Saul Steinberg is a 30-year-old wonder who founded Leasco, a pioneer computer-leasing company, two years after graduating from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce in 1959. Since then, by extending his successful leasing activities into other areas and adding insurance and data-processing operations, he has built the company into a business with assets of $400 million. When Steinberg, a tall and portly man, announced last summer that he intended to make a $60 million bid for the London scientific publishing house of Pergamon Press Ltd., Britons viewed him as a brash Yankee millionaire—one of those action sculptors who hammer out free-form conglomerates. This impression was fortified by Leasco's on-again, off-again tactics. After withdrawing the offer in a falling-out with Pergamon's chairman, Robert Maxwell, with whom he had originally got on well, Steinberg lined up enough support from British institutional investors to oust Maxwell at a stormy meeting two weeks ago.
Steinberg wanted Pergamon for the 135 scientific journals that it publishes —solid assets for a Leasco data bank. "Over the years you build up an immense file of information," he says. "We can provide instant retrieval for that information." Presumably, Steinberg would like to sell this information directly to companies, governments and educational institutions in the U.S. and abroad.
During the takeover struggle, Steinberg remained in the background while the British Rothschilds, who acted as Leasco's advisers in the bid, rounded up the crucial 15% of Pergamon's stock that is controlled by staid bankers in London's City. That stock, added to Leasco's 38% holding in the company, put Steinberg over the top.
Help from Raquel. It would please Steinberg if the U.S. financial community would also accept him as the sobersided entrepreneur that he believes himself to be. He started his company with $25,000 borrowed from his father, bought IBM computers and leased them to users at rates below IBM's own rental charges. He could undercut IBM's prices because he was willing to risk depreciating the computers over eight instead of four years, gambling successfully on a longer useful life of the equipment. From this base he moved into related fields, buying a container-leasing company and developing software, data and time-sharing operations.
In 1968, Leasco acquired Philadelphia's Reliance Insurance Co., an old-line company with useful cash assets. This deal, accomplished through a stock swap, sparked an inquiry by Brooklyn Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler, who has serious doubts about conglomerates' taking over insurance companies and using their funds for expansion. Among the details turned up in hearings last week was that, in preparing the bid, Leasco executives used the code name "Raquel" for Reliance to conceal the identity of the target from even Leasco's own employees.