New York – Prominent Jewish American Investment Banker Dies At 61

New York – Bruce Wasserstein, the Brooklyn-born Lazard CEO and takeover magnate who helped create the image of the modern Wall Street investment banker, died unexpectedly Wednesday at 61.

Wasserstein’s father was a Jewish immigrant, who came to Ellis Island from Poland in the 1920s and started, with his brothers, a ribbon company on 18th Street in Manhattan called “Wasserstein Brothers Ribbons.” The family also made a sizable fortune investing in New York real estate and the stock market, according to William D. Cohan’s “The Last Tycoons,” which chronicles the history of Lazard.

One of five children, Bruce attended the University of Michigan, where he was an editor of the school newspaper. He obtained business and law degrees from Harvard and later studied merger law at Cambridge in the 1970s.

Bruce came to the M&A world as a lawyer at the New York law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, but left to become an investment banker, at First Boston Corp., where he and Joseph Perella, another top Wall Street banker, built its M&A practice. The two men left First Boston to start Wasserstein Perella & Co in 1988.

In 2000, Mr. Wasserstein sold his boutique investment bank Wasserstein Perella & Co. to Germany’s Dresdner Bank for $1.5 billion.

Wasserstein joined Lazard Freres & in Co. in 2002, as bitter infighting rocked the storied firm with a complex ownership structure. He helped streamline Lazard’s ownership structure and helped take it public in 2005. The firm employs about 2,000 employees and generates $1.36 billion in annual revenue.

According to Forbes as of 9/30/09, Wasserstein’s net worth is estimated to be $2.2 billion