Wasserstein Perella & Co.
Wasserstein Perella & Co. was a boutique investment bank founded in 1988 in New York by Bruce Wasserstein, Joseph R. Perella, Bill Lambert, and Charles Ward, former First Boston bankers. It was sold to Dresdner Bank in 2000 for about $1.4 billion in stock, with the private equity arm left to be sold to Wasserstein shareholders.
Perella, known as one of the industry’s sharpest recruiters, helped build a large network of bankers and executives who spread through Wall Street. Perella left the firm in 1993 for Morgan Stanley, while Wasserstein stayed until the Dresdner takeover and then joined Lazard in 2002, passing away in 2009. The Dresdner Bank deal later led to the unit being renamed Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and the Wasserstein name was dropped in 2006.
In 2000, Wasserstein Perella ranked fifth in the U.S. for mergers and acquisitions advisory. The firm advised on major deals including AXA Financial’s $11.5 billion sale of Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette to Credit Suisse First Boston, Philip Morris’s $14.9 billion acquisition of Nabisco, Time Warner’s $128 billion merger with AOL, the $25 billion merger of Swiss Bank Corp and UBS, and the $10 billion merger of Morgan Stanley & Co. and Dean Witter Discover & Co.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 00:50 (CET).