A top Wall Street lawyer, he worked on some of the biggest corporate mergers in history, including KKR’s takeover of Nabisco in 1989. He also served in the Carter administration and in city government.
Richard Beattie, a mergers lawyer who helped pioneer private equity takeovers — work that was immortalized in the much-lauded book “Barbarians at the Gate” — and who served in Washington and New York City government, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 86.
His daughter Lisa Beattie Frelinghuysen said the cause was cancer.
Over nearly six decades at the white-shoe New York firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, the soft-spoken Mr. Beattie — Dick, as he was widely known — became one of Wall Street’s most-sought corporate advisers.
He helped put together AOL’s $165 billion takeover of Time Warner in 2001 and JPMorgan Chase’s $58 billion acquisition of Bank One in 2004, and advised the board of the insurer American International Group on its $85 billion federal bailout during the 2008 financial crisis.
He went on to serve as Simpson Thacher’s chairman from 1991 to 2004 and as senior chairman until his death.
But his earliest and most enduring claim to fame was in the late 1960s, when he presciently recognized that private equity firms — corporate takeover artists who used debt to buy companies — would become a major force on Wall Street.
As a young associate, Mr. Beattie was introduced to Henry R. Kravis, who would go on to be one of the top names in leveraged buyouts. Mr. Beattie became Mr. Kravis’s go-to counsel on ever-larger takeovers, culminating in the $25 billion takeover of RJR Nabisco, completed in 1989, that was chronicled by the journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the book “Barbarians at the Gate,” published that year. For a decade, the transaction held the record as the biggest leveraged buyout.