Back in the late ’90s, when I was working in Merrill Lynch’s M&A group, our leader Jack Levy and I used to traipse up to Ronald Perelman’s triple-wide, five-story palazzo on East 62nd Street, between Madison and Park, from the bank’s headquarters downtown at the World Financial Plaza. The goal of our visits was to bat around acquisition ideas with the billionaire, for a time the richest man in the United States, and his impressive crew of dealmakers at his holdco, MacAndrews & Forbes, which owned the stakes in an industrial empire that once included Revlon, Panavision, and the company that made the Humvee, among many others.