Background
Eli Black was born Elihu Menashe Blachowitz in 1922 in Poland. He immigrated to the United States as a child.
Eli Black was born Elihu Menashe Blachowitz in 1922 in Poland. He immigrated to the United States as a child.
Eli graduated from Yeshiva University in 1940. Later he also received training to be an Orthodox Jewish rabbi.
Black served for four years as rabbi of a congregation in Woodmere, New York. Black then left the religious life for one in business. His initial position in the business world was at Lehman Brothers. After a few years he joined American Securities Corporation, where he handled financing of several deals, one of which was for American Seal-Kap, a $5 million, Long Island-based operation that he considered "a small company with huge problems. " American Seal-Kap was the leading manufacturer of seals for milk bottles at a time when that container was being phased out. In 1954, Black joined American Seal-Kap as its chairman and chief executive officer. Immediately he started restructuring the company, selling off unprofitable and soon-to-be-obsolete lines of business and purchasing promising properties. In 1965, he renamed the company AMK, and two years later purchased John Morrell and Company, which was twenty times its size, creating an $840 million giant.
In 1970, Black merged his firm with United Fruit, one of the nation's best-known companies and the largest single firm in the banana business. Its prime product was Chiquita bananas, but it also had oil palm plantations and lettuce and melon farms. The company was renamed United Brands. United Fruit generated a substantial cash flow, which Black put to work in additional investments: A&W (root beer and drive-in restaurants), which Black tried to expand into fast foods, and Baskin-Robbins, a highly successful ice cream producer. Black also acted to mend United Fruit's reputation. He erected modest but clean houses for banana plantation workers and provided them with schools and hospitals at which they received free education and medical care. American supervisors were replaced by natives. Wages and benefits were increased.
United's Inter-Harvest lettuce subsidiary was one of the first to sign a labor agreement with the United Farm Workers (1970). Although large and dominant in some of its product areas, United Brands ran into trouble from the start. In 1973, the banana countries in Central America formed the Union of Banana Exporting Countries and demanded a $1 tax on each forty-pound box of bananas. The plan failed, but in 1974 Honduras passed a fifty-cents-per-box tax, which it subsequently reduced to twenty-five cents. In September 1974, Hurricane Fifi ravaged more than half the company's Honduras plantations, resulting in a $20 million loss. Simultaneously Panama enacted an export tax on bananas that cost an additional $11 million. John Morrell turned in a bad year, losing $6 million. A cash crunch obliged the company to omit dividends on its preferred stock, and it attempted to sell subsidiaries to raise needed funds.
Even before the hurricane struck, Black was selling off assets. In 1973, he sold United Brands' 83-percent share in Baskin-Robbins to J. Lyons (U. K. ) for $37. 6 million. In early 1974, its money-losing Revere (Massachussets) sugar refinery was sold to Sucrest, a transaction on which United Brands took an $8. 2 million loss. In early 1975, Black sold United Brands' majority ownership of Foster Grant, a profitable manufacturer of plastics and sunglasses, to West Germany's Hoechst AG for $70 million. Part of the reason for Black's failure was his unfamiliarity with the business. He recognized this, and in 1974 asked Edward Gelsthorpe, a former Gillette president, to assist him. In November 1974, Gelsthorpe became executive vice-president and chief operating officer. Gelsthorpe believed United's problems could not be solved while Black was at the helm, and a few months later he attempted to organize other executives in a move to replace Black.
On February 3, 1975, Black broke open one of the windows in his office on the forty-fourth floor of New York's Pan Am Building and leaped to his death. For the next few days newspaper stories attributed his action to overwork and the pressures of taking United Brands out of debt. Then the Securities and Exchange Commission learned that Black had authorized a $1. 25 million bribe of Honduran government officials to obtain a reduction in the country's banana tax, which was to have been followed by an additional $1. 25 million. Another $750, 000 in bribes was later uncovered, these to Italian officials.
Eli Black was a well-known founder of the billion‐dollar United Brands Company, which had vast interests in bananas, meatpacking and other enterprises. Unfortunately his company had incurred heavy losses in Central Amencan banana plantations from Hurricane Fifi and undergone burdens with export taxes on bananas imposed by Central American republics, which led to selling off assets.
Black married Shirley Lubell in 1946; they had two children.
