Who

Gutfreund is the former Wall Street titan who served as CEO of Salomon Brothers in the 1980s. His wife is socialite Susan Gutfreund.

Backstory

Raised in Scarsdale, where his father owned a meat-trucking business, Gutfreund spent his entire career at Salomon Brothers: He joined the firm in 1953, following college and a tour of duty in Korea. (He landed the job thanks to his dad, who occasionally golfed with Billy Salomon.) Rising through Salamon's municipal securities business, Gutfreund was named a partner in 1963 and succeeded Salomon himself as senior partner in 1978. Three years later, Gutfreund sold the partnership to commodities firm Philipp Brothers and took control of the combined company, turning it into one of the most formidable banking interests on Wall Street during the 1980s.

Crowned as the "King of Wall Street" on the cover of Fortune in 1985, Gutfreund experienced some drama a few years later when Ron Perelman staged an attempt to take over the company. (Gutfreund's white knight during the ordeal was Warren Buffet.) But nothing would compare to the summer of 1991, when the firm got caught up in a bond trading scandal. As part of a settlement, Gutfreund was fined $100,000 and banned for life from running a brokerage firm, a crushing downfall for a man who had once been one of the city's most powerful financiers. Since then Gutfreund has tended to his own investments and served on various boards. One thing he hasn't gotten around to is paying that $100,000 fine.

Currently

Gutfreund returned to Wall Street in 2002, albeit on a smaller scale. He took a job as senior advisor to the small investment bank C.E. Unterberg Towbin. It seems his brash '80s style didn't go over so well. In 2006, Gutfreund was accused of sexually harassing an assistant at the firm

For the record

Gutfreund's profane quips, fat cigars, and "dour, grumpy, and charmless" demeanor was memorably immortalized in Michael Lewis's Liars' Poker. John and Susan Gutfreund are also widely believed to have been the models for the Bavardages, the Wall Street society couple in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Personal

Gutfreund married his first wife, Joyce Low, in 1958. They had three young sons before divorcing in the late 1970s. In 1981, he married Susan Penn, a former beauty queen and Pan Am flight attendant 16 years his junior. The couple quickly established themselves as poster children for the obscene excess that defined the era. Susan—who was once described by a reporter as the woman who "invented the 1980s practice of taking the limo to gym class"—spent a record sum designing their Fifth Avenue apartment. (Among her extravagances, she had a refrigeration system installed in the bathroom to keep her perfume chilled.) Susan and John have one son together, John Peter ("JP") Gutfreund, an aspiring banker/scenester who launched a line of tequila in 2008.

Habitat

The Gutfreunds live at 834 Fifth Avenue, the same building that's home to Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Deng, Woody Johnson, and Carroll Petrie. Their 16-room, 12,000-square-foot apartment, designed by Henri Samuel, features their extensive collection of impressionist art, including one of Monet's water lilies which hangs in the foyer. They also have a home in Paris, where Mrs. Gutfreund reportedly spent $1 million constructing a glitzy underground garage.

True story

It was Gutfreund who fired Michael Bloomberg from Salomon Brothers in 1981. Bloomberg started Bloomberg L.P., the media company that would make him billions, the following day.