Eli M. Black (April 9, 1921 – February 3, 1975) was a Jewish-American businessman who controlled the United Brands Company.[1] His son, Leon Black, is a founding member of private equity firm Apollo Management.
Contents |
Born Elihu Menashe Blachowitz in Poland, he came to America as a child. As a young man he trained as a rabbi serving a congregation in Woodmere, New York but after three-and-a-half years he left the pulpit to enter business.
Several years later Black had become a successful investment banker. By 1954 he was named president of the American Seal-Kap Company which made the plastic liners for bottle caps.
Black renamed the company AMK, after its ticker symbol, and turned it into a vehicle for acquisitions; joining the conglomerate bandwagon of the 1960s. Among his many takeovers was the John Morrell & Co. meatpacking company.
But in 1969 it all changed when Black acquired United Fruit Company. He soon discovered that United Fruit had far less capital than he had believed.
Black was not a good manager and United Fruit, now called United Brands, soon became crippled with debt. The company's losses were exacerbated by Hurricane Fifi in 1974 which destroyed many of its banana plantations in Honduras.
In 1975, the Securities and Exchange Commission uncovered a $2.5 million bribe that United Brands had agreed to pay Honduran president Oswaldo López Arellano in return for reducing taxes on banana exports.
A few weeks before the scandal broke, Black went to his office on the forty-fourth floor of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan, bashed out the window with his briefcase, and jumped to his death on Park Avenue.
After Black's spectacular suicide, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, one of millionaire Carl Lindner, Jr.'s companies, bought into United Fruit.
Black's suicide was the inspiration for a scene in the 1994 screwball comedy film The Hudsucker Proxy.[2]
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
