There can be no capturing Bill Mahoney in a handful of paragraphs.
His journey in financial services took him through Lehman Brothers, Bankers Trust, and, most significantly, Bridgewater Associates, where he ran sales for the Westport-headquartered hedge fund until he retired in 2006. He retired as a young man, only 48 – even younger in body and spirit – free to focus on his beloved wife Alice and his two daughters Virginia and Jo-Jo, and a life of much deserved leisure in Watch Hill and Sydney. He died this week at home in New Canaan, only seven years later, of pancreatic cancer.
For those of us who knew him – and so many in the asset management industry did – it seems inconceivable that the door is not going to open again on Bill, with his ever-present impish grin. He was simply larger than life; he was the most amusing and charming man any of us ever met. He was generous to a fault, and completely without rancor of any kind. Life had treated him impossibly well, he often said, and the ups-and-downs that prove discomfiting to so many of us were simply occasions for him to demonstrate his singular style of sangfroid.
There is no one story that can ever capture how much larger than life Bill was. But how he earned his nickname, The Kaiser, after Keyser Söze, the central and all-powerful figure in the film The Usual Suspects, will have to do. A group of about 15 executives in the asset management business met before a 10-day fishing trip to Patagonia. Few of us knew Bill, who arrived at the airport limping and unassuming. Halfway through the trip, all of us, all with exceptionally healthy egos, had recognized that we had a true leader of men amongst us, and it was Bill. From then on, he was Kaiser.
Bill laughed more easily than any man I have ever known. He had more friends, really good friends, than any of us could even aspire to having. He was a mentor to countless young men and women who passed through Bridgewater. He was cool in a crisis, steadfast in times of trouble, the first to pick up the bill, the last to leave the party. He leaves our stage with footprints that will never fade.
I have the honor of saying he was my friend. That hundreds of others can rightly make the same claim makes it no less special.
–Charles Ruffel