This Crooked CEO’s ‘Roman Orgy’ Had Its Own Centurions

“I wish you worked for me, Haden-Guest,” Saul Steinberg told me, breezily.

This, I should say, was not Saul Steinberg, the penetrating cartoon artist, but Saul Steinberg, the fashionably notorious corporate raider and greenmailer, a genial tub of a man, and it was in the early 90s at a party that he and his wife Gayfryd were throwing in their 34-room triplex at 740 Park Avenue.

This spread, once owned by John D. Rockefeller Jr, was choc-a-bloc with 18th and 19^th-century furniture, Chinese Export porcelain, dozens of Old Masters and a throng of … well, the Steinbergs had recently been crowned as leaders of Nouvelle Society by W Magazine, so just assume boldface names.

Clearly this was not a job offer. Just why did Steinberg wish I worked for him, asked?

“So that I could fire you,” he said with a jolly laugh.

A money joke. And why not? The Wow! factor at parties in the Early Billionaire Period into which we were lumbering tended to be provided by the production values, meaning the moolah and ingenuity of the host.

And if you had to pick the most examined party of the time it might well be the birthday party that L. Dennis Kozlowski, CEO of Tyco International, threw in June 11, 2001, on the island of Sardinia for his second wife, Karen.

This shindig has achieved such a stature not because it was pricey—which it was, at $2 million, double the tab for Saul Steinberg’s fiftieth—than because of the prominent part it would play in a Manhattan courtroom about eighteen months later.

Okay. Time to backtrack.

Dennis Kozlowski was born in Newark in 1946, went to the Catholic university, Seton Hall, and joined Tyco, a small New Hampshire company, in 1975.

He became CEO in 1992, and over the decade turned it into a $40-billion-a-year entity that operated in a hundred countries and continually surpassed Wall Street expectations.

But Kozlowski also wheeled in family members and began using Tyco like his private ATM. It happened that one of these uses to which Kozlowski was putting this dodgily acquired dough was the building of an art collection.

He was undone for evading New York’s 8.25% sales tax by the pretense that $14 million dollars-plus of pictures were Tyco-bound when they were intended for Park Avenue.

Kozlowski was indicted for this in June 2002, but the Feds were already looking further, deeper. In September, Kozlowski, his former CFO, and General Counsel were arrested. Dennis Kozlowski was released on payment of $100 million bail. Good morning, judge!

In the court proceedings various goodies Kozlowski had picked up came under scrutiny, including above-mentioned art, which included a Monet and a Renoir—$14 million wouldn’t get you a decent Warhol nowadays—and desirable properties in Nantucket and Boca Raton, but most famously the $6,000 shower curtains, which made the as-always inventive cover of the New York Post, with a headline reading OINK OINK, and—most puzzlingly, at least to me—his $15,000 “dog umbrella stands.”

The focus of attention though was the birthday party, which had been listed as a “shareholder meeting” when half of the cost was billed to Tyco. “It’s going to be a fun week,” Kozlowski told the 75 guests as they arrived. “Eating, drinking, all the things we’re best known for.”

This was recorded on a 21-minute excerpt from the four-hour camcorder party tape, which was played for jurors, and upon which Kozlowski also observed that the party would demonstrate another key Tyco characteristic, an aptitude for hard partying.

A press report of the trial notes that the tape also showed “five young women in scantiaphanous frocks cavorting around a swimming pool, half-naked male models posing in snapshots with female guests and a performance by music legend Jimmy Buffett.”

It emerged at the trial that the said music legend had been flown in with his group at a cost of a quarter mill. (By the way, does the verbal coinage “scantiaphonous” deserve to survive? Your commentary is welcome here.)

The State Supreme Court Justice Michael Obus, who was presiding, did instruct that some segments of the tape not be shown on the grounds that they were irrelevant to any criminal charges and that they might prejudice the jury.

So the jurors were spared such upsetting spectacles as two men armored as centurions in Imperial Rome carrying the birthday girl Karen into a faux arena, also a partygoer dropping his pants for the benefit of the camera, to say nothing of—an important production value, this—a sculpted ice replica of Michelangelo’s “David” peeing Stolichnaya vodka. That is why the Kozlowski do has become embedded in the historic record as the Tyco Roman Orgy.

A defense lawyer did admit that the shindig had been celebrating a birthday, but claimed that Tyco business had been transacted also. Nonetheless the jury found the defendants guilty and Kozlowski was sentenced to between 8 years 4 months and 25 years.

His appeal was turned down in 2007. He was released from Lincoln Center, a New York jail on January 17, 2014. “I was a piggy,” Kozlowski, now married to his third wife, Kimberley, told the New York Times after getting out. “But I’m not that person anymore.”