Gary Parr is a much-sought-after man these days.

As a deputy chairman of investment bank Lazard and a consummate dealmaker, Parr has helped bail out the U.S. banks and financial institutions hit hardest by the subprime-lending crisis. Parr and Lazard advised the China Investment Corporation on its recent $5 billion investment in Morgan Stanley, helped engineer a $1 billion capital infusion into bond insurer MBIA from private equity firm Warburg Pincus in early December, and guided subprime lender New Century Financial through its restructuring and bankruptcy filing last spring. Earlier this month, Lazard was advising the state-run China Development Bank on its deal to buy a $2 billion stake in Citigroup before C.D.B. pulled out at the last minute.

The 50-year-old Parr attributes his and Lazard’s central role in these deals to the ongoing relationships he and his colleagues have with big global financial players and the experience Lazard has in helping to raise large amounts of capital quickly.

“That’s part of the network—we’re out seeing people, we’re talking about the environment, we’re involved with them,” he says.

As other investment banks stumbled spectacularly in 2007 due to their own exposure to the subprime markets, Lazard, which has no trading desk, has continued to do well as its advisory business has boomed, in no small part due to Parr. Lazard has also benefited from being a slightly smaller player in the banking world because its larger competitors would likely not allow each other to vet their books in the process of engineering one of these necessary capital infusions.

The bank’s third-quarter earnings more than doubled due to record transaction fees and the growth of its asset-management division. Deal advisory fees jumped 103 percent over the previous year, with M&A revenue jumping to a quarterly record of $295.4 million. The fourth quarter is expected to be similarly strong.

Though Parr is quick to emphasize that Lazard’s recent success has been a team effort, it’s clear his talent and connections have played an important role. William Cohan, the author of The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. and a former junior banker at Lazard, calls Parr “one of the premier names in advising financial institutions.”

Cohan says Parr is among the handful of bankers on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs investment banker Kendrick Wilson and Citigroup’s Gary Shedlin—both of whom are former Lazard bankers—who are sought out for the biggest deals.