The fifth in a series of anonymous reminiscences

There’s this guy in Florida, a real character, who made his money in garbage hauling and landfills. People just loved him. And he loved to do deals. I must’ve bought and sold about half a dozen companies with this guy over the years.

But when it came time to walk down the aisle, he had a habit, just before saying “I do,” of simply disappearing. Sometimes he’d just go underground. You had no idea where the hell he had gone.

This time, we’re in the process of selling a $3.5 million landfill to a publicly held company. On the day of the closing, I go into the office, and — what a surprise — he’s gone. A few hours later, he calls me from Atlantic City. When I ask what the hell he’s doing there, he says he’s attending an equipment auction: “I can get all this heavy equipment, and then we can put it in the deal. . . . ”

His harebrained idea was to ship this stuff down to Florida so that when the buyers came to look at the landfill, they’d see all this equipment and agree to buy all of it, lock, stock and barrel. (He’s one of those guys who, if he found 25 cents in a desk drawer at a company he was trying to sell, he’d try to put that in the deal.)

My partner was working under the misguided assumption that these buyers were complete idiots, but of course he was wrong. They ended up not buying any of the stuff (including compactors from the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island), because it was all junk. Instead, we spent the whole day faxing documents back and forth between Florida and Atlantic City, but we got the deal done. About six months later, I was dealing with a corporate attorney who works for the company that had just acquired the public company we did our deal with. We went out to a due-diligence dinner one night, and he said, “Hey, I wanted to ask you: I’ve been going through the files. How come all the documents have caesars atlantic city written on the top?”

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