Word: goldsmiths
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...Despite Goldsmith's youthful reputation as a scapegrace playboy, there are other patterns here: a determination to do exactly as he pleased, an insistence on living well, a readiness to fight anyone who opposed his wishes, a willingness to take risks, a confidence that more money could always be found. Such patterns, combined with shrewdness and luck, make a success in business all but inevitable. His pharmaceutical business grew rapidly, too rapidly. At one point, he was on the verge of bankruptcy, then discovered on the day that his notes came due that the Paris banks had all gone...
...raid on Diamond International, began eyeing St. Regis, the Continental Group, Colgate- Palmolive, Crown Zellerbach, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Pan Am. He operated through a network of Panamanian and Caribbean holding companies, all ultimately controlled by an organization called the Brunneria Foundation, headquartered in Liechtenstein and entirely owned by Goldsmith and his family...
...People in America were willing to work much harder than in Britain," Goldsmith says, rubbing a lemon-size piece of amber as he paces up and down in an almost bare penthouse office, which overlooks the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. "Most people forget that America's strength is not its culture but its ideology, and that ideology is freedom...
...Goldsmith's takeover strategy was simple. His targets were almost invariably old companies that had strayed from their original purpose through diversification, acquired too many senior managers, and were selling at a good deal below their breakup value. He would break them up, sell off the odds and ends, streamline the core and move on to the next project. Goodyear, which Goldsmith tried to acquire last year, provides a good example. The company's original purpose, he told a congressional committee, "was to build better tires, cheaper, and sell them harder," but it diversified into oil and gas, started building...
...Goldsmith can be ruthless in his pursuit of profits. "There is a lot of internal rage in Jimmy," says John Train, a New York financier who knows him well, and Goldsmith himself acknowledges, "When I fight, I fight with a knife." Yet he is rather different from the standard buccaneer. When Ivan Boesky moved uptown from Wall Street in 1985, he rented a suite of offices in the same building that housed Goldsmith's New York headquarters, 630 Fifth Avenue, and then asked for a meeting. "He spent most of his time telling me about all the contributions...