J. Ira Harris, Chicago dealmaker, dies at 83
J. Ira Harris, a former senior partner of Salomon Brothers who played a leading role in establishing Chicago as a viable Wall Street stand-in for dealmaking and investment banking, has died. He was 83.
He died on Monday at his home in Palm Beach, Fla., of an apparent heart attack, according to his son, Jon.
The New York-born Harris was a fixture at Salomon during its final years as a private partnership through its transition following its 1981 sale to Phibro, the world’s largest publicly owned commodity trading firm. Harris’s fulsome embrace of Chicago, both as a businessman and longtime resident, boosted the profile and prospects of the banking industry outside New York City.
A 1977 New York Times profile noted that Harris had become “a total Chicagoan,” all the way down to speaking like a Midwesterner (except for the “occasional Bronxian lapse.”) He held a reception to show off Salomon’s new offices on the 87th floor of the Chicago skyscraper then known as the Sears Tower.
“I like Chicago better than New York,” he told the Times. “It’s a friendlier city, a fine place to raise my children.”
In 1989, Crain’s Chicago Business called Harris “Chicago’s best-known deal-maker.”
His passion for sports and generous waistline were among the traits that separated him from the image of the buttoned-up banker. He so loved the number 13 that he made sure it was included in his home address, license plate and personal and office telephone numbers, and he once charged a client a fee of $1,313,313.13, according to “M&A Titans,” Brett Cole’s 2008 book.
“He was larger than life,” William Mack, chairman of Mack Real Estate Group, said Tuesday of his friend for more than three decades. “He loved people, he was a great philanthropist. He had an awful lot of friends. He knew everybody in the world.”
Among the deals Harris was involved in: Walter E. Heller’s purchase of Chicago’s fifth-largest bank, the American National Bank and Trust; Aon’s acquisition of Alexander & Alexander Services; the sale of Helene Curtis to Unilever; Illinois Central Industries’ purchase of Pepsi-Cola General Bottlers; and the 1973 purchase of McCall’s magazine by the family of Hyatt International head Jay A. Pritzker.
The Pritzker family would remain important clients and partners for many years. In 1998, Harris became vice chairman of the Pritzker Organization, the family’s Chicago-based investment firm.
“Ira’s integrity and outgoing personality were the tools that drove his success,” Thomas Pritzker, executive chairman of the Pritzker Organization and chairman and chief executive of Hyatt Hotels, said in an interview. He credited Harris with engineering the 1981 purchase of Trans-Union by the Pritzker-controlled Marmon Group — “a very famous transaction actually because of how quickly it was done.”
Harris departed Salomon at the start of 1988 to open a Chicago branch of its competitor, Lazard Freres & Co. He left in 1998 and formed a consulting firm, J.I. Harris & Associates. With son Jon, he later founded Alternative Investing Management to invest on behalf of this family and the Pritzkers.
The surviving senior partners of Salomon, Henry Kaufman and Richard Schmeelk, paid tribute to Harris in a paid death notice in Tuesday’s Times: “We, the remaining senior partners of Salomon Brothers, mourn the loss of a fellow member. He contributed importantly to the growth of the firm, especially to its rise to prominence in investment banking.”
Harris was a longtime supporter of his alma mater, the University of Michigan, where the football team’s locker room bears his name and that of his wife, Nicki. Also bearing their name is the title of head football coach, currently held by Jim Harbaugh. The couple also funded the university’s schools of business and public policy. In Palm Beach, Harris supported the Norton Museum of Art and the Palm Beach Civic Association.
Harris was born Jay Ira Horowitz in New York City on April 13, 1938. His father, Harry Horowitz, sold lace trimmings for handkerchiefs and tablecloths. (Harris changed his name from Horowitz after college.)
He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1959 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He paid for his education, the Times said, by working as a sports stringer for the New York Post, organizing a student laundry service and working behind the counter of an ice cream parlor for $1.25 an hour and all he could eat.