Joseph Baratta is the kind of private equity guy who sits in the front seat of the roller coaster, especially when he's buying one. When Baratta led private equity giant Blackstone Group's €102 million ($136 million) deal to buy Merlin Entertainments in 2005, the U.K. theme park group was best known for the macabre London Dungeon, a museum that recreated gory historical events for curious tourists. But with Blackstone's backing and €3.5 billion in capital, Mer-lin was soon devouring other attractions — bidding for Legoland and acquiring Italy's leading theme park operator, aquariums in Asia, Madame Tussauds, and the London Eye. Merlin CEO Nick Varney stresses that without Baratta's deal-making skills and Blackstone's capital, the company would have had little chance of becoming what it is now: the second-largest theme park operator in the world, behind Walt Disney Co. Varney remembers Baratta's detailed due diligence, which included riding the roller coasters at Merlin's parks and asking intense questions about its business — at least once at 3:00 a.m. To say that Baratta was working in darkness as he built Blackstone's European business from scratch before returning to the U.S. in 2012 to lead the firm's global private equity business is somehow both very wrong and very right. Within the cloistered world of private equity, his reputation precedes him. Yet to the larger world—which associates Blackstone with Steve Schwarzman, co-founder, CEO, and multimillion-dollar party-thrower—the name "Baratta" is all but meaningless. "He was in London for more than ten years and hasn't been a fixture in NewYork," explains Hamilton (Tony) James, Blackstone's president and chief operating officer. James, along with Jonathan Gray and Bennett Goodman, has been mentioned as apossiblesuccess or to Schwarzman, a topic that has grown more urgent as the founder celebrates his 70th birthday. A man less talked about as a potential CEO-in-waiting is Baratta.
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