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In the past 30 years, Vail has been bought and sold as often as any ski resort.
It is, like it or not, an asset.
It's big and beautiful, but its success is measured in numbers, such as its $27 million annual income from operations, or the record 2 million-skier days it tallied last season. If it weren't putting up profitable numbers, it would be a liability and people would still be herding sheep on those mountainsides.
These days, Vail is owned by a couple of guys from New York City who carry some public relations baggage that they'd rather leave at the "unclaimed luggage" counter in the train station of life. They came to own it because they sit at the top of a world where money is made to perform. These guys make money sing and dance like the Temptations in government surplus suits.
In the final analysis, Leon Black and Craig Cogut own Vail Associates because they're better at what they do than almost anybody alive.
But who are these guys?
Black and Cogut are a couple of down-to-earth guys who happen to be in an intergalactic tax bracket.
They're both Ivy Leaguers of the around-40 set, both with wives who they insist are too good for them, and kids who come home with the obligatory number of skinned knees, elbows and other crises. Cogut lives and works in Westchester, Conn., just outside New York City. Black lives in the city, and works out of the firm's Manhattan office in the Credit Lyonnaise building on the Avenue of the Americas. They've seen some good deals done badly and some bad deals go well. They've become rich by picking up the pieces of companies left in ruins by people who used junk bonds incorrectly to buy things they couldn't afford.
Black, Cogut, Mark Rowan, Rob Katz and attorney Bruce Spector and a cast of several are the partners in Apollo Partners, Black and Cogut's investment firm formed after Drexel, Burnham, Lambert came crashing down. Apollo runs a holding company for businesses with an estimated value of more than $8 billion. Among them is Vail Associates. It was Spector, one of the foremost bankruptcy attorneys in the business, who was joined by Rowan...