Charles Murphy, who helped pick insurance investments for U.S. hedge-fund manager Paulson & Co. and was an architect of the firm’s activist push at American International Group Inc., has died. He was 56.
Murphy plunged to his death from a room in the luxury Sofitel New York Hotel on Monday afternoon, said a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified.
Murphy, who joined Paulson’s firm in 2009, played a key role in developing a stance to break up AIG. Paulson, along with a representative from Carl Icahn’s investment company, last year took seats on the insurer’s board in what analysts had seen as one of the toughest campaigns for the billionaires.
Murphy previously worked at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York and then for Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank AG and Credit Suisse Group AG in London. He moved to the U.S. in 2007 and bought a $33 million limestone property on East 67th Street, the highest price on record at that time for an Upper East Side townhouse built on a standard 25-foot-wide lot, the New York Times reported in 2009. He tried to sell the house after losing his job at Fairfield Greenwich Group, a hedge-fund manager that invested money with convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff, the paper said.
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