The last tycoons: the secret history of Lazard Frères & Co Read Online Free PDF

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    A fter two days of eerie silence following the earthquakes and fires that devastated San Francisco in the early morning of April 18, 1906, an unnamed bank officer of the London, Paris, and American Bank--the California outpost of Lazard Freres & Co.--was able to make his way through the rubble to a Western Union office and cable a staccato and desperate message back to his Lazard partners, three thousand miles away in New York City: "Entire business totally destroyed. Calamity cannot be exaggerated. Banks practically all destroyed. Our building completely destroyed. Vaults apparently intact. All records and securities safely in vaults. No lives lost among friends. Will wire fully upon..." The message ended tantalizingly. For the next few days, similar pleas for succor were sent to New York and the other two Lazard offices, in Paris and in London. These appeals met their own, inexplicable stony silence from the Lazard brethren, even though the capital needed to open these three offices had come from the ongoing success of the San Francisco operation.
    A week after the initial calamity, on April 25, another, most emphatic missive was sent: "It is hardly necessary for us to say to you that this is the time for the London, Paris and American Bank, Ltd. to show all the strength that it may be able to command." Finally, the Lazard partners in New York responded and wired $500,000 to San Francisco and arranged for an additional $1.5 million line of credit to help resurrect their sister firm. The rescue financing allowed the San Francisco bank, operating from the basement of one of the partner's homes, to survive the disaster. This was not the first time--or the last--that the great bank came close to collapse.

    BY THE TIME of the great earthquake of 1906, Lazard had been around, in one form or another, for fifty-eight years. The story of the firm's humble origins as a dry goods store in New Orleans in 1848 has been buffed to such a high gloss it is no longer possible to determine if the tale is true. As a literal translation of the firm's name suggests, though, at least two Lazard brothers--Alexander, twenty-five years old, and Simon, then all of eighteen--likely in search of both a refuge from certain military conscription and better opportunities for Jews in America, moved to New Orleans in the early 1840s to be with an uncle, who had already been "making money in commerce" in the Big Easy. Once this beachhead had been established, the two brothers sent for their eldest sibling--Lazare Lazard--and he soon joined them. Together, on July 12, 1848, the three brothers founded Lazard Freres & Co. as a retail outpost for the sale of fine French clothing.
    These three Jewish brothers had emigrated from Frauenberg, three miles from Sarreguemines, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. Their grandfather Abraham had probably walked to France through Germany, from Prague, in 1792, with the hope of seeking greater political freedom. At that time, France appeared momentarily more progressive in its treatment of Jews than did the surrounding countries: there were some forty thousand Jews in all of France then, with twenty-five thousand of them in Alsace-Lorraine (but only five hundred in Paris). Abraham became a farmer. His son Elie was born in Frauenberg. In 1820, Elie married Esther Aron, a banker's daughter who brought to the marriage a considerable dowry. Together they had seven children, among them five sons, including Lazare, Alexander, and Simon, the founders of the New Orleans store. When Elie Lazard died, Esther married Moise Cahn. Together they had another four children, including Julie Cahn, who later married Alexander Weill, the Lazards' cousin and Michel David-Weill's great-grandfather.

    WHILE REVOLUTION WAS sweeping across their homeland and reaching into other parts of Europe, the Lazards' New Orleans store was an immediate hit. Some of the profits were sent home to France--beginning a long Lazard tradition of sending