Illness Drops Kennedy Cabot’s Kane From TV : Brokers: Fellow staffers will offer commentaries for the discount brokerage’s founder, who has an undisclosed condition.
Daily television commentaries by David Paul Kane, the colorful chairman, president and chief executive of the Beverly Hills-based discount brokerage Kennedy, Cabot & Co., have been suspended following Kane’s hospitalization for an undisclosed illness.
Kane’s stock market commentaries, sponsored by his firm, have been a staple on KWHY-TV Channel 22 for years. A spokeswoman for the TV station said the spot is being filled by four Kennedy Cabot brokers on a rotating basis.
Kane’s picture, shown in Kennedy Cabot’s newspaper advertisements, is familiar to many business news readers.
A spokesman for Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said Kane, 77, was discharged on July 26 after a month in the hospital’s Schuman Building, a rehabilitation center where recovering stroke patients typically are treated. He is recovering at home.
“He’s come a long way,” said longtime friend Linda D. Tallen, who said she recently married the brokerage executive, a lifelong bachelor. Asked about Kane’s condition, she said: “It’s not cancer, it’s not heart disease.”
Though synonymous with the firm he founded--which claims the nation’s lowest commission rates--Kane actually owns only a very small piece of it. Kennedy Cabot’s majority owner is John Gebbia, former chairman of Jesup, Josephthal & Co., a New York brokerage that no longer exists.
Kennedy Cabot general counsel George Kupper said the firm is running smoothly in Kane’s absence, crediting Gebbia with leading it to “our best year ever.”
Gebbia acquired majority ownership in October, 1991, from a successor firm to Jesup Josephthal, which had purchased the stock from Kane in 1990. According to the New York Stock Exchange, the successor firm, JJC Securities, liquidated virtually all of its holdings after failing to meet a government-imposed capital requirement in 1991. Capital provides a financial cushion against losses.
Separately, Kennedy Cabot disclosed that the NYSE has censured its treasurer, Daniel Cunningham, and fined him $5,000 for permitting JJC Securities to underwrite stock while it was inadequately capitalized in 1991. Cunningham, who neither admitted nor denied guilt, was chief executive of JJC Securities when the violations took place.
