Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

by Bryan Burrough

Kohlberg saw the LBO as “the missing link,” a way for aging executives “to have their cake and eat it, too.” His first deal, in 1965, was the $9.5 million acquisition of a Mount Vernon, New York, dental products maker named Stern Metals. It remained his blueprint for years. Kohlberg formed a shell company, backed by a group of investors he assembled, to buy Stern from its seventy-two-year-old family patriarch, using mostly borrowed money. The Sterns retained a stake in the business and continued to run it. Eight months later Kohlberg sold some of his stock—which he had bought for $1.25 a share—to the public for $8 a share, using the proceeds to retire debt. Kohlberg then took the company on a buying spree, snapping up a California dental supply company, an Ohio X-ray firm, and a European maker of dental chairs. When the original investors sold off their $500,000 investment in the transformed company to the public two years later, it was worth $4 million.