Frederick Ross Johnson

F. Ross Johnson, who as chief executive of RJR Nabisco instigated an era-defining takeover struggle that was chronicled in film and a best-selling book and made him a symbol of corporate greed, died on Thursday December 29 2016 at his home in Jupiter, Fla. He was 85. Frederick Ross Johnson was born on Dec. 13, 1931, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the only child of a hardware salesman and a bookkeeper. He was entrepreneurial as a child — he rented his comic book collection to friends and at 7 won a bicycle for selling magazine subscriptions — but was indifferent as a student. Still, he managed to graduate from the University of Manitoba with a degree in commerce. His career started slowly, first with a job as an accountant for General Electric in Montreal and then with a sales position in Toronto, where he took friends to what he called “the good parties” while deploying expense budgets to entertain customers extravagantly. But he had made little corporate headway by age 32, and when he failed to get a transfer to the United States, he left G.E. for T. Eaton, a venerable Canadian department store chain. From there, he landed the No. 2 job at General Steel Works, a maker of small appliances. His breakthrough came when he was presented with the chance to lead the Montreal-based Canadian subsidiary of Standard Brands, a stodgy operation that included Chase & Sanborn coffee. He fired 21 of the top 23 executives in his first year and led a revival that won him a promotion to lead the company’s international operations in New York. The board made him president before long and then, in a 1976 coup, chief executive. Mr. Johnson promptly transformed Standard Brands management, lavishing on his executives industry-topping salaries, country-club memberships, apartments and a private box at Madison Square Garden. The team was a raucous, profane, fraternity-like group that would go out after business hours to dine and drink, repairing afterward to a new company-owned apartment. In 1981, a restive Mr. Johnson negotiated a $1.9 billion stock swap with the packaged-food juggernaut Nabisco, maker of Oreo cookies and Ritz crackers. Mr. Johnson, shaggy-haired and fond of gold necklaces and open-collar shirts, promptly slashed the corporate staff by two-thirds and, to vitriolic backlash, moved the headquarters to Atlanta, from Winston-Salem, N.C., where it had been rooted for more than a century. He is survived by his wife, Susan; two sons, Neil and Bruce; and two granddaughters.