Bari Weiss and the CBS Bust-Out

Rick Wilson

There is a scene in The Sopranos every fan remembers. Davey Scatino, a degenerate gambler, gets into Tony Soprano’s card game and can’t pay.

So Tony takes his sporting goods store and starts a bust-out.

Not in a hostile takeover. Not in a leveraged buyout. He simply moves in, runs up the credit lines, orders pallets of merchandise on the store’s account, sells it out the back door, and when the inventory is gone, and the vendors are screaming, and the name over the door means nothing anymore. Scatino torched what was left of his life and walks away from the ashes.

A “bust-out,” they call it. You drain the asset, you collect the insurance, you leave the husk. There are prettier, more genteel terms of art for it in private equity, but they’re all part of the same spectrum.

I have been thinking about Davey Scatino’s sporting goods store all week. Because that is what is happening to CBS News, and Bari Weiss is the one holding the gas can.

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