Report: Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein Dead

(MoneyWatch)  The WSJ is reporting that legendary investment banker and Lazard chief executive Bruce Wasserstein, 61, has died. The exact cause of death was unknown, although he recently had been hospitalized with heart problems (disclosure: I'm a former employee of The Deal, which Wasserstein owned).

Wasserstein, known in his hey-day as "Bid 'em Up Bruce," was one of the preeminent investment bankers of his time. A former corporate lawyer, he is perhaps best known for having worked on Kohlberg Kravis Roberts's 1988 takeover of RJR Nabisco, which at the time was the biggest leveraged buyout ever.

Among the other major deals he worked on over his career were the mergers of Morgan Stanley-Dean Witter, Time Warner-America Online, AIG-SunAmerica, UBS-Swiss Bank, Kraft-General Foods, Beecham-SmithKline, U.S. Steel-Marathon Oil and Nestle-Carnation.

Wasserstein was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and served as a member of the visiting committees of Harvard Law School, the University of Michigan and Columbia Journalism School.

Wasserstein's death raises questions about his successor at Lazard, with vice chairman Steven Golub cited as a likely successor. Wasserstein became CEO of Lazard in 2005, taking the bank public after effectively winning control of the investment bank from then-chairman Michel David-Weill.

Under Wasserstein, Lazard's business advising on mergers and acquisitions steadily grew, with the executive spending heavily to recruit star bankers. In October, for example, the company advised brewery giant Anheuser-Busch in a $2.3 billion deal to sell its theme park business, Busch Entertainment, to buyout firm Blackstone. Lazard this month also advised Tandberg in the video conferencing company's $3 billion sale to Cisco Systems.