On November 1, more than 100 wealthy political donors, including former New York Stock Exchange CEO Dick Grasso, streamed into the luxurious Conrad Suite at the Waldorf-Astoria on Manhattan's Park Avenue for a lunchtime fundraiser. The event was a smashing success, raising six figures for Mitt Romney—three times what had been expected. Save for the candidate himself, no one could have been more pleased than Ken Langone, the legendary investment banker who had organized the fundraiser and who, armed with a fat Rolodex and the pugnacity of a by-the-bootstraps billionaire, wants nothing more than to defeat Barack Obama in 2012.
The 76-year-old Home Depot cofounder looks how you'd imagine a self-proclaimed "fat cat" might: tall, broad-shouldered, and jowly, with a crown of white hair and a penchant for crisp collars. Langone, who dug ditches as a young man, is a legend in corporate America, and his vast network of business titans could prove crucial to Romney if he faces the cash-flush Obama political machine. (At the start of this year, Obama had raised $88 million to Romney's $32 million.) "You'd be hard-pressed to find a major CEO that wouldn't take his call," says his friend Anthony Carbonetti, a former bundler for Rudy Giuliani. "Everyone takes his call—because they want to know what he has to say."
