The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (Lisa Drew Books): Diana B. Henriques
Editorial Reviews
Here is the engrossing story of the original corporate raider, Thomas Mellon Evans, who, half a century ago, pioneered a business style that forever changed the American commercial landscape and, ultimately, American life. In The White Sharks of Wall Street, New York Times investigative reporter Diana B. Henriques has crafted a well-researched and entertaining account of this renegade trailblazer, who championed “shareholder rights” and “down-sized” companies, and built “conglomerates,” decades before the terms had been coined.
Preferring to call himself a “corporate re-juvenator,” Evans often worked without a salary, pealing off assets, eliminating entire layers of middle management, always obsessed with the bottom line. He waged war with unparalleled brilliance, accusing corporate America of forgetting who its real owners were. Henriques writes, “Evans was a man so far ahead of his contemporaries that he had moved into the shadows before the full daylight of his business style had dawned on the rest of Corporate America. At every step of his career, he was barging in where few would follow–at first. But follow they did, at last.” Proxy fights, hostile takeovers, tenders and countertenders, greenmail, golden parachutes, poison pills, and shark repellent–it’s all here, the deep roots of present-day corporate merger and acquisitions strategy. White Sharks is a compelling and dramatic story of power, greed, ambition, and personal tragedy that illuminates an otherwise obscure period of Wall Street history. –Scott Harrison
From Publishers Weekly
In her absorbing, if occasionally meandering work, Henriques demonstrates that while today’s multibillion-dollar deals may be larger in scope than those acquisitions pulled off by Thomas Mellon Evans (a distant relative of the Pittsburgh Mellons) and his contemporaries in the 1950s and ’60s, the history of corporate power plays in American business is almost as old as the nation itself. Henriques follows a group of men, Evans among them, who have changed the landscape of America’s largely passive corporate culture to one devoted to efficiency and generating value for shareholders. Evans acquired his first company, H.K. Porter, in 1939, and bought about 80 companies, many through proxy fights, before retiring from corporate life. His constant wheeling-and-dealing brought him in contact with other power brokers of the day, such as Lou Wolfson, Leopold Silberstein and Robert Young who helped reshape the business world. Henriques (Fidelity’s World) is at her best when she evokes Evans’s colorful life, from his rise as a young orphan to his death in 1997, covering his three marriages, his passion for art and his relationship with his three sons (one of whom took over Macmillan Publishing until he lost it in a hostile takeover by Robert Maxwell). In a narrative that is part biography, part business history, Henriques engagingly documents some of America’s most charismatic and controversial businessmen, who laid the groundwork for the more recent “greed is good” era. (May)
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