Leo (A Life)

"My relationship with the Bronfmans has been compared to that of Tom Hagen's consiglière to the Corleone family in The Godfather - I was a surrogate son and adviser to the father and a friend and counsellor to the sons. I was brought into the family as an outsider and became privy to its secrets." Thus begins Leo Kolber's account of his remarkable relationship with the Bronfman family dynasty and the world of high-flying business.

For thirty years Kolber was chairman of Cemp Investments, the Bronfman trust, and Cadillac Fairview Corporation, one of the largest real estate firms in North America. He charts his directorship of Dupont and other companies in which the Bronfmans held an important interest and reveals the inner workings of mega deals, including the Bronfman acquisition of MGM in the 1960s. The memoir also offers a sobering look at Edgar Bronfman Jr's disasterous decision to sell Seagram's 25 percent interest in DuPont in order to buy MCA-Universal Studios, a deal that Kolber strongly opposed and which signalled the dissolution of a great business empire.

Leo offers an insider's look at the lives of business tycoons, famous politicians, and Hollywood moguls and stars such as Danny Kaye, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra.