Word: bluhdorn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...peak of his rambunctious form, Chairman Charles Bluhdorn of Gulf & Western Industries, one of the world's biggest conglomerates (1976 sales: $3.4 billion), is a curiously compulsive monologuist. Whether lolling with a weekend visitor by a sleepy lagoon outside his luxurious beach house, La Favorita, in the Dominican Republic or lecturing to an awed audience in his company's baronial headquarters suite overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Bluhdorn fearlessly offers his forthright and often funny opinions on such disparate topics as acquisition strategy ("I want to buy things no one else wants"), American businessmen ("They have surrounded...
...Lately, Bluhdorn has been uncustomarily silent. Three separate investigations are being made into the affairs of Gulf & Western, its subsidiaries and some of its officers and directors. The SEC is looking into, among other things, the adequacy of the company's public disclosure in connection with transactions of G & W's securities, the company's pension funds and its dealings in the shares of an auto-parts subsidiary that had some stock traded on the over-the-counter exchange. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is supervising another probe. Finally, the New York State senate committee on crime...
With his citadel under siege, Bluhdorn is silent as a mime on all these matters, and no other officer will offer as much as a syllable of explanation. One middle-level employee describes the current atmosphere at G & W as "paranoid." It was rather startling that a routine registration statement filed lately by Associates First Capital Corp., a financial-services subsidiary of G & W, was rejected by the SEC because of incomplete disclosure. Even more anguish has been caused to shareholders by the drop in the company's stock: it has sagged by more than 20% this year, leaving...
...catalyst for this calamity is a silver-haired lawyer named Joel Dolkart. He was G & W's general counsel for al| most 20 years, a bosom pal of Bluhdorn's -and a partner in the Wall Street cor| porate law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Dolkart, a mergers and acquisitions expert with a taste for modern art, was hit with an 89-count indictment in 1974 for stealing $2.5 million through fraudulent checks from law firms representing G&W.* He pleaded guilty to one count of forgery a year ago and was sentenced to a jail term...
...Bluhdorn is hoping to repeat the success of The Godfather with one of the dozen or so movies that Paramount will introduce this year: Orca, the saga of a killer whale, produced by Dino de Laurentiis, or Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a Richard Brooks adaptation of the best-selling novel. Columbia is putting its big bets on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another science adventure epic, and The Deep, a successor to Jaws, which is the highest-grossing motion picture of all time (MCA's count of the worldwide gross: $196 million). A rash of copycat productions...