The Predators’ Ball Read Free

colleagues) and others.
    After about forty minutes of a dazzling performance, Ross began circulating among the guests. Finally she settled on the lap of straitlaced Baptist Carl Lindner and sang to him.
    M ILKEN IS SAID by close associates to spend barely a moment in his twenty-hour workday that is not dedicated to business purpose. It is not surprising, therefore, since this extravaganza was his creation, that it was such an intensely purposeful event.
    It was an evangelical happening that stirred a mass excitation in its participants, many of whom felt they were part of a large and unstoppable force destined to change the world. It was deal heaven. There seemed to be a deal for everyone. Money, as Ivan Boesky once told a group of prospective investors in his arbitrage partnership, was falling off the trees. It was a glorified road show for the buyersand for the scores of companies that made presentations, many of whom would soon be doing junk-bond offerings. It was a reunion for Milken’s high-rollers, whose camaraderie, if not collusion, he encouraged. One Drexel lawyer later recalled having seen Ivan Boesky, Carl Icahn, Carl Lindner and Irwin Jacobs huddled in a corner. “Anything could have been happening there,” he remarked with a laugh. It was a good time. Bungalow 8 would not soon be forgotten, and client loyalty gets forged in sundry ways.
    And it launched Milken’s now full-blown tour de force. Within the first two weeks of April 1985, hard on the heels of the Predators’ Ball, five more Drexel clients—in addition to Triangle Industries—would make bids for companies, all backed by Milken’s junk bonds.
    Mesa Petroleum, with a net worth of $500 million, would go for Unocal.
    Lorimar, with a net worth of $105 million, would offer $1 billion for Multimedia.
    Sir James Goldsmith would make a bid for Crown Zellerbach Corporation for $1.1 billion.
    Golden Nugget, with a net worth of $230 million, would go for Hilton Hotels for about $1.8 billion.
    And Farley Industries, with earnings of $6 million, would go for Northwest Industries, for about $1.4 billion.
    Other bids would take longer to germinate—but they would turn out to be the most fruitful of all.
    N ELSON P ELTZ went through the four days of the Predators’ Ball, as he would later say, as a “nervous wreck.” Peltz, who had a track record in business that can be described as lackluster, saw National Can as the opportunity of a lifetime. He had run his family’s frozen-food business, expanding it through acquisitions and then selling it in the midseventies; it later went bankrupt. Peltz had struggled for years, been close to broke, finally managed in 1982 to acquire with Peter May a controlling block of Triangle Industries, which he intended to leverage up as his vehicle for acquisitions. Until now, nothing had worked. And he was terrified that this deal too would somehow get away from him.
    What had probably gotten Peltz to this point, however—to be one of Milken’s players, on the verge of acquiring one of the largest can-manufacturing companies in the United States—was his longtime conviction that he would someday make it very, very big. Thiswas a conviction shared by few others, and unsupported by events. But it made him persist, and continue to think in grandiose terms. Now he began to picture the vistas that would open to him if he were to acquire National Can. At Don Engel’s cocktail party at Bungalow 8, Peltz was introduced to Gerald Tsai, then the vice-chairman of American Can. “Someday,” Peltz said eagerly, “I’d like to talk to you about buying your cans.”
    R ONALD P ERELMAN brought more to the party than Peltz did. Perelman, for whom Drexel had been doing junk-bond financings since 1980, had boot-strapped himself into a series of acquisitions—keeping the profitable core, selling off the pieces, paying down the debt and leveraging up for the next