How Joe Nocera got inside a hostile takeover

Russell Gold of Texas Monthly writes about how former senior editor Joe Nocera got access to T. Boone Pickens during a hostile takeover back in 1982.

Gold writes, “A few weeks earlier, Nocera had visited Pickens at his home in Amarillo. They dined on blackened catfish and drank a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. Nocera pitched Pickens on a profile, and the media-hungry magnate agreed. Nocera was working on it when news broke that Cities Service had launched a hostile bid for Pickens’s Mesa. He was in the right place at the right time, except he was in the wrong city.

“A flight from Houston to New York later, Nocera checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, the same hotel where Pickens and his team had encamped. Over the next two weeks, he would witness the twists and turns of a hostile corporate takeover deal from the inside. No one had ever had that kind of access, and almost no one else would in the future.

“Pickens enjoyed having Nocera hang around his suite, but the interloper made the New York bankers and lawyers nervous. He was periodically escorted from the suite. But the thing to know about a suite of rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria is that there is more than one entrance.”

Read more here.