Burrough, Bryan 1961–

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Burrough, Bryan 1961–

PERSONAL:

Born August 13, 1961, in Temple, TX; son of John and Mary Burrough; married Marla Dorman (an editor). Education: University of Missouri—Columbia, B.A., 1983.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Wall Street Journal, 200 Liberty St., New York, NY 10281-1099.

CAREER:

Journalist and author. Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, worked in Dallas, TX, bureau while in college, reporter assigned to Houston, TX, bureau, 1983-85, assigned to Pittsburgh, PA, bureau, 1986-87, reporter on mergers and acquisitions, 1987—. Has also worked as a reporter for the Columbia Missourian and Waco Tribune-Herald.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Missouri College Newspaper Award, 1981, for newswriting, and 1982, for editorial writing; John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism, 1987, for an article on a chronic embezzler; Gerald Loeb Award in Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism for deadline writing, with John Helyar, 1989, for a series of articles on the leveraged buy out of RJR Nabisco.

WRITINGS:

(With John Helyar) Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, Harper (New York, NY), 1990.

Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis aboard Mir, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1998.

Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York. Served as editor-in-chief of college student newspaper.

ADAPTATIONS:

Barbarians at the Gate was filmed by HBO and broadcast in 1993.

SIDELIGHTS:

Journalist Bryan Burrough has been reporting business news for the Wall Street Journal since his college days in the early 1980s. In 1987, he won the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism for his article on a chronic embezzler; then he teamed with fellow Wall Street Journal reporter John Helyar for a series of articles on the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, Inc. These articles garnered Burrough and Helyar a Gerald Loeb Award in Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 1989, and the pair decided to turn the articles into a book. The result, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list in 1990. Burrough followed up his first book success with a solo effort, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra. Five years later, he ventured beyond financial writing with Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis aboard Mir, which chronicled the troubled, three-year Russian-American partnership on the Mir space station.

Burrough was born in Temple, Texas, and went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri—Columbia. While there, he served as editor-in-chief of the university's student newspaper and won awards for his efforts both as a reporter and as an editorialist. Burrough also managed to get a reporting job at the local city newspaper while still a student, and he returned to Texas to do his internships at the Waco Tribune-Herald and the Dallas bureau of the Wall Street Journal. After graduation, he worked for the Wall Street Journal at various locations until finally being employed at its bureau in New York City.

When Burrough and Helyar turned their award-winning series of articles into Barbarians at the Gate in 1990, they covered the buyout in greater detail. The book, as Michael Massing explained in the Times Literary Supplement, "offers a blow-by-blow account of the ‘deal of the century’—the takeover battle for RJR Nabisco…. Burrough and … Helyar … nimbly recount the manic clash of wills and ambitions that, even by Wall Street standards, reached lunatic proportions. Admirably, the writers managed to interview all of the key players—executives, lawyers, bankers and brokers. And virtually everyone seems to have behaved badly." The takeover started in the mind of RJR Nabisco's own chief executive, F. Ross Johnson, who secretly began plotting a leveraged buyout in 1988. When negotiations with Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. ended, Kravis began making his own bids for the corporation, and a bidding war ensued, with RJR Nabisco finally going to Kravis's company.

Barbarians at the Gate has been widely praised by critics, though Nancy Goldstone, reviewing in Washington Post Book World, complained that the book is "too detailed, too all-encompassing to be comprehensible." Business Week contributor Judith H. Dobrzynski, however, asserted that the volume "becomes a page-turner. It puts readers smack in the middle of the action [and] sketches marvelous portraits of the major characters." A reviewer for the Economist noted that while "accounts of individual takeover battles … do not usually make good books," Burrough's and Helyar's "effort is a mostly honourable exception…. They tell a good story without getting bogged down in analysis." Patricia O'Toole, writing in the New York Times Book Review, was similarly impressed, noting that the authors "chronicle the fight with verve and relish, giving Barbarians at the Gate all the suspense of a first-rate thriller."

Harper, the publisher of Barbarians at the Gate, was pleased with the success of the book and offered Burrough one million dollars for his next book project. Burrough confided to John Greenwald in Time: "I was absolutely stunned. To me, the money is not a real thing. It's kind of like it's happening to someone else."

The project in question turned out to be Vendetta. It tells of a campaign set in motion by American Express executives to discredit Edmond J. Safra, a wealthy international banker who, in 1983, sold his Geneva-based Trade Development Bank to the American Express company. He took an executive position at American Express, but two years later he left the company. When he did so, American Express required him to pledge that he would not compete with them until 1988; before long, company officials were convinced that he had violated that promise. Detectives were hired to find proof of those suspicions, and to unearth any other unfavorable information about Safra. Rumors had circulated that Safra was involved in the Iran-contra scandal, and that drug dealers were laundering money in his banks. Although none of these stories proved to be true, a series of articles was published in certain publications in Italy, Peru, Mexico, and France alleging that Safra was guilty of these transgressions. The banker began a retaliatory campaign, which included hiring detectives to conduct counterespionage.

Vendetta met with favorable critical response. "This story has been told before," John Taylor declared in New York Times Book Review. "But Mr. Burrough … has amassed an immense amount of new material about the American Express operatives who spread the disin- formation, the reporters who published it and the private investigators who tracked it all down. It is by and large a seamy cast of characters." Leah Nathans Spiro wrote in Business Week: "What the author proves most successfully is that he can deliver another good read, a fly-on-the-wall account of the twists and turns in this bitter feud." One of the things Burrough had set out to prove in Vendetta, however, was the involvement of American Express chief executive James D. Robinson III, and, as Spiro noted, "Burrough convinces us only that Robinson probably knew." Concerning the issue, Spiro quoted Burrough, who asserted that Robinson either "knew and approved of what his aides were doing, or he knew he didn't want to know. It's hard to say which is worse." Robinson has denied knowledge of the smear campaign, and one of Burrough's sources, Harry Freeman, sued Burrough for libel, claiming, as Esther B. Fein reported in the New York Times, that Burrough "recklessly disregarded and distorted the truth in the [Wall Street Journal] article" that preceded Vendetta. But Burrough is unperturbed and has been the subject of lawsuits before for his reporting. He told Fein: "Big lawsuits and threats are very popular these days … but I'm not going to let that threat stand in the way of getting at the truth."

Burrough turned his reportorial skills from finance to space with Dragonfly. It is, according to Entertainment Weekly reviewer Will Lee, a "meticulous account" of the three-year team effort between Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts on the Soviet space station. "The choking, isolated intensity of the mission itself … is at once thrilling and terrifying…. Dragonfly is a fitting testament to those who endured, rather than enjoyed, their time on Mir." Mir was plagued with difficulties, and as Andrew Chaikin noted in a New York Times Book Review article, "when things go wrong in space, it makes for a good story." Mir's mishaps included a fire, leaks of toxic coolant, and a collision with an unmanned supply ship. "In Dragonfly we experience the emergencies through the eyes of the Russian and American astronauts themselves," confided Chaikin. "Here Burrough is at his best: the heart-stopping moments come through with immediacy. So much goes wrong … that by the time we get to the collision, we feel almost as wrung out as the hapless crew does."

In Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, Burrough tells the story of a number of the most notorious gangsters of the depression era, focusing on a two-year period that featured the likes of John Dillinger, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, and Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd. The availability of cars and submachine guns made these robbers mobile and swift. In addition, the depression era itself was a time when many people lived in their cars and wandered the country aimlessly in search of employment or any kind of break, which made it easier for the outlaws to blend in and disappear. What makes these gangsters stand out in particular was the freeness of their attitudes and the quasi-glamorous life they represented in a desperate time. Burrough looks at what inspired these people to such desperate measures, and how the government of the United States reacted to the sudden newfangled crime spree, first panicking, and then creating a special crime-fighting division to tackle the issue, which eventually became the FBI. Mark Costello, in a review for the New York Times Online Web site, dubbed the work "excellent true crime with all the strengths and limitations this implies. Burrough's stirring book goes easy on the Ph.D. conclusions." A contributor for Kirkus Reviews found the book "iconoclastic and fascinating. A genuine treat for true-crime buffs, and for anyone interested in the New Deal era."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bestsellers 90, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990, pp. 7-9.

Burrough, Bryan, Vendetta: American Express and the Smearing of Edmond Safra, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Business Week, January 29, 1990, Judith H. Dobrzynski, review of Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco, p. 16; June 1, 1992, Leah Nathans Spiro, review of Vendetta, p. 14.

Economist, January 20, 1990, review of Barbarians at the Gate, p. 102.

Entertainment Weekly, November 27, 1998, Will Lee, review of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis aboard Mir, p. 78.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2004, review of Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34, p. 479.

New York Times, May 4, 1992, Esther B. Fein, review of Vendetta.

New York Times Book Review, January 21, 1990, Patricia O'Toole, review of Barbarians at the Gate, p. 7; June 21, 1992, John Taylor, review of Vendetta, p. 29; February 14, 1999, Andrew Chaikin, review of Dragonfly, p. 28.

Time, October 22, 1990, John Greenwald, interview with Bryan Burrough, p. 50.

Times Literary Supplement, August 10, 1990, Michael Massing, review of Barbarians at the Gate, p. 846.

Washington Post Book World, January 14, 1990, Nancy Goldstone, review of Barbarians at the Gate.