Howard Gittis, 73, Businessman, Perelman Adviser
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Howard Gittis, the vice chairman of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings Inc. and a longtime adviser to M&F’s major shareholder, Ronald Perelman, died Sunday at 73.
The one-time lawyer for a former mayor of Philadelphia, Frank Rizzo, Gittis was chairman of the board of trustees of Temple University before coming to work at M&F in 1985. Mr. Perelman is chairman of M&F, a privately held company with investments in consumer and entertainment companies. Gittis supervised the firm’s legal, financial, and administrative affairs, including its mergers in the last two years with the check-making companies Clarke American and John H. Garland Co.
“Howard was my closest friend and most trusted adviser,” Mr. Perelman said in a statement.
Gittis was also a director at Revlon and REV Holdings Inc., and at Jones Apparel Group, where according to press reports he led the move to divest Barneys New York, the storied retailer.
Born February 16, 1934, in Philadelphia, Gittis got his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1958. He joined the Philadelphia law firm Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen and was made partner in 1965. Gittis became a close adviser to Rizzo, and in 1975 helped the mayor overcome a threatened recall election. In 1985, the year he joined M&F, the National Law Journal listed Gittis among the top 100 attorneys in America.
Gittis and Mr. Perelman became acquainted when the latter was running his father’s metal-fabricating firm in the early 1970s and Gittis did some tax work for him. By the 1980s the two were inseparable, and Mr. Perelman told the Wall Street Journal that he “couldn’t be without Howard.” The two were involved in numerous business deals over the years as the Revlon tycoon built a business empire.
Normally more circumspect than his boss, Gittis’s name surfaced in news reports in 2006 when it turned out that his longtime assistant had been systematically embezzling from him for years, to the tune of $2 million. The woman was convicted and sentenced to three to nine years in prison.
In recent years he was heavily involved in both Democratic and Republican fund raising, and he served as New York finance chairman for Senator McCain’s current presidential bid.
