Word: atlanta
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...While you are going through the transition period it is. If you take 120,000 RJR Nabisco people, yes, there will be some dislocation. But the people that I have, particularly the Atlanta people, have very portable types of professions: accountants, lawyers, secretaries. It isn't that I would be putting them on the breadline. We have excellent severance arrangements...
...date was portentous: on Oct. 19, precisely one year after the stock market crashed, the chief executive of RJR Nabisco was the host of a lavish meal at Atlanta's Waverly Hotel. Ross Johnson's guests had come to expect such treatment. A brash and hard-driving manager with a fondness for fine living, he liked to treat RJR Nabisco's board members to an elegant evening out before the next day's regular meeting...
...merged with Nabisco in 1981. Four years later, as Nabisco's president, Johnson sold out to RJR Reynolds for $4.9 billion and soon became president of the merged company. After adding the title of chief executive officer in 1987, he swiftly moved RJR Nabisco headquarters from Winston-Salem to Atlanta, sold the Heublein liquor business and slashed the corporate staff from 1,000 to 400. The dapper Johnson, a friend of such sports figures as hockey star Bobby Orr and broadcaster Frank Gifford, is described as a "charmer" by one associate. Another warned that when the boss was displeased, "swift...
...weeks ago, Bill Kovach, the highly-respected editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution resigned after a disagreement with his publisher. The New York Times reported that "some staff members suggested that the management of the Atlanta newspapers had been under pressure to rein in Mr. Kovach because of his aggressive coverage of [Atlanta's] business community." According to the Times article, the newspaper's investigations had angered David Easterly, president of Cox Enterprises, Inc., which owns the Journal Constitution. Cox Communications is also one of the 15 corporations that own most of the American press...
Johnson, 56, may have grossly miscalculated. When he announced during an Oct. 19 dinner at Atlanta's Waverly hotel that he and seven other managers intended to take the company private in a $17.6 billion leveraged buyout, RJR's board members reacted with shock, one of them now says, "because he was raiding the company from the inside." At first blush, the $75-a-share offer seemed generous, compared with the market price of about $56 at the time. But the directors' shock became outrage when they later learned about the huge piece of the action that Johnson...