Paul Bilzerian

Paul Alec Bilzerian (Փօլ Պիլզերեան, born 1950) is an American businessman and corporate takeover specialist.

Bilzerian was born in Miami, Florida but grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts in an Armenian American family.

His father, a civil servant, and his mother later divorced, leading to troubled teenage years for Bilzerian; he would later describe himself as a "juvenile delinquent".

Called into the principal's office of his high school one day in 1968 for violating the dress code by wearing blue jeans, Bilzerian responded by dropping out of school.

One of Bilzerian's first business deals was an investment in the 1970s in a Tampa Bay-area radio station, WPLP, which he made with two Army colleagues from the Vietnam War who had experience in the broadcasting industry.

However, in a dispute over control, Bilzerian left in the late 1970s to join his father-in-law in the real estate business.

After Bilzerian left the station its performance deteriorated which led to its bankruptcy and a lawsuit by Bilzerian against his former partners.

Bilzerian's real estate investments were highly successful and led to the beginning of his fortune.

However, after serving in the Vietnam War and earning a Vietnamese Gallantry Cross, Bronze Star Medal, and Army Commendation Medal, he went to college and earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Political Science and graduated With Distinction from Stanford University in 1975.

Bilzerian entered Harvard Business School that same year.

He was unsure about his choice to attend, having passed on offers of admissions to several law schools to enroll at HBS.

After his graduation, Bilzerian married Stanford classmate Terri L. Steffen in 1978, and moved with her to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Bilzerian has two sons, Adam and Dan Bilzerian.

Both Adam and Dan went on to careers as professional poker players.

In 1984, he moved to Sacramento, California where his father-in-law and another business associate lived.

While living in Sacramento, in 1985 Bilzerian embarked on his first two high-profile takeover attempts, one of New York clothing manufacturer Cluett Peabody & Company, and the other of Pittsburgh construction company H. H. Robertson.

After Bilzerian purchased a large stake and raised his bid for the remaining 76% of Cluett Peabody in October, Cluett Peabody's board of directors adopted poison pill provisions, earning them public criticism from Bilzerian.

Cluett Peabody eventually accepted a competing merger offer by WestPoint Pepperell (now WestPoint Home) for $41 per share (in cash or equivalent value of WestPoint Pepperell common stock); Bilzerian and his fellow investors agreed separately to sell their stake to WestPoint Pepperell for $40 per share plus reimbursement of $7.5 million in expenses.

Bilzerian moved back to Florida in 1986.

That July he and fellow investors William and Earle I. Mack (sons of New Jersey real estate developer H. Bert Mack) launched a takeover bid against the Hammermill Paper Company, purchasing about 3.3 million Hammermill shares at an average price of roughly $47 per share, and then offering $900 million ($52 per share) to purchase the remainder of the company.

Bilzerian's offer was ultimately rejected when Hammermill sold out to International Paper instead at $64.50 per share, but Bilzerian and his fellow investors still made a profit of more than $60 million from the deal.

In 1986, the government stumbled onto an insider trading scheme whereby a Drexel Burnham investment banker named Dennis Levine was exchanging inside information for suitcases of cash from Ivan Boesky.

This led to an indictment of Boyd Jefferies, the Owner & Chairman of Jefferies & Company.

Jefferies cut a deal to testify against three individuals in the corporate and investment banking community, including Bilzerian.

The SEC then went after Bilzerian – focusing its investigation on whether he had failed to timely make two Schedule 13(d) filings and whether he was required to disclose investors in his partnerships.

In 1987, Bilzerian began a takeover of defense electronics manufacturer Singer Corporation.

In October 1987, it came to light that a group of investors led by Bilzerian had purchased 2.1 million Singer shares in the preceding two months.

Singer seemed an unlikely target for a takeover; early reports cast doubt on the idea that the government would permit a hostile takeover of a defense contractor, and the company had already moved its headquarters from Connecticut to takeover-hostile New Jersey in an attempt to fend off a previous takeover by T. Boone Pickens.

But the United States government chose to grandfather Bilzerian's hostile bid, preventing the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987 from disallowing sales of assets in certain acquired businesses to be treated as capital gains for tax purposes.

In January 1988, Pickens provided $150 million in financing which helped Bilzerian acquire Singer.

Singer chairman Joseph B. Flavin had died in early October, leaving the company unprepared for Bilzerian's move.

The Black Monday crash less than two weeks later spooked competing investors.

In May 1988, the SEC began a probe against Edward J. DeBartolo, Sr. to determine whether DeBartolo had illegally aided Bilzerian's hostile takeover attempts through "stock parking", in which one party purchases shares in coordination with another to keep legal ownership separated and avoid either party's holdings exceeding disclosure thresholds.

Then, in December 1988 Rudy Giuliani announced that Bilzerian had been indicted in Manhattan by a federal grand jury for Schedule 13(d) disclosure violations with respect to Cluett Peabody and Hammermill Paper Company and general claims regarding failed takeovers of H. H. Robinson and Armco.

Bilzerian claims he was "the first person ever to be indicted for 13d disclosure violations as the hundreds of previous cases were civil and resolved with consent decrees and without fines or penalties."

In January 1989, Bilzerian pleaded not guilty to the charges amid growing public controversy and demanded a speedy trial to clear his name.

There were, broadly speaking, two different camps of opinion on Bilzerian's actions.

In June 2014, Bloomberg News reported that Paul Bilzerian had become one of the licensed service providers who processed applications for the same Saint Kitts and Nevis citizenship-by-investment program which his son had used.

The report added that Bilzerian had gone on to process a citizenship-by-investment application for Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, and that the two men had co-launched a website through which customers could use Bitcoins to pay for the fees and the real estate purchase in the citizenship-by-investment program.

The government of Saint Kitts and Nevis responded in a statement the following week that Bitcoin was not an acceptable payment method for participation in the program.