What is the Carlyle Group and how did it start?
Briody: The Carlyle Group gets its name from the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. The founders believed that the name Carlyle portrayed some kind of blue blood, silk stocking air of an old-school kind of investment house and so the Carlyle Group was born from the Carlyle Hotel in New York. The Carlyle Group actually started through a tax loophole – something called the Great Eskimo Tax Scam, that’s what the company calls it today. The Tax Scam was essentially that Eskimo owned companies in Alaska were allowed to sell their losses to profitable companies in exchange for cash. The profitable companies would buy these losses then write them off their taxes and give a fraction of those losses to the Eskimo-owned companies who obviously needed cash. So a guy named Stephen Norris was a tax accountant essentially at Marriott Corporation, looking to exploit this tax loophole for Marriott and in so doing, he needed to find someone who could hook him up with Eskimos – Native Americans in Alaska,
