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Investment bankers have brought Chicago Corp. back to life in response to forecasts that the Midwest in general, and the Windy City in particular, will be a good source of deals involving middle-market companies.
The original Chicago Corp., which took Waste Management public, was co-founded in 1965 by Bob Podesta, who left four years later to become assistant secretary of the Commerce Department in the Nixon administration.
Now the new version's employees, including veterans of the old Chicago Corp. and a number of defectors from Focus LLC, plan to build a full-service investment bank with research, sales and trading to serve institutional investors. They say they can establish a foothold in the market for advising companies worth $100 million or less, because dealmakers at many large firms do not focus on middle-market businesses.
Fred Floberg, a managing director and co-founder of the new Chicago Corp. sums up the firm's mandate thusly: "Providing the kind of advice that [smaller] companies are entitled to that they can't get simply because of their size."
They are also using their Chicago address as a selling point for clients in the Midwest.
Originally, Chicago Corp. operated for just over three decades and underwrote municipal bonds, corporate bonds and initial public offerings until ABN Amro bought it in 1997. The Dutch banking giant moved the firm to New York...