FROM THE VAULT: MARCH 15, 1971

A conglomerate king presages the leveraged-buyout boom of the 1980s.

At 47, MeshulAM Riklis lived in a six-story Fifth Avenue townhouse that once belonged to the Sulzberger family, owners of the New York Times. He rode in chauffeured limousines, accompanied by bodyguards. He possessed a chameleonlike charm and an offbeat sense of humor. (Heard the one about the fish, the restaurant and “the big schnook”?) Born in Turkey, raised in Israel and having lived for a time on a kibbutz, Riklis counted his net worth in the multimillion-dollar range. How multi? “Plenty multi,” he replied. The source of his wealth: Rapid-American, a wide-ranging conglomerate built on a pile of debt. This leveragedriven tactic was novel in the 1970s. A decade later, a group of rather more hostile capitalists would employ it with great success, becoming the infamous corporate raiders of the booming ’80s.

Riklis was a pioneer, picking up companies such as Elizabeth Arden and Fabergé. By 1984 he was worth $150 million (some $350 million today), a figure that would more than double over the next five years. But neither his fortune nor his empire would survive the end of the leveraged-buyout era, and after he siphoned out cash and assets, many of his companies collapsed into bankruptcy. He largely vanished thereafter; one of his only recent surfacings came via the 2016 announcement of a grandson’s wedding—a notice that described the then 92-year-old Riklis as, simply, a “financier.”

From the editor’S deSk The Cost of Concern In the years after ralph nader’s landmark book Unsafe at Any Speed, malcolm Forbes lamented that “businessmen who suggest that any proposed safety measure be weighed in terms of its cost are assumed to be ogres indifferent to human life.”

PluS Ça change . . . In the rough “Private country clubs . . . are changing with the times. maybe even dying.” the number of such clubs had fallen from a high of 5,500 in the 1920s to 4,500. the industry is in decline today, too: nationwide, the number of clubs and golf courses is down 10% over the past decade.

amazing ad Dog’s breakfast Greyhound Lines’ ambitions were growing beyond mere interstate travel. a year earlier, in 1970, the bus company had entered the meat business, buying armour & co. for $415 million (about $2.7 billion today).