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The story of 'Florida's bank,' without the scandalous bitsBy JEFF HARRINGTON
© St. Petersburg Times, As a 20-year employee of the former Barnett Banks, David J. Ginzl assembled plenty of scandalous tidbits he could have including in his upcoming book, Barnett: The Story of "Florida's Bank." As a historian by training, he chose to leave most of the juicy stuff out. "I found a lot of dirt but most of it didn't really relate to the story of the running of the bank," Ginzl said. "The goal was to make this a serious historical work." So when the book rolls off the University of Tampa presses this month, readers won't see references to Ginzl's research into one messy Barnett family dispute decades ago. The issue: whether a grandchild of longtime bank CEO Bion H. Barnett's was illegitimate. It arose in the inevitable tug-of-war over the patriarch's estate when he died in 1958, three weeks after his 101st birthday. Ginzl, however, includes the tale of how Bion left his wife, and temporarily the bank, and went overseas to pursue another woman whom he eventually married. That episode was noteworthy, the author says, because it had repercussions in how the bank was managed during the Great Depression. And he recounts the previously known episode in which Barnett CEO Charles Rice checked in for a six-week alcohol treatment program in 1997, a situation that some observers think directly led to Barnett's sale to NationsBank (a predecessor of Bank of America). Ginzl says he knows the "undisclosed location" where Rice went but isn't identifying it. The landmark, $15.5-billion sale eliminated Florida's last big bank and turned the state into a banking colony, a deposit-rich piggy bank for out-of-state financial giants. Ginzl's book of 440-some pages -- 330 pages of text, 60 pages of photos and a lot of footnotes -- marks the end of an era in more ways than one. After Barnett was sold, bank president Allen Lastinger, Ginzl and others created the Barnett Historic Preservation Foundation to preserve the relics of the bank and memories of its 22,000 employees. Ginzl's book was a focal point of the effort. When the book comes out (about a year behind schedule), it closes the chapter on the foundation, which will dissolve at year-end. The University of Tampa Press is printing 1,500 copies of the historical treatise with hopes for brisk sales in Florida. "The book is not in any way meant to be an expose, though I think a lot of people will be interested in reading the last chapter first," Ginzl says. Even though, he acknowledges, everyone knows how it ends.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
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From the Times Business report
From the AP
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