Allied’s management has had unending opportunities to answer my allegations, and I have not seen them once address the actual facts that form the basis of my allegations. They can’t. Instead, they have cried manipulation. Rather than have me tell you about the speech, you can see it for yourself at www.foolingsomepeople.com.
PART ONE
A Charity Case and Greenlight Capital
CHAPTER 1
Before Greenlight
My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered. My grandparents decided to sell. Though my father was a chemist, he worked on the sale of the company. When it was over, he enjoyed the work so much he decided that his future would be in mergers and acquisitions (M&A). He tried to get a job on Wall Street but did not have the right background.
My dad decided to open his own M&A shop in the basement of our house in Demarest, New Jersey. After a year with little success, my mom convinced him to move us back to Milwaukee, where she grew up and where her family remained. We moved in 1976, when I was seven. My father started his business again by working out of a converted bedroom in our house in the suburb of Fox Point.
Suburban Milwaukee was a great place to grow up. I rooted for the Milwaukee Brewers and its stars, Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. I went to a lot of games, including the World Series in 1982. The Brewers may have been a bad team for most of my life, but to have your team at its peak when you are thirteen years old is an experience I wish for every fan.
I was a pretty good student, especially in math. I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic. I was very excited when my wife, Cheryl, announced that in honor of the tenth anniversary of Greenlight Capital, she had sponsored the creation of an Urban Debate League in Milwaukee, where hundreds of high school students will get debate training and experience. Apparently, debate raises test scores, literacy, and graduation rates. I am not surprised—I benefited enormously from the experience.
My parents often discussed business at the dinner table. Like his father, my dad has an enormous reservoir of patience and persistence. My mom is much more demanding. The M&A business was tough. My dad was paid mostly on contingency. This means that he would often work hard for a deal that did not close and would get paid little, if anything, for his effort. Other times, the deal would go so smoothly that the client would look at Dad’s work and conclude that it was so easy that the fee was not fair. Because the fee was not due until after the closing, many of the clients would take the opportunity to renegotiate. Mom always thought Dad was soft in these negotiations. Dad tended to take a longer-term view. Eventually, he moved the business out of the house. As it grew, it became successful and enabled Dad to provide well for our family. On my best days, I fancy myself a combination of Dad’s persistence/patience and Mom’s toughness/skepticism.
I majored in government at Cornell University, but became more interested in economics after I interned during my junior year at the Office of Economic Analysis at the SEC in Washington. I wrote my thesis on the cyclical regulation of the U.S. airline industry. Policy makers balance two competing interests: Airlines want to make money, but consumers want cheap, ubiquitous air transport. In the anticompetitive phase of the cycle, regulators allow airlines to generate generous profits by operating monopolies on routes, capturing cities as hubs, and eliminating competition by merging. This leads to unhappy consumers and politicians, who then require procompetitive measures to provide more and cheaper service, which kills the profitability of the industry. After the airlines suffer through losses or even bankruptcies, policy makers realize that having airlines is a good thing. To induce airlines to buy planes and provide service, there has to be a profit opportunity, so the anti-competitive phase of the cycle returns. This vicious pattern perhaps explains Warren Buffett’s quip that investors should have shot the Wright brothers’ plane from the sky at Kitty Hawk. This thesis won me highest honors in the Government Department, and Greenlight, not surprisingly, has never owned a U.S. airline stock.
I started to look for a job through on-campus recruiting. I met with a lot of companies, including The Company—the Central Intelligence Agency. I received a few offers and decided to take the one as an investment banking analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (DLJ), even though it offered the lowest salary. I chose it because I liked the people I met during recruiting. I later realized I needed to work on my judgment.
I had two miserable years at DLJ, which provided a different kind of education. Working there felt like pledging a fraternity, except the hazers had no interest in even pretending to be friends. I won’t go into the gory details, but a few years ago John Rolfe and Peter Troob wrote Monkey Business, a graphic account of life as a junior investment banker at DLJ. Their description is consistent with my memory, including the true-to-life, hysterical description about managing the copying-center personnel. The main difference between their experience and mine: I was one level on the totem pole junior to them, which made life that much worse.
Part of my
