Business Notes

It's moments like this that put the high in high finance. Last week GAF announced that it was offering up to 20 million shares in its major subsidiary, International Specialty Products. The deal is as profitable as anything ever concocted in the Wayne, N.J., chemical maker's laboratories -- particularly for chairman Samuel Heyman. The stock he would control could now be worth at least a wallet-fattening $900 million -- more than 20 times what he paid to take GAF private in 1989.

Thus begins the latest chapter in the tangled history of GAF. Seized by the U.S. government in 1942 for its links to Nazi Germany's I.G. Farben, infamous inventor of the poison gas used in Hitler's concentration camps, the company was owned by the feds for the next two decades. During the early 1980s, GAF fought a bitter two-year battle in boardrooms, courtrooms and newspaper ads against Heyman's ultimately victorious takeover effort. Since then, in the words of one analyst, "Heyman made a lot of money, and he made a lot of people a lot of money."