Three Who Watch, Wait and Strike

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As it turned out, failing at brewing was one of the best things that ever happened to him. He sold his beer brands (Grain Belt, Hauenstein and Storz) to G. Heileman Brewing and auctioned off machinery, thus making a $5 million profit. He used that money in a joint venture with the Pohlad family of Minneapolis to buy nearly $300 million worth of property and uncollected bills from bankrupt retailer W.T. Grant for the fire-sale price of $44 million. Says he: "That was the mother lode that got it all going." It earned him the nickname Irv the Liquidator.

Jacobs, though, is far more than a liquidator. He is a takeover artist of the first magnitude. In 1981 he went after Pabst. In two hard-fought battles that spanned 14 months, Jacobs and the Pabst management struggled fiercely for shareholder votes and Jacobs spent $7 million in legal fees. In the middle of the affair, Pabst President William F. Smith Jr. posted a sign on his office wall: SHOW ME A GOOD LOSER, AND I'LL SHOW YOU A LOSER. Jacobs actually lost his bid, but he and his partners walked away with a profit of more than $20 million.

Jacobs has a knack for transforming failures into successes. When a snowmobile- and boat-making firm he acquired in 1978 went bankrupt, he salvaged some of the pieces to form a new company called Minstar. Last week Minstar, which in 1983 bought Bekins, the moving company, announced record earnings of $23 million for 1984. Minstar is selling off chunks of real estate owned by Bekins, hinting that more takeovers are in the works.

Late last year Jacobs went after his biggest target yet: ITT, which had sales of $14 billion in 1984. He bought a reported 2% of the company, an investment estimated at $84 million, and began bringing pressure on ITT officials to break up the firm, arguing that the parts of the conglomerate were worth more than ITT as a whole. Said Jacobs at the time: "ITT's management has created such a monster of overhead in its operations that something's got to happen." Partly because of those attacks, ITT decided in January to sell off $1.7 billion worth of subsidiaries.

A fast-talking, blunt-speaking man with a boyish face and ready grin, Jacobs wears his wealth casually. He sometimes answers his own phone and regularly drives himself to work from his home in the stylish Minneapolis suburb of Wayzata in a Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow II. He makes no claims to being a great long-range corporate planner, even to the point of refusing to keep an appointment calendar. Jacobs is a person of instinct and action. Says he: "You can't predict what I'm going to do next because there is no track, no character to it. Our big asset is our flexibility, being able to move on a moment's notice."