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Who

J. Christopher Flowers is the billionaire founder of J.C. Flowers & Co., a private equity firm that focuses on the financial services sector.

Backstory

The son of a Harvard Business School administrator, James Christopher Flowers was a math geek at his Massachusetts high school and a fan of the macabre, it seems: In lieu of a photo, his high school yearbook page featured an extensive passage from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Flowers majored in applied mathematics at Harvard (and was active with the Republican Club on campus) before joining Goldman Sachs in 1979. His intense analytical abilities helped him rise up quickly at the firm: He was named a partner in 1988, and quickly became a star banker in the financial institutions group and one of the most prominent experts on banking mergers and acquisitions.

During the 1990s, he worked on a series of mammoth deals, including the $61 billion merger of Nationsbank and BankAmerica (now Bank of America) and the $34 billion takeover of Wells Fargo by Norwest. After working throughout '98 on Goldman's plans to go public, Flowers stepped down just months before the IPO, reportedly unhappy that Goldman's chiefs, Jon Corzine and Hank Paulson, had decided against promoting him to the management committee. Today he operates the fund J.C. Flowers & Co., where he focuses exclusively on buyouts in the financial services sector.

Of note

Flowers' first big deal following his two-decade career at Goldman was the purchase of Long Term Credit Bank of Japan in 2000, a transaction he carried out with Tim Collins of Ripplewood Holdings. Bankrupt after collapsing under trillions of yen in nonperforming loans, Flowers and Collins cut jobs and fixed the broken bank's balance sheet, renaming it Shinsei (or "reborn") before taking it public in 2004 and raising $4.9 billion in an IPO, which reaped Flowers and his partners some $2.3 billion. In 2002, Flowers founded his eponymous fund, JC Flowers, and he's since engineered a handful of other big deals in the sector. With Steve Feinberg's Cerberus and Fortress Investment Group, in 2003 Flowers purchased Conseco Finance for $850 million. In 2005 he negotiated the purchase of NIB Capital, the Dutch investment bank, for $2.6 billion, and teamed up with the employees of Fox-Pitt, Kelton a year later to acquire the New York-based investment bank from Swiss Re.

But not every deal has been a winner. He aborted a deal to save Refco, the bankrupt futures brokerage, after a judge threw out a clause that assured him a lucrative break-up fee if his rescue bid failed. He's since faced another mess with Sallie Mae, the nation's largest student loan provider. In the spring of 2007, Flowers teamed up with JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America to buy Sallie Mae for $26 billion, the largest-ever LBO of a financial services company. But the ensuing credit market meltdown led Flowers and his partners to walk away from the deal. The exceedingly cautious Flowers has also abandoned a handful of other deals, including a bid for Northern Rock and a takeover of Friends Provident. He reportedly considered a bid for the investment bank Bear Stearns, but lost the deal to Jamie Dimon's JP Morgan instead. There is some good news, though. China's government investment fund, China Investment Corp., recently partnered with Flowers to start a new $4 billion fund.

Keeping score

Forbes estimates Flowers' net worth at $1.5 billion, which makes him the 321st richest man in America.

Campaign trail

Flowers is a committed Republican. He made a $25,000 contribution to the National Republican Committee in 2006 and backed Mitt Romney's ill-fated presidential campaign in 2008.

Off hours

You won't find Flowers mixing it up at society events. The brainy math whiz can often be found at home in the evenings playing chess. In fact he's such a chess fan, he reportedly has a board set up in his office, where he plays against himself.

Personal

Flowers is married to Dr. Mary White, an oncologist. The couple has two kids, Rebecca and Elizabeth. In October 2006, Flowers paid $53 million to purchase the Harkness House, a 20,100-square-foot townhouse on East 75th Street that was previously owned by financier/heir Jacqui Safra, the boyfriend of film producer Jean Doumanian. (Paula Del Nunzio brokered the deal.) But that's not the only high-priced real estate deal he's been involved with recently. In 2007, he sold a townhouse at 12 East 73rd Street, which he'd purchased from Aby Rosen for $19 million, to Andrew Farkas for $23 million. The Flowers' also have a weekend home in Maine.