Firms

Even after the record $8.4 billion write-down for bad debts at Merrill Lynch & Co., the unprecedented ouster of three chief executives within five months and the elimination of $84 billion of market value at the five largest securities firms, Wall Street still is poised to report its second-most profitable year. And 2008 may be better. "As the bombs are dropping and the mines are exploding, it's a bit of a surprise," said Kenneth H. Crawford, who helps oversee $950 million Argent Capital Management LLC, of St. Louis, which holds Morgan Stanley and Merrill shares.

CHICAGO -- When Suzanne Smith and Barney Olmsted of San Francisco founded New Ways to Work in 1972, a group of New England teachers and social workers were "job sharing" as part of an experimental project.But the idea of two people, each a part timer, voluntarily sharing the responsibility, salary and benefits of one full-time position hadn't caught on nationwide."We started our organization to be a full-service vocational resource center with an emphasis on the quality of life, so when we heard about job sharing, we grabbed hold of it," said Smith, who job shares as co-director with Olmsted.

It was a weird prejudice, Raymond V. Haysbert says. After all, it's not as if black Americans hadn't been cooking for whites since about the time the two groups met.But there it was. Parks Sausage Co., then H.G. Parks Inc., needed a kid to whine its now-famous slogan "More Parks Sausages, Mom . . . Please?" And though Parks was one of America's pioneering black-owned businesses, no one ever much questioned that the kid had to be white."If a person with a Negro voice said something in a commercial, people would be against it," said Mr. Haysbert, the 75-year old chairman of Parks and one of the 44-year old firm's first employees.

Opening statements began in Baltimore Circuit Court yesterday in an $18 million lawsuit Baltimore has filed against five firms that provided asbestos products that were used in city buildings.Stanley J. Levy, an attorney for the city, asked the jury to ponder whether the firms acted responsibly when they installed the asbestos products.The inhalation of tiny asbestos fibers has been linked to lung cancer, asbestosis and mesothelioma, a rare and always fatal cancer of the lining of the lung or abdomen.

Twenty-two Maryland companies have been named to Inc. magazine's list of the nation's 500 fastest-growing private companies, placing the Free State fifth among the 50 states in nurturing up and coming entrepreneurs.The top Maryland company on the list in terms of sales is No. 37 Counter Technology, a Bethesda firm that provides security management and telecommunications systems design services. The company's sales grew 3,157 percent between 1990 and 1994, reaching $10.1 million last year.

The minority-owned firm tied to Baltimore City Council President Sheila Dixon - already under scrutiny for how it operates - has rarely, if ever, performed its own work on government contracts and city-backed developments, according to documents obtained by The Sun. The company, Union Technologies LLC, or Utech, is one of two city contractors that the Maryland state prosecutor's office is investigating because of ties to Dixon. In response to grand jury subpoenas issued by state prosecutors in March, the city delivered 27,000 pages of documents, including contracts, e-mails, transcripts of public meetings and phone logs.

New York. -- Add Salomon Brothers to a list of names that appears to expand quarterly, if not monthly: BCCI, Drexel Burnham Lambert, E.F. Hutton, Goldman Sachs, Kidder Peabody, etc. They are all powerful, or once-powerful, financial firms that were rocked by scandal.Often, they could not survive the tumult. Hutton and Drexel are, essentially, no more. Kidder's management, indeed almost its entire staff, is new. Occasionally ruthless, Wall Street firms routinely withstand rounds of bitter populist criticism.

April Fools: an Insider's Account of theRise and Collapse of Drexel Burnham.Dan G. Stone.Donald I. Fine.249 pages. $19.95.Burning Down the House:How Greed, Deceit, and Bitter RevengeDestroyed E. F. Hutton.James Sterngold.Summit.305 pages. $19.95. It's a bit simplistic to measure things by decades, but such an approach can reveal essential truths. Wall Street's decade was the 1980s.Securities firms rose to unprecedented strength by the middle of the 1980s, riding bull markets that just wouldn't quit, merging large corporations or breaking them apart, creating a flow of new financial instruments to be sold to pension funds and Mom and Pop. Even the most newly minted MBA, it seemed, would be paid outrageous sums of money simply to join the party.

Anthony Conti was 25, fresh from law school, when Piper Marbury Rudnick and Wolfe offered him his first job two years ago. But before he started work, the firm sent him two letters - bumping his starting salary $10,000, to $95,000. "I was ecstatic," Conti recalled. Faced with competition from dot-coms and other technology firms, law firms across the nation were forced into bidding wars for new talent. To compete for top graduates, for example, Baltimore law firms raised the average salary for new attorneys almost 20 percent.

With the price of bringing a new drug to market reaching stratospheric levels, small biotechnology companies are scrambling to form partnerships with stronger, richer and bigger firms.Genentech Inc., which flourished by licensing its own products to large pharmaceutical companies, is now on the other side of the equation, busy putting together research and development deals with small biotechnology firms."Biotechnology is probably the most difficult business to succeed in for a start-up company," said Gary Lyons, vice president of business development for Genentech in San Francisco.