Bonaparte's Retreat

Eddy Gilbert was always fond of telling people what great things he could do, and sometimes he did them. As a brash, icy-eyed youngster of 24. he decided he wanted control of Memphis' E.L. Bruce Co., a leading manufacturer of hardwood products. Ten years later, in 1958, he won control of the company after a go-for-broke battle that established him as one of Wall Street's boy wonders. Eddy, who once showed up at a costume party as Napoleon, assured friends that this was only the beginning. He intended, he said, to use Bruce "as a vehicle to build an empire.''

Last week the Napoleonic empire of Edward Mortimer Gilbert, 38, abruptly collapsed. Summoning a quartet of Bruce directors from Memphis to Manhattan. Gilbert admitted to them that he had written $1,953,000 in company checks for his personal use and submitted his resignation as president of the company. That evening, while the directors brooded about what action to take, Gilbert paid cash for the last seat aboard a plane for Brazil to join an Elba of fugitive U.S. financiers that already includes multimillion-dollar Swindler Lowell Birrell and Texas Insurance Embezzler Ben-Jack Cage.

Persuading Papa. Eddy Gilbert (ne Ginsberg) was a plunger. At 27, angered by his father's refusal to make him a director of the family-controlled Empire Millwork Corp., he quit the company and started his own hardwood flooring business. Whithin four years he could point to annual sales of $250,000, and persuaded papa to buy him out for 20,000 shares of Empire stock. Then, armed with his stake and an Empire directorship, he began to move in on E.L. Bruce.

With voluble promises of profits for all, Gilbert enlisted friends and strangers to buy Bruce stock for him. He himself bought heavily on margin. Bruce's family management resisted the takeover stubbornly, and in the course of the battle--during which the American Stock Exchange temporarily suspended trading in the company's stock--Bruce shares soared from $17 to $190. But by September 1958, Gilbert had 50% of the company's stock in his pocket. Then, expansively persuasive as ever, he talked his father into agreeing to a merger of Bruce and Empire, and in September 1961 installed himself as president of the new company.

To Prove a Point. "Eddy was always trying to prove a point," a friend recalls.

And one way was to spend to get attention. He cultivated Elsa Maxwell to make sure that he met the right people, kept a regular Monday-night box at the opera.

In his ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment, five-story East 70th Street town house and Palm Beach mansion, he lavishly entertained the people he wanted to impress.

He maintained a villa on the French Riviera at Roquebrune, complete with poolside orchestra, and held open house for international drifters. On paper, he was worth well over $10 million, and he had a pretty wife ready to help him dispose of it. Just one month ago, Rhoda Gilbert was sued by Cartier for the return of $734,000 in diamonds, emeralds and black pearls that she had had sent round "on approval"--and which she had assumed Eddy would pay for. even though they were already estranged.

But there were other lands to conquer.

Last year Eddy Gilbert set his sights on a new target: Celotex Corp., a $62 million-a-year Chicago building materials firm.

By last April, he had picked up 14% of Celotex's outstanding stock. Alas. Celotex shares began to slip--from $41.75 in March to $25 on Wall Street's Blue Monday. Since Gilbert presumably bought most of his Celotex stock on margin or had used it as security for loans to buy still more, he stood to see it sold out from under him unless he could raise more collateral. Evidently assuming that he could make restitution when the market rose again, he began writing out checks, and with remarkable ease persuaded other Bruce officers to countersign them.

Out of Reach. At week's end. still unsure just how much Eddy Gilbert's checks actually added up to, Bruce officials prepared to start civil suit against him for recovery of the money (Chairman Edwin Bruce stepped back in as president of the company). Both the SEC and the New York County Fraud Bureau were investigating the tattered Gilbert empire to see whether Gilbert's manipulations added up to a criminal offense.

Gilbert himself was safely out of reach in Rio. Though Brazil recently signed its first extradition treaty with the U.S., the Brazilian Congress has not yet ratified it.

Eddy, however, insisted that he was "not fleeing United States justice" and still hoped "to pay everybody back and make everything whole some day.'' But he conceded that he had perhaps been overambitious in his Wall Street operations and added pensively: "I would like to write a book warning other young men.''

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