That the big banks have no more checks to write, that their mortgage-backed, debt-burdened balance sheets prevent them from using their house accounts to buy deals, is a source of unending glee for Wasserstein. Who could have imagined a decade ago that Bruce Wasserstein would be the face of prudent investment banking? Perhaps, when it comes to investment banks, small is the new big. Lazard may actually be the new "old" prototype, as some of Wall Street's megafirms unravel in part because they have been acting more like hedge funds than investment banks.

By now, we should be done with him. Bruce Wasserstein and his fellow corporate raiders—his padded-shouldered brothers in their masters-of-the-universe pinstripes, yellow ties, and red suspenders—should have been shuttled to some secluded private island where they could endlessly swap war stories about hostile takeovers and tender offers, about Federated Department Stores and Texaco and RJR Nabisco, about bidding 'em up and then taking them apart, about selling off pieces of great American corporations to pay back massive chunks of junk debt. Wasserstein was arguably the smartest of that gang: the banker most often described as brilliant, the Harvard-educated attorney who, along with his partner, Joseph Perella, practically invented modern tender offers, who boasted that keeping in his head the various components of a deal—tax implications, legal issues, regulatory hurdles, debt covenants, all the intricate moving parts—was like playing "three-dimensional chess." For many years, it seemed Wasserstein could talk his clients into any deal by droning on and on in his steady, gravelly, soothing voice as he delivered his famous "Dare to be great" speech. He could keep talking, colleagues say, until finally—in part to get him to shut up—all parties would agree to the terms of the deal.

Wasserstein so defined that era—the quaint time when a few million was a respectable fee and a few billion was considered a massive transaction—that it is surprising to now have to take his measure again. He has been written off so many times. Wasserstein was viewed almost as an embarrassment after Henry Kravis, famously, hired him just to keep him away from a deal Kravis was working on in 1989. Wasserstein was disemboweled by the media after leaving First Boston, where he had built its mergers-and-acquisitions practice into the best in the business, to found Wasserstein Perella and then riding that company down with the M&A cycle to the point where the firm was barely making payroll. He was dismissed by much of Wall Street when he came to Lazard and again when he overrode the objections of his largest block of stakeholders by taking the troubled firm public. He was mocked after joining with financier Carl Icahn (a fellow Flock of Seagulls-era vestige) to propose a takeover of Time Warner in 2005 that became a fiasco.

There was glee in the banking community after each of Wasserstein's stumbles, a sense that he had finally gotten his comeuppance. "That was hard on him," Biondi told me a few months before he died. "He was used to being the brightest boy in class. He had to come to grips with this new world."