Free Last Man Standing by Duff Mcdonald Page B

was announced on August 29, 1988.
    Every single person involved on the Commercial Credit side would go on to give the 32-year-old Dimon primary credit for structuring the transaction. Although he eventually passed certain tasks on to others, he handled all the gory details, from determining write-downs and purchase accounting adjustments to formulating the financial projections to convincing investors and rating agencies that the newly merged Primerica would be a strong going concern.
    Joe Califano, who sat on Primerica’s board at the time and who stayed on after the deal, met Dimon for the first time when Dimon made a presentation about the finances and projections of the merged company. Afterward, Califano, who had worked as secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Carter, walked over to Dimon. “That’s the most perceptive and sophisticated and clear presentation I have ever seen,” he said.
    Later, when the Primerica team talked to Shearson Lehman about selling Fingerhut to that company’s merchant bank, Dimon faced a man named Jay Fishman across the negotiating table. “He and I went at it several times,” Dimon recalls. “A week after the deal broke down I called him up and said, ‘I know we fought a lot, but I really came to admire and trust you during the process. Want to talk about coming over here?’ He told me I’d got him at exactly the right time. So we hired him.”
    As all this was going on—the negotiations were secret—Dimon’s grandfather Panos died. Dimon had managed to visit him on his deathbed beforehand and make Panos an “insider” in the first big transition of his career. He said that they were taking over Primerica, and that hewas being made CFO as part of the bargain. Panos teared up in response. But even in his weakened state, Panos remained a broker to his core. During one hospital visit, he insisted that the young man needed to buy Exxon stock, immediately. “He never stopped, right up to the very end,” recalls Dimon.
    • • •
    Weill quickly made a series of executive changes at the top of Primerica. The president of Smith Barney, George Vonder Linden, had survived its purchase by Primerica in 1987 and might have thought he could do it again. But Weill found Vonder Linden’s excessive concern about maintaining Smith Barney partners’ high compensation irritating.
    When Vonder Linden asked Weill to stay away from a President’s Council meeting of top-performing brokers in October at The Inn at Spanish Bay in Pebble Beach until the second day, Weill ignored the request and showed up on day one. He then became enraged when he learned he was not on the agenda as a speaker. Vonder Linden was soon out the door, and Weill’s old friend Frank Zarb was brought in to run Smith Barney. Zarb, who’d been on the board at Commercial Credit, was a banker at Lazard at that point, but Weill persuaded him to jump ship and join Primerica.
    Weill also hired the former cohead of Lehman Brothers, Lewis Glucksman, as vice chairman to run the company’s capital markets business under Zarb. Dimon continued his jack-of-all-trades approach at Primerica, keeping his role at the parent company while also immersing himself in operational issues—tracking expenses; improving technology processes—at Smith Barney. Zarb tasked Dimon with overhauling the company’s financial management and control functions, a job he took to with relish. In the end, Dimon got his hands in pretty much every part of Smith Barney’s business, from capital calculations to performance elements to the trimming of expenses.
    As a result of this change in responsibility, Dimon and his wife and two children—a second daughter, Laura, had been born on June 16, 1987—moved back to New York at the end of 1988, settling in an apartment at 211 East 70th Street. As New York addresses go, this was
not
one that mattered. There was still a long way to go. Dimon took an office in Smith Barney’s longtime