re: #56 Killgore Trout

…and even with the renegotiated salaries the company couldn’t stay afloat with mounting debt and competition from larger companies like Staples. They restructured and are part of a larger parent company today. Still no definitive word on their employee count today. Somewhere between 1,000 and 5,000.

articles.latimes.com

When Ampad permanently shut the Marion plant several months later, Romney, then back at Bain Capital, expressed his regrets in a letter to Johnson. Romney wrote that he had tried to end the strike “privately without fanfare. It included communicating my strong personal desire that the strike be settled and that the plant remain open, offering my ideas for a possible settlement, and relaying the sentiments of the workers I met with in Boston.”

That’s not how Wolpow, the former managing director at Bain Capital, remembers Romney’s role, however. Wolpow had been installed on Ampad’s board of directors as part of the leveraged buyout, and he reported directly to Romney before and after the Senate race.

“He was in charge,” recalled Wolpow, now co-director of the Audax Group, another private equity group. “He could have ordered me to settle with the union. He didn’t order me to do that. He let me make decisions that would maximize the value of the investment. That was the right business decision as CEO of Bain Capital. But let’s not pretend it was something else.”