[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 14956-14957]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     IN MEMORY OF RICHARD RAINWATER

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. JOE WILSON

                           of south carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, September 28, 2015

  Mr. WILSON of South Carolina. Mr. Speaker, Richard Rainwater sadly 
passed away on

[[Page 14957]]

Sunday, September 27, 2015, at his home in Fort Worth, Texas. The 
following obituary by Miguel Bustillo, Gregory Zuckerman and Rob 
Copeland was published in The Wall Street Journal on September 27, 
2015. The citizens of South Carolina especially appreciate the 
Rainwater and Moore families for their phenomenal generosity promoting 
business education at the University of South Carolina.

       Long before Wall Street was littered with swaggering hedge-
     fund billionaires, Richard Rainwater earned a Texas-size 
     reputation as an investor with an eye on the big score.
       He helped install Michael Eisner as Walt Disney Co. chief 
     executive, steered George W. Bush to buy a stake in Major 
     League Baseball's Texas Rangers and helped multiply the Bass 
     family fortune one-hundred-fold before building a billion-
     dollar one of his own.
       ``My brother said, `Don't be mediocre at anything; be 
     remarkable at something,''' Mr. Rainwater recalled in 2010 in 
     a speech at Stanford University.
       Mr. Rainwater died on Sunday morning at his home in Fort 
     Worth, Texas, according to the Rainwater Charitable 
     Foundation and his family. He had been suffering from 
     complications of a rare brain disease. He was 71 years old.
       Born to a middle-class family, Mr. Rainwater parlayed a 
     gift for mathematics and a gregarious personality into a more 
     than $2 billion fortune as a financial adviser and wheeler-
     dealer whose underlings went on to become chief executives, 
     governors and hedge-fund tycoons.
       ``He was a laid back guy who liked to invest but he was not 
     a fan of fancy dinners or some of the other things that went 
     with it,'' his son, Todd, said on Sunday. ``What he was best 
     at is being a talent scout. He would find a troubled 
     business, find the best person to run it, the Michael Jordan 
     of that industry, and inevitably that person would turn the 
     business around''.
       A native of Fort Worth, Mr. Rainwater attended the Stanford 
     Graduate School of Business on scholarship, where he met Sid 
     Bass, who hired him to serve as chief investment adviser for 
     the Bass brothers, who were also from Fort Worth.
       He began working in 1970 for the Bass family, which had 
     inherited an oil fortune from Texas wildcatter Sid Williams 
     Richardson, and helped them to dramatically increase their 
     wealth over the next decade and a half through a dizzying 
     succession of deals.
       Perhaps the most famous deal was the Bass family's rescue 
     of then-struggling Disney in 1984 with a nearly $500 million 
     investment to ward off a potential hostile takeover bid by 
     financier Saul Steinberg. Mr. Rainwater helped handpick a new 
     management team for Disney led by Mr. Eisner that brought the 
     studio back to prominence--and made the Bass brothers 
     billions.
       ``Richard was one of best deal guys who ever lived,'' said 
     David Bonderman, who met Mr. Rainwater while working for 
     Robert Bass and later founded private-equity giant TPG. ``He 
     was always confident and idiosyncratic, and generally was 
     right.''
       Mr. Rainwater struck out on his own in the late 1980s, 
     continuing his penchant for spotting distressed assets and 
     market quirks that made for bold investment opportunities 
     through his private-equity firm, Rainwater Inc. His winning 
     moves included buying more than 15 million square feet of 
     downtown Houston real estate during a slump in the mid-1990s; 
     many of the properties later sold for two or three times his 
     purchase price.
       In addition to mastering the art of the deal, Mr. Rainwater 
     became known for his extraordinary ability to spot and 
     cultivate young talent during the 1980s and early 1990s. His 
     Fort Worth offices became a salon of sorts for ambitious 
     young financiers.
       Among those he encouraged was Edward S. Lampert, who began 
     his ESL Investments Inc. hedge fund in the office. Down the 
     hall at the time was Rick Scott, who became the CEO of the 
     Columbia/HCA hospital chain and is now governor of Florida.
       ``He believed in [young people] and made them believe in 
     themselves,'' said Mr. Lampert, who later made a fortune for 
     investors buying the debt of Kmart and steering the troubled 
     retailer out of bankruptcy.
       Mr. Rainwater's unorthodox personal style--he would often 
     stand on his desk to hammer home a point--made an impression 
     on his proteges, as did his lack of pretense. Mr. Bonderman 
     recalled how Mr. Rainwater once traveled to a city to cut a 
     deal without packing a suitcase; the billionaire brought a 
     change of clothes in a paper bag.
       ``He couldn't be bothered, he was a total character,'' Mr. 
     Bonderman said. ``It was all about making lot of money and 
     having fun doing it.''
       Mr. Rainwater, who had three children with his first wife, 
     Karen, married Darla Moore, a prominent bankruptcy banker, in 
     1991.
       Ms. Moore became CEO of Rainwater Inc. in 1994 and brought 
     a harder edge to some of the firm's dealings that generated 
     controversy, notably when it forced oilman T. Boone Pickens 
     to leave the company he founded, Mesa Petroleum, in 1996.
       Mr. Rainwater had slowed his investment activity, playing 
     golf and traveling with his wife, when he began experiencing 
     falls and mood changes. He slowly withdrew from public life 
     as the symptoms of progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare 
     brain disease with no known cure, became more pronounced and 
     he lost his ability to speak clearly. Doctors warned his 
     friends and family that he would almost certainly die from 
     the disease.
       Undeterred, Mr. Rainwater's family tackled the problem 
     through an investment, creating the Tau Consortium, a group 
     of international scientists, which is trying to understand 
     and ultimately treat degenerative brain diseases such as the 
     one that struck Mr. Rainwater. The Tau Consortium has spent a 
     total of more than $50 million trying to find a solution to 
     the disease, a cure that may also assist people with a more 
     common illness: Alzheimer's disease, Todd Rainwater said 
     Sunday.
       ``Just like my father invested in business, we went about 
     assembling the top team possible to work on this,'' he said. 
     ``I do have faith that ultimately, we will be able to make a 
     difference.''

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