Ace Greenberg liked to play cards. Bridge was his favorite game, but he was known to keep a deck of cards on his desk to distract himself from the rigors of Wall Street trading.
But in 1987, or it could have been 1988, Ace and I played a different game — cat and mouse.
Back at the time I was writing a financial column called “The Bottom Line” for New York Magazine. Corporate takeovers were big then, and I was breaking news about companies going after other companies and corporate raiders making a nuisance of themselves.
Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who died Friday from cancer at the age of 86, was running Bear Stearns at the time. He was a legend on Wall Street and in bridge circles.
And mostly because of Greenberg, Bear had become a favorite of corporate raiders who would buy a big stake in companies through that brokerage firm and then — using that leverage of those purchases — got the target’s management to do whatever the raiders wanted.
The raiders were making lots of money. Bear Stearns was doing a lot of business. And I was filling up a bunch of columns. So it was all good — for a while.
I started to notice there were leaks when many of these raiders had accumulated stock. The rule was that buyers would have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission whenever they purchased 5 percent or more of a company’s shares.
But word was leaking out whenever someone got to, say, 4.9 percent or 4.5 percent. In other words, someone wanted the world to know that the company was under attack, but he didn’t want to get the SEC involved.
This bothered me, but not for the reason you might think. Sure, people were gaming the system and manipulating the shares of the targeted company. And, yes, that was a bad thing. It was even illegal.
But here’s what really bothered me: I wasn’t the one getting the leaked information for my column. The leaks were going to another journalist and I was at a competitive disadvantage.
That’s when I called Ace. I told him that I was working on a column about leaks coming out of Bear and asked if he’d like to comment. He denied there were any leaks, of course. But it really didn’t matter because I wasn’t seriously going to write that column.
What I was really trying to do was alert Greenberg to the leaks and say — in my own cute way — “why don’t you tell whoever is doing it to either stop or share some of them with me.” I didn’t say that out loud, but that’s how I hoped Ace would interpret it.
Months later Bear Stearns put out a very odd press release announcing that some low-level clerk had been let go from the firm. It wasn’t the sort of firing that companies would normally announce publicly, but there it was in a press release.
I knew what it meant. Ace had found the leak, plugged it and wanted the world to know without going into any of the details.
This story would be good enough if it ended there. But years later, and after Ace had retired, I recounted the leaker’s story to him. I didn’t see Ace very often and this was the first time I got the nerve to bring up the clerk’s firing. I remember Ace mumbling to me, “I think we got the wrong guy.”
That probably bothered Greenberg enormously because he was, by all accounts, a fair man who particularly liked Wall Streeters who were just starting out in the business.
Mary Ramsey King, a friend of mine, remembers Greenberg fondly from her stint at Bear Stearns that started in 1983. “He was a great guy. He was my mentor,” King said. “I always knew, if I needed something, I could call him and he’d always take my call.”
Ace probably wished he hadn’t taken that one particular call from me.