woman to part with her shares, it was just another day in the trenches.
I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in Wall Street History in general, and the specific predecessors of today's big names. Long before "Chainsaw Al" there were men hacking away at companies that even he would have found audacious.
The Authoress does a wonderful job of relating this History in a readable easily accessible format, which is well worth a reader's time. You will be amply rewarded.
I don't know how Trump got in this; his contribution was an endorsement on the book jacket. Not one of his deals made the book.
Great addition to your financial library.
In the 1950s the first "green shoots" began to appear and these financial operators are the subject of Diane Henriques book. Thomas Mellon Evans (1911-1997), a "poor relation" of Pittsburgh's famous Mellon family, was a serial acquirer in that era. Major proxy battles were waged by other raiders such as Louis Wolfson and Robert Young. Each of them were major "innovators" in regards to financing, proxy solicitation, minority shareholders etc. Rightfully these "innovators" usually required subsequent reforms of regulatory methods. An example would be the SEC's proxy solicitation rules which never visualized two or more parties taking opposing newspaper advertisements (i.e. did they have to be reviewed by the SEC as factual). Diane Henriques' is an established journalist and the occasionally complex issues are presented clearly.
To my mind the book is unfocused inasmuch as it is 60-70% the story of Thomas Mellon Evans and 30-40% the story of the other raiders. If the book is about raiders in that era then much of the biographical detail about Thomas Mellon Evans is extraneous. Conversely, if the book is a biography of Thomas Mellon Evans, then much of the detail about the transactions of other raiders is irrelevant. The author tries to straddle both genres but, while most of the individual details are interesting, the overall effect is confusing.