Samuel J. Heyman (March 1, 1939 – November 7, 2009) was an American businessman and hedge fund manager best known for his longtime chairmanship of the GAF Materials Corporation and International Specialty Products Inc. (ISP).
Early life and education
Heyman was born to a Jewish family in Danbury, Connecticut, to Lazarus and Annette Heyman. His father was a real estate developer.
As an undergraduate at Yale College, Heyman was a regionally ranked varsity tennis player and member of Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating from Yale in 1960, he attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1963. After graduation, he became an attorney for the US Department of Justice during the Kennedy Administration, rising to become Chief Assistant United States Attorney for Connecticut. In 1968, after the death of his father, he took over his family's Connecticut-based real estate firm, Heyman Properties.
Business career
In late 1982, Heyman, by then a savvy risk arbitrage investor, acquired approximately 4.1% of the outstanding shares in GAF Corporation (GAF an abbreviation for General Aniline & Film), a troubled, 1960's-style conglomerate that was formerly owned by the US Government during each of World War I and World War II. Heyman invested in GAF with the expectation that then-Chairman, 65-year-old Dr. Jesse Werner, would retire. Between 1978 and 1981, in an effort to streamline the business and improve profitability, Werner sold GAF's consumer camera, projector, and photo processing operations (including the ubiquitous GAF View-Master stereo 3D picture viewer) and its dyes and pigments businesses, leaving GAF with three businesses: GAF Chemicals (which would become International Specialty Products Inc.), GAF Broadcasting (at the time, the New York City-based classical radio station, WNCN-FM), and GAF Building Products (today's GAF Materials Corporation). When Dr. Werner reneged on his pledge to retire (he signed a five-year, multi million dollar employment agreement), Heyman prepared his own slate of directors, including Heyman as chairman, and ran against the incumbent Board and management team in an unprecedented proxy fight. In late December 1983, the shareholders voted to oust the existing Board (including Werner) and to install Heyman as CEO and chairman. At the time, given Heyman's minority ownership of less than 5% of the company, Barron's hailed the development as "one of the most striking achievements in the annals of corporate finance."
Within a year of Heyman's takeover, GAF's performance quickly improved due to a major cost-cutting initiative (which included relocating GAF's headquarters from the pricey Time-Life Building in Manhattan to suburban Wayne, New Jersey) and increased research and development outlays.
During the late 1980s, Heyman continued to invest his personal wealth using risk arbitrage, and subsequently encouraged GAF Corporation's treasury department to increase returns on the company's cash by also pursuing risk arbitrage as an investment strategy. This investment style led GAF Corporation to pursue the attempted hostile takeovers of Union Carbide in late 1985 (Union Carbide's stock had cratered as a result of the December 1984 Bhopal incident) and Borg-Warner in April 1987 (Borg Warner's stock was substantially undervalued due to the poor performance of its automotive business, which masked the exceptional performance of its chemicals business); these investments were operationally justified by Heyman in the public markets as an effort to increase the scale of GAF's chemical operations. Despite the inability of Heyman to complete these takeovers, his efforts resulted in large profits for GAF through the ultimate sale of the shares GAF had acquired in each of the target companies. Many of Heyman's takeover attempts were to be funded with commercial borrowings from Chase Manhattan Bank and high yield debt from Drexel Burnham Lambert. A close personal friend of Heyman was Martin A. Siegel, who lived across the street from Heyman in Green Farms, Connecticut, and the two often played tennis together. Later in Siegel's career, he would serve as Heyman's personal financial advisor.
In September 1987, Heyman offered to take GAF private for $2.3 billion, but the October 1987 stock market crash and the resulting changes in the economy resulted in a decline in GAF Corporation's performance through 1988. Nonetheless, Heyman pursued the privatization of GAF, and in March 1989, he and a select group of GAF management acquired the company for $1.4 billion in a leveraged buyout.