Top deal-maker reinvents himself with hedge funds

J TOMILSON Hill was a well-known Wall Street deal-maker in the 1980s, a skilled merger tactician whose work on the bidding war for RJR Nabisco earned him a role in the book Barbarians at the Gate, which memorably said he came across to enemies as "an oiled-back Gordon Gekko haircut atop 5 feet, 10 inches of icy Protestant reserve".

But in 1993, Mr Hill's climb up the ladder at Lehman Brothers ended when he was ousted as co-chief executive, and he spent the next seven years of his career in less prominent roles at the Blackstone Group, the private equity firm.

But Mr Hill has reinvented himself by applying his deal-making skills to a different business. Since 2000, he has taken Blackstone's hedge-fund-of-funds business from barely a blip on the radar screen to the No 1 spot. Its US$53 billion in assets are more than double its nearest competitor's.