Peter A. Dattilo, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge in World War II who spent almost 40 years in the municipal bond industry, died last week. He was 88.
Mr. Dattilo joined government securities dealer C.J. Devine & Co. in 1940 in the government bond department. He spent three years there before he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He was assigned to the 84th Infantry Division — nicknamed the Railsplitters — and shipped to the European theater in late 1944.
After the war ended in 1945, he returned to C.J. Devine and moved into the muni bond department where he remained for the rest of his career. The firm merged in 1964 with Merrill Lynch, where Mr. Dattilo worked as a vice president in charge of the municipal institutional sales department until he retired in 1982.
Those who worked with him remember Mr. Dattilo as a dedicated muni salesman and innovative thinker. Tom Byrne partnered with Mr. Dattilo at Merrill Lynch for 15 years, from the late 1960s until the latter’s retirement.
“He was a spirited leader with very imaginative ideas on salesmanship, proving over and over again the value of the knowledge of markets coupled with a fertile mind,” Byrne said. “I will miss him.”
Rick Hulse worked as a younger associate of Mr. Dattilo’s and Byrne’s for almost 10 years in munis at Merrill Lynch. He remembers learning under the wings of both.
“I watched them form and apply strategies in bond trading,” Hulse said. “Bond values are all relative. And I became a student of both of their abilities to determine the relative value of bond issues and bondholdings, trading positions we had.”
Hulse remembers Mr. Dattilo’s talent for negotiating prices on “stale issues” — poorly selling or half-sold new bonds that sometimes went neglected by sellers — with large institutional clients.
“He would negotiate a price for one of these stale issues that you’d forget about with a big institutional client,” Hulse said.
“They’d buy the whole rest of the deal. I was amazed at how he was able to do that. I mean, $5 to $10 to $15 million [of] bonds sold to a large institution. And he’d sit there like the Cheshire Cat when it was over, because everyone else had forgotten it. But Pete never forgot it.”
Mr. Dattilo was born and raised in the Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, in New York City. He is survived by his wife, Gloria Dattilo; his son, Peter R. Dattilo; his daughter, Susan Ventura; and his granddaughter, Mimi Dattilo.
The family has asked that any donations can be made in memoriam to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, at
