JES

In March of 1968, 48 years ago, I moved to New York City and started looking for an entry-level accounting job.  I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as an accounting major in May of 1967.  (One year later, Donald Trump graduated from the Wharton School as well.)  I went to an employment agency I found in the classified section of The New York Times.  They were quickly able to arrange several job interviews for me.

In short order I received two job offers:  $7,500 per year from Reynolds Metals Company and $8,000 per year from CBS’s News Division.  I had one more scheduled interview, with Joseph E. Seagram & Company, Inc. (JES), the US subsidiary of The Seagram Company, Ltd., the Canadian liquor conglomerate.  Around 5 PM the day before the interview, I started thinking how tired I was of the whole interview process and how unnecessary the next and last one was.  I already had two job offers.  A third one would be superfluous...I thought.  So I called the contact number I had for the interview to cancel it.  The person that was to interview me had just left for the day.  I missed cancelling the interview by a minute.  In a blink of an eye, life can change.

Not wanting to be discourteous, I showed up at the interview the next morning.  It was supposed to be with the Controller, Tony Paalz, but he was out with a bad cold.  His second in command, Tom Hawe, interviewed me instead.  It was a very different interview from others I had.  He asked me several very technical questions.  I was relaxed since I already had two jobs offers.  If I didn’t know the answer, I told him I didn’t.  Good advice!

More good luck:  Seagram offered me a job as well, at $8,500 per year.  Since the three jobs were similar, I took the highest offer, Seagram’s.  I stayed there for thirty-one years and three months, until June 30, 1999 when I retired at age fifty-three.

In 1968, Seagram’s was a closely-held company controlled by the Bronfman family.  The head of Seagram’s was Sam Bronfman, the seventy-eight year-old Canadian businessman who had built a liquor empire in Canada, and after Prohibition ended, in the United States.  He died three years later while I was on vacation in Yugoslavia.  I remember reading of his demise in the International Herald Tribune while sitting on a beach near Dubrovnik.  He was succeeded by his son, Edgar Bronfman, Sr., at that time forty-two years of age.  Twenty-three years later, in 1994, Edgar, Sr. turned the company over to his son, Edgar, Jr. who was then thirty-nine years of age.     

I started in the Accounting Department as a Fixed Asset Accountant, an assignment which lasted for about fourteen months until May 15, 1969.  I was responsible for maintaining the  records for Seagram’s furniture , fixtures, and equipment in the New York metropolitan area.  It was a good first job.  I remember sitting in a large room with row after row of desks, sort of like Jack Lemmon did in the film, The Apartment.  My desk was at the end of a row, right behind a older man just short of retirement by the name of Harry Miller.  In those days, retirement was mandatory at 65 years-of-age.  He and his wife were looking forward to retiring and moving to Florida.  Unfortunately, during that short span of time I knew Harry, his wife was diagnosed with cancer and died.  Best laid plans of mice and men.

Shortly after joining the company, I was directed to fly to Louisville, Kentucky to visit one of their distilleries.  It was the only time in my life I flew first class.  I saw how corn was mashed, cooked, distilled into alcohol (bourbon), placed in charred barrels, left to age for at least four years, removed from the barrels, and then bottled.  I’ve simplified a fascinating process.

Three months after joining JES, I was scheduled to be married in Detroit, Michigan on a Sunday afternoon before immediately returning to New York.  At the time, I did not qualify for any vacation time.  I asked my boss, who worked for Tony Paalz, if I could take Monday off (a very short honeymoon).  When I gave the reason, Tony authorized me to receive a week’s vacation with pay.  I never forgot his kindness.   

As I discussed in a post last May, Marty Kolins found me and I got promoted to be his Assistant Federal Tax Manager in the Tax Department on May 15, 1969 and where I stayed for the next 30 years, 1 ½ months.  My Accounting Department colleagues teased me that I was moving to the “graveyard” as they called it since the other nine in the Tax Department at that time were in their 50s and 60s.  I was all of 23.  A baby! 

In the Tax Department, I got to know a lot more about Seagram’s.  My main task was to assist Marty in preparing the annual Consolidated Federal Corporate Income Tax Return, an IRS Form 1120.  I say consolidated because there were many different US corporations under the Seagram umbrella whose accounting data could be combined into one big number.  Before the days of Excel and computers, we had to do all the combining by hand on very large spead sheets with the help of adding machines.

Besides reporting Seagram’s federal taxable income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and paying its estimated federal income tax (on a quarterly basis), our next big job was to defend our calculations with the same IRS.  Almost constantly, we would play host in the Tax Department to representatives of this feared government agency.  A team of them would stay for months and years asking lots of questions.  They were from the highest level of the IRS.  I once dealt with an IRS agent regarding my personal taxes and I noticed a significant difference in skill and ability between her and the group at Seagram’s.

The head of the Tax Department in 1969 was Chris Bakos.  I remember him calling out for “Marty” whenever he wanted my boss to come to his office.  Marty would jump out of his chair and fly into the office of the man he called Mr. Bakos.  From where I sat, if I looked over my right shoulder, I could peer into Chris’s office.  Most times, he had his feet up on his desk, apparently in a thinking mode.  After lunch, he would take a nap.  For me he was a very intimidating figure.  However, he once gave me good advice.  “Don’t bullshit me.  Just tell me the truth.”  I always remember.  Chris was of Greek ancestry and was very sensitive about it.  When someone once made a joke about it, he never forgave them.  A year before his retirement, the powers that be in JES moved Tony Paalz and his tax advisor, Howard Miller, into the Tax Department, in order to prepare for the eventual transfer of power on the day of Chris’s retirement.  Chris wasn’t happy, but he tolerated this intrusion into his private domain for a year.

As my boss was still Marty Kolins, the addition of Tony and “Howie” didn’t affect me until Marty retired in 1984.  Tony was from Kentucky originally and had a very different accent than I was used to.  I learned he served in WWII on a battleship in the Pacific theater, like the actor, Richard Boone.  After the war, also like Richard Boone, he used the GI Bill to get an education.  However, he wanted to be an accountant, not an actor.  Starting with JES in his home state, he worked his way up to the headquarters in New York.  Tony, again like Richard Boone, liked to smoke cigars.  I remember being in his office many times when he lit up.  I also remember one unforgettable quote of his:   “Sex is overrated.”

In 1975, Seagram’s became part of a big news story when Edgar, Sr.’s eldest son, Samuel Bronfman, Jr., who was twenty-one years-old, was kidnapped.  The family paid a $2.3 million ransom, but it was not for several more days before he was found by the police, alive and unharmed.  Tony Paalz arranged with some banks to raise the ransom money and Edgar Bronfman, Sr. delivered it personally.  Two men were arrested and charged with kidnapping and grand larceny.  The two claimed that Samuel Bronfman, Jr. himself had engineered his own kidnapping in an attempt to get money from his father.  The jury bought their story and they only received less than four years in prison on the larceny charge.  However, the police didn’t buy it.  Neither did I.  And neither did the Bronfmans.  Samuel, Jr. subsequently spent many years as an executive with Seagram’s. 

After Chris retired, Tony and Howie thought there was a need to expand the Tax Department staff to include tax planners besides just tax preparers as was the case under Bakos, who had done all the tax planning in the past, if any.  As such, my friend, Joe Giordano, joined the staff in 1982, as Assistant Director International.

As a vestige from the dark days of the Great Depression (when having a job was life), many employees stuck around with Seagram’s for years and years, something unheard of today.  I myself was there for more than thirty-one years.  Marty was there for fifty.  The company encouraged this loyalty by forming what was known as the Twenty-Five Year Club.  Annually, there was a super party honoring those who had been with Seagram’s for twenty-five years or more.  When we made various milestones, as in my case, twenty-five years and thirty-years, we received a plaque and had our photos taken with the leadership of the company, one or more of the Bronfman family.  I had a photo of me with two millionaires.  Funny!

Some other of their very generous perks included a vacation package.  After twenty years, I started receiving six weeks paid vacation per year.  That’s a week off every other month.  That’s something hard to give up to go elsewhere and get only two weeks vacation.  In addition, every Seagram employee received a certain amount per year of company products free.  I received $600 per year which I alternated between Tropicana Orange Juice and Mumm Champagne.

In 1995, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. engineered a deal in which (a) Seagram sold its investment in DuPont for $9 Billion and then (b) used the proceeds to purchase Universal Pictures.  He wanted to get into the film and electronic media business. 

In 1999, with the help of Tony’s successor (after his retirement), Paul Buscemi, I was able to retire from Seagram’s.  But, I can't forget those I knew at JES such as Bob Labriola, Harry Kriegel and Chari Biton.  What would my future hold?

In 2000, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. sold Universal Pictures and its music divisions to Vivendi  and its beverage business to Pernod Ricard, both French companies.  Thus, the company I worked at for more than thirty-one years basically disappeared.  The empire his grandfather built, Edgar Bronfman, Jr. destroyed.  In a 2013 interview, Edgar, Jr.’s uncle, Charles Bronfman (the original owner of the Montreal Expos baseball team, now the Washington Nationals), stated that the demise of Seagram’s “was a disaster.  It is a disaster.  It will be a disaster.  It was a family tragedy.”  What a shame!