Peltz: Spittle-on-the-Check Persistence from Near-Broke

“NELSON PELTZ went through the four days of the Predators’ Ball, as he would later say, as a “nervous wreck.” Peltz, who had a track record in business that can be described as lackluster, saw National Can as the opportunity of a lifetime. He had run his family’s frozen-food business, expanding it through acquisitions and then selling it in the midseventies; it later went bankrupt. Peltz had struggled for years, been close to broke, finally managed in 1982 to acquire with Peter May a controlling block of Triangle Industries, which he intended to leverage up as his vehicle for acquisitions. Until now, nothing had worked. And he”

“In April 1983, Peltz and May (in a two-thirds/one-third partnership) purchased Goldberg’s block, 29 percent of Triangle’s shares, for about $14 million. Two million was lent to Trafalgar; twelve million was lent to Peltz and May, from Manufacturers Hanover and Bankers Trust. Bankers Trust took the stock as collateral; Manufacturers Hanover took Peltz’s and May’s signatures and a lien on Peltz’s house in Quogue. Peltz recalled that it took all his powers of persuasion at the bank, and that when he finally walked out of Bill Rykman’s office at Manufacturers Hanover with the certified check in hand and met Goldberg, Goldberg told him that he couldn’t do the deal after all, because the Triangle board would not approve the change of control. “I literally ran the check under his nose, the spittle started to come out of his mouth, he was dying to put his arms around the money,” Peltz declared. “I said, ‘Let me try, let me talk to the board, let me show them I don’t have horns.’ ””